The Western Balkans, China’s backdoor to Europe

Not that long ago, as protests swelled during the Arab Spring, social media and digital tools were hailed as instruments of change, capable of bringing down dictators. But these technologies have also contributed to an increasingly polarized US under Donald Trump and rising authoritarianism in countries around the world, as Zeynep Tufekci reports for the MIT Technology Review. 

This month, with the last of the third aid package from the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, Greece's economic crisis will come to a tentative end. In Spiegel Online, Giorgos Christides and Tobias Rapp report on the uphill battle still facing the Mediterranean country as it looks to begin paying off all that debt.

Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate — known as the GRU — has in recent years been blamed for a slew of things (for instance, hacking the Clinton campaign's emails, poisoning Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and others in England, and shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17). In The Daily Beast, Amy Knight lays out how the GRU — whose power was thought to be waning just a few years ago — bounced back.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two reporters for Reuters in Myanmar, uncovered the murder of 10 Rohingya Muslim men during a military operation, and were subsequently arrested. As Tom Lasseter reports in this special investigation for Reuters, the government's prosecution of the two men for their journalism is "seen by many as a test of the country's nascent democracy."