CHIATURA, Georgia — Giorgi Neparidze, a middle-aged man from near the town of Chiatura in western Georgia, still has marks on his lips from where he sewed his mouth shut during a hunger strike last year. He says Georgian Manganese, a mining company with close links to the government, has wrought environmental devastation around his home and has ignored the rights of its workers. He is seeking compensation.  Europe, which imports Georgia’s manganese, is partly to blame for the black rivers and collapsing houses in Chiatura district, Neparidze says. The former miner-turned-environmental and civil rights activist claims that in one village, Shukruti, toxic dust from the pits is making people unwell. Filthy black water, laced with heavy metals, periodically spurts out of pumps there. Houses are collapsing as the tunnels underneath them cave in.  Manganese, a black metal traditionally used to reinforce steel, is crucial for Europe’s green energy transition as it is used in both wind turbines and electric car batteries. The metal is also vital for military gear like armor and guns. In 2022, the European Union bought 20,000 metric tons of manganese alloys from Georgia — almost 3 percent of its total supply. A year later the bloc added manganese to its list of critical minerals. But Chiaturans say their lives are being ruined so that Western Europeans can breathe cleaner air. “We are sacrificed so that others can have better lives,” Neparidze says. “There are only 40,000 people in Chiatura. They might feel ill or live in bad conditions but they are sacrificed so that millions of Europeans can have a cleaner environment.” Neparidze says cancer rates in the region are unusually high. Doctors at a hospital in Chiatura back up the observation, but no official study has linked the illnesses to the mines. An aerial view of Chiatura with the polluted Kvirila River running through the town | Olivia Acland Hope that things will improve appears dim. European companies often don’t know where their manganese is sourced from. As ANEV, Italy’s wind energy association, confirms: “There is no specific obligation to trace all metals used in steel production.”  Last year the EU enacted a law that was meant to change that. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive obliges companies to run closer checks on their supply chains and clamp down on any human rights violations, poor working conditions and environmental damage.  But barely a year after it took effect, the European Commission proposed a major weakening of the law in a move to reduce red tape for the bloc’s sluggish industry. EU member countries, motivated by this deregulation agenda, are now pushing for even deeper cuts, while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz want to get rid of the law altogether.  Meanwhile, Europe’s appetite for mined raw materials like manganese, lithium, rare earths, copper and nickel is expected to skyrocket to meet the needs of the clean energy transition and rearmament. Many of these resources are in poorly regulated and often politically repressive jurisdictions, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Indonesia and Georgia. Weakening the EU supply chain law will have consequences for communities like Neparidze’s. “Only an empty shell of the directive remains,” says Anna Cavazzini, a member of the European Parliament’s Green Party, adding that the legislature caved to pressure from businesses seeking to reduce their costs. “Now is not the time to abandon the defense of human rights and give corporations a free hand,” she says.  A resident of Chiatura standing on a collapsed house following a mining-related landslide in Itkhvisi village. | Olivia Acland As Georgia’s government pivots toward Russia and stifles dissent, life is becoming increasingly dangerous for activists in Chiatura. On April 29, four activists including Neparidze were arrested for allegedly assaulting a mine executive. A statement put out by Chiatura Management Company, the firm in charge of staffing Georgian Manganese’s underground operations, says that Tengiz Koberidze, manager of the Shukruti mine, was “verbally abused and pelted with stones.” Supporters call it a staged provocation in which Koberidze tried to incite violence, and say it’s part of a broader campaign to silence resistance. If convicted they face up to six years behind bars. Koberidze did not respond to requests for comment. Chiatura residents are protesting over two overlapping issues. On one side, miners are demanding safer working conditions underground, where tunnel collapses have long been a risk, along with higher wages and paid sick leave. When the mine was temporarily shut in October 2024, they were promised 60 percent of their salaries, but many say those payments never materialized. Workers are also raising concerns about mining pollution in the region. “The company doesn’t raise wages, doesn’t improve safety, and continues to destroy the natural environment. Its profits come not just from extracting resources, but from exploiting both workers and the land,” says one miner, David Chinchaladze. Georgian Manganese did not respond to interview requests or written questions. Officials at Georgia’s Ministry of Mines and the government’s Environment Protection and Natural Resources Department did not respond to requests for comment. A collapsing building in Shukruti. | Olivia Acland.  