Euractiv.com

French President Emmanuel Macron will seek to raise more than $350 million in aid for Lebanon at a donors' conference marking the anniversary of the Beirut port blast, and send yet another warning to its squabbling political class.

The EU has agreed to pay a premium on new orders of COVID-19 vaccines because it is requiring tougher terms to be met, officials said, as the bloc tries to protect supplies after a rocky start to its vaccination campaign.

Half of the European Union's population has now been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, an AFP tally showed Tuesday, as China's Wuhan said it would test all 11 million residents after the virus returned to where it first emerged.

Ukraine will do its best to investigate the death of Belarusian activist Vitaly Shishov who was found hanged in a Kyiv park, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Tuesday.

Portugal, Luxembourg and Belgium on Tuesday received their first tranches of money from the 800 billion euro ($950.8 billion) EU recovery fund aimed at helping them rebound from the pandemic and make their economies greener and more digitalised.

The NATO alliance Tuesday condemned a deadly attack on an Israeli-operated tanker last week, and urged Iran to respect international shipping rules.

Troops from Russia and Uzbekistan began joint military drills on Monday (2 August) near the Afghan border, amid fears in both countries that a worsening security situation in Afghanistan could spill over into Central Asia.

Israel's foreign ministry on Monday (2 August) said a European Union decision to send diplomat Enrique Mora to this week's inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi showed "poor judgment".

Germany will start offering Covid booster shots from September and make it easier for 12-to-17 year olds to get a jab, the health ministry said Monday (2 August), amid concerns about the spread of the Delta variant.

German politician Christian Schmidt on Monday (2 August) took over as the top international envoy in Bosnia despite opposition from Russia and Bosnian Serbs who consider him "illegal" and say they won't work with him.

The EU on Monday (2 August) deepened its probe into Facebook's acquisition of Kustomer over concerns the social network giant could restrict the US start-ups' rivals' use of its WhatsApp and Instagram platforms.

The EU imposed sanctions Monday on Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's wife Rosario Murillo, who is his vice president, as well as one of his sons and six more officials.

The European Union will retain its tariffs on U.S. biodiesel for a further five years after concluding that removing them would likely lead to a surge of imports at artificially low prices.

The European Union sent help to Turkey on Monday and volunteers joined firefighters in battling a week of violent blazes that have killed eight people and put pressure on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The entire IT infrastructure of the Anhalt-Bitterfeld district administration, which was paralysed after being targeted by a ransomware attack at the start of July, has requested assistance from the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces.

It is a truism that Europe is unstable if its North African neighbours are unstable. That being so, it should be of some concern to EU leaders that, on the bloc’s south Mediterranean border, Tunisia’s ten-year-old democracy appears to be on life support.

The European Commission has opened infringement procedures against 12 member states after they failed to transpose EU rules banning unfair trading practices in the agri-food sector within the allotted time frame. 

High feed costs are giving member states a cause for concern, while the European Commission is hopeful that feed prices are likely to go down in the near future.

Facebook has teamed up with French anti-piracy association ALPA up to protect content on its platforms from copyright infringement, the tech giant announced on Monday (26 July). EURACTIV France reports.

At a time when Taliban is likely to take over Afghanistan, the stakes could not have been higher for Uzbekistan’s reformist President Mirziyoyev who hosted the 15-16 July Central-South Asia Connectivity Conference in Tashkent.