This story was originally published by Inside Climate Newsand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In January 1966, a South African ship caught fire at sea. In port in Bristol, England, after firefighters pried open the smoking container, the conflagration spread and burned for five days. A little over a month later, a Liberian steamship caught fire near Rotterdam, ignited a storage area with barrels of petrol and sank. The month after that, a Danish ship caught fire off Long Beach, California, injuring three firefighters, killing a longshoreman and causing over a million dollars in estimated damages.
The culprit in each fire was fishmeal, a dark yellow powder made by drying and pulverizing fish that, if left untreated, is known for spontaneously combusting as it decays and oxidizes.
Tied to at least 90 ship and plant fires from the 1950s through the 1970s, fishmeal’s combustibility was a serious worry for seafarers, insurers and dock workers, according to a sweep of historical news coverage by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization in Washington, D.C.
In 1967, American feed producer Cargill announced a solution: ethoxyquin.
A crew abandons ship as the SS South America burns in Rotterdam in 1966. Sepia Times, NY Daily News, Evers, Joost / Anefo
A fire retardant previously used to keep rubber tires from drying out and applied as a preservative on fruits and alfalfa, production of the antioxidant was soon ramped up.
“Antioxidant treatment has made bulk handling an easy matter,” the director of the Canadian Department of Fisheries told an industry publication in 1966, arguing it should be required for fishmeal shipments.
The chemical was highly effective. By the 1970s, press-reported fires dropped sharply—from a typical 16 ship fires a year, according to the Liverpool Underwriters Association, to five.
By 1976, the U.S. Coast Guard imposed mandatory ethoxyquin treatment on fishmeal shipments, and three years later, the United Nations body that oversees maritime activity recommended fishmeal be treated with it “to prevent spontaneous combustion.”
But there was a problem: Ethoxyquin is a carcinogen.
“Toxic effects had been observed in laboratory animals fed high concentrations of ethoxyquin,” said a 1969 paper by U.N. food and agriculture authorities.
87 fires in fishmeal cargoes, plants, and warehouses, 1950–1978. The Outlaw Ocean Project
As its use in animal feeds and aquaculture grew, a 1987 study by British researchers found the chemical “caused severe damage” and had a potentially “carcinogenic effect” in rats. In 2015, the European Food Safety Authority said an impurity within ethoxyquin, known as p-phenetidine, was capable of causing mutations in genetic material.
There is a lack of scientific consensus on whether it is safe to eat farmed seafood raised on feed treated with ethoxyquin, but some countries have considered the risk to be high enough to justify banning or limiting the use of the chemical. In 2017, the European Commission suspended authorization for its use in animal feed across the European Union.
Today, ethoxyquin has been banned in the U.K. and by members of the European Economic Area, including Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. But ethoxyquin, within limits, is still permitted in animal feed in Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S.
With more than half of the seafood eaten worldwide now coming from fish farms, and with the majority of such species fed fishmeal and fish oil, studying the chemicals added to feed is critical for understanding the possible contamination of our global food supply.
Although ethoxyquin is not banned in the U.S., it has been at the center of a half-dozen lawsuits, typically involving claims of false advertising. Some lawsuits targeted seafood companies for marketing their products as “sustainable” even though they contained ethoxyquin, while others highlighted the potential risks that the additive poses to the environment.
Fishmeal production at an Exalmar plant in Peru spans from unloading fresh catch through processing and bagging the final powdered product. Growing health concerns over substances like ethoxyquin are fueling debate about the future of additive use in the global fishmeal industry.Credit: Pesquera Exalmar
In 2022, a New York resident brought a class-action lawsuit against Aldi Inc., a German supermarket chain with stores in the U.S., alleging its Atlantic salmon products were falsely labeled as “sustainable” due to “environmentally destructive” practices. The complaint cited the EU’s ban on the chemical and a study linking ethoxyquin to mortality and deformations in fish and crustaceans, noting the chemical “poses a risk for aquatic life.” The case was settled out of court.
The same year, a New York and a California resident jointly sued Gorton’s Inc., a seafood company, for labeling its frozen tilapia as “sustainably sourced” despite containing ethoxyquin. This lawsuit also cited the “risk for aquatic life” and the European Union’s ban, and was settled out of court.
In Canada, the country’s Food Inspection Agency requires feeds containing ethoxyquin to carry a label declaring that it meets the legal limits, but the agency does not specify how it tests for the chemical in feeds. Inspectors also do not check whether ethoxyquin ends up in the seafood itself, according to the agency’s latest food inspection report from 2022.
And a 2024 audit of the Canadian agency by the EU found it completed only about 40 percent of its planned inspections, citing “systematic and significant under-delivery” in terms of testing seafood products.
Read Next
Cargill said in a statement that it has assessed alternative antioxidants since 2005 and no longer uses ethoxyquin in its global salmon feed business or in any market where ethoxyquin is not authorized for use in aquafeed. The company also noted that it did not develop ethoxyquin. Globally, producers and feed makers have also increasingly shifted to alternatives, including natural additives such as rosemary extract and vitamin E compounds.
“More and more destinations are not accepting ethoxyquin, starting with our local Peruvian market,” said James Frank, managing director of the Peruvian fishmeal company MSICeres, during a 2022 webinar. He added that 100 percent of Peru’s fishmeal exports to Europe, Canada, the U.S. and Australia are now ethoxyquin-free, a shift also seen among companies in the U.K. and Norway.