The second group of protesters comes from the village of Shukruti, which sits directly above the mining tunnels. Their homes are cracking and sinking into the ground. In 2020, Georgian Manganese pledged to pay between 700,000 and 1 million Georgian lari ($252,000 to $360,000) annually in damages — a sum that was meant to be distributed among residents. But while the company insists the money has been paid, locals — backed by watchdog NGO Social Justice — say otherwise. According to them, fewer than 5 percent of Shukruti’s residents have received any compensation.  Their protest has intensified in the last year, with workers now blocking the roads and Shukruti residents barring entry to the mines. But the risks are intensifying too. Since suspending EU accession talks last year amid deteriorating relations with the bloc, Georgia’s ruling party has shuttered independent media, arrested protestors and amplified propaganda. The country’s democracy is “backsliding,” says Irakli Kavtaradze, head of the foreign department of the largest opposition political party, United National Movement. Their tactics “sound like they come from a playbook that is written in the Kremlin,” he adds. ‘KREMLIN PLAYBOOK’ In the capital Tbilisi, around 200 kilometers east of Chiatura, protesters have taken to the streets every night since April 2, 2024 when the government unveiled a Kremlin-style “foreign agents” law aimed at muzzling civil society.  Many demonstrators wear sunglasses, scarfs and masks to shield their identities from street cameras, wary of state retaliation.  A scene from the 336th day of protests in Tbilisi in April 2025. | Olivia Acland. Their protests swelled in October last year after the government announced it would suspend talks to join the EU. For Georgians, the stakes are high: Russia already occupies 20 percent of the country after its 2008 invasion, and people fear that a more profound drift from the EU could open the door to further aggression. When POLITICO visited in April, a crowd strode down Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main artery. Some carried EU flags while others passed around a loudspeaker, taking it in turns to voice defiant chants. “Fire to the oligarchy!” one young woman yelled, the crowd echoing her call. “Power lies in unity with the EU!” another shouted. They also called out support for protestors in Chiatura, whose fight has become something of a cause célèbre across the country: “Solidarity to Chiatura! Natural resources belong to the people!”  The fight in Chiatura is a microcosm of the country’s broader struggle: The activists are not just taking on a mining company but a corporate giant backed by oligarchs and the ruling elites.  Georgian Manganese’s parent company, Georgian American Alloys, is registered in Luxembourg and counts Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky as a shareholder. He is in custody in Kyiv over allegations that he hired a gang to kill a lawyer who threatened his business interests in 2003. Kolomoisky has also been sanctioned by the United States for his alleged involvement in siphoning billions out of PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank.  Giorgi Kapanadze — a businessman closely connected with the ruling Georgian Dream party of Bidzina Ivanishvili — is listed as general manager of Georgian American Alloys.  Until recently, Kapanadze owned Rustavi TV, a channel notorious for airing pro-government propaganda. The European Parliament has called on the EU to hit Kapanadze with sanctions, accusing him of propping up the country’s repressive regime. Kolomoisky and Kapanadze did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for comment. The government swooped in to help Georgian Manganese in 2016 when a Georgian court fined it $82 million for environmental destruction in the region. The state placed it under “special management” and wrote off the fine. A new government-appointed manager was tasked, on paper, with cleaning up the mess. He was supposed to oversee a cleanup of the rivers that flow past the mines, among other promises. Manganese mining pit in Chiatura region, Georgia. | Olivia Acland But POLITICO’s own tests based on four samples taken in April 2025 from the Kvirila River, which runs through Chiatura, as well as its tributary, the Bogiristiskali, which were examined in a U.K. licensed laboratory, show the manganese levels in both rivers are over 10 times the legal limit. Iron levels are also higher than legally permitted. Locals use the polluted water to irrigate their crops. Fishermen are also pulling in increasingly empty nets as the heavy metals kill off aquatic life, according to local testimonies. The water from the Kvirila River flows out into the Black Sea, home to endangered dolphins, sturgeons, turtles and sharks.  