BRUSSELS — In Europe’s fight against wildfires, eyes are turning toward the sky: not just looking for rain or water-dropping Canadair planes, but also for ways to exploit new satellite capabilities to help contain or even prevent new blazes.

Satellites and the images and data they gather from space are increasingly seen as a means of providing European governments and firefighters on the ground with more accurate information: to map damage and detect fires at an early stage. 

Such help is more than welcome during another scorching European summer with wildfires in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Approximately 600,000 hectares have burned across EU countries since the start of the year. Just last weekend, Belgium was hit by one of the largest wildfires in its history, in the High Fens nature reserve.

Still, this latest use of satellites is another reminder that Europe needs to step up its game in yet another strategic arena. After Elon Musk’s Starlink showed how satellite-based services could revolutionize everything from mobile communication to waging war, space technology for disaster management offers a potential avenue for Europe to compete.

Greece, a country that seems to be battling bigger wildfires every summer, was the first to act. 

In early May, a rocket of Musk’s SpaceX carried four small satellites into space with the specific task of helping the country detect and track wildfires in near real time.  It was a crucial step in the build-out of the “Hellenic Fire System,” which the Greek government boasted was the first national satellite system of its kind. 

The system was set up through European-wide collaboration, with the help of the European Space Agency, its Greek counterpart, German wildfire intelligence platform Ororatech and Finnish radar-based satellite provider ICEYE.

“By integrating space-based capabilities into our emergency response systems, we are equipping our fire services with the tools they need to respond faster,” Dimitrios Papastergiou, Greece’s minister of digital governance and artificial intelligence, said at the launch in May. 

The satellites that were launched before the summer were equipped with two infrared imagers. Those pick up the heat energy radiated by fires, allowing satellites to detect hotspots and gauge their intensity. 

The system is designed to “support early detection of emerging hotspots and continuous monitoring of fire behavior,” the European Space Agency said. 

Satellites’ role in gathering vast, real-time data and images can also help with other extreme weather events. The Finnish company ICEYE offers monitoring services for governments and businesses to manage both natural catastrophes, such as floods and wildfires, and man-made ones, such as illegal deforestation.

ICEYE raised €1 billion in new financing this year, and became the first company to get backing from the Scaleup Europe Fund, a new fund backed by the European Commission to help companies expand rapidly.

“If we want to be effective in managing the environment around us, both in terms of growth and development, as well as preventing or managing natural catastrophes, these sorts of space-based systems are extremely effective,” ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski told POLITICO.

He said the company has been mostly focused on “managing” wildfires, but is now “trying to push towards predicting wildfires or at least detecting them in an earlier stage.” Modrzewski says a similar offering is available for floods, and for wind damage stemming from hurricanes and typhoons.

The impact can be maximized if Brussels becomes a coordinating “buyer” of those services. “Using space-based capabilities is much more effectively done on an EU scale through [the European] Commission than on a national scale in 27 separate nations,” Modrzewski said. 

The Commission is already prominent in helping governments and emergency services map and detect wildfires. The European Forest Fire Information System, which sits within the Commission’s research desk, maps both active fires and burned areas based on data from NASA’s MODIS and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3, an Earth observation satellite. 

Currently, data and images arrive every 10 minutes, but the launch of a new satellite from the Meteosat third generation next Thursday should speed that up — with images arriving every 2.5 minutes, improving detection and even forecasting of possible wildfires.

TerraPower's nuclear power plant possesses a strategic advantage over competitors, especially when chasing after data center deals.

BRUSSELS — EU countries will be able to fund small local media without asking Brussels for permission, according to a draft of the bloc’s revised state aid rulebook obtained by POLITICO.

Government subsidies to businesses are strictly disciplined by Brussels under state aid rules, but there are exceptions. These are spelled out in frameworks, with the master one, the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER), up for revision at the end of the year. 

The European Commission put out an initial draft for public consultation in February with a view to finalizing it by year’s end. The updated, 200-page draft gives a leg-up to local and independent journalism by allowing governments to fund small- and medium-sized outlets without formal vetting by Brussels.

“SMEs active in the press sector play an essential role in safeguarding media pluralism, cultural and linguistic diversity, democratic participation and citizens’ access to reliable information, particularly at local and regional level,” the Commission writes, highlighting structural challenges arising from the digital transformation of media markets.

To qualify for assistance, beneficiaries would need to fulfil at least one item in a Commission checklist that includes preserving media pluralism and diversity of opinion, transitioning to digital content while also preserving print editions. 

“The exemption covers aid pursuing cultural objectives — including linguistic diversity, the digitalization of press publications or the promotion of printed publications,” said Carole Maczkovics, of Counsel at Covington & Burling, of the press measures. 

Many European media outlets are struggling to stay viable, with print readership declining and publishers complaining that online platforms, such as search giant Google, are reducing referral traffic to their websites.

Broad scope

The GBER covers most sectors of the economy, from agriculture to transport, and is the target of intense lobbying from EU capitals, traditionally torn between big government spenders led by Germany and smaller member states, including the pro-free-trade Nordics, which complain that national subsidies distort the EU single market.

Countering the stereotype, Denmark was a leading advocate to extend GBER exemptions to the media. In a consultation response last year, the Danes said the state aid framework should be broadened to include private and public media providers “to promote harmonisation and simplify the general management of state aid in the media sector.”

The latest GBER draft focuses strongly on SMEs and innovation, as well as on the social dimension of state aid — as it expands on conditions for money that governments can put in training programs and the inclusion of disadvantaged workers. 

But it may not necessarily make things easier.

“Although the revision aims to simplify the State aid framework, it may ultimately make it more detailed and prescriptive,” warned Maczkovics. She added that the Commission’s gradual shift from broad aid categories to narrowly defined exemptions may sway EU countries to design measures that don’t quite fit the real needs of companies — for the sake of avoiding a notification.

Industry, for its part, is keeping a close eye on state aid exemptions, with airport lobby ACI Europe quick to react to the latest leak. 

“The revised GBER remains too restrictive for Europe’s smaller regional airports,” said Philippe Sacré, the association’s secretary general. He was referring to aid exemptions that would be restricted to airports handling over 500,000 passengers a year, according to the Commission’s draft. 

The Commission’s latest State aid Scoreboard shows that EU countries spent €168.2 billion in state aid in 2024, with Germany, France and Italy the top spenders. Capitals are increasingly taking advantage of block exemptions, with GBER representing close to 70 percent of all active exemption measures.

Tommaso Lecca contributed reporting.

Companies including Tesla and Base Power are vying for a piece of the rapidly growing market for home batteries. One technology has made it all possible.

Since January, many Cubans have lived a life of near-constant darkness. The Trump administration’s oil blockades have led the country into a worsening energy crisis, collapsing what was already an eroding national power grid. 

Daily blackouts have plunged the Cuban nationalized, universal health system, once the pride of the country, into a humanitarian crisis. For months, hospitals have been without necessary power and ambulances strapped for fuel. Piles of trash line the streets, increasing the risk of disease. Cold storage issues threaten lifesaving vaccines, and a combination of the frail economy and US sanctions has left pharmacy shelves almost empty. 

The public health crisis exposes an often overlooked aspect of the way we tend to think about the promise of universal healthcare. Having accessible and free medical services is only one part of the solution. While Cuba’s once-vaunted health system is bound up in its own history and national context, it still demonstrates that public health of all kinds can only be as resilient as the electricity, water, transportation, refrigeration, supply chains, and institutions that enable it. 

An old prototype for universal healthcare 

Not long ago, Cuba’s health system was seen as a promising model for successful free universal healthcare. In the years following Fidel Castro’s rise to power, health authorities focused on the integration of healthcare delivery models into a single public system. The Castro government aimed to expand services once concentrated in Havana into rural areas, such that the entire population would have access to basic care services. In 1974, the government launched community-based polyclinics that placed primary care specialists in almost every Cuban community. 

