Europe

less than 1% of victims of human trafficking in Romania receive financial compensation for the horrors they are subjected to by human traffickers.

Source.

There were 27,000 more unemployed people during April–June than in the same period last year, according to Statistics Finland.

Primary targets are NGO workers, housing rights activists, and anarchists

Criminalising social struggles and dissent as an instrument of political action: according to several experts, this is the true goal of the security laws pushed by Giorgia Meloni’s government, starting with the security bill that was approved last June. But the measure, increasing penalties and strengthening investigative techniques, comes after years of normalising stakeouts, wiretaps, spyware, and undercover ops, all in the name of greater security. The real goal was not to bring criminals to justice, but to monitor and map activist groups and, now, even political parties.

On the morning of July 4, an American marketing professor was walking towards his ex-wife’s house in Athens to pick up their two young children. It should have been an unremarkable, if strained visit – the couple had apparently been disputing the terms of custody arrangements.

But Przemyslaw Jeziorski never made it to the front door.

In broad daylight, in this typically quiet, suburban neighborhood of Greece’s capital, he was shot multiple times at close range, according to police. Jeziorski died where he fell, police said, his body riddled with gunshot wounds seen in grim photographs taken in the immediate aftermath.

As eyewitnesses rushed to his aid, the masked gunman fled.

The alleged perpetrator, arrested 12 days later for premeditated murder: His ex-wife’s new partner. The motive, he told police – to prevent Jeziorski from taking away her children.

“I did it all for (her) and our children so that we could have a normal life without problems,” he said, according to a transcript of a statement he made to police in the aftermath of his arrest.

• According to the most recent IMF data on foreign investment, EU member states held €72.1 billion in foreign investment in Israel in 2023, compared to €39.2 billion for the US.
• Israel itself has invested €65.9 billion in the EU, seven times as much as in the US (€8.8 billion). That makes the EU the main destination for Israeli investment.
• Despite Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and its unlawful occupation across the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the EU increased exports to Israel by €1 billion, standing at €25.5 billion in 2023 and €26.7 billion in 2024.
• The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, and its total trade with Israel in 2024, including imports and exports, amounted to €42.6 billion. This is significantly more than the US, whose trade with Israel totalled €31.6 billion in the same year.
• Of all EU member states, the Netherlands is by far the largest investor in Israel and is responsible for two-thirds of EU investment in Israel. In fact, no other country worldwide has more investments in Israel. With €50 billion in investment held by Dutch companies in 2023, the Netherlands even tops the US. Conversely, the Netherlands is also the largest destination for Israeli investment, attracting six times as much investment as the US.

Original Article by Chris Walker , Truthout.

“The influence of climate change has [temperatures] up by several degrees,” the study’s lead author said.

Human-caused climate change was responsible for around 1,500 deaths during this year’s atypical heat wave across Europe, a newly published rapid study of mortality data suggests.

The study, conducted by scientists at Imperial College of London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, examined 2,300 heat-related deaths across 12 European cities during the heat wave from June 23 to July 2. About two-thirds of those deaths — approximately 1,500 — were directly attributable to additional warming caused by the climate crisis, scientists said.

Those deaths only happened “because of climate change,” said study co-author Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College. “They would not have died if it would not have been for our burning of oil, coal and gas in the last century.”

Temperatures across those 12 cities were 2 to 4 degrees Celsius above what would have naturally occurred if not for human-caused climate change, the scientists discovered.

Certain groups of people, particularly the elderly, were more affected by the rise in heat levels than others — indeed, 1,100 of those 1,500 deaths involved people who were 75 years of age or older.

Related Story Activists project flames and commentary on the side of the Trump International Hotel in protest of President Donald Trump's response to science and climate change in the face of devastating wildfires burning throughout the United States on October 21, 2020, in Washington, D.C. | The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to an effort to withhold the raw information itself. “The influence of climate change has [temperatures] up by several degrees and what that does is it brings certain groups of people more into dangerous territory. … For some people it’s still warm fine weather but for now a huge sector of the population it’s more dangerous,” said lead author of the study Ben Clarke of Imperial College.

The climate crisis also likely contributed to higher rates of wildfires seen across Europe. More than 200,000 hectares of land have burned across European Union member states since the start of the year, more than twice the average that has burned annually from 2006 to 2024. Around 1,118 wildfires have been detected across the EU, too — a 56 percent increase from last year.

While wildfires can be natural phenomena, scientists around the globe largely agree that the drying conditions leading to an increase in wildfires are caused by the climate crisis.

“The evidence connecting the climate crisis and extreme wildfires is clear. Increased global temperatures and reduced moisture lead to drier conditions and extended fire seasons,” an article from The Nature Conservancy published earlier this year explains. “Prolonged heatwaves can take what was once a natural event in the fire-cycle process and supercharge it into a maelstrom that devastates entire communities. And, crucially, worsening wildfires mean larger amounts of stored carbon are released into the atmosphere, further worsening climate change.”

With Trump’s fascist agenda driving the narrative, it’s the duty of independent media to disrupt corporate propaganda.

Yet, at such a pivotal moment, donations to Truthout have been declining. Why? Blatant political censorship from Big Tech.