The most popular alternative to ethoxyquin is now butylated hydroxyanisole, or BHA, favored for its lower costs and strong antioxidant properties compared with fully natural additives. But like the chemical it aims to supplant, BHA has its own significant health risks, according to researchers.
The U.S. National Toxicology Program identified BHA as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” as early as 1991, and Japanese researchers found it caused malignant tumors in laboratory rats in 2008.
In February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it was reassessing the safety of the substance as a food additive.
To address the world’s insatiable hunger for seafood, the aquaculture industry will continue to expand. Perhaps there’ll be a shift away from carnivorous fish, or a replacement will be found for fishmeal. But for now, the aquaculture and fishmeal industries find themselves in a perilous loop: pivoting from deadly ship fires to a carcinogenic fire retardant, and then to yet another one.
This story is part of aninvestigationconducted by an internationalteam of journalistsbased at The Outlaw Ocean Project. Read the other storieshere.
The Foreign Press Association (FPA) condemned the attack on Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine in the West Bank on Friday and demanded Israeli authorities prosecute those responsible, as Levine sharply criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for saying details of the assault remained “unclear.”
Levine was badly beaten Friday while covering the olive harvest near the Palestinian village of Abu Falah, north of Ramallah. She underwent surgery Saturday on a finger that Levine and her daughter said was nearly detached during the attack and was listed in moderate condition at Rabin Medical Center.
The FPA said settlers also stole Levine’s passport, phone, wallet and equipment and described the assault as the latest in a series of attacks on journalists and civilians in the West Bank. The association called on the army, Shin Bet, police and government officials to act against those responsible.
It also directly challenged Netanyahu, calling on him to stop dismissing such violence as the actions of a few “troubled youths” and recognize what the FPA described as a broader problem.
Netanyahu said Saturday that the circumstances surrounding the incident had not been established.
“The facts surrounding the confrontation near Abu Falah, during which Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was allegedly assaulted, remain unclear and are under investigation,” Netanyahu said.
While condemning violence against “Jews, Arabs, Christians or journalists,” Netanyahu said “serious questions remain.” He cited reports that some 200 Arabs and far-left activists confronted approximately 40 Israeli youths and said footage showed masked people on both sides throwing objects.
“Other footage appears to show Levine knocked down and immediately helped to her feet by the same unidentified individual,” he said.
Levine rejected that characterization.
“That is such a lie and the biggest insult,” she said.
Levine said Palestinians were trying to drive the attackers away and credited them with helping save her life.
“Mr. prime minister, maybe take another look at those videos, okay? And really look at those videos with your full attention because you’ll see nobody was trying to help me except for my colleagues,” she said.
According to Reuters, 80 people, allegedly settlers, many masked and some carrying gas canisters, descended from a hill toward the terraced olive grove and began throwing rocks and attacking Palestinians, activists and Levine.
Footage, including video shared by the Washington Post, shows masked men beating and kicking Levine while she was on the ground.
Levine said at least 20 masked men attacked her and that the assault lasted about 10 minutes. She said they were armed with bottles and slingshots and that her helmet and protective vest marked “PRESS” likely prevented more serious injuries.
“They broke my cameras off my shoulders. They broke the straps,” Levine told Channel 12 from her hospital bed. She said doctors and a nurse suspected she may also have been stabbed.
“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she said.
Netanyahu said an investigation should determine who initiated the violence and cautioned against drawing broader conclusions from the incident.
“We will not allow disputed incidents to be exploited to demonize the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,” he said.
President Issac Herzog spoke with Levine by phone and condemned the violence, according to his office.
“I was morally tormented during Shabbat when I thought about it, and I express deep sorrow and apologize for what you went through,” Herzog told her.
“The despicable behavior of these criminals does not represent the citizens and values of the State of Israel,” Herzog said, urging authorities to investigate and prosecute those responsible.
American Tourist Fighting for His Life After Cliff Jump Goes Horribly Wrong
A 22-year-old New Jersey man is fighting for his life in an Italian hospital after a cliff-jumping accident during a romantic vacation with his fiancée turned into a terrifying medical emergency.
Jacob Fleig, of Berlin Township, New Jersey, was visiting Italy’s famous Amalfi Coast with his fiancée, Olivia, when he suffered critical injuries on October 5.
The engineering student has since undergone multiple life-saving surgeries and remains in intensive care as his devastated family desperately works to bring him home to the United States.
His brother, Jimmy Dorner, launched an online fundraiser on October 11 to help cover mounting medical bills and the potentially enormous cost of transporting Jacob back to America for further treatment.
“Jacob is a light in every life he encounters,” Dorner wrote, describing his brother as a funny, charismatic young man whose personality leaves a lasting impression on everyone he meets.
The family has not publicly explained exactly what happened during the cliff jump, how far Jacob fell or the full extent of his injuries.
However, the consequences have been severe enough to require numerous emergency procedures and an extended stay in an Italian intensive care unit.
For now, doctors must stabilize Jacob before his family can arrange specialized medical transportation home.
Dorner said his brother will likely need additional surgeries, rehabilitation and ongoing medical care once he returns to the United States.
The family is facing the added challenge of navigating a medical crisis thousands of miles from home.
