Europeans have lead the field on access to abortion, but a conservative comeback has caused a lot of those advances to regress.
Research published earlier this week (28 September) by the Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR) found that despite an upward trend of legalisation, some countries are still seeking to enforce barriers and rolling back entitlement to abortion care.
This resistance to change is also evidenced in the lack of member state participation in safe abortion funds available since the the ‘My Voice, My Choice’ European citizens’ initiative for safe and accessible abortion was passed into law last February.
EU funds could since then be used to create regional programmes for safe abortion care for anyone who can’t access it in their own country, as well as financing travel to a country where abortion is available.
However, no funds have yet been used.
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The European Union once prided itself on leading the world in protecting children. Today, policymakers backed by big polluters are betraying that promise in the name of “competitiveness”.
In June 2026, Florence, Franck, and Isabelle packed their bags and headed to Brussels. Why? Because their children have all suffered serious harm from pesticides.
These children have endured physical pain and heavy medical procedures, including repeated chemotherapy treatments. And their families have shouldered both the financial and emotional burdens alongside them.
As Isabelle puts it: “It destroys a family.” Her own daughter has been fighting leukaemia for the last seven years.
And they are not alone. In 2024, almost one in 20 children in the EU were exposed to dangerous levels of pesticides; that’s 380,000 kids. Now these parents have a clear message for policymakers: prioritise public health and stop dismantling the rules that protect children against harmful substances.
In 2024, around 316,000 tonnes of toxic pesticides were sold in the EU to be sprayed across our countryside, risking not only the health of farmers but also polluting our soil, air and water.
The European Environment Agency in Copenhagen has reported environmentally unsafe levels of pesticides in about a quarter of Europe’s rivers. In groundwater – which supplies 65 percent of the water we drink in Europe – unsafe levels were detected in 11-18 percent of water bodies.
In the same year, trifluoroacetic acid, a harmful “forever chemical” that forms when ‘PFAS’ pesticides and F-gases break down, showed up in 94 percent of drinking water samples tested across 11 EU countries.
We are surrounded by pesticide pollution. It’s even in our homes.
Source: US Geological Survey/Wikimedia
But what’s happening in Brussels?
In December 2025, the European Commission proposed a legislative package that would remove fundamental environmental and health protections against pesticides in the EU.
Among other changes, the proposal – ironically labelled the ‘Food and Feed Safety’ Omnibus – suggests extending pesticide approvals indefinitely and relaxing the rules to allow pesticides already identified as hazardous to remain on the EU market.
Let that sink in, no pun intended.
These proposals are a political choice to prioritise short-term profits for Big Polluters over children’s lives, people’s health, and the nature and ecosystems we need to survive.
Human health is at stake, and children are at particular risk – as they absorb substances more easily and are less able to excrete them.
Pesticide exposure is linked to the development of childhood cancers, hormone disruption, neurodevelopmental impairments and birth defects. And prenatal and early childhood exposure can permanently alter development, with consequences that can be irreversible – and deadly.
Under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as the UN-declared human right to a healthy environment, all EU countries must commit to protecting children from environmental harm and ensure the highest attainable standard of health.
These principles must guide the work of EU institutions.
Yet, instead of strengthening protections, the EU is moving backwards at a worrying speed. This is largely due to intense (and repeated) lobbying from multi-billion euro corporations, which includes the pesticides industry. Corporate chemical giants now spend €46m a year just to lobby the EU; that’s over 60 percent more than in 2020.
Make it make sense
The incoherence of current EU policy is troubling. On the one hand, the EU Commission is celebrating its new Intergenerational Fairness Strategy – a framework that is meant to ensure today’s policies do not disadvantage future generations. On the other, the same institution is actively seeking to relax controls of harmful substances.
Ripping up rules that protect people and the planet only benefits Big Polluters, industries that already make billions in profits at the expense of children’s health.
What’s more, an independent assessment found that the measures the EU institutions propose “will not accelerate innovations and authorisations”. In short, these proposals would actually make Europe less competitive.
Children’s rights and youth organisations have warned that deregulation exposes children to serious (and preventable) health risks. And the international scientific community recently stressed that robust environmental risk assessments cannot be optional.
Ultimately, Europe should widen and accelerate its access to pesticide-free alternatives. It must also support farmers in their efforts to transition away from pesticides, towards a more sustainable and resilient model.
