EU Scream

Families can go wrong. And unless you've been under a rock these last weeks, you'll know that a number of members of the Socialist family at the European Parliament went very wrong. They allegedly took sack loads of Qatari cash on top of their already generous salaries and benefits in return, it seems, for trying to block their own Socialist colleagues from criticising Qatar's record on human rights...

Putin's barbarism is somehow felt by us all even though it can be hard to get to grips with the magnitude of what's at stake. One reason may be what writer and academic Tom Nichols calls normalcy bias, an inherent resistance to accepting that large changes can upend our lives. Another may be what Lithuanian arts curator Raimundas Malasauskas calls unlearned lessons from history about Russia's imperialist and colonialist drives...

The European Parliament is reeling from corruption allegations involving the Gulf state of Qatar. Members' offices have been sealed. Raids have been carried out by Italian and Belgian authorities. And large sums of cash seized including sacks of banknotes from the father of one of the lawmakers at the centre of the scandal. That lawmaker, Eva Kaili, was with the Greek socialist Pasok party...

The European Union wants India as a strategic ally. And India loves the positive attention it's getting from Europe. Both sides are trying to speed up a long stalled-trade agreement amid steadily tightening relations. But that only serves to magnify a glaring double standard in EU foreign policy. While the EU openly criticises China for abusing its the mostly Muslim Uyghur population, the EU turns a blind eye to the way India treats its own Muslim minority. The problems run deeper still...

Decolonisation is a new way of confronting racism. It means rooting out colonial-era attitudes of white superiority that linger in our societies and institutions. The push for decolonisation in the US and parts of Europe took wings with the Black Lives Matter movement. But the EU still is nowhere near starting the process of decolonisation...

Georgia Meloni was 19 and speaking to French TV when she praised Italian dictator and Hitler ally Mussolini. Back then the likely next prime minister of Italy was dressed all in black and flanked by burly men. Twenty-six years later things look very different. Meloni favours bright white pant suits and presses the flesh with European dignitaries. The normalisation of the neofascist far right in Italy seems complete...

There are many things to love about France. But a stated policy of colour blindness is not one of them. Among those leading the charge against a French conception of universalism that makes discussing race so awkward is Grace Ly. Her Chinese Cambodian parents fled the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970s for France, where she has found success and celebrity with books like Jeune fille modèle and the podcast Kiffe Ta Race that she co-hosts with Rokhaya Diallo...

Europeans howl about U.S. backsliding on abortion rights but they don't exactly have their own house in order. Take the case of Bianca. She's a Romanian. She was studying medicine in Germany. And she discovered she was pregnant in Korea. Bianca eventually made her way home to Romania to terminate the pregnancy. But the doctor at her regional hospital was obstructive and barely paid attention to the medical code. Bianca was, to all intents and purposes, left to fend for herself...

Legal scholar Sahar Aziz says people who identify as Muslim are often perceived in racial terms, like black and brown people, in white-dominated societies. That makes Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic the subject of similar forms of racism. She also says protecting observant Muslims in Europe may be more difficult than in the United States, where religious observance is more commonplace. In this episode: Sahar Aziz in conversation with the journalist and think tanker Shada Islam...

Was Emmanuel Macron right to talk so much with Vladimir Putin before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine? And did Macron cross a line from well-intentioned engagement into something like naive appeasement? French journalist Guy Lagache spent the first six months of this year in close proximity to Macron, making a film that ended up focusing on the French president's Putin strategy.