Jacob’s mother, Kim, has traveled to Italy to be by his side, while relatives and friends back in New Jersey have rallied around the family.
A longtime family friend shared an emotional message on Facebook, asking people to pray for Jacob, his fiancée and his mother.
The friend explained that she had known Jacob since before he was born and was heartbroken by the news of his condition.
Meanwhile, donations have poured into the family’s GoFundMe campaign, which had raised more than $45,000 by Friday evening, October 16, according to published reports.
The money will help with hospital expenses, medical transportation and the long recovery process that may lie ahead.
Jacob is currently pursuing a career in electrical engineering. His professional profile indicates that he enrolled at American Institute in 2025 after previously studying biochemistry at Rowan University.
Despite the seriousness of his injuries, his family remains hopeful that he can overcome the ordeal.
“Jacob has persevered through many adversities in life and has always come out a stronger man,” Dorner wrote.
The accident occurred along Italy’s Amalfi Coast, a popular Mediterranean destination known for its dramatic cliffs, picturesque seaside villages and crystal-clear water.
Although the coastline attracts adventurous travelers, jumping from cliffs into the sea can carry serious risks, including submerged rocks, unexpected changes in water depth and powerful currents.
Even experienced swimmers can suffer devastating injuries if they strike underwater obstacles or enter the water at an unsafe angle.
The region has experienced other dangerous cliff-jumping incidents. In 2023, a woman slipped while preparing to jump at Fiordo di Furore, a scenic coastal gorge, and fell down the rocks before entering the water.
Authorities have not disclosed the precise location of Jacob’s accident or whether any environmental conditions contributed to his injuries.
For his loved ones, those unanswered questions are secondary to the urgent effort to help him survive and eventually recover.
As Jacob remains hospitalized in Italy, his family continues to ask for prayers and support while preparing for what could be a lengthy and difficult medical journey.
GO plc, has released the Q2 2026 edition of GO Trends, its data intelligence report on how international visitors move around the Maltese islands. Building on the full-year 2025 report published earlier this year, the new edition covers April to June 2026 and follows visitors from seven key source markets, namely Australia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, the UK and the USA, across 16 monitored sites and attractions and ten localities.
The result is a quarter in rotation: as summer built, visitors moved away from heritage and towards the coast.
“Q2 showed us just how quickly the picture can change within a single quarter. The UK nearly doubled its footprint between April and June, Valletta almost doubled its share of where visitors start and end their day, and beach and nightlife pulled clearly ahead of heritage,” explained Alison Schembri, Market & Data Insights Manager, GO plc.
A Surging UK Market and a Clear Shift In Where Visitors Spend Their Time
“Businesses that rely on market insight need to see that movement as it happens, and that’s why we want to sit down with them and work through what it means for their operations,” she added.
According to the latest GO Trends report, British visitors accounted for 45% of attraction footfall and grew 93% between April and June, the fastest rise of any major market. That growth went hand in hand with a seasonal swing, as beach footfall rose 55% and nightlife footfall 78% across the quarter, while heritage footfall eased back by 8%.
Where visitors base themselves is shifting too. Valletta’s share of combined morning and dining presence nearly doubled, from 10% in Q1 to 19% in Q2, while Qawra and San Pawl il-Baħar both gave up ground. Even so, that northern corridor remains firmly Polish, with Polish visitors making up 35–41% of morning and dining presence there, the highest single-nationality concentration of any locality.
Some venues are more concentrated still: at Numero Uno and Ġianpula in Ta’ Qali, UK visitors account for 83–85% of footfall. American visitors, meanwhile, make up around 24% of morning presence in Valletta against a 5% baseline, even as overall USA attraction footfall fell 25% over the quarter.
Compared to Q1, the report also confirms which patterns are holding firm, such as the Three Cities remaining an evening destination rather than a base.
As with previous editions, the report draws on anonymised and aggregated signals generated when international visitors’ phones connect to GO’s network. A visitor’s home operator reveals nationality, while the network site they connect to shows where they are, down to specific localities and points of interest, and at what time of day.
The Q2 edition focuses on seven nationalities and a defined set of monitored sites and localities, offering a meaningful sample rather than a census of Maltese tourism. All data is fully anonymised. GO Trends tracks movement patterns, never the individuals.
Alongside the report, GO is inviting businesses to an exclusive GO Trends briefing on Tuesday 3rd November, with further details to be disclosed soon. Business representatives are invited to register their interest in participating in this event here https://www.go.com.mt/form/go-trends-event/contact-details
Meantime, work on the Q3 2026 analysis is already under way. Visit https://www.go.com.mt/go-trends/ for more information and access to published reports.
Can a cockroach movement reverse India’s democratic decline?
More than 25,000 police officers were deployed across New Delhi recently to prevent demonstrations led by India’s new youth-led political movement, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Government authorities had denied the CJP permission to protest on public-order grounds.
The ensuing security operation saw the authorities shut one in six metro stations in the capital, barricade dozens of central roads and cancel over 250 trains in what Indian rail officials called an “unprecedented closure.”
The protests underscore a paradox at the heart of Indian politics. On the one hand, they show just how far India’s democracy has declined. On the other, they offer up glimmers of the key ingredients needed for democratic renewal: widening political participation, greater opposition coordination and mobilization around concrete demands.
The protests grew out of discontent over a nationwide electoral roll review known as the Special Intensive Revision. The revision, which began in 2025, has removed more than 130 million names from eligible voter lists – almost a tenth of India’s entire population.
