Trump’s attack on Radio Free Europe puts press freedom under new strain
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the US-funded newsroom set up during the Cold War to deliver independent news in countries where free media is under attack, and to serve as a pillar of American soft power. It was backed for decades by Republican and Democratic administrations until Donald Trump entered the White House and his officials […]
Prometheus bound to the Caucasus
Soon it will have been a year since the prime minister of the puppet government of pro-Russian oligarch Ivanishvili officially proclaimed Georgia’s refusal to integrate into the European Union. Since then, protests in the country have known no respite. The autocratic oligarch has had numerous citizens locked up in prison: today we call them prisoners […]
Polish YouTube disrupts traditional television
Before the second round of Poland’s presidential election in June, politicians began lining up at Kanał Zero. Members of the ruling Civic Platform, the liberal party led by Donald Tusk, concluded that the newcomer YouTube-based media outlet – launched in February 2024 – was the best place to try to win over conservative voters to […]
Rich Americans invent, rich Europeans inherit
“The very rich are different from you and me”: “Yes, they have more money,” goes one of the most overused quotes of all time, the one we use as an alternative to the one about happy families. A spurious quote, moreover, allegedly reporting a dialogue between Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Two writers who […]
Don’t let the free media that brings hope to Afghanistan be silenced
“Afghanistan can’t handle a totally free media”, I was told after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, by representatives of foreign governments, by Afghans who had returned from Europe or the US, by heads of NGOs. Can’t handle what exactly? I wondered. And which Afghans are you all talking about? Afghans who had […]
Denmark caught between Putin and Trump
When the fourth season of “Borgen” came out in 2022, almost ten years after the third, many people were shocked. The TV series that taught us about Danish politics is written by Adam Price, a screenwriter who is extremely popular in the country because he’s also a food critic and has worked as a TV […]
Raising a city kid in Barcelona
I remember the days of blurred schedules, of working late, sleeping in, slipping out of the house at strange hours for improvised lunch dates, lunch dates stretching into dinner dates becoming cocktail nights. Every now and then I’d catch a fleeting sight, like a blur or a moth skimming the edge of my vision, of […]
Oulu prepares culture festival with a formula for European happiness
When Oulu was chosen as “European Capital of Culture for 2026,” Putin’s massive invasion of Ukraine had not yet begun. Some could see, in the choice of a Finnish town whose region borders Russia, almost an attempt to broaden the concept of Europe, inviting neighboring nations to visit it. On one side the flat birch […]
Nitazenes: powerful, little-known, and fueling Europe’s drug epidemic
The UK National Crime Agency titled one of its recent reports as follows: “There has never been a time when taking drugs has been so dangerous.” The increased danger that agency alludes to lies in the fact that, more and more often, drug users don’t know what they’re putting into their bodies. Indeed, if in […]
EU sets a roadmap after illusions about the Russian threat vanish
One month for a deal on 140 billion for Ukraine In her State of the Union address, Ursula von der Leyen announced the proposal to provide a “reparation loan” to Ukraine to be financed using Russian sovereign assets frozen under sanctions. Until now, the major member states and the European Central Bank had always opposed […]