The Kingdom of Belgium, you must have read somewhere, is a federal state that consist of two big monolingual regions and a tiny bilingual one. Is that so? Not quite.

The 20th of February will mark two years since the start of military intervention and temporary occupation of the Ukrainian Autonomic Republic of Crimea by the Russian Federation.

We have seen it before in other countries - democratic elections resulting in a new government with an absolute or slim majority in the parliament.

Britain has never been an enthusiastic member of the European Union – and soon it could be the first to leave. With a referendum expected as early as June, the In and Out camps are neck and neck in the polls.

As 2015 came to an end, two cities on opposite sides of the world shut down due to safety concerns: alert levels were raised to their highest, schools and business were closed, and transport was restricted.

After spending two intense weeks at the climate negotiations in Paris I return to Brussels with my heart full of hope and inspiration. This is not due to the outcome of the UN summit, but to the people power I witnessed on the streets.

Brussels was on lockdown for almost a whole week after the terrible terror attacks in Paris on 13 November.

For the past 2 weeks i have attended several meetings in Brussels with representatives of religious communities and philosophy groups to discuss the problem of religious radicalization in European youth. Notwithstanding the opinions and ideas expressed, I felt an atmosphere of solidarity, all united against extremism.

The horrific Paris attacks look set to have an enduring impact on Europe in all sorts of ways, from tougher border controls to better intelligence sharing. But fortunately they are unlikely to do much harm to the economy.