Wopke Hoekstra

Rich countries' promise of $300 billion a year in climate finance brought fury at talks in Baku from poor nations that found it too paltry, but it also shows a shift in global political realities.

The two-week marathon COP29 climate conference opened days after the decisive victory in the U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump, a skeptic both of climate change and foreign aid.

A fresh draft of a climate pact unveiled on Thursday at COP29 failed to break an impasse over money, with time running out for nations to reach a long-sought trillion-dollar finance agreement.

The U.N. climate summit in Azerbaijan is supposed to conclude today, but the latest draft only underlines divisions as nations return to the negotiating table.

In an interview with Politico's Brussels Playbook, former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has expressed his disappointment over the discord that emerged between euro zone countries in their attempts to come up with a joint response to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. 

A messy compromise to unlock €500bn (£438bn) of EU support for countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic has been struck after Italy's prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, warned that the existence of the bloc was at stake.

By George Gilson

The finance minister of the Netherlands says Greece's new conservative government will have little leeway to change the country's economic reform and debt-reduction policies since they were adopted in agreement with other eurozone nations.