Europe
EUROPE
Kawthoolei Republic: Italy’s CasaPound Export Radical Dreams to Myanmar
In Myanmar’s remote hills, a rogue general and his Italian allies are forging a sovereign state on a harvest of ideas Rome would not permit at home.
Film
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.
EUROPE
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.
LIFESTYLE
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.
EUROPE
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.
Popular
Starlink, Grok and the Price of Private Infrastructure
As UK regulator Ofcom launched a formal investigation into X on 12 January 2026 over Grok's generation of sexualised deepfakes, including images of children, the case exposed how everyday life runs on systems voters never designed.
Cloudflare Pulls the Plug on the Italy’s Winter Games
Cloudflare quits Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics security after Italy fine, sparking US-EU clash over piracy laws and censorship
Mudejar Ruins in Spain: Brickwork on the Edge
At 8:00 on Monday morning, a wall of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Muriel de Zapardiel collapsed, sending 12th-century Romanesque-Mudejar brick crashing onto the ground and turning a quiet Valladolid village into the latest symbol of Spain's heritage crisis.
Poland’s Catholic Football Pilgrimage: Unity, Faith and a Hard Line on Migration
At a Marian shrine where football supporters gather to pray, a presidential call for “Poland without illegal immigrants” turned a devotional event into a political stage.
AfDB Turns to Gulf as Western Funders Step Back
The African Development Bank has installed a president with ingrained Gulf experience as Washington pulls back hundreds of millions
