Stories of shady Russian influence abounded during the U.S. election campaign, but the evidence in them was often sketchy and the eventual benefits to Russia questionable. The European Union, for its part, is dealing with a scandal in which both the Russian connection and the gain for the Kremlin are far less nebulous. On May 18, EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger …

  Amid whiffs of chemicals and the electric hum of transformers, Kraftwerk Jaenschwalde rises like an ash-colored fortress over a landscape disfigured by decades of open-pit coal mining. The communist-era colossus in eastern Germany is one of Europe’s dirtiest power plants, belching 24 million tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the air every year. It could have been closed for …

    Mark Whitehouse Do we have the 2008 financial crisis to thank for Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? More than a century of human experience suggests it’s a real possibility. Trump’s surprise victory has prompted a lot of worrying about the wave of antiestablishment — and often xenophobic — sentiment that seems to be rolling across the developed …