A 2022 analysis by the Georgian NGO Green Policy found even worse results, with manganese in the Kvirila River averaging 42 times the legal limit. The group also detected excessive levels of iron and lead. Chronic manganese exposure can lead to irreversible neurological damage — a Parkinson’s-like condition known as manganism — as well as liver, kidney and reproductive harm. Lead and iron are linked to organ failure, cancer and cardiovascular disease. On Georgian Manganese’s website, the company concedes that “pollution of the Kvirila River” is one of the region’s “ecological challenges,” attributing it to runoff from manganese processing. It claims to have installed German-standard purification filters and claims that “neither polluted nor purified water” currently enters the river. Protesters like Neparidze aren’t convinced. They claim the filtration system is turned on only when inspectors arrive and that for the rest of the time, untreated wastewater is dumped straight into the rivers. BLOCKING EXPORTS Their protests having reaped few results, Chiaturans are taking increasingly extreme measures to make their voices heard.  Gocha Kupatadze, a retired 67-year-old miner, spends his nights in a tarpaulin shelter beside an underground mine, where he complains that rats crawl over him. “This black gold became the black plague for us,” he says. “We have no choice but to protest.” Kupatadze’s job is to ensure that manganese does not leave the mine. Alongside other protesters he has padlocked the gate to the generator that powers the mine’s ventilation system, making it impossible for anyone to work there. Kupatadze says he is only resorting to such drastic measures because conditions in his village, Shukruti, have become unlivable. His family home, built in 1958, is now crumbling, with cracks in the walls as the ground beneath it collapses from years of mining. The vines that once sustained his family’s wine-making traditions have long since withered and died. Gocha Kupatadze, an activist sleeping in a tarpaulin tent outside a mine. | Olivia Acland. For over a year, protesters across the region have intermittently blocked mine entrances as well as main roads, determined to stop the valuable ore from leaving Chiatura. In some ways it has worked: Seven months ago, Chiatura Management Company, the firm in charge of staffing Georgian Manganese’s underground operations, announced it would pause production.  “Due to the financial crisis that arose from the radical protests by the people of Shukruti village, the production process in Chiatura has been completely halted,” it read. Yet to the people of Chiatura, this feels more like a punishment than a triumph.  Manganese has been extracted from the area since 1879 and many residents rely on the mines for their livelihoods. The region bears all the hallmarks of a mining town that thrived during the Soviet Union when conditions in the mines were much better, according to residents. Today, rusted cable cars sway above concrete buildings that house washing stations and aging machinery.   While locals had sought compensation for the damage to their homes, they now just find themselves out of work.  Soviet-era buildings and mining infrastructure around Chiatura. | Olivia Acland.  Making matters worse, Georgian Manganese, licensed to mine 16,430 hectares until 2046, is now sourcing much of its ore from open pits instead of underground mines. These are more dangerous to the communities around them: Machines rip open the hillsides to expose shallow craters, while families living next to the pits say toxic dust drifts off them into their gardens and houses.  MORE PITS The village of Zodi is perched on a plateau surrounded by gently undulating hills, 10 kilometers from Chiatura. Many of its residents rely on farming, and cows roam across its open fields. “It is a beautiful village with a unique microclimate which is great for wine-making,” says Kote Abdushelishvili, a 36-year-old filmmaker from Zodi.  Mining officials say the village sits on manganese reserves. In 2023, caterpillar trucks rolled into Zodi and began ripping up the earth. Villagers, including Abdushelishvili, chased them out. “We stopped them,” he says, “We said if you want to go on, you will have to kill us first.” A padlocked gate to the mine’s ventilation system. | Olivia Acland Abdushelishvili later went to Georgian Manganese’s Chiatura office to demand a meeting with the state-appointed special manager. When he was turned away, he shouted up to the window: “You can attack us, you can kill us, we will not stop.” Two days later, as Abdushelishvili strolled through a quiet neighborhood in Tbilisi, masked men jumped out of a car, slammed him to the pavement and beat him up. Despite the fierce resistance in Chiatura, Georgian Manganese continues to send its metal to European markets. In the first two months of 2025, the EU imported 6,000 metric tons of manganese from Georgia. With the bloc facing mounting pressures — from the climate crisis to new defense demands — its hunger for manganese is set to grow. As the EU weakens its corporate accountability demands and Georgia drifts further into authoritarianism, the voices of Chiatura’s people are growing even fainter.  “We are not asking for something unreasonable,” says activist Tengiz Gvelesiani, who was recently detained in Chiatura along with Neparidze, “We are asking for healthy lives, a good working environment and fresh air.” Georgian Manganese did not respond to requests for comment. This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were captured privately talking about living to at least 150 years old on the sidelines of China’s massive Victory Day parade in Beijing. According to audio picked up on CCTV, the two were overheard musing about the possibility of immortality through organ transplants and advanced medical procedures. “Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child,” Xi told Putin according to the translator in Russian. “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Putin replied, according to translation in Mandarin. “Predictions are, this century, there is also a chance of living to 150,” Xi responded. Xi hosted 26 world leaders, including Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Beijing on Wednesday, for a huge military parade which commemorated 80 years since Japan’s surrender in World War II and China’s victory over occupying forces. The event marked the first time the three rulers — Xi, Putin and Kim — have appeared together in public. China has a long history of organ harvesting from executed prisoners, which was officially banned in 2015. That hasn’t curtailed the practice, however, with the government turning to targeted minorities for organs, including the Uyghers facing a genocide in the western part of the country. Putin and Xi are both 72. Last year, The Times of London reported that Kremlin officials had directed scientists to fast-track anti-aging research, focusing on cellular degeneration, cognitive decline and strengthening the immune system.

Prices climbed at an unexpectedly slow pace last month, offering a boost to President Donald Trump, whose aggressive trade policies have sparked fears of a resurgence in inflation. The Labor Department on Tuesday reported that prices rose at an annual rate of 2.3 percent, the smallest increase since early 2021. While price growth in so-called core sectors of the economy — which exclude volatile food and energy costs — remained elevated at 2.8 percent, April’s Consumer Price Index contained only scant evidence that Trump’s tariffs have meaningfully driven up the cost of living. “President Trump’s plan to unleash American energy, cut regulations, and slash government waste is working!” The Trump War Room, an organ for the president’s political operation, posted on X after Tuesday’s report. The CPI report will likely bolster the administration’s claims that grim forecasts for the economy have been overblown. Most polls have Trump’s approval rating underwater as voters sour on his economic policies. The report will also amplify Trump’s calls for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates. Powell and other Fed policymakers have warned that the rapid escalation of import costs may soon cause consumer prices to spike and that the central bank needs to keep inflation at bay. And many economists still expect inflation to rebound in the coming months. Analysts at Citi say they expect the personal consumption expenditures index — the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — to climb by 3 percent by the end of the year. While that is less than their previous forecast for 3.5 percent inflation, it’s still well above the Fed’s annual target of 2 percent. Even though tariff rates have fallen since the administration negotiated a temporary détente with China, Fed Governor Adriana Kugler said Monday that the administration’s new taxes on imports are still “pretty high” and that she expects inflation to rise and growth to slow soon. So far, that hasn’t happened. Few economists had expected that overall inflation surged last month. But there was broad anticipation that Trump’s levies on Chinese imports, steel and aluminum and certain Canadian and Mexican products had caused prices for apparel, electronics and other consumer goods to spike. If anything, the opposite occurred: The cost of clothing and new cars — two areas that were highly exposed to Trump’s initial levies — both fell. The price of certain electronics and consumer goods, including household furnishings, computers, photographic and audio equipment, did rise last month, but that had little effect on the general cost of goods. The primary driver of April inflation was housing-related, accounting for more than half of the overall monthly increase. “There is some evidence of modest tariff pass-through in the April data, but it was somewhat less widespread than I had expected,” Omair Sharif, the founder of Inflation Insights, said in a client note. Inflation expectations had been increasing even before the bulk of Trump’s tariffs took effect. Consumers now project prices to rise at a rate of 3.2 percent over the next three years, the New York Fed reported Friday. That’s the highest monthly reading since July 2022, around the period when post-pandemic inflation was at its peak. New York Fed President John Williams, speaking at an economic conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, said over the weekend that keeping inflation expectations in check is a “bedrock” of central banking. “Maintaining well-anchored inflation expectations” is critical, Williams said, per Bloomberg. That’s especially true “when uncertainty is very high.”

