The sharp drop in irregular migrant arrivals is evidence that the EU’s policy reforms are working, EU migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, said on Thursday (1 October).
But Syria is also no longer the single biggest source of asylum claims after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime 22 months ago, a factor that appears to have been conveniently ignored.
On Thursday, he told reporters after a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg that irregular arrivals have dropped 55 percent in the past two years.
“So that’s a record low in the asylum applications,” said the former Austrian finance minister, adding that Austria and Sweden have recorded equally low asylum numbers and that Germany is deporting more people than are asking for protection.
“The basis for all of that, and the foundation for all of that, is the pact, the pact on migration and asylum,” he said, in comments that were echoed by Ireland’s migration minister, Jim O’Callaghan.
The pact, spanning a mix of complex regulations, was launched in June. Despite having two years to prepare for the launch, its implementation remains patchy.
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Greece will extend the presence of its air defense battery of Patriot missiles in Saudi Arabia for at least another month, top defense and foreign policy officials agreed on Thursday. In a session chaired by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Government Council on National Security and Foreign Affairs (KYSEA) took into consideration the increased tension […]
With Democrats leading competitive races and poised to reclaim the House, the American political map is shifting under Trump’s weakening hold, the impending exits of McConnell and Pelosi, and a familiar warning: never count out the party’s talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Good riddance to both. The major tectonic plates of […]
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will visit Athens next week as head of an American delegation to the 6th US-Greece Strategic Dialogue. According to a statement by the State Department, his visit is part of a series of stops at Rekjavik, Athens, and Lisbon from October 5 to 8, 2026. “In Greece, Secretary Rubio […]
In Germany’s recent state elections, voters as young as 16 could cast ballots. The results confirmed a global trend of political division between young women and men.
“On 1 January, we both deleted Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. And whichever of us would be the first to start watching Reels again or download Instagram would have to eat a slice of rotten cheese,” Greta and Lena told Germany’s Deutschlandfunk radio station.
The 16-year-old girls live in a village in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and chose to delete social media because they had been spending far too much time on it. They often scrolled on TikTok or Instagram late into the night, affecting their performance at school. This summer, however, both reinstalled TikTok for a month. This time without the punishment of a slice of rotten cheese.
They did so for an experiment with journalists from Deutschlandfunk. The journalists wanted to find out what political content the girls would consume through TikTok, the popular Chinese social network, during the peak of the election campaign. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern went to the polls on the third weekend of September. And, as is well known, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) swept the state, just as it had two weeks prior in Saxony-Anhalt.
Greta and Lena, however, were in a markedly different position from their peers in Saxony-Anhalt. For the first time, the north-eastern federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern had allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in state elections. Since young people consume much of their news on social media, Greta and Lena immersed themselves in TikTok, one of the networks now most popular among young Europeans.
For the first few minutes, the girls watched a range of non-political videos — recipes, tomato growing and “silly” AI videos. Then, at around the third minute of scrolling, the first political content appeared. First came a video about Erich Honecker, the former East German communist politician. “Why am I seeing so much stuff about the GDR here?” Greta wondered. As she continued scrolling, she came across AfD co-leader Alice Weidel herself.
It was the first moment when the girls began to notice how quickly their initially apolitical feed was changing. “I feel as if it is constantly just AfD,” Greta said later. She added that she had not searched for any such content in advance. Over the following month, the girls kept a diary of their feed and observed how, after political videos, more and more similar content began appearing — not only from the parties themselves, but also from a range of accounts that picked up and further spread their messages.
The experiment confirmed what has been known for some time: TikTok and other networks alongside it can quickly form the political world a young person sees and the views they come to adopt. At the same time, algorithms are accelerating a trend of a political divide between young women and men, which was also reflected in the results of the state elections mentioned above in Germany.
Algorithms exacerbate polarisation
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For “New Eastern Outlook”, this interview is not merely a political conversation, but a sign of special trust. It is a great honour for us to present to our readers a dialogue with a leader whose influence extends far beyond the borders of his country. We discussed topics that shape the global agenda: unity, historical […]
by Cassie B., Natural News: Germany’s governing coalition is pushing to explore banning the right-wing AfD party by year’s end AfD now leads national polls at 29.5 percent, more than double the vote share of its leading challenger Chancellor Friedrich Merz is skeptical of a ban, but a top official in his own party backs […]
by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News: After years of relatively low numbers, Fiji recorded 2,016 new HIV diagnoses in 2025. Officials point to methamphetamine injection, needle-sharing and a huge testing drive as an explanation. Not everyone is convinced by the official narrative. Some researchers are asking questions, based on the evidence. In the following, Dr. Philip […]
by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense: The pharmaceutical and health industry spent $456.9 million on lobbying expenses in 2025, according to OpenSecrets. According to STAT, it was the largest-ever single-year increase in lobbying spending. Leslie Manookian, president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, suggested the industry may feel threatened by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s […]
The media isn’t failing by accident. Only 28% of Americans still trust it to report fully, accurately, and fairly. Seven in ten have little or none. Republican trust is now 8%. That’s not a slump. That’s a collapsed institution. Why? Because they don’t work for you. They work… — Chris Martenson (@chrismartenson) September 30, 2026
from The Conservative Treehouse: In a remarkable series of events, Canadian TV (CTV) is reporting that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is likely to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, the Time Magazine Person of the Year Award and public veneration by Pope Leo XIV to culminate a year when the European Union is now […]
from Revolver News: There’s been a pretty grand assumption over the past decade or so that every new generation of American kids would identify as more sexually “fluid” than the one before it. That’s been really discouraging for a lot of folks who believe in faith and tradition. But it looks like that’s not what’s […]
Amidst all the sentimental populist fluff, a political theory of sorts could be discerned in Andy Burnham's conference speech, says Professor James Alexander. Let's call him Our Andy-with-his-10-year-Plandy.
Europeans have lead the field on access to abortion, but a conservative comeback has caused a lot of those advances to regress.
Research published earlier this week (28 September) by the Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR) found that despite an upward trend of legalisation, some countries are still seeking to enforce barriers and rolling back entitlement to abortion care.
This resistance to change is also evidenced in the lack of member state participation in safe abortion funds available since the the ‘My Voice, My Choice’ European citizens’ initiative for safe and accessible abortion was passed into law last February.
EU funds could since then be used to create regional programmes for safe abortion care for anyone who can’t access it in their own country, as well as financing travel to a country where abortion is available.
However, no funds have yet been used.
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The Anti-Defamation League reports each year on the state of antisemitism in the US. But its audit fails to disclose the fact that roughly 45% of so-called antisemitic incidents are actually anti-Israel or anti-Zionist.
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