Europe

Bury the Lead: MTV ‘Death’ and the Way We Read Now

As MTV continued broadcasting across the United States and most of Europe on 1 January 2026, millions of social media tributes mourned a channel that had never actually shut down.

La Befana: Italy’s Winter Gift Giver

As Rome's Piazza Navona packed with families yesterday for the 2026 Befana celebrations, one tradition proves that Italy's Christmas season runs on its own clock.

GoVolta €10 Amsterdam-Berlin Route: Promising Start, Limited Scale

Cheap tickets and glossy promises suggest Europe's trains can finally take on planes, yet the realities of infrastructure, price and time tell a more complicated story.

McDonald’s AI Christmas Ad Backlash: Audiences Reject Synthetic Sentiment

An AI Christmas advert that told viewers to hide in McDonald's because the holidays are "terrible" has done something many feared: it made people miss imperfect, human-made ads.

French Farmers Block Roads: Disease Control Reveals Europe’s Meat Economy

French farmers blocking motorways over diseased cattle look like a sudden crisis, yet they expose a quieter reality: slaughter has always been central to Europe's food system, just usually out of sight.

Popular

Winter Storm Research Rewrites a Witch Trial Tragedy

As new research published in Smithsonian Magazine this week connects a 1617 Arctic storm to Norway's deadliest witch trials, climate historians reveal how weather shock fed decades of persecution.

Prediction Takes Politics: Prophets and Polymarkets Collide

As 11 Peruvian shamans predicted Nicolás Maduro's fall on 29 December 2025, crypto traders were placing similar bets online—five days before U.S. forces extracted the Venezuelan leader to New York.

Mladenov Takes Over Gaza Board After Regional Veto

Nickolay Mladenov becomes Gaza peace board head after Arab states blocked Tony Blair, raising questions about whose interests guide Washington's selection.

Abu Dhabi Rebuffs British Universities Over Campus Radicalisation

The world’s wealthiest patrons now view Western campuses as hazards, forcing a costly inversion of the traditional hierarchy that once defined global education.

Bury the Lead: MTV ‘Death’ and the Way We Read Now

As MTV continued broadcasting across the United States and most of Europe on 1 January 2026, millions of social media tributes mourned a channel that had never actually shut down.