EUobserver

With one of the EU’s last openly left-wing migration agendas and a high-profile clash with Donald Trump over the Middle East, Sánchez’s fight for survival in Madrid could reshape Europe’s political balance in 2027.

Europe banned products made with forced labour. So why can clothes linked to child exploitation still reach our shops? 🇪🇺 Our investigation uncovered how bonded labour and child labour on Pakistan's cotton farms continue to feed Europe's fashion industry, while loopholes in EU supply-chain rules mean retailers often cannot prove where their cotton really comes from. 💬 Read one of our latest investigations into the hidden cost of fast fashion. Read more 👉 https://lnkd.in/e_k4q94F Investigative. Influential. Independent. Your EUobserver.

In case you missed it: Our investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein's network recruited girls in Prague. 🇨🇿 Using newly released court documents, witness testimony and cross-border reporting, we uncovered how Epstein's associate Jean-Luc Brunel targeted aspiring teenage models in Czechia and Slovakia, promising careers in Paris and New York before drawing some into Epstein's trafficking network. Read more 👉 https://lnkd.in/dgCKPTCd Investigative. Influential. Independent. Your EUobserver.

Residents of a Copenhagen housing estate, Mjølnerparken, are highly critical of plans to ‘upgrade’ it - arguing it was only the Danish government’s ‘Ghetto Law’ that turned it into a ‘parallel society’ in the first place.

Ukraine’s drone war at sea is already driving up wheat and fuel prices, choking Russian exports through the Azov and Black Seas and raising the prospect of a new global food crisis if the blockade holds.

Amid burning refineries, grinding Ukraine warfare is eroding Putin’s power faster than Western sanctions, but it is not easy to foresee when or where a breaking point might come.

A fight over one Kharkiv developer and 143 dirt‑cheap apartments has escalated into a showdown between Ukraine’s embattled anti‑corruption reporters and the law‑enforcement hierarchy tied to President Zelensky’s circle.

All Europeans should read a speech Koen Lenaerts, president of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, delivered to law students in Leiden in mid-June, writes Caroline de Gruyter. It is a speech about European values and the fundamental place they occupy in Europe’s legal system.

The EU has left the door open to age-estimation by behavioural profiling, and the EU's own data protection authorities have warned that this can be more intrusive than the verification it replaces, inferring age from a user's activity at scale, with weaker accuracy for the children it is meant to protect.

Behind the friendly “pizza comunista” and open-door consultations lies a party that still hails Marx, Engels and Lenin and wants Austria out of the EU, raising awkward questions for voters who back its housing fixes but ignore its revolutionary long game.