Over the decades that followed, that widened access to healthcare led to significant, measurable returns. Infant mortality in the country has dropped from 37 per 1,000 live births right after the revolution to seven per 1,000 live births in 2024. Infectious and parasitic disease mortality also improved, dropping from a rate of 45.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1970 to 9.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019, according to data reported by the Cuban Public Health Ministry. 

It’s not entirely surprising that the successful Cuban national health model has been the site of curiosity and enthusiastic scrutiny in American health equity circles, despite vast differences in state ideologies. The US has never ensured that every citizen has affordable access to healthcare, and large disparities persist in low-income and rural populations. The chokehold of private insurance has ensured that, unlike nearly every other country in the world, the US has largely rejected the prospect of universal care. Even historic gains in insurance coverage have faced rollback threats under the One Big Beautiful Bill. 

On certain key metrics, the US also falls far behind Cuba, which boasted 9.5 physicians to 1,000 people in 2021. That same year, the US reported just 3.7 physicians to every 1,000 people. The 2019 measles epidemic demonstrated a gap in childhood vaccination rates as well: 92 percent of children ages 13 to 17 in the US received two doses or more of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. In Cuba, the childhood completion rates were well over 99 percent, and the country has not seen a measles outbreak since 1993. 

From its early years, the Cuban health system has functioned against a background of economic decline particular to the country, one attributable to a complex combination of external pressures, among them US blockades, a complicated economic reliance on Venezuela, a struggling state-run economy, and a flailing industry heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

While other sectors faced attrition, Cuba’s health system, at least, appeared capable of weathering these crises. During the pandemic, the country proved to be a model in global health, having developed a homegrown Covid-19 vaccine rapidly and reaching a 95 percent vaccination rate. Its robust supply of trained health professionals made headlines when Cuban healthcare workers provided essential pandemic aid to a small town in Italy.

 So why has this system proved to be so fragile now? 

New blockades deal the final blow after Hurricane Melissa 

Torrents of rain and flooding from the Category 3 Hurricane Melissa hit Cuba in October of last year, affecting much of the island’s eastern provinces. More than 735,000 people were evacuated, and the environmental disaster has put the country’s basic health infrastructure in a precarious state. 

In the storm’s wake, a combination of flooding and damaged water systems increased the spread of viral infections of arboviral diseases such as dengue and oropouche. A report by the Pan American Health Organization published in March placed water, food, and vector-borne diseases in the “very high” health risk categories. Apart from damaged water and sanitation infrastructure, the report describes how disruptions to health service access, routine surveillance of disease vectors, and environmental conditions that breed mosquito-borne disease outbreaks have dramatically increased the risk of infectious disease spread. 

Hurricane Melissa arrived during a recovery period from earlier storms, such as Hurricane Rafael in late 2024, as well as sporadic earthquakes in recent years. These natural disasters also heavily damaged health facilities, leading to collapsed roofing, damaged roads and cables, and the loss of supplies and equipment. 

For years, Cuba’s economy was propped up in large part by its relationship with Venezuela. In exchange for support from Cuba’s highly trained professionals — especially healthcare workers — Venezuela long provided a critical supply of crude oil, which helped the country keep the lights on even in the face of US sanctions. 

That partnership ended in January after the nighttime capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the sweeping Trump oil blockade soon after has dealt a challenge too difficult for the energy infrastructure to withstand. 

Already struggling to recover from other disasters, Cuba plunged further into its present crisis. Mario Cruz Peñate, Pan American Health Organization representative for Cuba, said that while the public health situation has been evolving for a while, he has seen more acute upheavals as sanctions persist, causing mass blackouts that have made it impossible to sustain vital health services and emergency care.

Disease control continues to struggle post-Melissa, with aid organizations worrying about communicable food- and water-borne diseases, such as hepatitis A and diarrhea, that can be caused by unrefrigerated food. On the administrative level, limited transportation resources and electricity have led to a dearth of vaccine supplies, which typically require cold rooms for transfer and storage. 

Continuity of care, in particular, has been affected for the worse. More than 100,000 elective and reconstructive surgeries have been postponed, for example, because of a lack of supplies and a backlog of emergency surgeries. At a briefing in May, representatives of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organization reported that over 32,000 pregnant women faced limited access to diagnostics and limited amounts of the stable electricity needed to sustain neonatal units. Prenatal care faces delays because of the lack of everything from testing supplies to available facilities. And now, even once successful improvements in health indicators have fallen: a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research measured an increase in infant mortality rates from 4.0 to 9.9 per 1,000 births between 2018 and 2025. 

For humanitarian aid organizations, alleviating this health crisis also poses a stark challenge. Cruz Peñate ascribes this to availability, timing, and opportunity to distribute aid supplies, all of which have been made inconsistent by the ongoing blockade. 

“The response to the situation in Cuba has to increase; we have to scale up the response. All the support we can manage to receive will be important,” Cruz Peñate said. “Here in Cuba there is really a situation that needs attention.”

Is Cuba now an outdated prototype for universal healthcare? 

While Cuba’s healthcare system was never bound to map precisely onto the US, some of its most notable successes — the high physician-to-patient ratio, the almost entirely vaccinated population, the ample health screenings — still remain desirable. And yet those very accomplishments have crumbled under the threat of extreme weather events and the country’s inability to restore its broken power grid.  

Trump targeted even more petroleum suppliers in his latest round of sanctions on July 23, leaving Cuba scrambling still further to revitalize its energy sector. Those same sanctions also took aim at the Cuban healthcare export economy, alleging that it involves forced labor. 

Earlier this month, Cuba’s government loosened constraints on a handful of private operations, including pharmaceuticals and elder-care facilities, in response to the shortage of medicine in the country.  With state-stocked shelves running empty, the new decree allows private pharmacies with Cuban health registration to fill in the medicine gap. Similarly, privatized elder facilities are also allowed to operate at a capped rate of 60 people per home, with mandatory visits from state physicians. 

The government still prohibits private sector medical and dental care, and Cuban officials remain adamant that the “socialist state enterprise keeps its central role,” so it’s difficult to claim that the country’s medical model is being pressured towards privatization. But the erosion of some of its elements still speaks to a state-run health system under strain. 

We often think of healthcare itself as an equation of medical services along with healthcare personnel and the authorities — government, industry, or both — that control it. But the crisis facing Cuba gets at the dependence of all of these factors on the broader energy ecosystem. Even a once-promising healthcare model can quickly collapse when a crucial component is missing: fuel.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

President Donald Trump paused a 50 percent tariff on Canadian goods hours before it was scheduled to kick in, saying the two countries had reached a preliminary deal.

In a post on social media late Tuesday, Trump announced that he would delay the duties, set to go into effect at midnight on Wednesday, for three days “based on the fact that Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL!”

The president teased that the agreement could include resurrecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, a long-stalled pipeline extension intended to pump crude oil from Alberta, Canada to the Midwest of the United States.

BRUSSELS — Europe’s seas are overheating and climate change is to blame, researchers said Wednesday, warning that marine heat waves are threatening ecosystems and coastal communities. 

The Atlantic and the Mediterranean are far hotter than normal, with some parts of the oceans around Europe reaching 6 degrees Celsius above average this week.

The culprit is climate change, scientists from the World Weather Attribution consortium said in a study released Wednesday. They found global warming is the driver behind this year’s high ocean temperatures.

The report lands during a summer marked by record-breaking heat waves on land, droughts and fires — all worsened by climate change, according to the same scientists. In the sea, the soaring temperatures harm marine species, boost jellyfish populations and increase the risk of destructive storms later in the year.

“This summer, we’ve seen some really exceptional ocean temperatures around Europe,” said Catherine Gregory, a climate scientist at the University of Bern who contributed to the study.

“By July, the average temperature of the entire Mediterranean Sea was just over 27C, which was the highest July value on record,” she added. “We’ve had a buoy reading to the west of Mallorca measuring more than 33C in open water … and we’ve seen similarly extreme conditions in the North Atlantic.” 