India’s Election Commission has led the revision and says it is necessary to remove duplicate and ineligible voters. But critics allege the review has political motivations.
Indian police detain a protester during a demonstration in New Delhi on October 13. Photo: Rajat Gupta / EPA via The Conversation
In the state of West Bengal earlier in 2026, almost 12% of registered voters were removed from voter rolls before India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sailed to an election victory in a state it had not previously governed.
One analysis found that in a large number of constituencies the BJP won, the number of deleted voters exceeded the party’s margin of victory. These events do not definitively prove that Special Intensive Revision deletions changed the state election results. But the pattern is troubling.
So when the Indian Express recently reported that Election Commission members themselves raised 14 objections to voter exclusion during the revision, all of which were overruled by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the CJP called for his resignation and took to Delhi’s streets.
All of this is occurring in the context of considerable democratic decline under Narendra Modi’s government. This has taken the form of executive centralisation, intensified use of anti-terror laws and growing media ownership concentration.
No democracy watchdogs currently classify India as a full democracy. In 2021, Freedom House downgraded India from “free” to “partly free”, while the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute now classifies the world’s most populous country as an “electoral autocracy.”
Arresting the decline
The protests are unlikely to arrest India’s democratic decline. Modi’s government is powered not just by the BJP, but also by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. This is a century-old Hindu nationalist organization with well-organized networks extending into schools, unions, charities and neighborhoods.
The combination of deep grassroots organization and effective government control of the media makes Modi’s government extraordinarily capable of mobilizing supporters. These advantages help explain why Modi has remained in power for 12 years in a country historically known for turning incumbents out of power.
But the cockroach movement is getting three aspects of its political activism right. First, the movement has begun to restore a sense of political efficacy in India, or the belief that collective action can force a powerful government to retreat.
Earlier in 2026, CJP-led protests successfully forced Modi’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to resign over a scandal involving leaked exam papers. The stakes are extremely high. In a country where university graduates make up two-thirds of unemployed 20- 29-year-olds, success in such exams offers a rare pathway to upward mobility.
One indication that participation in the protest movement is now widening came from popular Indian YouTuber, Dhruv Rathee. In a recent interview, Rathee told the BBC that he was not a political figure but now felt compelled to participate in his first protest because “basically the foundation of our democracy is at stake here.”
The protests have brought together forces from across Indian society. Photo: Vipin / EPA via The Conversation
Second, the protests have brought together previously distinct forces across broad sectors of Indian society. For example, lawyers, farmers’ organizations and activists have come together to back the protests.
It is especially important to coordinate the CJP and the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (India) of opposition parties. This is because challenging a dominant party at the polls requires above all opposition coordination.
Opposition groups need not agree on every policy. The CJP is able to supply youth mobilization without the historical baggage of an established opposition party, while the India bloc can bring parliamentary representation and organization.
Third, protests are more effective when they coalesce around a clear and specific demand. Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March, a 24-day, 240-mile march to protest the British colonial monopoly on salt production and trade, epitomized this strategy. It brought together broad social alliances in opposition to a discrete policy that could be reversed.
A focused demand, in this case the resignation of the chief election commissioner, also gives any movement strategic flexibility. This includes the ability to pause mobilization after concessions without entirely dissolving the coalition that produced it.
India’s incumbent government retains formidable advantages. The BJP has enormous organizational resources, and nearly three years remain before the next national election in 2029, though an upcoming 2027 election in India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh will provide an important test of the government’s popularity.
That is ample time to outlast protests, exploit opposition divisions and wait for public attention to shift elsewhere. So, the recent demonstrations have not reversed India’s democratic decline.
But they have widened political participation, focused public attention on the institutions that underpin democracy and weakened the belief that public resistance is futile.
US Rep. Ilhan Omar challenges legality of FBI home search: WSJ
The defense of US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar have challenged the legality of a search of her Washington home, demanding that federal prosecutors immediately return all seized property and provide recordings made during the operation, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
In a letter sent late Friday, the Minnesota Democrat’s legal team argued that the search, conducted by Homeland Security Investigations agents early Monday under a federal judge-approved warrant, was “neither justified nor lawful.”
According to the Journal, the investigation focuses partly on how Omar, 44, obtained US citizenship after arriving from Somalia decades ago.
“There is no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” the letter said.
Her lawyers alleged that agents failed to follow the judge’s instructions, including a requirement to notify the US House general counsel before executing the warrant. They also said Omar and her attorneys were not given a copy of the warrant beforehand, as ordered by the judge.
The letter claimed agents prevented Omar from contacting her lawyers for more than an hour after the search began.
A Justice Department spokeswoman rejected the allegations, describing the letter as “riddled with false allegations and inaccuracies. Our attorneys and law enforcement partners complied with all court orders and legal obligations, as they always do.”
READ: Federal agents search US representative Ilhan Omar’s home in criminal investigation
Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington, defended the operation earlier this week, saying it had been approved by a federal judge mindful of constitutional protections.
“That judge would not have signed that warrant unless there was probable cause,” Pirro said on Fox News.
Omar’s lawyers also accused prosecutors of abusing the grand jury process through subpoenas issued in Washington and Minnesota.
