In July, India tested two new interceptors meant to destroy missiles at ranges up to 5,000 kilometers, the latest step toward one of the few layered missile shields in the world. New Delhi calls the program defensive. But a neighboring rival rarely sees a shield that way. India’s expanding defenses could embolden its leaders in […]
We went to Ceuta to see how Europe treats people who arrive at its borders. We came back asking how Europe can still call itself a continent governed by law.
What we saw there was the often abstract failure of migration policy made brutally concrete: the daily humiliation of human beings — people sleeping under plastic sheets, children left without protection, food distributed under military guard, allegations of beatings and torture, and migrants treated as a threat rather than as people with rights.
These are scenes we never expected to encounter in Europe in 2026. Yet we saw them ourselves. And now that we have seen them, we cannot pretend we did not.
Morally unthinkable and unacceptable
In Ceuta, the boundaries of what is morally unthinkable and unacceptable have been crossed.
Migrants and those who help them are living in a kind of state of exception, where European law has been suspended and prolonged arbitrary police and military rule prevails.
Ceuta is a city abandoned by Spain, Europe and the law, where people are segregated according to their origin in circumstances that recall apartheid regimes. It has become a laboratory for the degradation and dehumanisation of migrants.
The future of Europe is being decided there.
We visited locations where thousands of people are living in undignified conditions, under makeshift shelters, plastic tarpaulins or in the open, assisted by local residents and NGOs such as No Name Kitchen.
They described constant harassment, insults, threats, public targeting through leaked photographs, and the detention of five members accused of disobeying authorities after recording a police operation involving migrants.
First, the far-right Spanish party Vox turned desperate people into prey to be “hunted down one by one”. Eventually, those trying to feed or assist them also became targets. When a group is sufficiently dehumanised, those who try to help them can be dehumanised too.
At Trampolín beach, we saw how the Red Cross distributes, once a day, a single bag of cold food: bread, water, tuna, juice and biscuits, under the watch of National Police vans.
Migrants from other areas can walk for hours to reach it. One day, we witnessed military forces preventing the Red Cross from distributing the same ration to around 1,000 people.
Whether someone eats can depend on military personnel, who can remove people from the queue or deny them food. The food distribution also coincides with Red Cross medical assistance, forcing some people to choose between eating and having their wounds treated.
Children alone on the streets
We spoke with children living on the streets, alone, hungry and cold, without adequate protection. We were told that National Police officers sometimes refuse to identify children who approach them for help, preventing them from entering the protection system.
This is compounded by the refusal of autonomous communities governed by Spain’s centre-right People’s Party and Vox to take them in, and by the Ceuta government’s refusal to appoint legal representatives.
We also heard allegations concerning Ceuta University Hospital. Migrants can face separate treatment at the emergency department and, according to migrants and NGOs, military personnel guarding the entrance prevent them from waiting inside, including minors.
We heard the account of a child with a fractured leg who, after being treated by Médicos Mundi, was allegedly told at the hospital to “go back to your country and see a specialist” and given ibuprofen. In another case, someone was allegedly told: “We are not going to treat you because you have invaded us.”
We also received accounts of torture and cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment by regular military forces and the Legion. Migrants and NGOs described nighttime patrols involving harassment, humiliation, theft, destruction of mobile phones and beatings after people had been restrained with cable ties.
Some were allegedly forced to shave their heads or kneel to kiss a Christian cross. We are particularly concerned by allegations involving women and girls subjected to sexual humiliation.
This is extremely serious. The state is going on the hunt, while those who should protect these people are violating their rights. First came photographs, then video footage published by elDiario.es.
These were not images from the West Bank. They were from Ceuta. First there were allegations. Now there are images. Defence minister Margarita Robles must give explanations.
These soldiers should no longer be patrolling Ceuta’s streets. Article 51 of Spain’s Organic Law on the Disciplinary Regime of the Armed Forces allows for their provisional removal from duty. We have asked the minister to act immediately.
We also documented allegations of daily racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic harassment. Migrants and racialised people are reportedly prevented from entering the city centre, shops and supermarkets by military personnel who decide, based on skin colour or clothing, who can pass.
Racial profiling also affects Ceutíes of Moroccan origin or perceived as such. Some of us were even asked to leave a city-centre restaurant because we were accompanied by a human rights activist and a racialised person.
Our political assessment is clear: what is happening in Ceuta should not happen. We cannot become accustomed to systematic violations of human rights against migrants and those who assist them.
Responsibility lies with perpetrators, but also with political leaders, including those in Vox and the PP, far-right influencers spreading hate speech, and media outlets amplifying it by calling human beings “invaders”. When a child becomes an “invader”, his innocence can disappear in the eyes of those who hear that language, opening the door to dehumanisation.
The solution is to enforce the law, ensure accountability and transfer migrants to mainland Spain, where there are sufficient places to accommodate them in dignified conditions while their administrative status is resolved.
But the right does not want solutions.
They want migrants sleeping on beaches and streets in increasingly degrading conditions. They want Ceuta to remain a giant television set, a powder keg from which migrants can be portrayed as an “invasion”, insecurity and chaos used to fuel hatred and racist violence.
Their electoral campaign has begun in Ceuta. The socialist part of the government, afraid of being portrayed by the right as weak, refuses to transfer migrants to the mainland and keeps them trapped there. Those who want to set Ceuta on fire are pouring the petrol; those who could put out the fire are letting them do it.
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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
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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.
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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
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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 […]
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