The scientists used peer-reviewed methods to analyze four regions: The Eastern and Western Mediterranean; the Atlantic around the Bay of Biscay and Iberian Peninsula; and the seas around Ireland and western Britain. 

“We find it’s the most extreme July marine heat wave conditions in the record for the Western Mediterranean, the Celtic region, and for the Bay of Biscay-Iberian Peninsula region,” said Gregory. 

The scientists concluded climate change made both Mediterranean regions 2C warmer while heating the Iberian waters by 1.4C and the Irish seas by 1.3C. 

Global warming has also vastly expanded marine heat waves, the researchers found when comparing this year’s conditions to a simulated world without climate change. This year, 90 percent of the Bay of Biscay experienced hot temperatures and 80 percent of the Western Mediterranean; without global warming, only 40 percent of each region would have been affected.

The difference is even more dramatic in the Eastern Mediterranean, where 70 percent of the seas experienced marine heat waves this year, a figure plunging to 9 percent in a world without climate change. Around Ireland, the extent drops from 80 percent to 30 percent. 

Oceans absorb the vast majority of the excess heat produced by burning fossil fuels. The warming waters push some species to relocate in search of cooler seas, while those that cannot move — such as corals or seagrasses — are at risk of mass die-offs. 

“We have what we call winners and losers. So a lot of species wane in abundance or completely disappear while others bloom and proliferate,” said John Bruno, an ecologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the study’s co-authors. 

In the United Kingdom, for example, fishermen have found octopuses spreading north in the warming waters, decimating the shellfish catch with their voracious appetite for crabs. In France, jellyfish — which thrive in warmer waters — are clogging up nuclear power stations. 

Beyond the impact on ecosystems and the fishing industry, marine heat waves increase the extreme weather threat to coastal communities. The scientists noted that warm oceans supercharge the dangerous combination of heat and humidity along the shores, while also building up moisture that can fuel storms, such as the deadly 2024 floods in Valencia. 

“We find that when we have very warm sea surface temperatures, they provide added energy to storms,” said Gregory. “And then we also have the added impact of additional stress during land heat waves as well.”

President Donald Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure. Tehran may be willing to wait even longer.

Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation “never seen before,” former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to relinquish its desire to toll ships passing through the State of Hormuz and make the other concessions Trump is demanding to bring an end to the war.

“It’s an attrition campaign, and I am sure Treasury tweaks this or that to fill gaps or expand coverage of sanctions,” said James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term. “But, it’s hard to believe [there will be] something decisive after 20 years of U.S. sanctions and Iranian experience of going around them.”

It’s an acknowledgement that underscores the asymmetry of the situation. The Trump administration is staring down a consequential midterm election amid an unpopular war that has sent oil prices back up to roughly $90 a barrel and helped push long-term borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly two decades as hope dims that a peace deal is near.

Iran’s leaders, meanwhile, see the conflict as existential, giving Tehran reason to absorb the extraordinary economic pain rather than accept terms it believes could imperil the regime — especially as U.S. inflation remains elevated and treasuries sell off.

The yield on 30-year U.S. government bonds, a figure Trump has in the past been attuned to, jumped on Tuesday to its highest level since just before the global financial crisis.

The increase in the yield to its highest level in nearly two decades isn’t solely because of the six-month war; global fuel shortages and broader instability have kept energy prices higher for longer, increasing the threat of persistent inflation. And that’s heaped even more risk on global bond markets that have repeatedly blanched at Trump-related shocks.

“We are in a situation where we’re spending more and more to finance more and more,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives. And the war has created “a riskier world full of more frictions, full of more supply shocks.”

Iran’s outsized incentive to muscle through the pain is partly why some former administration officials doubt that the naval blockade, while unprecedented in its scale in the modern era or whatever new strategies Bessent may unveil, will change Iran’s calculus.

“I think the economic pressure would need to hit them in new ways we haven’t seen so far to change the mindset of the regime,” said one former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to candidly assess the impact of the U.S.’s economic pressure campaign.

The administration has yet to indicate what further action it plans to take, but options include going after major Chinese banks that facilitate Iran’s oil trade, expand secondary sanctions on countries doing business with Iran and confiscating Iranian assets under U.S. jurisdiction instead of just freezing them.

Iranian leaders publicly mocked U.S. efforts to sanction them into submission.

“Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, posted on X Tuesday.

“Bessent and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth are way out of their league,” he wrote. “Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the mess you made.”

White House aides, however, continue to contend that the leverage is on its side.

“The crushing sanctions and one of the most successful blockades that have crippled Iran’s economy and has left Iran completely broke,” said one administration official, granted anonymity to share the U.S.’s thinking. “There are many levers the president can crank harder in the weeks and months ahead.”

In the half-year since the Iran war began, the president has deployed an array of pressure tactics to choke Iran economically, including physically preventing the country from selling its most important export — oil — as part of an ongoing naval blockade of Iranian ports. The administration has also sanctioned foreign buyers of Iranian oil, targeted the country’s shadow fleet of ships that ferries it and sought to cut the country off from the financial networks it uses to move money.

That economic pressure has sent Iran’s economy, which was already troubled before the war, into a deeper tailspin. Now, Iran is grappling with year-over-year inflation of 88 percent, long lines and rationing at gas pumps and food prices that have more than doubled.

But those who have worked on previous Iran negotiations say that’s far from enough to get the regime to cave, especially after six months of U.S. bombing that has killed, by Tehran’s own measure, more than 3,000 Iranians.

“It’s undeniable that there is economic pressure. The question is whether there is a breaking point, and I would say for a regime that is fighting for its life and has never hesitated to transfer economic pain to its population, there is no breaking point,” said Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran project director, who helped work to bridge differences between Iran and world powers during negotiations over the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Yet Trump continued to project patience on Tuesday, signaling that he was prepared to let the pressure campaign play out.

“There are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled, with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Naval Blockade remains in full force and effect. The Hormuz Strait is open and operating. All water mines have been removed or detonated. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

A senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss the situation in Iran, insisted that Iran will cave long before the pain in the U.S. or world markets become intolerable.

“Ultimately we want a deal, but in the interim, the Iranian economy is tanking … people are lining up for gas, just for a half gallon of gas. And there’s a lot of civil unrest going on in Iran, that’s not being played on the news for whatever reason,” the official said late last week. “We’re fine if that’s the route they want to take.”

Still, there are signs inside the White House that the economic impacts are a growing concern. Vice President JD Vance last week said on Fox News that the administration’s first goal in the Iran war was to “keep oil and gas cheap for Americans all over the country.” The president, meanwhile, has repeatedly insisted voters will bear the pain of higher gas prices for an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The voters have a more dyspeptic view. A Reuters/Ipsos survey released this week showed Trump’s approval rating at 33 percent, the lowest level of his presidency. Roughly 80 percent of Americans — 87 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans — think U.S. involvement in Iran “will go on for an extended period of time,” the poll found.

But some former Trump administration officials, however, are holding out hope that patience will be rewarded and that the administration’s economic pressure campaign will work, in part because they see the other options on the table, including putting U.S. boots on the ground in Iran, as politically untenable.

Fred Fleitz, Trump’s former National Security Council chief of staff and vice chair of the American First Policy Institute’s American Security, predicted that the U.S. could be “dealing with a different Iran” in 30 to 60 days.

“I think patience is the best approach,” Fleitz said. “I don’t believe that a large-scale military attack right now is going to make a difference in changing the regime’s position, and I strongly oppose the idea of seizing Kharg Island or sending in American troops. The American people don’t want that. That would really bog us down in a quagmire.”

Several independent U.S. oil producers are expected to sign production contracts with Venezuela’s state-run oil company in the coming days, according to three industry representatives familiar with the plans — a step forward for the Trump administration’s efforts to boost production in the beleaguered South American nation.