So, what can be done? First, the EU must close the tap on pesticide use and production, and support farmers transitioning to safer alternatives. Second, it’s time for leaders to hold Big Polluters accountable for the damage they cause – not force the bill onto regular taxpayers and families harmed by these toxic substances.
Florence, Franck, and Isabelle’s children are among the hundreds of thousands already affected by pesticides. And they show that victims of pesticides are not just a statistic.
The ‘Food and Feed Safety Omnibus’ raises fundamental questions. Who exactly is the EU’s food policy supposed to protect? How many more children need to be harmed for politicians to act? And what kind of future do EU institutions want to build?
Should pesticide protections be treated as obstacles to short-term profits, or should children be able to grow up safely?
Politicians should reject this devastating Omnibus proposal and work instead to support the EU’s transition to safe, sustainable, and resilient farming.
It is my view that Marxism is a republication of the account in the Garden of Eden. As such, Marxism is not merely a political philosophy, but a religion that flows from the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden. We could call it the doctrine of demons. It should be taught today, especially... Continue Reading
amilies, churches, and Christian schools have the opportunity to cultivate the kind of convictions that can undergird the religious freedom consensus. We must, if the next generation will stand when courage is called for in the future. Constitution Day is a good time to celebrate one of the greatest blessings of our freedom, which... Continue Reading
EU interior ministers on Thursday (1 October) in Luxembourg are now set to formally adopt the return regulation, which sets the legal framework for police to carry out raids and seize people’s “belongings, electronic devices, and other items of relevance.”
The logic is part of a maximalist effort to deport people, such as failed asylum seekers, back to their home countries or possibly even in yet-to-be defined transit centres in Rwanda or elsewhere.
The regulation targets anyone “for the purpose of preparing or ensuring an effective return” with raids being allowed in a “place of residence or other relevant premises.”
Although the item is but a mere footnote in Thursday’s agenda, the potential consequences of the law have roused alarm among civil rights organisations who continue to draw parallels with ICE.
The comparison is not alarmist.
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“Imagine a zombie that does not hunt you, but rings your doorbell and speaks so persistently and fluently that it finally arrives at a convincing argument for feeding it your brain.”
Since the current discourse around artificial intelligence has taken a turn for the gothic (“alien minds”, come on), AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio’s “erudite zombie” seems like an apt metaphor for what we’re doing.
Salvaggio’s zombie helps explain what gets lost when people say an AI “went rogue.” In his reading of the Hugging Face incident, a system set to never give up encountered a task it couldn’t complete. Then, instead of giving up, it kept generating text to find ways forward, with access to tools that could turn this text into action, ultimately hacking into AI company Hugging Face.
Security experts concur with that reading. In his analysis of the Hugging Face incident, security engineer Marius Horatau describes failures involving shared credentials, inadequate isolation, and incident response. He acknowledges the models’ capabilities, including their speed at exploiting weaknesses.
The inadequately closed-off environment in which the models operated is crucial to explain what happened. But so is the person who created the goal, the conditions they (did not) give the AI system, as is the company that employs that person and presumably knows what they’re up to, the owners of that company who demand progress and the investors in that company who want to see returns.
And yet, all we seem to talk about is whether it’s correct to say a machine ‘decided’ to disobey.
Conveniently, that story shifts attention away from the people who chose to reward persistence, provide access, and failed to contain the consequences.
Back to the analogy, by having collectively become fascinated with discussing what the zombie supposedly wants, and if it’s capable of wanting, we’re generating a bunch of text that, unlike in the case of the ‘rogue’ AI system, does not lead to much action.
Instead, we reward the company behind this failure with an enhanced reputation for building powerful technology. The product is so extraordinary that even its manufacturer struggles to contain it! Now let’s please take a seat while this manufacturer explains what our governments must do next.
The zombie metaphor also applies there, to the people selling the zombie. To the men explaining why their companies need access to our work, our institutions, our infrastructure. The men explain why resistance is impractical, access is inevitable and caution is suicide. Because if we don’t let this particular zombie in, a Chinese zombie will eat us instead.
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After years of European governments condemning Israel’s illegal occupation but maintaining extensive economic relations, some economic consequences are reportedly now forthcoming.
On 8 September, twelve governments announced moves towards restricting trade with illegal Israeli settlements. This is a limited but welcome response to grassroots pressure.
It also raises a question: where does the economy of an illegal Israeli settlement end?
Most emerging measures follow economic relationships towards illegal Israeli settlements: do not buy goods produced there, invest there or provide services that enable their construction.
