Bartosz Brzezinski

1 week ago | politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski |Lucia Mackenzie

On the flat plains of central Poland, where densely packed poultry sheds crowd the landscape, the future of Europe’s meat industry hums to the rhythm of millions of broiler chickens. Inside, birds bred to grow at record speed shuffle under the constant glow of artificial light, each one a copy of the last. They live fast, grow faster and end their lives in industrial kill lines — destined for export to Germany, the U.K. and Saudi Arabia. Chicken isn’t just dinner.

3 weeks ago | politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski

BRUSSELS — Europe’s favorite bottle of red or white may come with an unwanted ingredient: toxic chemicals that don’t break down naturally. A new investigation has found widespread contamination in European wines with trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) — a persistent byproduct of PFAS, the group of industrial chemicals widely known as “forever chemicals.” None of the wines produced in the past few years across 10 EU countries came back clean.

3 weeks ago | politico.eu | Laurens Cerulus |Hanne COKELAERE |Marianne Gros |Bartosz Brzezinski

BRUSSELS — All European Union laws are lobbied, but some are lobbied more than others. Brussels is known as a rulemaking machine. And, in line with many other political power centers, it is home to a staggering number of people whose job it is to influence the final shape of those rules.

3 weeks ago | politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski

Hungary on Thursday confirmed a fifth outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) at a cattle farm in Rábapordány,  near the Slovak border, escalating concerns over the spread of the highly contagious livestock virus first detected in the country last month. The latest case, confirmed by laboratory tests Thursday afternoon, prompted authorities to place the facility — housing some 600 dairy cows — under immediate quarantine, Agriculture Minister István Nagy announced on social media.

1 month ago | politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski

In the summer of 1982, seven heroin users were admitted to a California hospital paralyzed and mute. They were in their 20s, otherwise healthy — until a synthetic drug they had manufactured in makeshift labs left them frozen inside their own bodies. Doctors quickly discovered the cause: MPTP, a neurotoxic contaminant that had destroyed a small but critical part of the brain, the substantia nigra, which controls movement.