As we face mounting repression, Truthout appeals for your support. Please donate during our fundraiser — we have 10 days left to raise $50,000.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

In the middle of the 20th century, a prolonged animosity came to an end. For more than four centuries, the enmity between Catholics and Protestants, known to theologians as the two confessions, had been one of the organising principles of European life. But, then, it stopped.

To grasp just how revolutionary this inter-Christian peace was, it’s worth remembering what came before it. Because the mutual hatred between the confessions shaped not only the early modern era, when gruesome acts of violence like St Bartholomew’s Day (1572) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) tore Europe apart. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism remained powerful forces well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and shaped social and political life. The most extreme case was Germany, where the Protestant majority in 1871 unleashed an aggressive campaign of persecution against the Catholic minority. For seven years, state authorities expelled Catholic orders, took over Catholic educational institutions, and censored Catholic publications.

In the Netherlands, Protestant crowds violently attacked Catholic processions; in Austria, a popular movement called ‘Away from Rome’ began a (failed) campaign in 1897 to eradicate Catholicism through mass conversion. Catholics, for their part, were just as hostile to Protestants. In France, Catholic magazines and sermons blamed Protestants for treason, some even called for stripping them of citizenship. Business associations, labour unions and even marching bands were often divided across confessional lines.

Even on an everyday level, it still was common into the 20th century for neighbourhoods, parties and magazines to be strictly Catholic or Protestant. Prominent politicians and lay writers routinely blamed the other confession for backwardness, subversion and sexual perversity. A prominent German historian even claimed, in the 1860s, that Catholics and Protestants were descendants of different races.

But then, by the 1950s, this mutual disdain ended. The two confessions reconciled, lay leaders established joint organisations, and politicians even founded powerful interconfessional political parties. Even Church authorities, who for a while dragged their feet, ultimately came around. The Catholic Church, during the Second Vatican Council, officially declared in 1964 that Protestants were not heretics, but brethren in faith. Only in Northern Ireland did anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism remain powerful, a remarkable exception that proved the rule.

How did this shocking change come about? After four centuries of division, why did old animosities die so quickly? It’s easy to presume that this dramatic shift happened after the Second World War and was part of Europe’s broader liberalisation. After the trauma of Nazism and Stalinism, we may think, many Europeans came to appreciate pluralism. Or one might imagine that Catholic-Protestant peace came from the onward march of secularisation. People left the Churches in the 1960s, so they also cared less about old tensions.

But both these assumptions would be wrong. Because the Catholic-Protestant truce in fact began long before the Second World War, in response to the Nazis’ call to end religious discord and to instead forge racial unity. Many Catholic and Protestant thinkers and leaders were deeply impressed by this revolutionary message. Even if they disliked some of Hitler’s ideas, they believed that inter-Christian cooperation opened exciting new possibilities. More than anything, they hoped that unity would allow them to build a European order that was based on inequality. Under the Nazis’ hegemony, Catholic and Protestant leaders hoped to protect the economic hierarchy between workers and employers, and the sexual disparity between men and women. In its origins, that is, the peace between Catholics and Protestants entailed not just new tolerance, but also protection of harsh exclusion. And after the Second World War, this fact turned out to be hugely consequential, when Catholics and Protestants came to power and helped build a deeply unequal Europe.

Clean Energy Wire, under “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)

Germany is not sufficiently prepared to protect its citizens in the event of widespread power outages or large-scale natural disasters, Kay Ruge, head of the German Districts Association (DLT), told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung (NOZ). "There is no comprehensive, overarching plan," he said, adding that "civil protection has played no role in political prioritisation in recent years."

Ruge pointed out that districts, for example, could not support dozens of nursing homes with emergency generators in case of a power outage. "We need risk analyses and bottleneck registers," he warned. The bottleneck registers list all resources and personnel needed in the event of a crisis which might not available in sufficient quantities, NOZ wrote. "Civil protection is the responsibility of the federal government: the government must finally develop a comprehensive plan quickly, involving the states and us [districts]," he said.

To protect people during heatwaves and water shortages, Ruge said: "In our view, the first priority is genuine climate change adaptation". This meant, for example, installing triple glazing, cooling ceilings or air conditioning systems in care homes, hospitals and schools.

For many years, Germany has experienced the effects of climate change in the form of worsening heat waves, droughts, and mild winters. The country has a national climate adaptation strategy and has set measurable targets to increase the country's resilience against the worst consequences of climate change.

Still, more attractive conditions are needed to make people join civil protection and disaster relief volunteer units as Germany faces more frequent extreme weather events, the Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) said earlier this year.

Source.

• Global governance arrangements are under pressure from the climate action withdrawal of the Trump administration and, in many countries, from leaders’ fears of a growing domestic “greenlash”.
• The EU has adjusted its topline messaging in response, but most governments remain committed to driving the global green transition.
• Many countries around the world share the same goals as the EU and want to decarbonise their economies while creating jobs and moving up the value chain. However, in an interconnected world, like the EU, they all need partnerships to underpin their own decarbonisation.
• The EU and member states should heed partner countries’ requests for: greater trade openness to generate demand for low-carbon products made in the global south; share technology more generously; and establish stronger access to finance in pursuit of equitably shared green growth.
• These partnerships can contribute to alliances for global governance reform in order to futureproof the multilateral framework for climate action in an increasingly transactional world.