Euobserver.com

Some 12 Belarusian officers armed with riot-control gear crossed the border into Lithuania on Tuesday near the Gintaras Žagunis crossing point in order to force 35 irregular migrants into the country, Lithuania said. "We cannot tolerate this bold provocation of ... crossing the border of the Republic of Lithuania today," interior minister Agnė Bilotaitė noted. Belarus has recently pushed thousands of migrants into Lithuania in reaction to EU sanctions.

France registered 111 deaths from Covid-19 in hospitals on Tuesday, the first time since June 1 that the daily toll was more than 100, health ministry data showed, Reuters reports. The new figures took the cumulative death toll from COVID-19 since the start of the epidemic to 112,844. The seven-day moving average of deaths increased to 72, from fewer than 20 per day at the end of July.

Solar power supply in the European Union during June and July rose to a record high in 2021, accounting for 10 percent of total electricity produced in the region, a report by independent climate think-tank Ember said, Reuters writes. "There are exciting green shoots in core solar markets where solar is taking off, but overall it is not growing fast enough," Ember analyst Charles Moore said.

Spain received its first tranche of money amounting to €9bn from the €800bn EU recovery fund meant to help the bloc recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and make its economy greener and more digitalised, Reuters reports. Spain will get a total of €69.5bn in grants from the fund in the coming years. Lithuania received its first tranche of money of €289m from its allocated total of €2.22bn.

Russia's 2021 wildfires are already its largest in the history of satellite observations, burning across 17.08m hectares of land, the Greenpeace Russia environmental group has said, The Moscow Times reports. The new record beats the previous one set in 2012, when fires burned 17 million hectares of land across Russia, and comes with weeks left to go in a devastating wildfire season.

German chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday condemned the way Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko treats refugees, adding that Germany would consult closely with its European partners on a coordinated response, Reuters writes. "President Lukashenko is using refugees, for example from Iraq, in a hybrid way to undermine security, and of course we condemn this in the strongest possible terms," Merkel said at a news conference with the Estonian prime minister.

"We have to get in touch with authorities in Kabul, whatever they are. The Taliban have won the war so we will have to talk to them," EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said.

For 20 years, Westerners and Afghans have been trying to build a free and democratic Afghanistan. This project has failed. Let us avoid that those who believed in it pay the price.

The global attraction of democracy depends on the real-life performance of democracies. The US has not been an attractive case in the last years and nor has the EU.

Poland has said it will disband a judicial disciplinary chamber to comply with an EU court order, while vowing to continue its controversial judicial reforms.

Germany has announced plans to sell up to a quarter of its stake in Lufthansa, Deutsche Welle writes. The German finance agency said the move would take place in the coming weeks and cited positive development at the airline. The state's 20 percent stake was acquired for €300m. The federal government announced the 20 percent stake initially to help the airline mitigate the effects of the global pandemic.

The death toll in northern Turkey has risen to 70 in the wake of this month's devastating floods, the country's disaster management authority (AFAD) announced on Monday, Deutsche Welle reports. Torrential rains battered the country's northwestern Black Sea provinces on 4 August, causing flash floods that demolished homes and bridges, swept away cars, and blocked roads. Officials confirmed that rescuers recovered more bodies over the weekend.

In The Netherlands tension in the labour market is high as there are more vacancies than unemployed people, the Dutch broadcaster NOS reports. "This we haven't seen in 50 years," Peter Hein van Mulligen, chief economist of the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) said. For every 100 unemployed people, there are 106 open vacancies in the second quarter of 2021, which makes it hard for employers to find employees.

Two wildfires, fanned by strong winds, raged out of control near Athens on Monday, forcing the evacuation of villages, but there were no immediate reports of casualties, Reuters reports. More than 500 wildfires have broken out in recent weeks across Greece, which, like other countries in the Mediterranean region including Turkey and Tunisia, has seen some of its highest temperatures in decades.

Postal voting for Germany's federal election began on Monday, piling pressure on conservative chancellor candidate Armin Laschet (CDU) to reinvigorate his floundering campaign or else risk losing out to a left-leaning coalition, Reuters reports. Although polls show that the Bavarian leader, CSU politician Markus Söder, is still more popular than Laschet, Söder ruled out replacing Laschet, saying "the ballots are printed, the posters are pasted, it's been decided."

Poland's ambassador to Israel has been recalled until further notice, the foreign ministry said on Monday, in a further sign of the deteriorating relations between the countries after Warsaw introduced a law affecting World War Two property restitutions, Reuters writes. Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid on Saturday branded Poland's law "antisemitic and immoral". Lapid said the head of Israel's embassy in Warsaw was being called back immediately.

Several EU member states are worried that the Taliban takeover would trigger a replay of the 2015-16 migration crisis when the bloc has seen the arrival of over one million asylum seekers in a matter of months.

EU countries have resumed evacuations from Kabul airport, the last piece of allied-controlled territory in Afghanistan, as Taliban forces urged people to return to normal life.

The struggle for the survival of the Taliban's survival starts today. Afghanistan is a potential sink hole of instability. And we know what sinkholes do: they usually drag a much wider region down.

Of all Western-European capitals, Brussels has the lowest Covid-19 vaccination level, Belgian newspaper De Standaard writes. So far, just half of the Brussels population received at least one jab. The vaccination level in Flanders is 78 percent, in the Walloon region 67 percent. Opposition parties in the Brussels region have demanded an emergency meeting in the Brussels parliament to discuss the matter.