‘PARKINSON’S IS A MAN-MADE DISEASE’ Europe’s flawed oversight of pesticides may be fueling a silent epidemic, warns Dutch neurologist Bas Bloem. His fight for reform pits him against industry, regulators — and time. Text and photos by BARTOSZ BRZEZIŃSKI in Nijmegen, Netherlands Illustration by Laura Scott for POLITICO In the summer of 1982, seven heroin users were admitted to a California hospital paralyzed and mute. They were in their 20s, otherwise healthy — until a synthetic drug they had manufactured in makeshift labs left them frozen inside their own bodies. Doctors quickly discovered the cause: MPTP, a neurotoxic contaminant that had destroyed a small but critical part of the brain, the substantia nigra, which controls movement. The patients had developed symptoms of late-stage Parkinson’s, almost overnight. The cases shocked neurologists. Until then, Parkinson’s was thought to be a disease of aging, its origins slow and mysterious. But here was proof that a single chemical could reproduce the same devastating outcome. And more disturbing still: MPTP turned out to be chemically similar to paraquat, a widely used weedkiller that, for decades, had been sprayed on farms across the United States and Europe. Advertisement While medication helped some regain movement, the damage was permanent — the seven patients never fully recovered. For a young Dutch doctor named Bas Bloem, the story would become formative. In 1989, shortly after finishing medical school, Bloem traveled to the United States to work with William Langston, the neurologist who had uncovered the MPTP-Parkinson’s link. What he saw there reshaped his understanding of the disease — and its causes. “It was like a lightning bolt,” Bloem tells me. “A single chemical had replicated the entire disease. Parkinson’s wasn’t just bad luck. It could be caused.” THE MAKING OF A MAN-MADE DISEASE Today, at 58, Bloem leads a globally recognized clinic and research team from his base at the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, a medieval Dutch city near the German border. It treats hundreds of patients each year, while the team pioneers studies on early diagnosis and prevention. The hallway outside Bloem’s office was not hectic on my recent visit, but populated — patients moving slowly, deliberately, some with walkers, others with a caregiver’s arm under their own. One is hunched forward in a rigid, deliberate shuffle; another pauses silently by the stairs, his face slack, not absent — just suspended, as if every gesture had become too costly. On its busiest days, the clinic sees over 60 patients. “And more are coming,” Bloem says. Bloem’s presence is both charismatic and kinetic: tall — just over 2 meters, he says with a grin — with a habit of walking while talking, and a white coat lined with color-coded pens. His long, silver-gray hair is swept back, a few strands escaping as he paces the room. Patients paint portraits of him, write poems about him. His team calls him “the physician who never stops moving.” Unlike many researchers of his stature, Bloem doesn’t stay behind the scenes. He speaks at international conferences, consults with policymakers, and states his case to the public as well as to the scientific world. His work spans both care and cause — from promoting movement and personalized treatment to sounding the alarm about what might be triggering the disease in the first place. Alongside his focus on exercise and prevention, he’s become one of the most outspoken voices on the environmental drivers of Parkinson’s — and what he sees as a growing failure to confront their long-term impact on the human brain. Advertisement “Parkinson’s is a man-made disease,” he says. “And the tragedy is that we’re not even trying to prevent it.” When the English surgeon James Parkinson first described the “shaking palsy” in 1817, it was considered a medical curiosity — a rare affliction of aging men. Two centuries later, Parkinson’s disease has more than doubled globally over the past 20 years, and is expected to double again in the next 20. It is now one of the fastest-growing neurological disorders in the world, outpacing stroke and multiple sclerosis. The disease causes the progressive death of dopamine-producing neurons and gradually robs people of movement, speech and, eventually, cognition. There is no cure. Age and genetic predisposition play a role. But Bloem and the wider neurological community contend that those two factors