Despite the change in timing, the Commission insisted "the proposal will be made" and warned that a return to Russian fossil fuels after the war would be a "strategic blunder".

@detig.bsky.social espero que a crise dos fertilizantes não impeça a atribuição deste prémio na época 25/26 da liga dinamarquesa www.tvsyd.dk/haderslev/fo...

EU tech law EU Commission sues Portugal for not implementing national law elements of the Digital Services Act - parallel action was also brought against Spain eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-conten...

Russian attack on Ukraine damaged Moldova power lines and disconnected Moldova from its key power link with Europe,

Over the course of the weekend & Monday, Viktor Orbán held two major events in Budapest bringing far-right leaders from across Europe and the world together. I tried to track them and put them the public endorsements on a map, which shows the broad support he is mobilizing.

The most striking differences between the EU's Australia deal and the UK's post-Brexit Australia deal are the clauses the EU has included to protect its farmers and workers. These range from limited quotas to workers' rights, sustainability, designations of origin and environmental protections.

Mark Rutte is pathetic, and I say this fully aware that handling a deranged crook as president of the US is not an easy job. As far as what a NATO SG can do, Stoltenberg did a much better role when he prevented Trump from further undermining the alliance, without resorting to pitiful adulation.

The illiberals do not always get to win.

Good night, world www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWYJ...

broke: lenin was good woke: lenin was evil bespoke: i have heard that on his deathbed lenin received the light of islam and unhesitatingly recited the shahada.

I've been asked over the last few days/weeks what I think will happen on April 12th in Orbán's 🇭🇺 (and the aftermath), so here's my assessment, looking at everything as it stands now 🧵 tldr: It's complicated, and no one really knows (and those who say they do are either lying or overly confident) 1/

I keep seeing this framing like Bremmer's. It is wrong. Instead: 1. Iran was developing an ICBM when Khamenei imposed a 2,000-km range limit. 3. The programs shifted to space launch. 4. Khamenei lifted the restriction in October 2025 after the June attacks. 5. Now he's dead, and here we are.

we can remember that the Trump war is illegal and evil while also remembering that the Iranian regime is evil.

"I thought the consequences of the Special Military Operation were only for the *other* people!"

"software is the new content" might be the most profoundly stupid sentence I've read this week

What would an EUCO meeting be without member states who deliberately stall any adance? €uro zone crisis, refugee crisis, Covid, and since 2022, handling Russia's war of agression against Ukraine. euobserver.com/207729/eu-fi...

BREAKING: The blackout in Spain and Portugal in April 2025 did NOT happen because of renewables. The final ENTSO-E report on last year's Iberian blackout is out — and it's essential reading for anyone working on the energy transition. www.entsoe.eu/news/2026/03...

PLO offered to have NATO peacekeepers in the State of Palestine and the US and Israel said no in 2014

If right after Soleimani's assassination someone from the future had shown me the numbers about GDP growth & international travel for 2020, I would have assumed there was a war between the US and Iran that dragged along a great part of the world.

Le saviez-vous ? #lesaviezvous L'OAS, organisation terroriste, a tué plus de Français que tous les attentats islamistes réunis. Le RN est l'héritier de cette organisation. À demain pour d'autres trucs que tout le monde sait, mais feint d'oublier.

@detig.bsky.social Hehehe até cliquei para ouvir isto por causa deste destaque - a partir dos 49:10 'demasiado rural para um clube tão metropolitano' - isto é uma personagem que vai render anos e anos sicnoticias.pt/podcasts/jog...

all of you, pull up a chair

"katamari damacy ball of desires and grievances" 🤘

i would say it's amazing that a magazine whose politics emphasize working class solidarity would treat engagement with lived realities in China as optional, but it's such a durable feature of US leftist China discourse that by this point all I can muster is a smirk and a shrug

Quite a picture from AP: Viktor Orbán watches from outside the main table as Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks to EU leaders via video link.

Alliances work when you respect your allies.

Remarkable story from Denmark's nat'l broadcaster. "When Danish soldiers were flown to Greenland in January...they brought explosives so they could destroy, among other things, the runways in Nuuk & Kangerlussuaq [to] prevent US mil aircraft from landing" www.dr.dk/nyheder/indl...