“This vindictive, retributive, and politically motivated criminal investigation into one of the president’s chief congressional critics violates Representative Omar’s constitutional rights and threatens the separation of powers,” the letter said.
The search came three weeks before November’s midterm elections, in which Omar is seeking a fifth term.
The letter also accused the Justice Department of violating its longstanding practice of avoiding public investigative actions involving political candidates within 60 days of an election, a measure intended to prevent the appearance of partisan interference. Department officials have denied violating any policy.
“This search—which arose from a years-old, tired conspiracy theory concerning conduct stretching back decades—violated longstanding Justice Department policy concerning interference in elections,” the letter said.
Omar has long been targeted by President Donald Trump and conservatives, as well as GOP-led congressional investigations.
Jewish Educators Cancel Italy Study Trip Over Proposed Anti-Israel Declaration
Nearly 70 Jewish educators from US schools canceled an October 11–16 study trip to Reggio Emilia, Italy, after a proposed declaration asking visitors to distance themselves from Israeli policies in Gaza prompted safety concerns and accusations of antisemitism. The Italian host organization disputes that signing such a statement was ever required.
The Paradigm Project, a US professional network for Jewish early childhood educators, had organized the visit to study the city’s internationally recognized teaching methods. Organizers canceled the trip on October 7 after local activists questioned participants’ connections to Israel and reportedly examined their social media profiles.
A proposed declaration asked teachers to disavow the occupation of Gaza and violations of children’s rights in occupied territories. The American educators objected to being asked to take a political position concerning Israel’s government because of their Jewish identity.
Reggio Children, a partly municipally owned educational organization, said the additional language had been circulated for discussion but never formally adopted. Its official charter calls for respect for human rights, opposition to discrimination and war, and condemnation of genocide without naming a specific country.
“The text you quote was never adopted,” the organization said in a statement. It confirmed that a separate delegation of Israeli educators was attending the program as planned.
Reggio Emilia Mayor Marco Massari also denied that visitors were required to pass a political test. His earlier statements had acknowledged discussions about an additional commitment concerning Israeli government policies, contributing to conflicting accounts of the dispute.
US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Yehuda Kaploun welcomed the mayor’s clarification and expressed support for protecting visiting educators from intimidation.
Jewish community leaders in Italy criticized the proposed condition, arguing that Jews living outside Israel should not be expected to answer for decisions made by its government.
The controversy disrupted a longstanding educational exchange. The Reggio Emilia approach, developed after World War II by educator Loris Malaguzzi and local families, has influenced preschools internationally, including Jewish early childhood programs in the United States.
European Union leaders convene in Brussels on Thursday for a packed summit to debate how best to curb surging exports from China blamed by industry groups for factory closures, how to cope with high energy prices and how to bridge wide differences over the future EU budget.
The leaders from the EU’s 27 members meet less than a week after the European Commission secured an agreement with Beijing to limit imports of hybrid cars from China. It is a first step in what the EU hopes will be a broader plan to rein in the bloc’s goods trade deficit with China that hit €360 billion ($400.4 billion) in 2025 and is on course to surpass that level this year. The next EU-China meeting is planned for March.
Draft conclusions from the summit indicate leaders will request the EU executive, the Commission, to continue its dialogue with Beijing, while also making full use of EU trade defence measures and adding new trade instruments to protect the bloc further.
“These imbalances are not limited to one sector. We don’t have much time because every month that goes by, thousands of jobs are lost,” a senior EU diplomat said.
The summit comes as the bloc grapples with rising economic anxiety, which far-right parties are exploiting in elections. EU leaders tasked the Commission in June to produce concrete results in trade talks with Beijing by October. The hybrid cars deal was a first step, but the broader imbalance — spanning chemicals, steel and machinery — remains unresolved.
Beijing has said that hyping up the issue of economic imbalances is an excuse to promote protectionism and exert pressure on and restrict China.
GERMANY MAKES U-TURN ON CHINA IMPORTS
Franco-German proposals released last week are likely to be the focus of discussions. The EU’s two largest economies said there was an urgent need for measures to deal with imports of chemicals and PET — the plastic widely used in packaging — and called for measures to retaliate quickly against countries that harm the bloc. An investigation into PET is expected to begin soon.
The paper marks a sharp turn for Germany, which only two years ago was the most vocal critic of EU anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.
The summit will kick off at 10 a.m. (0800 GMT) with a broad debate about EU competitiveness, of which relations with China are part. Several EU countries have also put high energy prices on the agenda, which the draft conclusions call an issue of “critical importance.”
The conclusions point to proposals already made by the European Commission, such as a one-year delay to the EU’s methane emissions rules for oil and gas imports and ask the EU executive to come up with further short-term measures.
EU leaders will also on Thursday discuss the bloc’s next seven-year budget, which requires unanimous approval and often produces the EU’s most divisive negotiations between net contributors and net recipients. The 2028-2034 budget is no different, with a special summit set for late November to try to reach agreement.
One of Friday’s main topics will be the challenges facing Ukraine, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy due to attend. Leaders are likely to discuss Ukraine’s funding needs for 2027. The draft conclusions indicate leaders will also express regret over the US decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian diesel.
US President Donald Trump said at the weekend Zelenskiy should be replaced as Ukraine’s leader. Zelenskiy received a strong show of support in London on Wednesday.
The late Senator Lindsey Graham with Trump. It was clear from the start that The Graham-Blumenthal Bill would do little, if anything, for Ukraine.