alone cannot explain the steep rise in cases. In a 2024 paper co-authored with U.S. neurologist Ray Dorsey, Bloem wrote that Parkinson’s is “predominantly an environmental disease” — a condition shaped less by genetics and more by prolonged exposure to toxicants like air pollution, industrial solvents and, above all, pesticides. Most of the patients who pass through Bloem’s clinic aren’t farmers themselves, but many live in rural areas where pesticide use is widespread. Over time, he began to notice a pattern: Parkinson’s seemed to crop up more often in regions dominated by intensive agriculture. “Parkinson’s was a very rare disease until the early 20th century,” Bloem says. “Then with the agricultural revolution, chemical revolution, and the explosion of pesticide use, rates started to climb.” Europe, to its credit, has acted on some of the science. Paraquat — the herbicide chemically similar to MPTP — was finally banned in 2007, although only after Sweden took the European Commission to court for ignoring the evidence of its neurotoxicity. Other pesticides with known links to Parkinson’s, such as rotenone and maneb, are no longer approved. Advertisement But that’s not the case elsewhere. Paraquat is still manufactured in the United Kingdom and China, sprayed across farms in the United States, New Zealand and Australia, and exported to parts of Africa and Latin America — regions where Parkinson’s rates are now rising sharply. Once the second-most widely sold herbicide in the world — after glyphosate — paraquat helped drive major profits for its maker, Swiss-based and Chinese-owned company Syngenta. But its commercial peak has long passed, and the chemical now accounts for only a small fraction of the company’s overall business. In the U.S., Syngenta faces thousands of lawsuits from people who say the chemical gave them Parkinson’s. Similar cases are moving ahead in Canada. Syngenta has consistently denied any link between paraquat and Parkinson’s, pointing to regulatory reviews in the U.S., Australia and Japan that found no evidence of causality.  The company told POLITICO that comparisons to MPTP have been repeatedly challenged, citing a 2024 Australian review which concluded that paraquat does not act through the same neurotoxic mechanism. There is strong evidence, the company said in a written response running to more than three pages, that paraquat does not cause neurotoxic effects via the routes most relevant to human exposure — ingestion, skin contact or inhalation. “Paraquat is safe when used as directed,” Syngenta said. Still, for Bloem, even Europe’s bans are no cause for comfort. “The chemicals we banned? Those were the obvious ones,” Bloem says. “What we’re using now might be just as dangerous. We simply haven’t been asking the right questions.” A CHEMICAL EUROPE CAN’T QUIT Among the chemicals still in use, none has drawn more scrutiny — or survived more court battles — than glyphosate. It’s the most widely used herbicide on the planet. You can find traces of it in farmland, forests, rivers, raindrops and even in tree canopies deep inside Europe’s nature reserves. It’s in household dust, animal feed, supermarket produce. In one U.S. study, it showed up in 80 percent of urine samples taken from the general public. For years, glyphosate, sold under the Roundup brand, has been at the center of an international legal and regulatory storm. In the United States, Bayer — which acquired Monsanto, Roundup’s original maker — has paid out more than $10 billion to settle lawsuits linking glyphosate to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  Advertisement Glyphosate is now off-patent and manufactured by numerous companies worldwide. But Bayer remains its top seller — achieving an estimated €2.6 billion in glyphosate-related sales in 2024, even as market competition and legal pressures cut into profits. In Europe, lobbyists for the agricultural and chemical sectors have fought hard to preserve its use, warning that banning glyphosate would devastate farming productivity. National authorities remain split. France has tried to phase it out. Germany has promised a full ban — but never delivered. In 2023 — despite mounting concerns, gaps in safety data and political pressure — the European Union reauthorized it for another 10 years. While most of the debate around glyphosate has centered on cancer, some studies have found possible links to reproductive harm, developmental disorders, endocrine disruption and even childhood cancers. Glyphosate has never been definitively linked to Parkinson’s. Bayer told POLITICO in a written response that no regulatory review has ever concluded any of its products are associated with the disease, and pointed to the U.S.