The European Union's much-touted campaign to vaccinate 450 million Europeans against Covid-19 has gotten off to an inauspicious start. The vaccination rollout has been plagued by bureaucratic sclerosis, poorly-negotiated contracts, penny-pinching and blame shifting — all wrapped in a shroud of secrecy. The result is a needless and embarrassing shortage of vaccines, and yet another a crisis of legitimacy for the EU.

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Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has announced that her government intends to significantly limit the number of people seeking asylum in Denmark. The aim, she said, is to preserve "social cohesion" in the country.

Frederiksen's comments, which many have welcomed, and others have dismissed as empty promises, are the latest salvo in a long-running debate about multiculturalism and the role of Islam in Danish society.

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Armin Laschet, premier of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, has been chosen as the new leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He is now in a position to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor after general elections this September.

Laschet, a Merkel loyalist and continuity candidate, narrowly beat conservative Friedrich Merz by 521 to 466 votes in a run-off vote by party delegates on January 16. The CDU had previously chosen Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to succeed Merkel, but she stepped down as party leader in January 2020 after a series of regional electoral defeats cast doubt on her ability to retain the chancellorship.

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The European Union has negotiated a controversial trade deal with China. The pact has been widely criticized because European leaders, in their apparent rush to reach an agreement, have sacrificed their professed concern for human rights on the altar of financial gain. Indeed, precisely one week after the deal was signed, China launched a massive crackdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong.

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Germany's two-year term as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council ended on December 31, 2020. The German Foreign Ministry, in a self-congratulatory compilation of its supposed achievements to "strengthen the international order," declared that Germany now deserves to obtain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

A closer examination of Germany's voting patterns at the UN over the past several years, however, reveals a troubling double standard on a range of issues, especially on human rights, which the German government claims to be "a cornerstone" of its foreign policy.

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