The single most predictable action of the Trump second presidency happened just a few hours ago. Trump signed an executive order that exempted Russia from all of the key possible sanctions that could have been placed on it by the Graham-Blumenthal bill. Here is a link to the order and here is how it opens.
The specific sanctions lifted (in other words, the ones that will not take place), include:
The rate of duty on goods from the Russian Federation shall be increased by 500% ad valorem …
The rate of duty on goods from the largest five importers of crude oil and natural gas that originated in the Russian Federation shall be increased by 100% ad valorem …
The rate of duty on goods from the top five facilitators of Russian oil sanctions evasion shall be increased by 100% ad valorem …
The increases in the rates of duty provided by this order shall apply in addition to any other duty, fee, tax, exaction, or charge applicable with respect to the good …
Even more extraordinary, Trump made sure to waive the monitoring clause, which was supposed to be the tool to track what was happening in Russia on these issues.
In other words, he has used Graham-Blumenthal to protect Russia further, which is the least surprising thing possible. Look, as was said in early September, this version of Graham-Blumenthal was always part of the Trump con and was never going to force Trump to do anything to hurt Putin, contrary to what its backers were proclaiming.
By the way, Lindsey Graham himself, the chief proclaimer of this bill before his passing, was either a witting or an unwitting part of the con. He acted as if a bill such as this might help Ukraine, when it was never going to do so. The bill as constructed, if passed, was never going to be used to hurt Russia (or China) because Trump always held the ultimate power in his hands. So it was all a shell game being played to deceive people. Here was the conclusion of that section of the piece.
So Graham-Blumenthal might not give him any more powers than those he believes he already has, and if it does give him more powers, it will not be used to help Ukraine or hurt Russia. That is why it is part of a con.
So, all we are really left wondering now is whether the bill is used to hammer Ukraine’s European partners. It will certainly never be used on China, which is actually the country most at risk if you read the bill closely.
In that sense, passing Graham-Blumenthal ended up being a good thing. Trump is already sweating about the damage his pro-Russian steps are doing to his own popularity and GOP prospects in the midterms. He would not have wanted to take such a step as exempting Russia at this time, but he had to because he was never going to allow a step to be taken that would do material damage to Putin’s Russia.
So this will make his cravenness and Republican weakness to dictatorship and hostility to democracy a major news story for a while longer. It might empower a new Congress to take more aggressive action. That was the one good thing I could see from the bill long-term when I wrote in the September piece:
However, the November elections do hold out the possibility of installing a new Congress which will try to take back the powers of the legislative branch and stand up to the White House. In that case, having a Congress that establishes that it can play an active role in tariffs/sanctions would be a useful precedent. Indeed anything now that establishes Congress’s power is a good thing.
For those who say do not vote for it as it gives Trump power to tariff Europe / Japan / South Korea – well, he already seems to believe he has that power. If he then says, “Aha, Graham Blumenthal validates my power,” he is actually admitting Congress has a key role to play. That could bite him in the derriere starting in late January when the new Congress is seated.
The vast majority of Americans will never vote on foreign policy, particularly for midterms. That has to be understood. But if this further makes it clear to the American people that the USA is being run by a pro-Putin crime syndicate that is spreading corruption far and wide, that might help sway a few votes. It is heartening to see, in one poll, that worry about corruption in the US government is now the number one concern of Americans. If that is true, this story will only reinforce that fear.
So it was a good thing that Graham-Blumenthal was passed, an entirely predictable thing that Trump made sure that nothing was done to damage Russia with it – and all we can do is hope that it politically has the effect that it might on the US midterms.
Phillips P. O’Brien is a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrew. This article was originally published here, on his Substack, Phillips’s Newsletter. It is republished with permission.
Why BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights still has thousands of active players
Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers’ minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were.
Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. I think that’s partly because it was a completely different beast.
BioWare is known for making multi-character, story-driven role-playing games that focused primarily on single-player story campaigns, though some supported co-op play in those campaigns. With Neverwinter Nights, BioWare instead made a game that was as focused on a modding toolset for content creation as it was on giving players a pre-packaged story, and that emphasized multiplayer at least as much as solo play.
Today you would expect this to be a calculated attempt to bring more long-term, always-on, multiplayer-as-a-service to an RPG franchise that has mostly appealed to solo players. You might imagine it would be about selling cosmetics, a subscription, or a battle pass, or maybe you would think it was about nabbing appealing engagement numbers.
But it’s clear from playing it today that Neverwinter Nights wasn’t primarily made for those reasons. Instead, it came from a passion for tabletop role-playing and a desire to get closer to that in video game form than ever before.
Yes, the BioWare team noted in some interviews that they saw this as a trial run for exploring the idea of making a massively multiplayer game (MMO)—something that, in the year 2000, was seen by many as the hot new business opportunity in gaming, and which was in many ways the precursor to the games-as-a-service we see today. They then indicated they realized that an MMO was harder to make than they had assumed and abandoned that ambition well before Neverwinter Nights shipped.
Neverwinter Nights is not exactly an MMO. Instead, it’s designed for small communities of people to inhabit and create with, and it features a powerful toolset for virtual dungeon masters to use to subject regular players to challenges in an improvisational way on a live server.
