Euobserver.com

Chatham House research fellow Laura Wellesley discusses her new report, which looked at how alternative meat products are regulated. 'It's not about everybody becoming vegan,' she said.

A meeting of the central European Visegrad group countries scheduled to start on Monday in Israel has been cancelled after Poland pulled out. Bilateral discussions willl take place instead. The cancellation came after the acting Israeli foreign minister said, "Poles suckle antisemitism from their mothers' milk". The row initially started after Israel's PM Netanyahu was quoted as saying "Poles co-operated with the Germans" during the Holocaust, infuriating his Polish counterpart.

The next EU parliament will better reflect the political reality in member states: more populists, and fewer traditional, centrist MEPs, according to new data.

"Climate change is a direct and existential threat, which will spare no country," the EU's foreign ministers said in a text adopted on Monday. All EU countries signed off on the text, including coal-reliant countries like Poland. They also noted that "climate change acts as a threat multiplier and increasingly as a threat in its own right, with serious implications for peace and security across the globe".

Seven British MPs have resigned from the Labour Party in protest at the party leader Jeremy Corbyn's handling of Brexit and the party being increasingly perceived as antisemitic. The seven will not form a new party or join any other party. Leaving MP Mike Gapes was quoted by the BBC saying that it was "increasingly clear that prominent figures in the Corbyn Labour leadership do not want to stop Brexit".

Russia could be a Cold War-type "partner" for Europe, German leader Angela Merkel has said.

Czech prime minister Andrej Babis said Sunday at a party congress the upcoming European Parliament elections "are the most important ever", Bloomberg reported. He pressed for a larger role for smaller EU states. "We want member states to have significant influence on Europe's development, so that Europe isn't governed just by bigger states with a politically biased [European] Commission and European civil servants that cost us huge money," Babis said.

"History will judge us," UK prime minister Theresa May told Conservative MPs in a letter this weekend, referring to Brexit. She once again urged her fellow Tories to back the withdrawal agreement, writing that failure "will let down the people who sent us to represent them and risk the bright future that they all deserve". May will plan meetings with all 27 other EU leaders and the European Commission president.

Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed "profound failure of governance within Facebook", British MPs said, while blaming Zuckerberg for his contempt for democratic scrutiny.

Viktor Orban of Hungary and Poland's Jaroslaw Kaczynski seem to share the idea that the rights of some may come at the expense of the rights of others, and public institutions should serve the majority, and not all citizens.

Britain, France, Germany, and other EU states should take 800 radical Islamist fighters captured by US troops in Syria in recent years and put them on trial, US president Donald Trump has said. "The alternative is not a good one," he said on Twitter on Saturday. "We will be forced to release them. The US does not want to watch as these ... fighters permeate Europe," Trump said.

Venezuela has denied entry to five pro-opposition MEPs which its foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza, accused of "provocation" and "conspiratorial aims". The group, which included one Dutch, one German, and three Spanish MEPs, said Sunday their passports had been "seized" and they were being "expelled". Most EU states have backed Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaido to take power and hold elections, in Europe's bid to end Venezuela's political and economic crisis.

Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has cancelled his trip to a mini-EU summit in Israel after Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu said "Poles co-operated with the Germans" in the Holocaust. Warsaw is to send its foreign minister instead to join the Czech, Hungarian, and Slovak leaders in Israel on Tuesday. Netanyahu has cultivated closer ties with central European states to try to muffle EU criticism of Israel's occupation of Palestine.

The European Space Agency, which is independent of the EU, has asked the European Commission not to rename an EU agency as the similar-sounding European Union Agency for the Space Programme.

EU probes into Hungary and Poland on rule of law and democracy are back on the agenda of EU affairs ministers - but with little guidance from the Romanian presidency, without a clear idea where the procedures are headed.

There can be no more excuses for business. They will be held for responsible for their failure to take action to prevent the risk of human and labour rights through their supply chains.

Brexit talks will continue in Brussels, as UK PM Theresa May's government is trying to find a way out of the political impasse at home. Murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi's fiancee will speak at the European Parliament next week.

Spain's prime minister Pedro Sanchez on Friday called a snap election for 28 April. Sanchez's announcement came after his minority government suffered a defeat in parliament on its 2019 budget plan, with Catalan pro-independence MPs and centre-right opposition rejecting the proposal. The Socialist PM has been in power since June 2018. It will be the third time Spaniards are asked to elect a new parliament since December 2015.

One of Belgium's top spies has been accused of working for Russia, amid long-standing security fears in Brussels, the home to EU and Nato institutions.

Some 15,000 Belgian school children on Thursday marched to show their support against climate change. The latest demonstration is the sixth in a series of protests by Belgian school students against the broad lack of action to slow global warming. The movement initially kicked off last year in Sweden when a 15-year old skipped school to demand action. Her climate action protest has since mushroomed across the world.