Euractiv.com

European leaders urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to push for dialogue in neighbouring Belarus on Tuesday (18 August), as opposition supporters protested President Alexander Lukashenko's disputed election win for a 10th day.

A UN-backed tribunal on Tuesday (18 August) found a member of the Hezbollah Shiite movement guilty over the 2005 murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri but cleared three other suspects after a years-long trial.

On Wednesday (19 September) EU leader are holding an extraordinary summit on the situation in Belarus. But EU member Bulgaria has similar issues with its democracy, with protests ongoing for a 42nd day in a row.

Giving a new life to plastic trash gets Carlos Bento out of bed every morning. But the coronavirus pandemic has seen revenues drop up to 40% at Micronipol, the large recycling facility he runs in central Portugal, and it faces an uncertain future.

The European Commission will table proposals next month to raise the EU's climate target for 2030, amid warnings from Eastern countries to safeguard jobs and growth from the coronavirus fallout.

The COVID-19 crisis has only made worse the income and work security gap between Commission employees and European citizens. A senior university professor in Bulgaria makes similar salary as a starting secretary in the Commission. Is this the Union we want, Piotr Maciej Kaczyński asks.

Mali’s president and prime minister were detained by military forces on Tuesday night (18 August) in what the EU described as an attempted coup d’etat.

The recent scandal caused by the head of the EU Delegation to the Republic of Moldova is probably one of the worst diplomatic incidents for a EU representative in recent years.

French President Emmanuel Macron urged his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to foster "calm and dialogue" in Belarus, where protests are growing against President Alexander Lukashenko's disputed re-election, the Élysée Palace said.

Former European Central Bank chief, Mario Draghi, called on European governments on Tuesday (18 August) to ensure the colossal amounts of debt countries are running up in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic are invested in upgrading their economies.

The implementation of the EU’s recovery fund and taxation will dominate the second half of the year, as both issues will top the German presidency agenda, and new resources are needed to finance the stimulus package to respond to the coronavirus crisis.

Ramped-up U.S. restrictions on Huawei are likely to choke the Chinese company’s access to even off-the-shelf chips, threaten its crown as the world’s largest smartphone maker and disrupt global tech supply, executives and experts warned.

Germany’s anti-trust authority has launched an investigation into Amazon’s relationship with third-party traders selling on its site, its head was quoted as saying on Sunday (16 August).

The opportunity is here: to accelerate towards carbon neutrality and mark this moment as a historical turning point. The solutions are ready and proven. Now, it all comes down to the scale and speed of implementation.

Growing concerns around systemic racism have led some to reconsider the conduct of Germany’s police force and demand a study of racial profiling in policing. With more than 67,000 signatures, the petition calling for such a study must be debated in the Bundestag’s Petition Committee.

Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, Canadian author Margaret Atwood and Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk on Monday (17 August) accused Poland's ruling party of condoning homophobia in an open letter signed by dozens of global writers and directors.

EU competition regulators on Monday (17 August) cleared a €1 billion plan by Denmark and Sweden to recapitalise virus-hit SAS, saying the measure would prevent the Scandinavian airline's insolvency.

Italy has no more room for illegal migrants, its foreign minister Luigi Di Maio said Monday (17 August) on a visit to Tunisia, from where many of them cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Demonstrators descended on the Belarusian capital on Monday (17 August) for a ninth night of protests against strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko, who was heckled by factory workers as pressure grows on him to step down.

Creating a carbon border adjustment mechanism would not work as well as extending the EU Emissions Trading Scheme to reduce global emissions and further integrate energy exporting countries into the European power market, argue András Mezősi, Zsuzsanna Pató and László Szabó.