Category: EU Reporter

Ten years ago, I had the honour of speaking at news conference in Moscow with Russia’s human rights defenders. A week later, president Vladimir Putin signed a new bill into law and Russia’s human-rights landscape has become almost unrecognisable since.

EU post-pandemic aid to Italy is helping fuel a new boom in young people living the city to try their hand at old-fashioned, organic farming and food production.

Only 11 out of the 340 cities analysed by the European Environment Agency had good air quality from 2020 to 2021, according to new data published by the environmental watchdog on Monday. The best cities in terms of air quality include Umeå in Sweden and Faro and Funchal in Portugal. The World Health Organization’s threshold for […]

Doses of the Covid-19 vaccines likely to have been wasted is estimated at 1.1 billion, according to an Airfinity analysis published on Monday. Broken down, around 25 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine were discarded, while 19 million AstraZeneca jabs have been wasted, the report finds. Doses-wastage is estimated to be around 10-percent of […]

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the European Medicines Agency recommended on Monday that elderly people, and those with medical conditions, should receive a second booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine — as healthcare facilities in several member states are facing again increasing rates of hospital and intensive care unit admissions. The […]

As the summer harvest season begins in Ukraine during wartime, farmers face multiple challenges — while a hunger catastrophe looms.

Russia has shut down its Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline to Germany, the biggest single conduit to Europe, for 10 days of annual maintenance, amid fears it might extend the cut-off to put pressure on Europe to stop helping Ukraine. “[Russian president Vladimir] Putin knows no taboos,” Timm Kehler from German industry association Zukunft Gas […]

Russian president Vladimir Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a phone call where they discussed coordinating efforts on exporting grain and safety of navigation in the Black Sea, the Kremlin said on Monday. It said the talks took place in the run-up to a Russian-Turkish summit scheduled for the near future.

Greek NGOs on Monday hailed last’s week judgement from the European Court of Human Rights in an eight-year old case that vindicated people who lost their lives in the 2014 shipwreck off Farmakonisi. The judgement cited right to life violations by Greek authorities. “The case is not closed: the file will reopen in the Greek […]

A successor to Boris Johnson as Conservative party leader and British prime minister will be announced on 5 September, the Tory party announced on Monday. Nearly a dozen MPs are seeking to be the replacement to Johnson, who announced last week he was stepping down. Conservative MPs vote this week to narrow the field down […]