A signing ceremony involving several smaller U.S. producers and the Petróleos de Venezuela had been set for Tuesday evening in Houston, according to the people, who were granted anonymity because details of the event have not been made public. Venezuela’s oil minister is scheduled to attend, as is the head of exploration for PDVSA, one of the people said. The ceremony could be pushed back until Wednesday morning, another of the people added.

The White House, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, is not expected to be formally involved with Tuesday’s ceremony, but it comes after top administration officials traveled to Caracas in late April to secure memorandums of understanding that laid the groundwork for formal production deals in the country that holds some of the world’s largest oil reserves.

It marks a sign of progress after the Trump administration’s effort to push new oil development in Venezuela, which began after the U.S. raid that captured former leader Nicolás Maduro in January, had slowed in recent months. Despite a boost from higher crude prices, negotiations have bogged down around key details like dispute resolution, while authorities in Caracas dealt with a devastating pair of June earthquakes that killed thousands.

Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez last month unveiled new regulations offering more favorable fiscal terms to international oil companies.

The signings come after the Trump administration renewed pressure on Rodríguez to have PDVSA sign contracts with American companies, an industry source familiar with the negotiations. Those efforts included outreach from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss how increased oil revenue could help the country after a devastating earthquake earlier this summer, this person said.

“There’s a renewed acknowledgement from Delcy that increased oil production is the pathway to rebuilding after the earthquakes and accomplishing what her government wants to do for the people who are suffering because of the earthquakes,” this person said.

David Goldwyn, head of the international energy consulting firm Goldwyn Global Strategies, said investment from independent oil producers and expanded production from existing fields are likely to be Venezuela’s “primary source of new oil growth for the next couple of years.”

“While the supermajors bide their time until they see how the politics sort out, and whether they can cherry pick the best assets, independents can derisk their projects in a short period of time,” Goldwyn said.

But those investments are only likely to add up to 300,000 barrels a day to the country’s oil production over the next year, far from the increase of millions of barrels the authorities in Caracas and Washington would like to see, Goldwyn said.

“Incremental production is all we will see until the framework improves, electricity is restored, and the political picture becomes clearer,” he said.

Battery materials startup Anthro Energy has broken ground on a Louisville factory to make electrolytes, including those for solid-state batteries.

Sonic Fire Tech raised its new funding to help get its sound-powered fire protection system into everything from commercial kitchens to apartment buildings.

Ukraine called on the European Union to sanction the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom on Monday, hours after a POLITICO investigation revealed allegations of safety and engineering failures at one of the company’s flagship projects.

“Rosatom is not just another energy company — it is the instrument of Russia’s ambition to secure a global monopoly in nuclear energy,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X.

He said the findings were further evidence that Rosatom was “not a reliable partner” and urged capitals to restart talks on EU sanctions. “No state should be doing nuclear business with a company complicit in war crimes,” he added, sharing a link to POLITICO’s article.

POLITICO’s investigation revealed warnings from Egyptian authorities and internal assessments by Rosatom regarding the construction of the El Dabaa nuclear plant. The documents obtained by POLITICO raised concerns ranging from the quality of concrete work to delays and management problems, while an Egyptian agency alleged “deliberate negligence” and violations of “nuclear safety culture.” Nuclear material has yet to be introduced at the site.

Rosatom previously defended its safety record at El Dabaa and pointed to regular scrutiny of the project by Egyptian, Russian and International Atomic Energy Agency officials. None of the allegations contained presented to Rosatom by POLITICO, have been “confirmed within the contractual, technical and oversight procedures envisaged by the project,” the company said in a statement.

It did not respond to a request for comment on Sybiha’s remarks on Monday.

Sybiha’s call puts renewed pressure on EU governments that continue to cooperate with Rosatom despite Russia’s war in Ukraine. In Hungary, the company is building two new reactors at the Paks II nuclear plant using the same VVER-1200 technology planned for El Dabaa.

Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar last week challenged Rosatom’s claim that construction for the reactors remained on schedule, saying his government was carrying out a full review of the project.

PALAU, Micronesia — The ride out to sea was, in a word, unpleasant. The coastal waters of Palau, an island nation in the western Pacific, are typically calm and electric blue, like what you might see on a screensaver or postcard. The country has put in place some of the world’s most rigorous protections to keep its marine environment pristine.

But on this particular morning in July, a super typhoon named Bavi was churning north of us in the Philippine Sea. Clouds darkened the water and battered us with rain as our boat seesawed through the swell toward the horizon. 

Our destination was what you might call a coral garden — a patch of coral, about two miles from shore, that scientists had planted over the past couple of years in an effort to rebuild a damaged reef. 

I was wet, cold, and nauseated when we arrived. So naturally, I strapped on a mask and jumped in. 

Below me, I could see dozens of star-shaped metal structures that researchers had attached to the seafloor. They were studded with corals in all forms and colors: neon blue antlers, fluffy green mittens, baseball-sized brains. Some of the corals looked like a collection of human vertebrae. Others resembled miniature pine forests. 

In the past two decades, governments, nonprofits, and even hotels around the world have dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to replanting coral reefs like this one. Reefs are among the planet’s most endangered ecosystems: Rising ocean temperatures, pollution, and other threats have killed off an estimated 50 percent of live coral globally since the 1950s.

Those steep losses erode the irreplaceable benefits that coral reefs provide. They go far beyond tourism. Healthy reefs lessen coastal flooding from storms like Bavi. They also serve as nurseries and homes for larger animal species, such as endangered sea turtles and valuable fish like snappers and groupers that people eat. 

That’s why so much time and money has gone into restoring these ecosystems globally. Including here in Palau. A different typhoon and warming waters had destroyed some of the region’s coral many years ago, which caused the local fishery to decline, according to Sharp Sakuma, the governor of Ngaraard, a Palauan state where the coral garden is located. “It’s our food,” Sakuma said of fisheries. So a few years ago, he asked local researchers to help bring the reef back.

But reef restoration has a fatal flaw. 

Rising global temperatures are heating up the ocean and fueling marine heat waves, which kill reefs. That means that much of the coral that people painstakingly plant often ends up dying months or years later — simply because the ocean is too hot. It’s like planting trees to restore a forest that will soon burn in a wildfire. And this raises serious doubts about the role reef restoration can play in the recovery, and ultimate survival, of these iconic ecosystems.

The colorful antlers, mittens, and brains below me, however, were not your typical planted corals. 

They were different. 

And they may offer a new reason for hope.

These corals had all gone through what you might call a fitness test. In a lab on shore, marine scientists exposed them to extreme heat and scored them for their ability to tolerate warming. Corals on some of the metal stars here got top marks — they appeared resistant to heat. Those individuals may have more of a fighting chance at surviving as ocean temperatures rise. 

These sorts of fitness tests for corals are inexpensive and unexpectedly low-tech: They take place in cheap, store-bought picnic coolers, like what you might bring to the park. But by helping researchers identify the hardiest corals, these tests could help overcome one of reef restoration’s greatest challenges. 

Subjecting corals to hot water in a plastic cooler may sound ridiculous. Until you consider the stakes and the circumstances: As the planet warms, simply protecting our beloved, life-supporting places is no longer enough to save them. Neither is restoring them to some former state.

To truly help coral reefs endure, we may actually need to reengineer them.

Scattered across a remote stretch of the Pacific is a collection of more than 300 islands, which, together, form the nation of Palau. Many of those islands are no larger than a small house. And because they’re eroding at the base, they look as though they’re floating above the ocean. When you’re out at sea, it’s easy to pretend that you’re flying through the floating mountains of Avatar’s Pandora.

But the real magic is, without a doubt, underwater. 

Palau is surrounded by a vast network of coral reefs, many of which are in near-perfect condition. The region has more than 400 coral species — for comparison, the Caribbean has about 70 — which form the base of a thriving marine ecosystem. On just one weekend of diving there, I encountered close to 100 sharks, more than a dozen sea turtles, and three enormous manta rays. (In my more than 20 years of diving, I’ve rarely seen such an abundance of sea life.)

