
2022 could be a make-or-break year for Europe
CNN
In 2022, the European Union must confront some of the most difficult challenges it faces if it is ever to become the geopolitical power its leaders so desperately want it to be.
The Covid-19 pandemic has left efforts to create a more assertive global Europe on the backburner -- at the very moment when the global politics of the past two years has created myriad problems for the bloc. These will only get worse if prompt action isn't taken.
Whether it's a migration crisis on the bloc's frontier with Belarus; the Russian military buildup on the border of Ukraine and the antagonism of member states like Lithuania and Estonia; or Chinese trade threats, the EU badly needs a strategy for dealing with the world beyond its borders before these hybrid issues overwhelm and weaken the union.

The US intelligence community’s annual threat assessment led with the threat from drug cartels for apparently the first time in the report’s nearly 20-year history, according to Senate Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton and a CNN review of previous assessments, highlighting a top agenda item for President Donald Trump.

Several of President Donald Trump’s top national security officials, at times with assistance from a top Senate Republican, shifted responsibility to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for sending potentially classified information that appeared in a group chat about US military strikes in Yemen that a journalist was included in.

Top Justice Department officials told a federal judge on Monday that the Trump administration is invoking the state secrets privilege to avoid giving him information about deportation flights from earlier this month that are at the center of a legal dispute over whether the government flouted his judicial commands.