74% of the world's population now live in autocracies, and only 7% in liberal democracies. Freedom of expression has declined in 44 countries.

The Trump administration alignment with Russia is not primarily about China - at least, not for Trump and probably not for those close to him. If it were, then Trump would have been saying so for all the many years he's been focused on "getting along with Russia".🧵 www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

WTAF??

Merecem 1 ponto pela sinceridade. Se todas as pessoas favoráveis a regimes autoritários e repressivos o afirmassem sem ambiguidades a esfera pública seria muito mais transparente - e nós perderíamos menos tempo com palavras inúteis.

Fun fact: my dissertation was called "Wars of Choice" (became Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions @cornellupress.bsky.social). Tl;dr: they rarely go well. 1/ www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801...

Between Russia, Iran, Israel, the US and now Pakistan, the competition for the worst acts of mass murder committed against civilians is becoming all too common in 2026.

I was looking forward to read this. The autocratization in the US under Trump has been so severe, it earned its own chapter in the @vdeminstitute.bsky.social report.

Yep, right there on art. 6 - the same way that US efforts outside NATO's area of operation do not come under the Alliance's coverage. Individual member countries are nonetheless sovereign to participate with others in their military operations.

The Return of the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions ✌️

The UAE has taken functionally zero refugees from Middle East conflicts. Contrast that with counties like Jordan or Turkey which, while with more than their own share of problems, host millions of Syrians alone.

Iran closing off the Strait of Hormuz is such a likely outcome that it must have been wargamed dozens of times, with probably always the same result: this is a bad idea. There was a reason no other administration attacked Iran in this fashion and this was a big part of it.

“The Swiss ​government said on Saturday that ‌it discussed requests by U.S. military and official aircraft to fly over the country, ​and based on its law ​of neutrality, rejected two Iran-related war ⁠flights but permitted three others.” www.reuters.com/business/aer...

Thus the centre right in Belgium long imagined that they were enthusiastic about European security, democracy, and government efficiency, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about cheap fossil fuels.

Hong Kong is fine to welcome Andrew Tate to run amok in LKF, but it will bar journalists/human rights defenders and issue bounties on pro-democracy activists living overseas. Tate's charges include rape, human trafficking, sex with minors, and bodily harm. Image credit: @hongkongggag.bsky.social

Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.

Inside the Department of War are two wolves: "We've shut down the Colleges of War because book learnings are woke, gay, and irrelevant to war fighting." "How come no one told us the Strait is important, there are different kinds of Kurds, Iran is big, and air power historically doesn't win wars?"

Not even the Nazis expressly announced they were committing war crimes. Indeed, at Nuremberg war crimes were denied. But here, openly, the US Secretary for Defense is explicitly admitting to committing war crimes.

"managing expectations across multiple audiences: financial markets, domestic political allies, & international partners. Such ambiguity may itself complicate the search for a clear endgame"

The Netherlands has filed a Declaration of Intervention in the ICJ genocide case against Israel. As a non-party, they are submitting a legal interpretation arguing that forced displacement, starvation, and acts against children can prove specific genocidal intent. icj-cij.org/sites/defaul...

IMO a good counter to Trump’s “unpredictable madman!” shtick has always been responding to short term threats with long term consequences. EU should’ve responded to tariff threats with aggressive counter tariffs & snooze for 3 months. Now with little left to lose, Iran is doing it in an actual war.

Narratively having Ever Given getting stuck in 2021 to set up Hormuz in 2026 is great foreshadowing. You want your audience to understand the basics of international shipping in a lower stakes context so you drop the real plot without a lot of saggy exposition about the minutiae of cargo logistics.

The sheer strategic stupidity of bailing Russia out of its economic hole by launching a war that entirely foreseeably spikes the oil price - and then having no minesweepers in place to deal with the foreseeable fallout. Rank incompetence.

This war in Iran is a perfect illustration of the dangers of autocratic rule — and right now we indisputably have the foreign policy of a personalistic autocracy. Trump got high on his Venezuelan supply, and immediately got the entire world into a completely unnecessary crisis.