In the last two decades, Palau has become an epicenter for research on how warming affects coral reefs. Part of that is practical: The country’s abundant corals allow scientists to study how different species and populations respond to rising temperatures. It’s also home to a well-equipped marine lab, the Palau International Coral Reef Center.

But there’s also an urgent local need. Palau is deeply dependent on its coral reefs: Its fisheries and tourism make up more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. And while Palau is home to one of the world’s largest marine protected areas — which bans commercial fishing across 80 percent of its national waters — that does little to protect the reefs here from the existential global threat of ocean warming.

Why is heat such a dire problem?

One “coral” is not a single animal but a colony of hundreds or thousands of individual animals, known as polyps. Those polyps are all nearly genetically identical. They grow the colony — the coral structure that you see on a reef — by cloning themselves over and over again.

Polyps fuel themselves, in part, by grabbing particles out of the water with tentacles (up close, polyps look a bit like sea anemones). But most of their food, and much of their color, comes from a kind of algae that lives within their cells. Like plants, that algae photosynthesizes. And it passes the solar energy it generates onto the coral, in return for nutrients and a place to live.

This partnership fails under extreme heat.

When the ocean is too warm, the algae malfunction, and the polyps kick them out. As a result, the corals lose their primary source of food and their iconic color. That’s bleaching. A bleached coral is not dead but starving, and it will die unless the water cools back down. 

Yet there’s another key detail here: Some corals seem to resist this heat-fueled bleaching. They appear naturally more tolerant to warming than their peers. And you can actually see this when you’re snorkeling during a heat wave: Some corals will be bone white, whereas other colonies of the same species nearby will appear fully saturated. Heat tolerance is a trait with natural variation, like height or eye color in humans. 

It’s this detail that underpins efforts to make reef restoration less futile in a warming world. If scientists can find local corals that can tolerate warming, they can use them to regrow native reefs that might endure some degree of climate change, here and anywhere coral reefs can be found. 

What scientists in Palau are trying to demonstrate is how — absent a naturally occurring heat wave — you can identify those heat-tolerant colonies.

On a mostly clear afternoon in July, days before the typhoon grazed Palau, I boated out to a shallow reef with Steve Palumbi, a marine ecologist at Stanford University. He’s tall and thin and has white hair that he often pulls back into a short ponytail. 

Once the boat dropped its anchor in the sand, Palumbi and I jumped in, along with three researchers from the Palau International Coral Reef Center (PICRC). I felt like I was swimming in a tropical fish tank. The water was clear and full of silvery fish. A carpet of colorful coral coated the seafloor. Every hole and crevice was occupied — by a giant clam, a spiky starfish, a sea cucumber, a furry crab. The reef was a giant apartment building with a cast of unusual tenants.

I followed Palumbi and the PICRC researchers over to metal structures on the reef that his team had built. They looked like sunken bed frames, and like those metal stars, they were covered in pieces of coral.

These corals are some of Palumbi’s guinea pigs. 

Over the last two years, researchers in his lab at Stanford have been subjecting them to a variety of different heat tests and scoring their performance. The concept is simple: Put the corals in a tank, crank up the temperature, and measure how quickly each one bleaches. The colonies that stay colorful as the temperature soars — the “winners” — may be more tolerant to warming.

There are several different ways to measure a coral’s tolerance to warming in a lab. Some tests expose corals to moderately high temperatures over weeks, whereas others blast them with extreme heat over days, or even hours. Longer-lasting tests tend to better represent a natural heat wave — what corals will actually face in the years to come. But they’re expensive, time-consuming, and require expertise. That’s a problem for people who are racing to rebuild damaged reefs, especially in poor regions that lack fancy marine labs and funding.

Working with PICRC, the Nature Conservancy, and other partners, Palumbi’s lab has been trying to demonstrate that the quick and cheap version of these heat tests — using picnic coolers to pressure-test corals over a few days — works well enough. They can help identify heat-tolerant corals and, thus, improve reef restoration, all within one work week, and on a low budget. 

That afternoon, Palumbi was collecting corals from those metal frames to test at PICRC. Using wire cutters, Palumbi and the other researchers snapped off branches of coral from the individual colonies. Breaking fragments of coral off a colony is not unlike taking clippings from plants — the “donor” colony continues to grow, even as parts of it are removed. 

After filling plastic bins with dozens of coral fragments across three species, the researchers brought them to the boat, loaded them into a large container full of seawater, and then we headed back to shore. 

It is hard to put a price tag on coral reefs, but those who have tried say it is quite a lot.

The authors of one study published in 2024 estimated that reefs in the Asia Pacific, which includes Palau, Australia, and Indonesia, among other countries, contribute about $25 billion a year on average to the region’s economies for their role in supporting fisheries and tourism alone. 

That doesn’t include the damage that reefs offset during tropical storms. Coral reefs are self-regenerating seawalls that can reduce wave energy — dulling the fiercest brunt of a hurricane making landfall, for example — by an average of 97 percent. In the US, economists estimate that reefs save the country more than $1.8 billion a year just in avoided flood damage. Globally, the cost savings from coral reefs are far higher. 

So it’s no surprise that people are so eager to rebuild reefs when they collapse.

To restore these ecosystems, people typically harvest fragments of coral from the wild and grow them in a tank on land or in a “nursery” in the ocean. Then they plant them, one piece at a time, on the seafloor, often using an adhesive putty. 

Reef restoration has grown into a global project of enormous scale: A network called the Coral Restoration Consortium counts more than 900 reef restoration efforts worldwide led by more than 350 organizations. By one estimate, groups have spent more than $250 million on reef restoration over roughly the last decade. 

But as important as those efforts may be, many of them haven’t worked — they haven’t actually helped coral reefs grow back. “Show me a square mile of reef that has been [successfully] restored,” Palumbi said. “There isn’t one.” 

At the heart of that failure is climate change: Prolonged bleaching kills off much of the planted coral, undoing a tremendous amount of effort.

One of the most extreme examples of this is in Florida. In the last three decades, organizations have planted tens of thousands of corals in the Florida Keys, which is home to the world’s third-largest barrier reef. I visited in 2022 and saw the progress of restoration firsthand — there were beautiful fields of planted staghorn and elkhorn, two federally threatened coral species. Some colonies were more than a meter wide. I wrote a story about how it was reviving Florida’s reef. 

Then in summer 2023, a record-breaking heat wave struck. The reefs turned a ghostly white. And eventually, nearly all of the staghorn and elkhorn coral in the Florida Keys — including the vast swaths of replanted corals — died, becoming functionally extinct. It was one of the more devastating things I’ve seen in my time covering the biodiversity crisis.

There are similar examples from around the world — in Colombia and Costa Rica, for example, along with Indonesia and the Seychelles. 

It’s not that restoration groups are unaware of this problem. Scientists have been studying bleaching for many years in search of solutions. In Florida, researchers are testing out what happens if you cross-breed corals from South Florida with colonies from a warm reef in Honduras, which have a natural ability to withstand higher temperatures. Perhaps their hybrid babies will be more likely to survive the next heat wave. But most of these approaches are time-intensive, costly, run by teams of PhDs, or stuck in the lab.

“The lab science is cool,” Palumbi told me. “But it’s going too slowly. We don’t have time to wait.”

The outdoor research space at PICRC looked like a typical marine lab — a labyrinth of pipes and pumps and, of course, tanks full of sea creatures, which in this case included corals, urchins, and giant clams that would abruptly close if you got too close. It looked appropriately science-y. With the exception of one wooden shelf. On it were eight blue and red plastic picnic coolers, in which Palumbi’s team is doing the bulk of its heat testing.  

After returning to shore with bins full of coral fragments, Palumbi put some of them into the coolers, which were fitted with small heaters and pumps. The water inside was around 30 degrees C (86 degrees F). That’s the average high temperature for waters in this region, and the baseline for the test he was about to run.