“We always envisioned it as a table with four legs—the single player, the multiplayer, the DMing tools and the toolset (the module making tools),” BioWare’s Ray Muzyka told IGN around the time the game was released. “They all appeal to different groups, and we’ve tried to make them all equivalently high quality.”
Over the past month, I’ve been replaying Neverwinter Nights‘ main story campaign, The Wailing Death, as a solo player, for the first time in 20 years. The nostalgia has been strong in this replay, but I have also found that BioWare didn’t quite nail “equivalently high quality” for all the pillars. Still, it doesn’t matter, because as we’ll see when we check in with the game’s community, the campaign is not the point.
Table of Contents
The single-player experience is… fine
“The single player experience has to be as good as anything we’ve ever done in [Baldur’s Gate], [Baldur’s Gate 2], or Throne of Bhaal and hopefully better,” Muzyka told IGN. “Our goal here at BioWare is that each game we do has to be better than the previous one.”
If single-player is one of the legs, it might be fair to call Neverwinter Nights‘ table a little wobbly. It still stands, but you know how irritating it can be.
For example, Neverwinter Nights leaves behind Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale‘s party-based systems, and instead has the player controlling just one character directly. It makes sense for a multiplayer game, but doesn’t work as well for a single-player experience in this case—at least with the Dungeons & Dragons rules of the time.
I chose to play a monk, a martial arts specialist, simply because I’ve always been drawn to that particular fantasy identity, and because I’d never played one in a D&D game. I regretted that decision after a while.
For many of the character levels covered in The Wailing Death, the monk basically just picks between two fighting modes: one that misses more but attacks more frequently, and one that’s just normal. That, along with some intense restrictions on which weapons or armor can be used while keeping all their benefits, and a couple of knockdown and stun attacks that often don’t work, make up the whole kit for many hours of playtime, particularly in the first act. (It does get better later on, though.)
The original campaign is fun and nostalgic, but it’s arguably not BioWare’s best.
The original campaign is fun and nostalgic, but it’s arguably not BioWare’s best. Credit: GOG
A kit like this makes sense in a pen-and-paper RPG with a live dungeon master (DM), because the player and DM can work together to invent creative expressions of their abilities, and it works in a party in a video game because it’s just one of multiple complementary characters with a wide range of skills and spells.
But for a game that is about 80 percent battling enemies without controlling any other characters, it gets monotonous quickly. There aren’t as many meaningful character builds, gearing, or tactical choices as you’re used to in some other RPGs until quite a ways into the campaign. Often, you just run in and watch the dice roll until either you die or the enemy dies, while sometimes drinking potions.
This problem is less severe with some other classes, but the tension is usually there to some degree.
Whereas Baldur’s Gate 2, for example, had a partial authored background for your character that then played into the narrative, Neverwinter Nights leaves you as an Elder Scrolls-like blank slate. I normally love that! It’s good for role-playing with friends, because you can make up your own character completely. But it means the story can’t be character-driven, and the gameplay doesn’t provide enough flexibility or freedom in return.
Still, I enjoyed my experience with the campaign when I replayed it recently, even if it couldn’t match Baldur’s Gate 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, or other BioWare classics for me personally. While the story wasn’t anything special by BioWare’s standards, there was something genuinely cozy to me about the genericness of the narrative. It took me back to an earlier time in CRPGs, before things got quite so precious. “This is just like D&D!” was still enough to sell it on its own. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, though.
Since most people played the game solo, and it was a relatively small portion of the player base that dove deep into the construction kit or DM tools, I think this is the main reason Neverwinter Nights has not achieved the same pantheon status as other BioWare titles that came before and after it.
But for those lucky few who were invested in those other table legs, it actually was quite special—and amazingly, it remains so today.
The persistent worlds of Neverwinter Nights
“The main thing I would shout from the rooftops if I could, is that firing up Neverwinter Nights and launching its original campaign… does not do justice to what Neverwinter Nights has become since,” a longtime player named Daniel Morris told me. He goes by Irongron in the community, and he runs Arelith, which is both one of the OG persistent multiplayer servers and one of the most popular servers today. Morris is also working on a visual overhaul of the original campaign; he hopes to release it next year.
Arelith hit its peak player count “a little less than two years ago,” as Morris tells it—not way back when the game was new. “Our community is the heart of Arelith, it’s not just our audience, but where we find our DMs and developers,” he said.
Arelith is a fountain of creativity; for example, this is original artwork commissioned for the game’s loading screens from artist Matheus Graef.
Arelith is a fountain of creativity; for example, this is original artwork commissioned for the game’s loading screens from artist Matheus Graef. Credit: Matheus Graef
I spent many evenings in my younger days playing multi-user dungeons (MUDs), the text-based online role-playing games that preceded MMOs like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. While there were big MUDs, many were small communities of just one or two dozen people, and often, those same people were the ones actually making the game’s content. For example, I was a room builder for one MUD; I wrote the descriptions for places in the MUD’s world and decided which monsters, NPCs, or items inhabited those places.
Neverwinter Nights‘ multiplayer platform and community—both as it was back in the 2000s and as it is today—reminds me of those MUD days. There’s an ownership of that shared world that is entirely lost in the MMO days, perhaps more akin to a modern, small Minecraft server than an MMO with thousands of users.
