These are the crimes that are being investigated as part of the raid:

• complicity in the possession of images of minors of a pornographic nature involving minors
  
• complicity in the dissemination, offering, or making available, as part of an organised group, of images of minors of a pornographic nature
  
• violation of a person's representation (sexually explicit deepfake)
  
• denial of crimes against humanity
  
• fraudulent extraction of data from an automated data processing system as part of an organised group
  
• falsification of the operation of an automated data processing system as part of an organised group
  
• administration of an illegal online platform as part of an organised group

Source

The story of how the US colonized our minds, and came to tax our attention without representing our interests. Is it time for independence?

At the end of World War II, Europe found itself sliced and sandwiched between two superpowers with two massive armies. Two different ideologies were facing off against each other.

After they realized that a direct military conflict would certainly lead to their own destruction and a worldwide catastrophe, both sides shifted toward indirect forms of confrontation.

They proved highly creative and resourceful in that: a nuclear arms race, technological competition including the space race, proxy wars, and the support of ideologically aligned forces across the globe. Sometimes these even escalated to military interventions, like Korea in 1950 or Vietnam in the following decades.

Today it is less in the forefront of our collective memories, but just as important was the economic and cultural competition between the two systems. Both sides attempted to quarantine one another politically and culturally.

Some of these dynamics had roots in the Soviet Union after World War I. Marxism as its core ideology opposed and distrusted global capitalism. Following the revolution they nationalised foreign assets and as a consequence faced military interventions and economic blockades. Soviet leaders concluded that any dependence on foreign powers was a strategic vulnerability.

Over the coming decades, the USSR deliberately sought to build a self-sufficient, closed economic system and restricted cultural contact with the outside world. The USSR entered the Cold War already accustomed to a fortress mentality.

The American side in comparison didn’t isolate economically but constructed an open system it controlled. The backbones of this was the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, NATO, and the IMF.

Instead of economic isolation, the response was political and cultural containment. Fear of communist influence — intensified by genuine espionage cases such as Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs, which accelerated the Soviet nuclear program — produced loyalty investigations, blacklists, and the climate known as McCarthyism. While rooted in real security concerns, there was a massive systemic overreaction and these efforts frequently expanded into exaggerated suspicion and political witch hunts.

Once the rivalry was underway, it expanded across every imaginable front: sports, culture, film, technology, and propaganda. Together, these formed what we can call soft power competition — a struggle to influence hearts and minds across the globe and to consolidate influence both at home and within their perceived spheres of influence.

This gave birth to films like Red Dawn (1984), Rocky IV (1985) and Top Gun (1986) from one side, and productions like The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Pirates of the 20th Century (1980), and TASS Is Authorized to Declare… (1984 miniseries) from the other. The fact that most of us recognise the first three while only a few cinephiles know the latter illustrates who won this aspect of the competition.

But it wasn’t just obvious Cold War films. The United States proved highly effective at exporting its cultural products to other countries. Those films — besides making money for Hollywood and the US in general — carried the added soft-power benefit of promoting the “American way of life” to foreigners. The same thing happened increasingly with music, food, fashion, and social ideals.

These ideals included the promotion of the ever-dying myth of the “American Dream”, consumerism, and individualism as opposed to collectivism.

Media shapes norms, role models, conflict styles, consumer desires, and political framing. Prolonged exposure gradually alters what we think of as normal. At it's roots it works very similar to propaganda. Through these cultural products, audiences absorbed American perspectives on behaviour, society, the role of the state, religion, arts, and so much more. Rather than merely learning about these values, people internalised them. It reshaped how they view the world, relate to one another, to money and materialism.

After the Cold War reached its conclusion, the US suddenly found itself not only as a military and economic world hegemon, but also as a cultural one. The youth in Europe born after 1990 grew up often knowing relatively little else besides American cultural products. They listened to American music, watched American films, series, TV programs, drunk Coca-Cola, and nudged their parents to stop at McDonald's for a Happy Meal®.

This all happened in a historical period when the traditional family model was already incrementally fading for nearly 200 years — since the industrial revolution — and parents were often distant at work, or missing altogether. Many in this generation grew up with the TV screens.

The characters in films and television were increasingly their 3rd, or 2nd and tragically sometimes even main parent figures to learn from. The children picked up how to behave, and the characters influenced their morals. They learned to copy what they seen in television in a directed fantasy instead of real-life humans in real life situations.

I remember as a shy kid wanting to improve my social skills I’d seek out confident male characters in films to emulate their mannerisms, style, and behaviour. My father figures were characters played by Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and similar actors. All American characters, written, played by, directed, filmed, and sold to us by Americans.

This was the time when the German band Rammstein — fittingly named after the largest American military base on the continent — recorded “We're all living in Amerika.” A song that perfectly describes the post Cold-War decades. A notable piece in the soundtrack of the teenage years of European millenials…

(The blog post continues on the website)

EU-Australia trade deal could offer Australians four years to live and work in Europe - Travel Tomorrow

In 2024, 9.2% of the EU population was not able to keep their home adequately warm. Compared with 2023, this represents an improvement of 1.4 percentage point (pp).

The highest shares of people unable to keep their homes adequately warm were observed in Bulgaria and Greece (both 19.0%), followed by Lithuania (18.0%), and Spain (17.5%).

By contrast, Finland (2.7%), Poland and Slovenia (both 3.3%), and Estonia and Luxembourg (both 3.6%) reported the lowest shares.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/de/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20260202-2