Then Palumbi, rather unceremoniously, cranked up the dial. 

Over each of the next four days, the water in half of the coolers would hit a higher temperature, before returning to the baseline of 30 degrees. On day one, for example, it would reach 34; on day two, it would hit 35; and so on. And each morning, Palumbi would assess the fragments for bleaching. Although these tests run for only a few days, they’re meant to mimic what some corals might experience at low tide during a heat wave, Palumbi said.

I visited the lab early one morning, after just one day of heat stress — after the coolers had reached 34 degrees. Palumbi laid the fragments out on a white grid to evaluate their color, ranking them from one (no bleaching) to five (fully bleached). They were shaped like twigs and still had their normal orangy brown color. No bleaching yet. By the next morning, however, the corals appeared more varied: Some were starting to pale and others remained saturated.

On the last morning of the test — after the coolers had reached 37 degrees, or close to 100 degrees F — nearly all the fragments were white, resembling cauliflower florets. They had expelled their algae. And yet a handful of the fragments still appeared mostly brown. Even after getting blasted by extreme heat, they hadn’t bleached. 

“Those are the champions,” Palumbi said.

Palumbi believes that quick heat tests like this stand to benefit restoration projects across the tropics. The equipment, including four coolers, costs less than $1,000, according to Courtney Klepac, a researcher in Palumbi’s lab, who studies heat testing. Groups that are rebuilding reefs can essentially run the corals they harvest through these tests, and then only plant the champions. 

That’s precisely the idea behind a project Klepac leads called the Coral Futures Academy. She’s been helping environmental groups across the Pacific integrate these low-overhead heat tests into local reef restoration efforts. And these actually include the coral garden I snorkeled during the typhoon: All the pieces of coral there had gone through similar heat tests. 

As promising as this approach sounds, however, there is an important caveat: These tests are only useful if they actually predict which corals are more likely to survive under real-world warming. And so far, scientists haven’t proven that. 

Previous studies comparing short heat tests to those that are longer and more faithfully replicate a real heat wave show mixed results; the winners of one are often not the winners of the other. It suggests that surviving a short blast of heat requires different skills than withstanding warmth that lasts for weeks. 

Some researchers have also measured what happens to corals that went through an even faster one-day test after they were put in the ocean and then experienced a real heat wave. The champions in those rapid tests were not always more heat-tolerant in the wild. 

Ilan Bubb, a marine biologist at the University of Amsterdam who’s studied heat tests, says it’s like trying to predict a person’s marathon time based on how well they perform in a sprint. “We know there’s some correlation there, but how good is that correlation?” he said. “How much information you can get about that marathon from a hundred-meter sprint is still just undetermined.” 

Palumbi, Klepac, and their colleagues have been exploring this question, too. They’ve compared bleaching scores from heat tests that last for three or four days to those that last for roughly two weeks. The results appear to be similar, Klepac said: On average, the same corals resisted or succumbed to bleaching in both experiments.

Klepac has also studied what happens to heat-tested corals when an actual marine heat wave hits. At the coral garden I visited with those metal stars, PICRC researchers planted the heat-test winners as well as the poorer performers, as a point of comparison. And as Klepac’s unpublished research shows, the winners of the short heat tests survived better during a bleaching event in Palau in 2024, compared to the losers. 

“I am probably one of the few people that you will talk to that kind of low-key gets a little excited for bleaching events,” Klepac told me. “It is a very true test of what we’ve been doing. If we’re trying to market this approach, I want to feel confident that what we’re prescribing actually works.”

There are other drawbacks to this testing approach. For one, it relies on a visible trait — whether a coral resists bleaching or not. That trait, however, doesn’t always indicate whether the coral has the genes to resist bleaching. The colony may have just been healthier going into the test than its peers. Two runners, for example, might get different times in a 100-meter sprint, not just because of their genes but because of how much rest they got the night before. 

This matters when you’re trying to rebuild a reef: Typically, you want the coral colonies you plant to eventually reproduce and create heat-tolerant babies. That only happens if the parents have heat-tolerant genes. 

And there are other traits that corals need to survive, beyond the ability to withstand warming. 

“It’s not just about heat tolerance,” said Liam Lachs, a coral researcher at University of Queensland in Australia who has extensively studied the value of different heat tests. 

By only planting the corals that perform well on these heat tests, you might miss colonies that have other important strengths, such as the ability to withstand disease. In fact, future research may reveal that testing corals for one of these other traits may ultimately be a better predictor of their survival in the era of climate change, says James Guest, a reef ecologist at Newcastle University in England.

Palumbi readily admits that the short picnic cooler tests are not perfect. But the important question, he says, is whether they are good enough — good enough to start using them now to help reefs as the science around fitness testing gradually improves. 

That much is clear, he says, and several other researchers I spoke to agreed. While the utility and accuracy of short heat tests is not yet proven, people who want to rebuild reefs should still use them, they said. For restoration, there simply aren’t many better alternatives. 

“It’s quick, it’s easy to do, people can apply it relatively straightforwardly, and it offers some kind of test,” Guest told me. “Coming up with these practical approaches makes sense.”

The sun was still low in the sky as Palumbi and I strapped on our tanks and weights and plunged into the ocean near one of Palau’s floating islands.

Sinking down felt like descending onto an alien planet. There were rolling hills of branching coral and stacks of plate coral the size of merry-go-rounds. Schools of colorful fish flew over them, like flocks of birds across a woodland.

Toward the end of the dive, we came across a single coral colony as large as a suburban home. The surface was lumpy and covered in what looked like large bulbous fingers. Given its size, the coral was likely at least three hundred years old.

When we were back on the boat, I asked Palumbi what he thought of the reef. “It doesn’t get better than this,” he said. 

Isn’t it arrogant to think we can recreate, or even fortify, something as complex as a coral reef? 

There could have been 200 species of coral on this one reef alone, Palumbi said, some of which may still be unknown to science. If this is what coral reefs are supposed to look like, even our best science probably can’t recreate them.

It seems like our time would be far better spent trying to prevent reefs like this from dying in the first place. “We all know that we have to solve the bigger problem,” Guest said. “If we don’t reduce carbon emissions and we don’t deal with climate change, nothing we do is going to help corals.”

But the way Guest and other scientists see it, restoration — and the science to improve it — is not about recreating thriving coral reefs. The goal is much more humble, and much more depressing: to prevent as many species and reefs as possible from disappearing altogether so that, if and when the planet cools back down, there’s still something left to regrow.

Reef restoration encompasses a broad range of approaches, Guest said, meant to “stop species and populations from going off into an extinction vortex.” It would seem anything that might help that cause even a little bit — including a handful of plastic picnic coolers — is worth a try.

BRUSSELS — A Russian state-controlled corporation building a nuclear power plant in Hungary is facing allegations of safety, security and engineering failures at another project in Egypt that uses the same technology, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO. 

In a confidential letter dated June 4 and addressed to a Rosatom executive, Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority describes “defects” affecting multiple reactor units and violations of “nuclear safety culture” as it builds the El Dabaa nuclear plant. The letter also cites “deliberate negligence” on the part of an official at the project. 

The tranche of documents was shared through an intelligence official who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, and it has never previously been made public. It includes confidential company documents that describe construction delays and engineering concerns coming from Rosatom’s own reviews of the project. 

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted Europe to impose sweeping sanctions on the country, Rosatom has tried to convince European governments that it remains a reliable and competent supplier in the nuclear power market. But the accusations of safety breaches could add to existing concerns over the Kremlin-controlled company’s operations in the EU.

In an emailed statement to POLITICO, Rosatom said it upholds the highest levels of nuclear safety and had done so throughout the construction of El Dabaa. The company declined to comment on whether it had received the letter or the complaints from Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment about its communications with Rosatom.

