Month: July 2022

LONDON — Senior Conservative politicians who have been sanctioned by China are demanding that the U.K. parliament takes down its newly created TikTok account. Senior MPs and members of the House of Lords laid into parliamentary authorities for setting up an account on the social media platform, which is owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance. […]

Europe is courting some extremely dodgy regimes for oil and gas. Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine means EU leaders are spending the summer cozying up to presidents, and the odd crown prince, who rank among the world’s most autocratic heads of state; from warmongers to human rights abusers and serial polluters. Call it European […]

EDINBURGH — At least once a month, on average, in the small Scottish county of Fife, an addicted user of heroin or other drugs will need to have their leg amputated — the result of injecting an illegal substance directly into their groin. “[The groin] is a very difficult place to inject safely and cleanly,” […]

Viktor Orbán is striding back into the global culture wars — deflecting from economic woes at home and aware the EU is unlikely to challenge his rhetoric. The longtime Hungarian leader, a onetime liberal who is now Europe’s leading far-right figure, prompted cries of outrage this week after he declared Hungary does not want to […]

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column. The next prime minister of the U.K. will need the backing of as many high-profile figures as possible, and the race is on to get the biggest name of them all on board. No, not the man on the way out of 10 Downing Street, Boris Johnson, whose […]

Mikko Huotari is the executive director of the Mercator Institute for Chinese Studies. Sébastien Jean is a professor of economics at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. After a long period of uncertainty, the European Union and China once again engaged in high-level economic and trade dialogue, just before Brussels went on summer break. It’s […]

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe. “The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never!” says a character in “The Master and Margarita,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s grimly satirical Stalin-era novel blending fantasy and reality. But in the real world, the eyes can all too often deceive — especially when the lies are spoken […]

Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the Supreme Court’s earth-shaking decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade, is mocking foreign leaders who lamented his opinion doing away with a half-century of federal constitutional protection for abortion rights in the U.S. During a surprise appearance as a keynote speaker at a religious freedom conference in Rome last week, […]