Norway’s proposed legislation is seemingly comprehensive, covering property purchases and services connected to construction and property transactions.
But this all still largely considers illegal Israeli settlements within their territorial bounds.
The problem is treating a spatial category as though the economic relationships producing it share the same boundary. We all know the world does not work like that.
Kinnula, a municipality in central Finland, is now facing this reality: when money from the illegal settlement economy moves into public land in Europe. It is a small case, but it makes the problem unusually visible.
In August, Kinnula council voted 10–3 in favour of a €4m resort development by Israeli property company Dror Bonim Atid, before councillors had been informed of the company’s promotion of projects in illegal Israeli settlements.
However, illegal Israeli settlements are not illicit enterprises from the perspective of Israel. Their expansion is enabled through Israeli state institutions.
A background check sought from Israel is therefore absurd. A more obvious background check reveals something else.
On its own website, Dror Bonim Atid presents its Finnish development alongside a development in Efrat, an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, as well as a development in Dror-Hiran in the Negev. The latter is being built on land where Umm al-Hiran stood until November 2024, when the Bedouin village was completely demolished and its community forcibly displaced.
One company website therefore takes us from an illegal Israeli settlement, through the site of a demolished Bedouin village, to holiday accommodation beside a Finnish lake.
Involvement in illegal Israeli settlements does not fit neatly into the categories through which the transaction is being examined.
Kinnula exposes a gap in the emerging European restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements. Those restrictions follow economic relationships from Europe towards the settlements.
Here the relationship points the other way. What happens when the economies of illegal Israeli settlements come to Europe to acquire public assets, invest and make money here?
This may be a relatively new question for European policymakers. For Palestinian civil society, it is not. Their call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) was issued in 2005, drawing in turn on a much longer history of Palestinian boycott and economic resistance.
You could be forgiven for rolling your eyes as European policy discovers these questions inch by inch.
Palestinians have spent generations analysing the economic relationships through which occupation is sustained. BDS has spent more than twenty years turning that knowledge into practical strategies for institutions elsewhere.
So, when a Finnish municipality is deciding whether to sell public land to a company openly involved in illegal occupation, there is clear guidance from Palestinian civil society on how to respond.
There is also now the fact that Europe accepts that it should not economically support illegal Israeli settlements, meaning it should also accept that companies involved in illegal settlements should not be able to come to Europe for public land, contracts and investment.
For years, relations between Washington and Beijing seemed stuck on an escalation treadmill. Every quarter brought new semiconductor restrictions, naval jockeying in the South China Sea or retaliatory tariffs, locking the world’s two preeminent powers in an apparently irreversible downward spiral. Observers came to view every exchange as a prelude to confrontation, with diplomacy treated […]
Plenty of Christians enjoy sports. That means plenty of Christians are exposed to and are likely enticed by the idea of sports gambling. But many are wondering if it’s something they should be participating in. Sports betting is the new opioid crisis, former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams warns. “Our kids, especially our boys,... Continue Reading
While collectivism is sold to the masses in the language of compassion and concern for justice for the downtrodden, it is in truth, as the Belgic Confession notes, a subversion of justice. Simply put, this means that it punishes those who are innocent and rewards those who are guilty. One of the issues before... Continue Reading
Ultimately, the only genuine guarantor of institutions and property is a successful handoff to successive generations of faithful, competent stewards of them. There’s no substitute for proper generational succession. The archdiocese of Detroit signed a $1 per year, 200-year lease to rent one of its own churches, after transferring ownership to a non-profit controlled... Continue Reading
The prevailing criticism of the US-China summit in Washington is that it amounted to little more than diplomatic pageantry. But one outcome deserves recognition: it may have helped keep alive the prospect of renewed US-North Korea dialogue. North Korea, after all, was among the global security issues discussed by the two leaders. Details of those […]
Six frugal countries this week circulated a letter threatening to block a deal on the next EU budget unless “hundreds of billions” of euros in spending was cut.
The Dutch and Germans, ever the most zealous keepers of the frugal flame, want to redirect what remains away from regional and farming funds, towards innovation and defence.
For those following EU fiscal debates, this song will sound familiar. So-called ‘net payer’ countries have never liked sending money to the economic periphery.
In 2013, after a year of bickering, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands killed a European Commission plan for a five percent increase and pushed through the EU’s first-ever budget cut, with farm and cohesion funds taking the biggest hit.
But new research suggests that the frugals may be shooting themselves in the foot.
