HowRu68

The Norwegian police have announced the opening of an investigation into Thorbjørn Jagland, who led the Labour government from 1996 to 1997, on suspicion of 'aggravated corruption' in connection with his past ties to the American sex offender.

Jagland was prime minister of Norway from 1996 to 1997 and secretary general of the Council of Europe from 2009 to 2019. Between January 2009 and March 2015, he also chaired the committee that selects the Nobel Peace Prize winner. The police "have opened an investigation into... Thorbjorn Jagland, on suspicion of aggravated corruption," said the Norwegian police's economic crime unit, Okokrim, in a statement.

Real intelligence is not about having all the answers, but about staying humble enough to keep questioning, brave enough to stand alone and strong enough to resist the confort of stupidity

Bonhoeffer was accused of being associated with the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler and was tried along with other accused plotters, including former members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office). He was hanged on 9 April 1945 during the collapse of the Nazi regime.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau in 1906. The son of a famous German psychiatrist, he studied in Berlin and New York City. He left the safety of America to return to Germany and continue his public repudiation of the Nazis, which led to his arrest in 1943. Linked to the group of conspirators whose attempted assassination of Hitler failed, he was hanged in April 1945.

Unlike many of Hitler’s victims, Bonhoeffer was not a Jew, but a Lutheran minister, scholar, and theologian who boldly spoke against Hitler’s policies. Bonhoeffer landed a position in the German government during WWII and subsequently used that position as cover for assassination attempts against Hitler.

While awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer recorded a number of his thoughts in a work we now know as Letters and Papers from Prison. One of these essays, entitled On Stupidity, records some of the problems which Bonhoeffer likely saw at work in Hitler’s rise to power:

“Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. … The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Europe’s largest asset manager Amundi is reducing its exposure to US dollar assets and turning to European and emerging markets, its chief executive has said.

Valerie Baudson, whose firm has €2.4 trillion of assets under management, said Amundi would advise clients to shift away from the greenback over the coming year, warning that if US economic policy remains unchanged, “we will go on seeing a [weakening] of the dollar”.

Europe’s largest asset manager Amundi is reducing its exposure to US dollar assets and turning to European and emerging markets, its chief executive has said.

Valerie Baudson, whose firm has €2.4 trillion of assets under management, said Amundi would advise clients to shift away from the greenback over the coming year, warning that if US economic policy remains unchanged, “we will go on seeing a [weakening] of the dollar”.

The year 2025 may come to be seen as a "tipping point" when democratic institutions were severely damaged and human rights suffered as a result, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The global human rights system is in peril," wrote HRW executive director Philippe Bolopion. "Under relentless pressure from US President Donald Trump, and persistently undermined by China and Russia, the rules-based international order is being crushed."

Here the whole world report available in several languages.

Hungary’s forthcoming election [ April 12] potentially offers a first test of the US government’s new commitment to assist like-minded politicians in Europe. Yet when it comes to gauging just how much help Orban might expect from Washington, the picture is confused(...)

Seeing how fruitless Orban’s visit to Washington in November was, I doubt that any meaningful material support would arrive from the US in the period before the election,” believes Zoltan Ranschburg a freelance political analyst based in Budapest. That said, he adds, “Trump is of course famously unpredictable.”(..)

Dr Garvan Walshe [research associate at the Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels] however, thinks that, depending on the outcome of April’s vote, the true significance of American support for Orban may only be felt after polling day rather than before it. In his view, “if there’s a disputed outcome, they [the Americans] are likely to either stand by Orban, or demand a huge and random price from others in exchange for making him stand down.”

France has finally passed a budget for this year after the minority government survived a series of no-confidence votes in a long-running political saga that has unsettled debt markets and alarmed the country’s European partners.

The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, told parliament on Monday, after months of wrangling, that French people “refuse this disorder and want our institutions to function”.

The safety organisation VeiligheidNL estimates that 5,000 fatbike riders are treated in A&E [ i.e Accident & Emergency] departments each year, on the basis of a recent sample of hospitals. “And we also see that especially these young people aged from 12 to 15 have the most accidents,” said the spokesperson Tom de Beus.

Now Amsterdam’s head of transport, Melanie van der Horst, has said “unorthodox measures” are needed and has announced that she will ban these heavy electric bikes from city parks, starting in the Vondelpark. Like the city of Enschede, which is also drawing up a city centre ban, she is acting on a stream of requests “begging me to ban the fatbikes”.

Ukraine and Russia have agreed to hold a second round of US-brokered direct peace talks next weekend after a two-day meeting in Abu Dhabi, despite Ukrainian complaints that negotiations were undermined by a barrage of deadly strikes. The trilateral talks in the UAE would resume on 1 February, a US official said on Saturday, adding: “I think getting everyone together was a big step

Zelenskyy said “a lot was discussed, and it is important that the conversations were constructive”.

Russia was criticised for launching drone and missile attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv – Ukraine’s two largest cities – during peace talks in Abu Dhabi, reported Peter Beaumont. “Peace efforts? Trilateral meeting in the UAE? Diplomacy? For Ukrainians, this was another night of Russian terror,” the country’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said after the latest Russian assault on critical infrastructure.

Pension industry leaders and investment chiefs from Finland, Sweden and Denmark told Reuters they viewed U.S. foreign policy uncertainty and White House debt levels as a threat to the dollar, U.S. Treasuries and stocks. The Nordic region is home to some of Europe's biggest pension funds by assets.

TLDR; they divested ca. 10 billion euro

"The value of the U.S. Treasuries held by Dutch pension fund ABP, Europe's ​largest, dropped steeply from the end of 2024 to September ‌last year, another sign that major European investors have grown more cautious around holding U.S. assets.

The market value of ABP's U.S. Treasury holdings dropped to nearly 19 billion euros ($22 billion) last September from 29 billion euros in December ‌2024, according to statements outlining its investments." (..)

Several considerations play a role in our investments in government bonds. Naturally, we look at a country's fundamental situation ‍and prospects," she [spokesperson for ABP] added.,(..)

Hi there,

Anyone ( and @EuroMod@feddit.org. ) knows whether the community rules of Europe.feddit.org have been changed recently? Am a bit confused, for example:

• I just saw under the rules that the old Archive. Today ( Archive. ph ; .is etc) websites are not to be used due to a possible changed and malicious ddos-script. There is a link to a (for me unknown) blog post as an explainer. Also, more officially there is a FBI action going on. Both are from January 2026.

• However, Archive. Today has always been vague . Afaik, I think Sunshine?, has posted about attention to tid matter because It reroutes to a Russian IP. But still, there isn't much choice nowadays.

• Is using the wayback machine Archive.org thus still ok , and all other options like deblock sites?

• The title states "Rules (2024-08-30)", which strangely enough is an USA date format, and secondly if rules are updated so should imo the date of changes be updated accordingly, I assume.

• Could be more rules have changed. Like I believed, but could be I'm wrong, that post titles should use the "official article title", or at least match the content. I'm not sure.

• If the rules were indeed recently changed, please condider informing the community about Rule changes going forward, via a post and updating the date in the Community info .

#edit syntax ;and deleted (European) as Mods use ISO date format, TIL.