Euobserver.com

The Czech Republic has sacked its health minister, Roman Prymula, for flouting anti-coronavirus rules by going to a restaurant with VIP friends, which had stayed open for them despite a lockdown. "We can't preach water and drink wine," Czech prime minister Andrei Babiš said. Nato and the EU recently donated ventilators to help Czech hospitals cope. Prymula previously said the virus had "escaped from a Chinese lab".

UK prime minister Boris Johnson will probably wait until US elections 3 November before deciding whether to embrace a no-deal Brexit, Ivan Rogers, the UK's former ambassador to the EU, has told The Guardian. If pro-European Joe Biden wins, Johnson might "conclude that this is just too risky ... and hence live with some highly suboptimal (for Johnson) skinny free-trade agreement", instead of a new US-UK trade deal, Rogers said.

The number of Jewish people in Europe has gone down by 60 percent in the past 50 years, mostly due to an exodus from the former Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991, a new study by London-based think-tank the Institute for Jewish Policy Research has said. Populations drooped drastically in Russia and Ukraine, but increased in Austria, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. Some 70,000 Israeli-born Jews have also moved to Europe.

Video footage in an investigation by German daily Der Spiegel and other media has shown the EU border control agency, Frontex, has been systematically helping the Greek coastguard illegally push back refugee boats into Turkish waters. "Greek authorities have confirmed that an internal inquiry had been launched," Frontex said on Twitter. Its own staff had acted "in full respect of fundamental rights and international law," Frontex added.

Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has put himself at the forefront of a Muslim backlash against France's handling of the recent Mohammed cartoons killing.

After almost a week of arm-wrestling and ten days before the UK severs all of its EU ties, negotiators are back working hard on a deal on the future EU-UK relations. Budget and rule of law talks will also continue.

EU environment ministers reached on Friday a partial agreement on the bloc's climate law, pending a decision by EU leaders on the updated 2030 target. While none of the 27 EU countries rejected the bill, Bulgaria decided to abstain.

The mayor of a small German seaside town now faces sanctions from a bipartisan coalition in the US Congress - because local companies are working on the Nord Stream 2 German-Russian pipeline.

European Parliament demands to impose visas on visitors from the United States were cast aside by the European Commission. Bulgarians, Croatian, Cypriots and Romanians still require a short-stay visa to enter the United States. MEPs say it is discriminatory.

Feminists disrupted church services in Poland on Sunday in a fourth day of "revolution" against new anti-abortion laws and the ruling party's right-wing vision.

Current Brexit talks envisaged a £3bn (€3.3bn) net British contribution to the EU's next Horizon Europe scientific research programme, Vivienne Stern, the director of a British universities' association, told a House of Lords Brexit committee Thursday, in what she called an "unfair" EU offer, The Guardian reports. But "it's not just about money ... [we'd] be a poorer nation scientifically," if EU ties were cut, Britain's pro-science Royal Institute said.

The quarantine imposed on the Vial migrant reception and identification centre on the eastern Aegean island of Chios was extended to 4 November, the Greek migration ministry announced on Thursday, Greek newspaper Ekathimerini writes. The centre has been in lockdown since 14 October, after health authorities confirmed "numerous" coronavirus infections. The ministry has not specified how many camp residents have tested positive for Covid-19.

The recent fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been much deadlier than previously feared, with Russia estimating that it claimed 5,000 lives.

The human rights commissioner of the Council of Europe said the ruling marked a "sad day for women's rights", adding that more women will seek abortions underground and abroad.

Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko as well as 14 other Belarusians are to join an existing EU blacklist of 40 names following initial diplomatic talks this week. The decision will be formalised next week and the number could still change. The 14 are officials, rather than businessmen said to sponsor the regime, diplomatic sources said. The EU move comes after more than two months of Lukashenko's violence against pro-democracy protesters.

Member states on Thursday imposed a travel ban and an asset freeze on two individuals and one body responsible for or complicit in the cyberattack on the German parliament in 2015. Some 16 gigabytes of data, documents, and emails were stolen from the Bundestag's network, including thousands of emails from Angela Merkel's office. In total, eight people and four bodies have been sanctioned for cyberattacks in the EU.

Cross-party MEPs called on the European Commission to prepare to withdraw from the controversial Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) if negotiations for its modernisation fail. At the heart of the row is fossil fuel companies ability to sue governments for compensation.

Italy has reignited an old dispute with France over Mont Blanc border-rights, after French authorities imposed natural preservation measures that encroached on Italian territory, the Guardian writes. The French measures would harm tourism in the popular Mont Blanc skiing area, Rifugio Torino, which was defined by a treaty signed in 1860 as being part of Italy. Foreign minister Luigi De Maio has sent an official complaint to the French government.

The European Commission rubber-stamped over 99 percent requests by officials to take on jobs in the private sector, posing ethical questions in light of known examples where conflicts of interests appear to be clear cut.

The German government believes it has fashioned an instrument that can protect EU taxpayers from fraud and corruption. It is wrong.