Euobserver.com

EU negotiators have said they can ease customs checks in Northern Ireland in return for the UK falling into line with EU plant, animal health, environment, and food safety rules, according to British newspaper The Times. They also offered to ease travel for animals with pet passports. But the UK was against the EU's "dynamic alignment" proposal, while arguing for more "proportionate", case-by-case checks on food imports.

Talks are ongoing among EU capitals on further expulsions of Russian diplomats in solidarity with the Czech Republic.

The US, German, and French governments should stop pushing Kosovo's new leaders into a dangerous, Bosnia-type deal with Serbia.

Russia and China plan to build a joint station on the moon, Roscosmos and the Chinese National Space Administration said Friday. Their "International Scientific Lunar Station" would be "a complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in Moon orbit with possible involvement of other countries", they noted. Russia is also leaving an existing International Space Station by 2025 and building its own orbiting laboratory by 2030.

"We remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring," US president Joe Biden said Saturday, becoming the first-ever American leader to describe the 1915 killings as "genocide". "We will not take lessons from anyone on our history," foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on behalf of modern Turkey, which rejects the label.

Leaders of the world's biggest economies recently renewed their climate commitments. But climate targets decades into the future, with a belief in tech-induced salvation, minimise the sense of urgency needed now to reduce emissions.

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and European Council president Charles Michel will give their versions of events that took place at their visit to Ankara earlier this month, in a plenary debate at the European Parliament.

The EU has the chance to lead the international community out of the biggest crisis of the century. We need to support the request for a waiver to lift patents on Covid-19 vaccines.

My father was one of the 93 percent of Bulgarians over-80 who had not yet been vaccinated.

Viktor Orbán has one key card in his hands: Hungary has still not approved the legislation necessary for the EU Commission to raise money on the markets. However, it will be difficult to hold out on this.

Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu has said troops would return to base after massing on Ukraine's border in recent days in what the West feared was preparation for a new invasion. "The troops have demonstrated their ability to provide a credible defence for the country," Shoigu said said. Ukraine and Nato welcomed the move, with Nato saying it was "important and well overdue".

Germany's business elite favours Greens candidate Annalena Baerbock to succeed chancellor Angela Merkel after a federal election in September, an opinion poll published on Thursday showed, Reuters reports. The Civey poll of 1,500 executives for WirtschaftsWoche magazine, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday, showed 26.5 percent favoured Baerbock for chancellor, ahead of Christian Lindner of the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) on 16.2 percent.

Europe experienced its hottest year on record last year, while the Arctic suffered a summer of extreme wildfires partly due to low snow cover as climate change impacts intensified, EU's Copernicus Earth observation service said, Reuters writes. Europe's average annual temperature in 2020 was at least 0.4 degrees Celsius above the next five warmest years - all of which took place in the last decade, the observation service said.

Germany is against redrawing borders in the Western Balkans, German foreign minister Heiko Maas said in Pristina Thursday, after a Slovenia-linked plan leaked to break up Bosnia and creating a Greater Albania. "The idea that things can be solved with new lines on a map is not only unrealistic, but it is dangerous to even initiate this discussion," he said. The informal paper was put into "the shredder of history".

Czech foreign minister Jakub Kulhanek said Moscow would have until the end of May to withdraw 63 embassy employees, a move he said aimed to bring staff numbers in line with those at the Czech embassy in Russia, Deutsche Welle reports. The announcement marks an escalation in a diplomatic row over the alleged role of Russian spies in a deadly blast at a Czech munitions depot in 2014.

At least 120 asylum seekers are feared dead after their rubber boat capsized in stormy seas off the coast of Libya while they were attempting to reach Europe, charities and the UN migration agency say, The Guardian writes. Dozens of bodies were spotted near a capsized vessel on Thursday, which had had about 130 people on board, a rescue charity said.

President Joe Biden announced at a virtual climate summit of dozens of world leaders that the US will aim to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by between 50 percent and 52 percent by 2030, based on 2005 levels. He added that the new US goal will set it on the path to net-zero emissions by 2050, and that other countries now needed to raise their ambition.

The European Commission said on Thursday it has not yet decided whether to take legal action against AstraZeneca for failing to meet its contractual obligations - but repeated that all options are still on the table.

Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told MEPs that Israel is actively sabotaging the first Palestinian election to be held in 15 years. He also asked the EU to pile pressure on Israel so that people can vote in East Jerusalem.

In the autumn, the EU Commission will launch five pilot projects under the New European Bauhaus with funding of €25m, and it will be possible to combine this with money with EU structural funds.