Euobserver.com

A strong earthquake in the Aegean Sea on Friday has struck Greece and areas of western Turkey, killing several people, Deutsche Welle reports. The magnitude 7.0 quake reportedly caused several buildings to collapse in the Turkish city of Izmir. At least four people were killed and 120 injured in Turkey, the country's disaster agency said.

The European Commission has launched the first step in a legal case against Hungary for having placed restrictions on people seeking asylum in the country. "The commission considers that new asylum procedures set out in the Hungarian Act and Decree introduced in response to the coronavirus pandemic are in breach of EU law," it said on Friday. The decree imposes extra administrative burdens, deemed illegal by the EU commission.

Poland's prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki appealed to abortion rights activists on Thursday to halt mass protests, saying they would fuel more coronavirus infections and threaten the elderly, Reuters reports. Tens of thousands of mostly young people have gathered across Poland since a top court ruling last week introduced a near-total ban on abortion. Protestors blame Morawiecki's nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party for the court's decision.

The EU has set aside €220 million to help transfer coronavirus patients across borders in case hospitals in any given country cannot cope, the European Commission president said after video-talks with EU leaders Thursday. "The spread of the virus will overwhelm our healthcare systems if we do not act urgently," Ursula von der Leyen said. The number of infections in Europe now stands at more than 10 million people.

Some 140 people have drowned after a boat carrying 200 migrants from Senegal to Spain's Canary Islands caught fire and capsized last Saturday, the UN confirmed on Thursday. "We call for unity between governments, partners and the international community to dismantle trafficking and smuggling networks," a UN spokeswoman said. Some 11,000 migrants came to the Canaries so far this year, compared to 2,557 in the same period last year.

The European Central Bank (ECB) indicated Thursday it might take action to help the eurozone economy in December, amid a new slump due to the second wave of coronavirus-related lockdowns. "We will be looking at everything," ECB chief Christine Lagarde said. "We are going to use all the instruments that we have," she added, referring to potential interest rate adjustments, bond-buying programmes, and quantitative easing.

EU leaders have urged other nations to stop inciting hatred after a Tunisian migrant murdered three people in France on Thursday.

Negotiators failed on Thursday to clinch a deal on linking EU funds to the respect of rule of law, although a compromise haD been close. The main obstacle had been a time-limit on a decision to suspends funds in case of wrongdoing. Talks between MEPS and diplomats of the German EU presidency on the long-term EU budget and coronavirus recovery package did also not yield breakthrough on Wednesday.

The leader of the UK's main opposition party Labour, Sir Keir Starmer has suspended Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader, from the party over his reaction to a highly-critical report on anti-Semitism. The human rights watchdog found Labour responsible for "unlawful" harassment and discrimination during Corbyn's years in charge. Corbyn said the scale of anti-Semitism within Labour had been "dramatically overstated" by opponents, BBC reported.

The burden on healthcare systems all across the bloc, as a result of the autumn surge in coronavirus infections, is triggering new nationwide lockdowns and restrictive measures in nearly every EU member state.

A new report on gender equality in the EU makes it clear: improved gender equality in decision-making is the main driver of progress in the EU. And most progress so far is due to outliers Sweden, Denmark and France.

There is a persistent problem of 'fake observers.' Often the government of the country they are observing, or even the election management body itself, pays for these observers, holds fancy dinners, and puts them in five-star hotels.

World stock markets went into a dive in response to the news that Europe's biggest economies were imposing nationwide restrictions almost as severe as the ones that drove the global economy this year into its deepest recession in generations, Reuters writes. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Germany will shut bars, restaurants and theatres from 2 November to 30 November. European stock markets closed at their lowest levels since late May Wednesday.

French president Emmanuel Macron ordered the country back into lockdown on Wednesday, as a massive second wave of coronavirus infections threatened to overwhelm Europe before the winter, the Guardian writes. "Overrun by a second wave which we know will be harder, more deadly than the first," Macron said in a TV address, "I have decided that we need to return to the lockdown which stopped the virus".

Much still depends on if the German EU presidency is willing to sign up to a strict time limit for member states to decide on possible sanctions in the new rule-of-law conditionality.

NGOs and MEPs have said Frontex was wrong to spend €100m on military-grade surveillance drones, to come into operation next spring, instead of focusing on saving lives with search and rescue operations. "The EU's external border is becoming increasingly militarised," German left-wing MEP Özlem Demirel told The Guardian. "Are we going to have more cameras in the sky to watch people drown?", Wim Zwijnenburg, from Dutch NGO Pax, said.

Hungary and Poland plan to create a joint "rule-of-law institute" in the first half of 2021, brining together a network of academics to counter EU criticism that they have destroyed judicial independence and violated other democratic EU values, The Guardian reports. "We need to show to Europe that there might be an alternative interpretation," Hungary's justice minister, Judit Varga, said, amid EU sanctions procedures against Budapest and Warsaw.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has vowed legal action against French magazine Charlie Hebdo for a cartoon showing him peeking under a Muslim woman's dress. Erdoğan is also suing Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders for a cartoon of him as a terrorist and Greek newspaper Dimokratia for a headline saying "Fuck off Mr Erdoğan". He tried and failed to sue German comic Jan Böhmermann in 2019 for a satirical poem.

Russia is to criminalise comparisons of Stalinism with Nazism, president Vladimir Putin has said. "I agree with your suggestion," he told Russian MP Elena Yampolskaya, who proposed it at a cultural event, Kommersant reports. "God himself ordered us, probably, to include appropriate mechanisms to protect the very recent past," Putin said. The European Parliament has declared 23 August as a "European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism said Nazism".

The European Federation of Public Service Unions, representing the bloc's health and social service workers, urged EU leaders to increase the funding for the EU4health programme saying the pandemic has put public health systems on the verge of collapse. In July, the European Council cut the proposed budget from €9.4bn to €1.7bn. EU leaders are meeting on Thursday via videoconference to discuss responses to the second wave of the pandemic.