Euobserver.com

Sebastian Kurz will be a global strategist for Thiel Capital, whose founder, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, is a long-time acquaintance of the former chancellor, the Austrian daily Heute reported on Thursday. Thiel was an early backer of Donald Trump's political ambitions in the US, heads Palantir Technologies, which specialises in big-data analytics, and has been embroiled in controversies. Kurz resigned in October after being accused of corruption.

Eurocentrism in our education and thinking is actually a product of a German-Christian ideology of the 18th century. Instead of admitting guilt we should change the way we study and teach history.

The pandemic has boosted the appeal of Italy's offbeat idyllic villages among global digital nomads. It is giving some of these villages some kind of Renaissance.

Germany will close down three of its last six nuclear power plants on Friday, while speeding up its transition to solar and wind energy.

US and Russian leaders have repeated their red lines on Ukraine ahead of New Year talks designed to prevent a new war in Europe.

More than 12,000 Lebanese have left their homeland in the past two years for Cyprus, enrolling their children in schools, setting up businesses and snapping up apartments on the island, Ekathimerini writes. Lebanon plunged into an economic crisis that has thrown two thirds of the population into poverty since October 2019. Beirut was partly destroyed by a massive explosion in August 2021, followed by a political deadlock in the country.

About 1,200 migrants are risking their lives every month this winter crossing by foot the snow-filled Alps from Italy into France, The Times reports. Most are probably heading for the Channel. The numbers walking the eight-hour trek across the border from Claviere to Bardonecchia are higher than in 2020 and 2019, suggesting that the known death toll of six people over the past four years could rise in coming weeks.

Northvolt became the first European start-up to design and produce a battery at a gigafactory on the continent, the Financial Times reported. Founded by two former Tesla managers, the Swedish company is backed by Volkswagen, BMW, Volvo Cars and Ikea and opened operations days before its new-year deadline. Northvolt is the most notable of European contenders trying to compete in battery production with bigger Asian producers and Tesla.

France announced on Wednesday that the number of Covid infection cases had now soared to 208,000 cases, being a record number in Europe for the second day in a row, France24 reports. "I wouldn't call Omicron a wave anymore, I would call it a groundswell," French health minister Olivier Véran told lawmakers. "Given the numbers we have been seeing these past few days, we're talking about a landslide," he added.

US president Joe Biden will hold talks with Russia's Vladimir Putin by phone on Thursday for the second time this month, in a bid to de-escalate tensions over Ukraine, the BBC writes. They will discuss forthcoming security talks between the countries and the situation in Europe. The US consulted European leaders ahead of the call to co-ordinate a common response to the issue, a White House statement said.

Eurotunnel is warning British citizens that they cannot travel through France by car from the UK without a "compelling reason" due to new coronavirus restrictions, The Guardian writes. "Following a French government decision, on 28/12/2021, unless they hold French residency, British citizens are now considered 3rd country citizens and can no longer transit France by road to reach their country of residence in the EU," a Eurotunnel statement said.

A Russian court on Wednesday ordered the closure of Memorial Human Rights Center. It is the second major human rights group that was banned in two days. On Tuesday, Russia's Supreme Court banned the group's parent organisation, Memorial International. Both groups were outlawed for violating a controversial foreign agent law. Memorial International was founded in 1989 to document Soviet-era political repression.

Environmental degradation is pushing animals and plants to the brink of extinction, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Wednesday. The speed and scale has not been seen since dinosaurs died out 66m years ago. There are currently 142,500 animal and plant species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) - 40,000 of which are "threatened with extinction" - the largest number ever recorded.

In January Italian representatives will elect the country's new president. All eyes are on current prime minister Mario Draghi, but other names are starting to circulate as well.

Germany's foreign minister will boycott Beijing's Winter Olympics on human-rights grounds, but the EU has a "cognitive split" on China, it said.

In the coming two years, The EU's biggest economy will likely miss its climate targets, co-leader Robert Habeck said.

From the Mediterranean to Minsk, from Covid to climate change, EUobserver has proudly broken original stories on the EU institutions in 2021 - under our ethos of 'Independent. Investigative. Influential.'

The German government will present draft legislation that protects disabled people or patients with pre-existing conditions if over-stretched hospitals are forced to decide who gets care. The decision is in line with a ruling by the constitutional court on Tuesday (29 December), which said that the constitution stipulates that people with disabilities cannot be discriminated against.

"Should new negotiations not lead to success, the bilateral agreements that were still in force would gradually expire and make our relationship obsolete at some point," EU Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič said in German magazine Der Spiegel Tuesday. Talks between Bern and Brussels on an overarching new treaty broke off in May. "We urgently need to know from Switzerland whether it seriously wants to negotiate with us," Šefčovič said.

Italy has let a charity ship, the Geo Barents run by Medecins Sans Frontieres, to disembark, in Sicily, 558 mostly African migrants it rescued in recent days. A second boat, Sea Watch 3, run by a German NGO, is also waiting to disembark a further 440 people it plucked from the sea. "The weather deteriorates ... Everyone has the right to disembark, now," Sea Watch said.