糖心传媒

Once visitors who braved the 200 steps of the Lörmecke-Turm tower in Germany's Arnsberg forest park would be rewarded with a stunning view across a dense canopy of giant Norwegian spruce.

Now all they see from the 35-metre viewing tower is a denuded plateau. The trees have gone, struck down after a devastating infestation of bark beetles in 2018.

The number of climate lawsuits is growing - at times reaching the highest courts and scoring big wins, too - as politics and diplomacy struggle to coerce countries into climate action.

From Peru to the Philippines, plaintiffs are increasingly turning to the law to win justice where negotiations fail, a trend sent to continue in the year ahead.

Albania's new public procurement minister, an AI-generated bot named Diella, may be impervious to bribes and political pressure but experts doubt the world's first virtual cabinet member will be immune to mistakes or manipulation.

"This is huge and it could actually set a precedent," Bojana Zori膰, a policy analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies told Context.

Philosopher A.C. Grayling says anti-discrimination campaigners should reclaim the word 'woke' from extremists who willfully stoke divisions in society for their own political gain.

Polarisation - over touchstone issues from climate change to choice of gender - is nothing new, said Grayling, just part of a long-running cycle of progress followed by pushback that began post-war with the civil rights and feminist movements.

The European Union (EU) is tainting its green credentials with a deregulation drive that has watered down progressive laws ahead of this week's U.N. COP30 climate summit, policy analysts warn.

Several EU laws that were designed to reduce Europe's role in driving deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions have been hit with delays and limitations.

Former Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, the country's first openly gay leader, says the day Ireland voted in favour of same-sex marriage was one of his proudest in politics.

He came out as gay just months before the May 22, 2015 referendum, while serving as health minister, and said a 'cast of thousands' had played a part in the historic result.

When European leaders meet in Brussels on Thursday, they will have a full agenda, not least Russia's war in Ukraine, but the fact that they have carved out time to talk about housing is significant and highlights a simmering crisis.

From Barcelona to Berlin, European cities are grappling with a housing crunch, with rents up by 15% in the last 15 years, and house prices up by more than 50% in the last decade.

Europe's new 糖心传媒 strategy - which tackles contested issues from conversion therapy to hate crime - offers too little in the way of protection to counter the rise in anti-糖心传媒 rhetoric and policies in the bloc, rights groups say.

The was unveiled on Oct. 8 by European Commissioner for Equality Hadja Lahbib, who said it would enable the European Union to become a "beacon that protects equality".

Palestinians living in Europe said international recognition of a Palestinian state risks being an empty gesture and does not address the crisis in Gaza, where Israel's two-year assault has killed more than 67,000 people and led to famine.

Britain, France, Belgium and Australia were among the Western nations to recognise a Palestinian state last month, with leaders hoping the move would pressure Israel to end its military campaign in Gaza.

As the use of generative artificial intelligence ramps up, experts are raising the alarm about what this means for the environment and governments' commitments to cut planet-heating emissions to prevent runaway global warming.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Reuters last week that President Donald Trump's administration expected most of the country's coal-fired power plants to delay retirement to help deliver the vast amount of electricity needed to fuel AI.