“The high standard of work organisation, the quality management system and the safety culture are affirmed by the sustained attention paid to the project by the political leadership of the Russian Federation and the Arab Republic of Egypt, as well as by the leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose representatives regularly attend key project milestones,” said the company by email, adding that a recent ceremony for one of El Dabaa’s reactor units was attended by Russian, Egyptian and IAEA officials.

None of the allegations contained in the letter, presented to Rosatom by POLITICO, have been “confirmed within the contractual, technical and oversight procedures envisaged by the project,” read the company’s statement.

Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said in July he expected the construction of all four El Dabaa reactors to finish by 2030, with the first reactor unit set to begin producing power by 2028. No nuclear fuel has yet been introduced to the site. Rosatom’s Egyptian plant will use the same technology at the heart of Hungary’s Paks II project, the Kremlin-backed nuclear expansion that has repeatedly raised tensions between Budapest and the European Commission.

The Commission told POLITICO it was not aware of the confidential documents and allegations they contain. “For the EU, nuclear safety is a key priority,” said a Commission spokesperson. 

They added that while the Commission was following the project’s developments, “issues of nuclear safety are [the] responsibility of the EU Member State concerned.”

Initially green-lit by Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2014, the Paks II project became emblematic of Budapest’s alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin and provided a foothold for Russian energy technology inside the EU. Work began on the project in February this year.

The Kremlin-controlled corporation also has plant projects in Turkey and China, while Germany is under fire for green-lighting a deal in July that will allow one of Rosatom’s subsidiaries to help produce nuclear fuel rods for a plant in Lower Saxony. The German government said the deal would be under strict national security controls.

The Egyptian government and its embassies in Belgium and the United States did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The allegations

Once fully operational, the El Dabaa complex will contain four Russian-designed nuclear reactor units under the supervision of the Nuclear Power Plants Authority. In the letter sent by the Egyptian authority to Rosatom, an official at the agency wrote that uncompleted reactor units have already encountered defects.

Originally sent to Rosatom in English, the letter appears to have been translated into Russian for internal circulation. POLITICO is citing a version of the letter translated back into English.

“There has been a re-emergence of serious concrete defects, including voids behind the metal cladding at Unit 4, defects in the foundation slabs of Units 1, 2 and 3, which took a year to repair, and defects in the cellular structure in the cylindrical wall of the reactor building at Unit 4,” details the letter. 

The Egyptian agency then accuses Rosatom of “misleading methods” and “fictitious work” attempting to prove the plant’s construction is over halfway complete, “while a visual inspection at the site clearly shows that the main buildings of the nuclear island are still in the underground construction phase.”

Rosatom, the Egyptian authority alleges, also presides over an unprofessional workplace culture in which workers were caught in possession of  “prohibited alcoholic beverages” on the work site, used “forged passes and impersonated others to gain unauthorized access,” and took several “photos and videos taken at the construction site” that ended up on social media, “which negatively affected the reputation of the project.”

The letter makes reference to a serious accident on the construction site, which resulted in a worker suffering “a severe open fracture” and then being smuggled to a private vehicle, not to an “equipped ambulance,” which the Egyptian authority claims was done “intentionally” to cover up the incident.

“Such behavior represents a serious disregard for both human well-being and professional responsibility, and constitutes a gross violation of workplace safety regulations, nuclear safety culture and reporting obligations,” said the letter.

Four additional internal Rosatom business documents reviewed by POLITICO reinforce aspects of the Egyptian authority’s concerns, detailing delays, construction-quality problems and project-management failures. One Rosatom draft audit prepared internally in 2025 warned of a “significant risk of failure to fulfill” the company’s contractual obligations and forecast that the preliminary schedule of El Dabaa’s first reactor unit could slip by 18 months, from September 2028 to March 2030.

Future in doubt

The allegations contained in the documents cast a shadow over the Paks II project in Hungary and are likely to reinforce concerns in Brussels about entrusting critical European infrastructure to a company under the Kremlin’s control.

In a lengthy commentary by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense and security think tank, researchers warned Western countries against doing business with Rosatom, citing its deep connections to Russian intelligence and its problematic role in forcibly running the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine through military force.

For the government of Hungary’s newly elected Prime Minister Péter Magyar, the Rosatom revelations also present a new headache: Paks II remains indispensable to Hungary’s plans to decarbonize its electricity system and replace aging nuclear capacity. In an effort to reexamine Orbán-era policymaking, Magyar’s government recently opened a review into Paks II, questioning its hefty price tag and connections to Putin. 

Former Hungarian Green lawmaker Benedek Jávor, who focused on Paks II and was critical of the Orbán government, cautioned other governments about working with Rosatom. He told POLITICO he now believed the allegations coming out of El Dabaa could have far-reaching consequences for Rosatom and the fate of Paks II.

“They’ve already decided to reconsider the contract, and this was already communicated during the election campaign,” he said of Magyar’s government. “[This] information from Egypt will definitely be part of the evaluation.”

ROME — In the barns where the milk for Italy’s most famous cheese is produced, the fans have barely stopped whirring for two months. As temperatures across northern Italy push close to 40 degrees Celsius, cows stand almost motionless, tongues lolling, while automated sprinklers soak their backs.

Italy is now enduring its fourth major heat wave of an exceptionally brutal summer. The prolonged heat is piling costs on the €4 billion industry behind Parmigiano Reggiano, forcing farmers to spend heavily on cooling their animals while drought and dwindling water supplies make it harder and more expensive to grow the forage needed to feed them.

Farmers have received support from regional authorities, the EU and a producers’ consortium to help them adapt to the heat, but they say the funding falls short of the investment increasingly required.

For producers of the protected cheese, there is no possibility of escaping somewhere cooler. Under the strict rules governing Parmigiano Reggiano’s EU Protected Designation of Origin — that secures its added value on the market — the cows, their milk and the cheese must remain tied to a defined area of northern Italy. At least 75 percent of their forage must also be grown locally.

Dairy cows can begin suffering from heat stress at around 25C, depending on humidity, according to Giovanni Buonaiuto, a vet with the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium, which defends producers’ interests. Their digestive system generates considerable heat as they break down food, while cows have relatively few sweat glands with which to disperse it. “It’s as if the cow has a radiator inside her,” Buonaiuto told POLITICO.

As temperatures rise, cows eat less and stand for longer to expose themselves to moving air. They rest and ruminate less, milk production falls and prolonged heat can also affect fertility.

Buonaiuto said milk production has fallen by about 10 percent on average during the summer, although the impact varies sharply between farms depending on their cooling systems.

Overheating herds

Federica Dall’Aglio, who raises 400 cattle on the plains near the city of Parma, said each cow was producing five to six kilograms less milk a day, a fall of roughly 20 percent, despite fans and water sprays installed to protect her herd.

The cows now spend much of their time beneath the fans and water sprays, she added, as they’re reluctant to move away from the cooling systems.

Outside the barns, farmers are reorganizing their working days around the heat too. Some now cut and collect hay at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., Buonaiuto said, before the morning heat causes the hay to crumble. By 8 a.m. or 9 a.m., it can already be too hot.

Keeping the cows cool comes at a high cost.

Luca Cotti, a sixth-generation dairy farmer and president of farmers’ association Coldiretti in the northern Emilia-Romagna region, said electricity consumption in barns can double or even triple during extreme heat as cooling systems run almost continuously.

He recalled worrying about winter 20 years ago, with the weather freezing drinking water and other systems in the barn. Now investment is directed toward surviving summer.

The new normal

Extreme summer heat was once exceptional and might last a week before temperatures eased, Cotti said. Now, he said, “it’s normal.” This year, “since June, it has never let up.”

For some smaller producers with older facilities, the question is whether the investment is still worthwhile.

Dall’Aglio’s family has been investing in cooling systems for around 15 years, recently adding solar panels to help offset their growing electricity needs.

Across the Parmigiano Reggiano supply chain, such technology is becoming commonplace. Around half of its dairy farms, responsible for 70 percent of its milk, have invested in advanced cooling systems, including fans, motion-sensitive water sprays and automated temperature monitoring, according to the consortium president, Nicola Bertinelli.