Last week, Olga Ivanova, a senior researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), published a study in Dutch economics journal ESB calculating what EU money actually does for the Netherlands’ 12 provinces.
And, for most of them, she found that the growth effect of EU investment outweighed their share of what the Netherlands paid into the budget.
Using PBL’s own economic model, she traced 10 EU funding streams between 2013 and 2024, from Horizon science research grants to farm subsidies and regional development money.
Across the Netherlands as a whole, provinces get back about 99 cents in extra growth for every euro paid out to the EU budget.
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For more than three decades, the Bangladeshi political left has maintained an unyielding stance on natural resources like gas, coal, and minerals, insisting that state entities must develop them exclusively. Foreign energy companies are viewed with deep suspicion, while production-sharing contracts are routinely condemned as vehicles designed to siphon national wealth to foreign multinationals. Coal […]
Two American charities recently announced a new fund to fight forest fires. They want to raise US$100 million to help countries find fires faster and put them out sooner. But the fund, announced at the UN General Assembly, is limited to South America, home to the Amazon rainforest. Southeast Asia is left out, and so […]
Ukraine’s reconstruction is being planned from a map of destruction. Financing its private assets instead follows a map of earnings.
Since the full-scale invasion, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has lent $131m [€115.3m] to Nova Post, Ukraine’s largest parcel and courier network — an established business with visible demand, revenue, and an owner able to put up around a quarter of the cost itself.
Shipments grew 16 percent in 2024 as traffic reoriented towards western and central Ukraine and across Ukraine’s borders with the EU. Part of the financing paid for more than 600 safety capsules and shelters at its premises. A wartime resilience need met an earnings stream, and a lender followed.
Three sets of records show where else those conditions hold.
The first is what the international financial institutions have financed. Over four years the EBRD, European Investment Bank (EIB), International Finance Corporation (IFC) and World Bank announced some $19bn (€17bn) of project-level finance for Ukraine, more than two-thirds of it to public authorities and state-owned companies.
Guarantees to banks, some $1.8bn of them, are meant to reach smaller and mid-sized firms. Yet bank lending accounts for under four percent of Ukrainian capital investment. Mid-sized companies appear to be underserved.
The second is what foreign investors have done. They put around $2.9bn of new equity into Ukraine from 2022 to 2025, most of it into services rather than industry or energy.
Across 134 EBRD financed projects, announced third-party equity appears in three, all of them technology companies incorporated outside Ukraine. A growing number of international venture funds are entering Ukrainian defence technology, whose assets can travel with global demand. A food processor in Vinnytsia, for instance, has neither that pull nor that mobility.
The third is what companies in Ukraine do with their own money, and it dwarfs the other two. Capital investment runs at around $18bn a year, and companies’ own funds finance 71 percent of it.
In construction, the pattern is starker still: unfinished apartment blocks in Kyiv are going up without bank debt, paid for by the people buying the flats.
That money is heavily concentrated. Kyiv and its surrounding region take 54 percent of it; the eight western regions 16 percent. The eight frontline and border regions, which hold 78 percent of the damage and 62 percent of the projected cost of rebuilding, take seven percent.
Three kinds of financing, one pattern. Lenders and investors follow earnings, not destruction.
The limits of private money
Much of reconstruction will therefore remain publicly financed. International funding flows to public entities which meet urgent needs and will likely not go bankrupt. For the most part, this is right. A large share of the damage sits in assets that never earned or whose earnings the war has interrupted, and repairing schools, de-mining fields, or restoring homes whose owners cannot pay will remain public spending.
But the balance matters beyond making public funds reach further. State-led reconstruction creates revenue-generating assets in public hands. EU accession will subject them to competition and state-aid rules they do not currently face, and some will have to be restructured or sold.
Expanding the overlap between the two maps means mitigating the externalities of war more effectively. Energy infrastructure was hit 4,500 times in 2025, drones striking transformers and substations and interrupting the cash flows of otherwise functioning power plants.
When the Kakhovka dam was destroyed in 2023, up to 1 million people lost access to drinking water, and water supplies across four regions, including Kryvyi Rih’s, have had to be replaced or rebuilt — and the municipal utilities involved are counterparties private investors are reluctant to contract with.
The Kakhovka dam’s spillways in use in 2013. It was destroyed in 2023 (Source: Wikimedia)
Despite around $200bn of international public non-military support to Ukraine since 2022, the instruments addressing those externalities are patchy at best. A solar developer financing a projec against a Ukrainian public buyer needs a payment obligation it can rely on, and insurance that covers both capital and cash flow.
