Belgium

BRUSSELS, July 27 (Xinhua) -- Seventy percent of adults in the European Union (EU) have received at least one vaccine dose against COVID-19, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen said on Tuesday.

Von der Leyen said in a statement that "the EU has kept its word and delivered. Our target was to protect 70 percent of adults in the EU with at least one vaccination in July. Today we have achieved this target."

20 July 2021; MEMO: The European Union is set to send a military mission to Libya to bolster the bloc's influence as a foreign superpower, according to a leaked paper, reports Anadolu Agency.

Libya's peace process requires large-scale disarmament, demobilisation, and the reintegration of combatants as well as fundamental security sector reform, according to an internal paper from the EU foreign service dated July 1 seen by Brussels-based news outlet EUobserver.

19 July 2021; MEMO: The EU border agency Frontex has failed to protect the human rights of asylum seekers, according to a European Parliament report, according to the Guardian.

The report's author, Tineke Strik told the Guardian that Frontex "did not fulfil its human rights obligations and therefore did not prevent future violations."

Strik, a Dutch Green MEP, wants the agency's Director Fabrice Leggeri to resign or be fired.

BRUSSELS, July 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — European Union leaders celebrated their coronavirus vaccination programme reaching a higher proportion of its people than in the US, which had outpaced the bloc for months.

“We promised it and it’s done. The EU this week overtook the US as the continent with the most first doses in the world,” Commissioner Thierry Breton wrote on Twitter.

Citing statistics website Our World in Data, France’s Europe minister Clement Beaune wrote that the EU had now given 55.5 percent of people a first dose, compared with 55.4 across the Atlantic.

BRUSSELS (AP) — Just as the European Union was announcing plans to spend billions of euros to contain climate change, massive clouds gathered over Germany and nearby nations to unleash an unprecedented storm that left death and destruction in its wake.

Despite ample warnings, politicians and weather forecasters were shocked at the ferocity of the precipitation that caused flash flooding that claimed more than 150 lives this week in the lush rolling hills of Western Europe.

16 July 2021; MEMO: Companies may ban Muslim employees from wearing a headscarf under certain conditions, the European Union's top court said today, in two cases brought by Muslim women in Germany who were suspended from their jobs after they started wearing the Islamic garment, Reuters reports.

BRUSSELS, July 15 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) is planning to overhaul its current energy taxation system in a bid to synchronize it with the bloc's green ambition, European Commissioner for Economy Paolo Gentiloni said on Thursday.

He noted that it was high time that the EU updated its Energy Taxation Directive which was almost two decades old and with minimum rates unchanged since 2003.

BRUSSELS, July 15 (Reuters) - The European Union's top court ruled on Thursday that Poland's system for disciplining judges undercuts the bloc's laws, part of an escalating battle over democratic rules that risks Warsaw losing some of its key development funding.

Poland's ruling nationalists set up a disciplinary chamber at the Supreme Court in a sweeping overhaul of the judiciary already condemned by the Brussels-based EU executive, which acts as the guardian of laws across the bloc's 27 member states.

BRUSSELS, July 14 (Xinhua) -- The European Commission on Wednesday unveiled a comprehensive roadmap for realizing the European Union's (EU) ambitious target of reducing its net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent from 1990 levels by 2030 and to become climate-neutral by 2050.

The massive package of legislative updates, dubbed "Fit for 55," was presented by the EU's climate policy chief Frans Timmermans, who said that the EU aimed to "give humanity a fighting chance."

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union on Wednesday is unveiling sweeping new legislation to help meet its pledge to cut emissions of the gases that cause global warming by 55% over this decade, including a controversial plan to tax foreign companies for the pollution they cause.

The proposals by the European Commission, which is the EU’s executive branch, will cover everything from tougher caps on car pollution to new national limits on gases from buildings. It will see a revamp of the bloc’s emissions trading scheme under which companies pay for the gases they send into the air.