That seems to be part of the appeal for a player I spoke with who goes by the name NelaK in the community, and who has, among other things, taken over maintenance and moderation of the Neverwinter Vault, the community’s de facto hub for two decades. The website hosts news, patches, assets, mods, a forum, a wiki, and an associated Discord server.
“It’s not an MMO, and that’s a good thing in my opinion. The communities are smaller, which means your roleplay and your actions matter and can affect the world,” said NelaK. “The world itself can be tailored around what the players want. That’s a unique thing that you can’t get from an MMO or from smaller-scale multiplayer games. It sits in a sweet spot where you can have enough players that it feels like a proper community and a world you can engage with while you can still matter.”
Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale did have multiplayer, where each player could control one or more characters directly. As noted, Neverwinter Nights limits each player to one character, but it adds a new role: a dungeon master, who can spawn enemies, occupy and act as NPCs, and more, to aid in group storytelling, similar to a pen-and-paper game.
“While Arelith is essentially a mini MMO, many of the other servers pride themselves in running highly curated, beautifully crafted campaign worlds much closer to tabletop role-playing game emulator that Neverwinter Nights was first intended as,” Morris told me. He called Neverwinter Nights “a direct translation of the tabletop role-playing game experience into the digital sphere.”
It’s as much a construction kit as it is a game
The game’s modding kit and easy-to-use scripting tools let players build scenarios relatively quickly. It essentially let players build a little RPG world, run it, and inhabit it. It was a bustling scene back then, and there’s still a community doing this today. The combination of the relative simplicity of the graphics and the elegance of the tools make this toolset an unusually excellent balance between flexible, powerful, and easy to learn.
“The tile-based areas are basic and limiting in some respects, but they do mean that building areas is quick and easy,” explained NelaK. “It’s much more approachable than a lot of other platforms.”
For NelaK and some other members of the game’s community today, the game’s tools aren’t just the remaining appeal—they’re the main appeal.
“I’ve been playing Neverwinter Nights since launch day. I remember one of my friends dragging me along to the store because they really wanted the game and I went just to keep them company,” he remembered. “I ended up buying it, and I’ve been hooked ever since, but to this day, I’ve still never played through the original campaigns… and yet I’ve played Neverwinter Nights or spent time building or working on something Neverwinter Nights-related most days since.”
I toyed around with the tools quite a bit back in the day. I remember re-creating a big chunk of the world of my favorite MMO at the time, Meridian 59, with the intent to make a story-driven, single-player campaign for that game; Meridian 59 had very little narrative as it was.
I also remember that Neverwinter Nights was for many years a common way for would-be narrative designers to make a portfolio piece for applying for jobs within the games industry. When I was in college, a close friend of mine (Brian “Psychochild” Green, who at the time co-ran Meridian 59, and sadly has since passed) offered to show my Neverwinter Nights modules to some friends of his at BioWare if I wanted to interview for a job there to write for their next game, which, based on timing, probably would have been Mass Effect. I declined in order to focus on other priorities I had at the time, for better or worse.
Similarly, many (though certainly not all) people in the community have professional backgrounds closely related to, or at least adjacent to, game development.
“Neverwinter Nights provides a unique intersection of where I can apply my technical and professional skills along with my interest in video games and do it for something that doesn’t feel like work,” said NelaK. Morris specifically noted that several members of the Arileth team work or have worked in the games industry or software development.
This is the game’s legacy, not the story campaigns that shipped with the game. And that explains the game’s relative obscurity today: that’s a more niche appeal than a really good, story-driven, single-player RPG. But for the people who are into it, there’s nothing else that quite compares.
Returning to Neverwinter Nights today
I don’t imagine most people still regularly see references to Neverwinter Nights, but I sometimes do. For the past couple of years, I’ve enjoyed the dark fantasy trend on TikTok. These are short, vertical videos set to a particular kind of 1980s fantasy-type medieval synth music, depicting imagery from what feels like a long-lost, strangely nostalgic subgenre of fantasy media that is more implied in our memories’ liminal space between real fantasy movies and books of the ’80s and early ’90s than it is something that actually specifically existed.
It turns out Neverwinter Nights‘ assets fit that milieu quite well, so I sometimes saw videos of people creating online Neverwinter Nights servers meant to capture that vibe. It’s niche as hell, but it’s there. The TikTok videos from one of the game’s servers were actually how I got inspired to try the game again.
“Over the last year there’s been a bit of a resurgence, with new servers going live, and others going viral,” Morris told me. Some player-run servers “have had hundreds of thousands interacting with their TikTok videos.”
He added that his own community’s Discord server has 5,000 members, and that’s just one part of the game’s wider audience.
If you want to get back into the game or try it for the first time, you can buy the Enhanced Edition on GOG and other storefronts; a front-page poll on the Neverwinter Vault indicates that about 65 percent of the community primarily uses that version, as compared to previous releases or the sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2.
If you want to try the single-player, the Enhanced Edition comes with a plethora of officially sanctioned campaigns of varying quality—not just The Wailing Death.
But let’s say you, like some members of the game’s current community, are more interested in multiplayer than single-player. A good place to start is the Neverwinter Vault. Additionally, Enhanced Edition developer Beamdog hosts a list of active community servers you can join.
As I write this, a few hundred people are playing across a couple dozen servers, which is impressive. I love to see old games like this keep the community going. It’s especially important for Neverwinter Nights, because more than any other BioWare game or even most other RPGs in general, this game is its community.