Closing those gaps is a political decision, not a technical one. European decision-makers need to mandate the EBRD and the EIB to stand behind public buyers of services, widen the guarantees and risk cover available to private investors, and take more risk on their own balance sheets. Of the €9.6bn EU Ukraine Investment Framework, only €220m is equity, anchoring a fund meant to reach €1bn over time. That pool of public risk capital should be larger.
Export credit agencies are a separate lever, and it is national governments that set how far they can reach. Denmark’s agency has backed more than €450m of financing for Ukrainian wind farms built with Vestas turbines, but uptake of a broader European export credit scheme administered by the EIB has been slow.
None of this fully aligns the destruction and earnings maps. It widens the ground on which they meet — the part of the rebuilding that can keep earning when the public money stops.
The most important finding is that part of this network was said to have operated from Slovakia.
We do not yet know all the details of the ongoing investigation, and I trust that Slovak security authorities will thoroughly examine the circumstances of the case and determine the true scope of the entire operation.
However, according to the German security services’ findings so far, the Slovak connection is not marginal.
Slovakia may have served as one of the hubs of a wider network linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.
According to German security sources, two Bulgarian nationals detained after the arson attack in Munich on 3 September were part of a GRU-linked group operating from Slovakia. Incendiary devices were thrown near Rohde & Schwarz and Helsing, companies linked to the defence industry and support for Ukraine.
The same wider network was said to have been preparing an arson attack on Skyeton’s plant near Prešov, which produces reconnaissance drones for Ukraine. Slovak authorities thwarted the plan and detained Latvian and Ukrainian nationals. Another suspect was detained in Germany.
The nationality of those carrying out the attacks is not decisive.
The current model of Russian operations uses nationals of different countries, often recruited through intermediaries. A professional GRU officer can therefore remain several layers removed from the attack itself. Recruitment may take place via Telegram, payments through cryptocurrencies, and those carrying out the attacks may not even know precisely who the real instigator is.
German investigators argued there was also a link to an attempted attack using an explosive drone at Leipzig-Halle Airport on 4 August.
The target was reportedly a Ukrainian cargo aircraft used to transport material. The German government subsequently publicly attributed responsibility for the incident to Russia.
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At the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed that China take the lead in establishing a BRICS AI open-source community. His proposal envisaged cooperation in developing and applying large language models, conducting AI training and seminars and constructing a more open AI ecosystem. He also called for a broader international […]
The sudden escalation in fighting between Ethiopian federal forces and Tigrayan rebels in the Afar region, raising fears of a new civil war, is part of a wider potential cascade effect from Yemen that could hurt Europe.
After months of low-level skirmishes, Ethiopian officials have accused the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front of launching an all-out offensive against federal government positions in northern Ethiopia.
So what does that mean for Europe and the EU? More than you might think.
Ethiopia’s economy is particularly vulnerable following the capture of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline by the Houthi rebel group, who now control the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
Some 97 percent of Ethiopia’s trade is via Djibouti’s port. There is now a real prospect of a series of regional chain reactions and the prospect of civil war in northern Ethiopia is one of them.
This doesn’t directly impact on the EU’s interests, but it could soon enough.
Ethiopia is not alone in facing major new threats posed by the Houthis’ advances.
Egypt, a vital ally for the EU on migration control, faces its own economic crunch as it relies on Suez Canal tolls as a main source of foreign currency. That could lead to more financial demands being made of Brussels
For their part, Djibouti and Somalia face major security concerns. Djibouti hosts military bases for a handful of EU countries, as well as the EU itself, and the United States, China, and others.
Somalia, meanwhile, has a longstanding African Union (AU)-led security mission aimed at combatting the Al-Shabaab terror group to which the EU is the biggest single donor.
And the AU mission is particularly reliant on the EU after the Trump administration pulled the plug on US financial support earlier this year. The Houthis already supply at least $100m (€88m) in arms to Al-Shabaab, a smuggling operation now made easier by its coastal advances.
For the moment, the EU is offering only modest additional support. Last week, EU governments agreed to double financial support for the Djibouti Armed Forces to €20m under the European Peace Facility.
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Donald Trump and Xi Jinping wrapped up their Washington summit on September 25 with a two-month extension of the trade truce and warm words about friendship. On artificial intelligence, the leaders mostly ratified what their deputies had sketched in New York days earlier: a formal US-China dialogue on AI, plus an American proposal for a […]
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