The remaining 30 percent of milk comes largely from farms in the cooler hills and mountains, he said.

With persistently high temperatures, insufficient rainfall and water levels in major Alpine lakes approaching historic lows, authorities in the Po River basin, which supports agriculture across northern Italy through a network of tributaries and canals, have declared a high level of drought severity.

Alfalfa, an important source of forage for the cows, is relatively resistant to drought because of its deep roots. But Dall’Aglio said her family had already been irrigating heavily to ensure a good hay crop this year.

When rivers run too low for irrigation, some farmers have to pump groundwater instead, which can make irrigation around five times more expensive because of the energy required to extract it, according to Lorenzo Catellani of farmers’ association CIA Agricoltori Emilia-Romagna.

Coldiretti is calling on politicians to treat water storage as infrastructure rather than emergency relief.

Cotti said regional and national authorities need to invest in reservoirs and other water-storage infrastructure, arguing that individual farms cannot solve the growing problem of water scarcity alone.

Paradoxically, Parmesan producers normally worry about producing too much, not too little — and had sought to curb output this year. “We always have the brake on,” Cotti said, adding that high prices mean farmers have little difficulty increasing production when needed.

Despite the strain, producers insist there is no danger of Italy running short of Parmesan.

The cheese’s strong global market gives farmers greater scope to invest than producers in more fragile agricultural sectors.

For now, those investments are keeping Parmigiano production stable, although smaller farmers with aging barns may eventually choose to close rather than spend the money needed to adapt. For now, there is little to do but wait for the temperatures to fall. “We keep going like this,” Cotti said. “We hope it ends as soon as possible.”

Hungary is sinking two barges to ensure a key nuclear power plant stays online, Prime Minister Péter Magyar said Saturday.

Europe’s summer of extreme heat has caused the Danube’s water level to hit record lows, affecting power production at the Paks nuclear plant. Nuclear power stations are typically built by rivers and along coastlines so they can use water to cool down reactors.

Hungarian authorities are sinking the two barges to raise water levels so Paks, which provides the country with more than a third of its electricity, can continue to operate normally. The sinking began Saturday morning and Hungarian media are quoting the prime minister saying the water level at the plant has risen by 1 centimeter.

Magyar said on X that the current water level near Hungary’s only nuclear energy facility is 122 cm lower than normal and it is projected to drop below 132 cm on Monday, which would force one of the plant’s two turbines to shut down.

On Wednesday, Magyar announced that they would be building a riverbed sill with 150,000 cubic meters of stone and was considering sinking the two 80-meter barges. A sill is an underwater dam meant to slow down the current and raise water levels. Hungary’s Defense Ministry has assigned 100 troops to work around the clock on the project, the prime minister said on X.

Nuclear energy facilities across Europe have been affected by this summer’s droughts and soaring temperatures. Romania shut down a nuclear power plant earlier this week due to the Danube’s water levels.

France — one of Europe’s biggest producers of nuclear power — has seen its fleet of nuclear power plants affected throughout the summer. Le Monde reported authorities had to shut down six of the country’s 57 nuclear reactors as yet another heat wave broiled much of the country. Earlier in the week, a climate change-fueled jellyfish invasion forced workers to bring parts of a different plant offline.

Magyar has also cast doubt on completing an expansion of the Paks plant by a Russian state-owned firm in a deal signed by Magyar’s predecessor, the Kremlin-friendly Viktor Orbàn, citing the water issue.

Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies. 

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The 2026 wildfire season on the West Coast is shaping up to be an especially bad one: In Oregon, more than 2 million acres have already burned, breaking a record set just a few years ago, in 2024. In neighboring Washington state, suburbs around the city of Spokane recently burned in an increasingly common example of fires reaching urban and suburban areas (as my colleague Caitlin Dewey covered recently). And the consequences are spreading far beyond where the fires are burning, with hazardous smoke from the Pacific Northwest drifting as far away as New England. 

Much of this is a story about climate change, as increasingly dry, hot summers provide ample fuel for fires. But the crisis is also being made worse by the Trump administration: Staff cuts to the US Forest Service have left the agency stretched thin and unable to respond as effectively to fires, while a planned reorganization is also set to shutter Forest Service labs researching and tracking wildfires. EPA research into wildfires and wildfire smoke has also been slashed. 

All of this — plus a Trump administration shift away from letting some fires burn themselves out, which has further increased the workload on wildland firefighters — has also resulted in a more dangerous fire season for firefighters; Reuters reported this week that firefighters are “being overrun by wildfires at the highest rate in two decades” — with months still to go until the end of the season.

Go a little deeper

As if the above weren’t enough to worry about, lawmakers are also raising a brand-new fire season concern: prediction markets. Specifically, the possibility that bettors could turn to arson in order to manipulate prediction markets — and earn themselves some money. 

Polymarket, on its international platform, has offered users the chance to bet on everything from when and where a fire might spread to when it could be contained or extinguished, which resulted in more than $1 million in bets on major fires in California last year. High Country News reported in June that a new prediction market, called Wyldfyre, had launched specifically for betting on wildfires.

Legislators like Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) have pointed out that, unlike most other natural disasters, fires are easily started or spread by humans, creating a real risk that people could attempt to manipulate markets. 

“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” Merkley and eight other Democratic senators wrote in a letter to the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week. “There’s also the heightened risk—according to state and local fire officials—that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful. By offering contracts on fires, prediction market sites run the risk of encouraging people to influence fires that have already started, creating additional concerns around public safety and insider trading.

One link for later

➨ Build (your attention span) back better. Beset as we are by short-form video and tweets, it can often feel like our attention spans are slipping unavoidably away. The good news, it turns out, is that decline doesn’t have to be permanent — there are ways to rebuild attention, including by simply letting your brain rest more.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that feral pigs are a serious problem for parts of rural America? After a tweet about “30 to 50 feral hogs” went viral in August 2019, my former colleague Dylan Matthews embarked on a serious consideration of how the pigs impact the US — and how we impact them in turn. It’s still one of my favorite articles on the Vox site. 
• Today’s trivia: Which US president responded to inflation by ordering wage and price freezes? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you for the first woman to perform hip-hop at the White House. That was MC Lyte, who performed at the Obama White House in 2014.

Natural gas prices could triple in some parts of the U.S., which could saddle hyperscalers with massive bills to power their AI data centers.

The U.S. on Friday threatened action against the EU unless Brussels reins in its environmental and human rights rules, which Washington says unfairly burden American companies.

Acknowledging Brussels had made “some positive reforms,” Washington said the EU had “failed to fully address U.S. concerns,” and that it “will take any actions necessary to address unreasonable burdens on U.S. commerce.”

U.S. Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder piled on the pressure Friday, writing on X that “now it’s time for the EU to deliver.” He pointed to commitments made under last year’s Turnberry trade deal to ensure U.S. businesses do not face “undue restrictions” on transatlantic trade due to Brussels’ green regulations.

The dispute centers on two pillars of the EU’s corporate sustainability rulebook: the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which requires large companies to address human rights and environmental harms linked to their operations and supply chains, and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which requires companies to disclose sustainability-related information.

Brussels has scaled back both laws in its drive to cut red tape, but has stopped short of Washington’s demand to shield U.S. companies from their reach.

Last week, Puzder similarly attacked the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism as a tariff on U.S. exporters. On Thursday, the White House also accused the EU and more than 40 countries of enabling Chinese goods to skirt U.S. tariffs by rerouting them through their markets.

A European Commission spokesperson told POLITICO that Brussels had made “considerable efforts” to explain its rules and highlight “its willingness to cooperate with the US to increase trade where possible,” but drew a line at changing its regulatory regime in response to U.S. pressure.

“We have been very clear and consistent on the fact that neither our rules framework nor our regulatory autonomy are up for negotiation,” said the spokesperson.

This story has been updated.

Koen Verhelst contributed reporting.