Euobserver.com

Russia already has "hundreds" of mercenaries in Mali, but there was no sign they were using EU-trained Malian soldiers, an EU spokesperson has said.

The EU has urged Russia to free Alexei Navalny on the one-year anniversary of his arrest. "We reiterate our call on the Russian authorities for his immediate and unconditional release without further delay," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Monday. The anti-corruption activist was detained for a parole violation after recovering from an assassination attempt using a chemical weapon. He is serving a two-and-a-half year sentence.

The European Parliament honoured the memory of the late parliament president, David Sassoli, at a plenary session in Strasbourg on Monday. Sassoli died on 11 January after months of health issues. French president Emmanuel Macron described Sassoli as "a man of rare benevolence" whose "ideas and vision were large enough for a continent." European Council president Charles Michel and former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta also spoke at the ceremony.

Sweden's security services are investigating three incidents involving unidentified drones above its Frosmarks, Oskarshamn, and Ringhals nuclear power plants last Friday. Sweden's military, last week, also reinforced patrols on and around its Baltic Sea island of Gotland amid a dramatic spike in Nato-Russia tensions. "Security threats against Sweden have increased with a ... more complex threat picture," the security service said in a statement on Monday.

EU officials on Monday removed Argentina, Australia and Canada from the EU's 'whitelist' of countries for which it recommends no Covid-linked travel restrictions. As of Monday, member states are expected to gradually lift travel restrictions at the external borders for residents coming from Bahrain, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Kuwait, New Zealand, Peru, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay and China. The list is updated regularly.

"Each further aggressive act will have a high price for Russia, economically, strategically, politically," German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said in Kyiv Monday, prior to meeting Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow Tuesday. Her visit is one of few high-level EU-Russia contacts on Russia's war-threats. But senior German politicians are against harsh Russia sanctions, such as stopping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline or blocking it from 'Swift' international payments.

Serbian tennis champion Novak Djokovic would be banned from playing in the French Open tournament in May under current rules, the French sports ministry said Monday. Djokovic refuses to get vaccinated, but under a new vaccine-pass law adopted by French MPs Sunday he would be barred from taking part, it told Reuters. "This will apply to everyone who is a spectator or a professional sportsperson ... no exemption," France said.

A French court on Monday fined far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour €10,000 for inciting racial hatred over his remarks to the CNews broadcaster in 2020. "They're thieves, they're killers, they're rapists ... they should be sent back," Zemmour had said of migrants who were unaccompanied minors. Zemmour is polling fourth behind president Emmanuel Macron, conservative contender Valérie Pécresse, and the far-right Marine Le Pen ahead of April's vote, Reuters reports.

The commission is expected to come forward with concrete proposals in the next months, and the debate is likely to heat up in June.

Investors and small businesses are not, in fact, as keen on tracking-based online adverts as Big Tech's lobbying efforts have claimed, new research revealed on Monday, ahead of this week's plenary vote on stricter rules for online platforms.

Simply opening the Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, sparked a large-scale expansion of China's economic warfare against democracies. China's actions amount to a fundamental attack on the DNA of the European Union: the internal market.

James Kanter becomes new editor-in-chief of EUobserver - Shada Islam will be editor of the EUobserver magazine.

There are also numerous loopholes in the deal which will enable corporations to keep portions of their profits outside of the scope of the tax, so paying even less than 15 percent.

The French parliament, on Sunday, gave the final approval to a stricter 'vaccine pass' system, after president Emmanuel Macron said that his strategy was to "piss off" the unvaccinated. Under the new system, a negative Covid-19 test will no longer allow people to access public venues, such as restaurants. Protesters demonstrated in Paris and other cities against the new rules. Some 78 percent of the French population is fully vaccinated,

The US State Department has held talks with energy firms to supply more power in the event of Russian gas-cut offs to Europe accompanying a new invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reports. "We've discussed a range of contingencies," a US source said. The talks come amid sky-high gas prices in EU markets and Russian refusals to increase supplies, in what Russia's deputy prime minister Alexander Novak blamed on poor European planning.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Amsterdam on Sunday to protest against Covid-19 related measures and vaccination campaigns as new daily infections hit a record in the country, Reuters reported. Regular protesters were joined by farmers who parked their tractors across the city centre. The Netherlands reported a record high of 36,000 new infections on Sunday. Over the weekend, anti-vaccine protesters also took the streets in Hungary and Austria.

Rainer Wieland, a German centre-right MEP, has defended spending €690,000 on office renovations on the 15th floor of the EU Parliament in Brussels, including €25,000 doors and €25,000 light fittings. He called it an "ideas lab" that can be used by other MEPs, including for filming, The Guardian reports. "I find it very difficult to justify that kind of expense to the EU taxpayer," German Green MEP Daniel Freund said.

Microsoft said in a blog post on Saturday that it had identified destructive malware in systems from agencies and organisations linked to the Ukrainian government, Reuters reported. Affected agencies include organisations that provided emergency response functions and a technology firm that manages websites for public and private actors. Ukraine suspects a hacker group linked to Belarus intelligence carried out an important cyber-attack that hit government websites last week.

Denmark's former defence minister, Claus Hjort Frederiksen, has been charged with treason and could face 12 years in prison, he said Friday. "I am charged under section 109 of the Penal Code for having violated the limits of my freedom of expression," he said. He previously revealed Denmark and the US stole information from undersea cables. Denmark's military-intelligence chief was recently jailed for six years for leaking secrets to media.

Unknown hackers stole and published 1.8m data-points of sensitive information about the Polish military's arms, ammunition, machine parts, and software, including from US, German, and Israeli-bought weapons systems, according to Polish news agency Onet.pl. The leak occurred on 9 January and information was downloaded by Chinese and Russian internet users, it said. "This is strategic data, which Russian intelligence wanted," Piotr Pytel, the former head of Poland's military counterintelligence, said.