-based Agricultural Health Study, which followed nearly 40,000 pesticide applicators and found no statistically significant association between glyphosate and the disease. Bayer said glyphosate is one of the most extensively studied herbicides in the world, with no regulator identifying it as neurotoxic or carcinogenic. But Bloem argues that the absence of a proven link says more about how we regulate risk than how safe the chemical actually is. Unlike paraquat, which causes immediate oxidative stress and has been associated with Parkinson’s in both lab and epidemiological studies, glyphosate’s potential harms are more indirect — operating through inflammation, microbiome disruption or mitochondrial dysfunction, all mechanisms known to contribute to the death of dopamine-producing neurons. But this makes them harder to detect in traditional toxicology tests, and easier to dismiss. “The problem isn’t that we know nothing,” Bloem says. “It’s that we’re not measuring the kind of damage Parkinson’s causes.” Responding, Bayer pointed to paraquat as one of only two agricultural chemicals that studies have linked directly to the development of Parkinson’s disease — even as Syngenta, its manufacturer, maintains there is no proven connection. Advertisement The EU’s current pesticide evaluation framework, like that of many other regulatory systems, focuses primarily on acute toxicity — short-term signs of poisoning like seizures, sudden organ damage or death. Manufacturers submit safety data, much of it based on animal studies looking for visible behavioral changes. But unlike for the heroin users in California, who were exposed to an unusually potent toxin, Parkinson’s doesn’t announce itself with dramatic symptoms in the short term. It creeps in as neurons die off, often over decades. “We wait for a mouse to walk funny,” Bloem says. “But in Parkinson’s, the damage is already done by the time symptoms appear.” The regulatory tests also isolate individual chemicals, rarely examining how they interact in the real world. But a 2020 study in Japan showed how dangerous that assumption may be. When rodents were exposed to glyphosate and MPTP — the very compound that mimicked Parkinson’s in the California heroin cases — the combination caused dramatically more brain cell loss than either substance alone. “That’s the nightmare scenario,” Bloem says. “And we’re not testing for it.” Even when data does exist, it doesn’t always reach regulators. Internal company documents released in court suggest Syngenta knew for decades that paraquat could harm the brain — a charge the company denies, insisting there is no proven link. More recently, Bayer and Syngenta have faced criticism for failing to share brain toxicity studies with EU authorities in the past — data they had disclosed to U.S. regulators. In one case, Syngenta failed to disclose studies on the pesticide abamectin. The Commission and the EU’s food and chemical agencies have called this a clear breach. Bloem sees a deeper issue. “Why should we assume these companies are the best stewards of public health?” he asked. “They’re making billions off these chemicals.”  Syngenta said that none of the withheld studies related to Parkinson’s disease and that it has since submitted all required studies under EU transparency rules. The company added that it is “fully aligned with the new requirements for disclosure of safety data.” Some governments are already responding to the links between Parkinson’s and farming. France, Italy and Germany now officially recognize Parkinson’s as a possible occupational disease linked to pesticide exposure — a step that entitles some affected farmworkers to compensation. But even that recognition, Bloem argues, hasn’t forced the broader system to catch up. WHERE SCIENCE STOPS, POLITICS BEGINS Bloem’s mistrust leads straight to the institutions meant to protect public health — and to people like Bernhard Url, the man who has spent the past decade running one of the most important among them.  Url is the outgoing executive director of the European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA — the EU’s scientific watchdog on food and chemical risks, based in Parma, Italy. The agency has come under scrutiny in the past over its reliance on company-submitted studies. Url doesn’t deny that structure, but says the process is now more transparent and scientifically rigorous. I met Url while he was on a visit to Brussels, during his final months as EFSA’s executive director. Austrian by nationality and a veterinarian by training, he speaks precisely, choosing his words with care. If Bloem is kinetic and outwardly urgent, Url is more reserved — a scientist still operating within the machinery Bloem wants to reform. Advertisement Still, Url didn’t dispute the core of the critique. “There are areas we don’t yet take into consideration,” he told me, pointing to emerging science around microbiome disruption, chemical synergy and chronic low-dose exposure. He didn’t name Parkinson’s, but the implications were clear. “We’re playing catch-up,” he admitted. Part of the problem, he suggested, is structural. The agency relies on a system built around predefined methods and industry-supplied data. “We assess risk based on what we’re given, and what the framework allows us to assess,” Url said. “But science evolves faster than legislation. That’s always the tension.” EFSA also works under constraints that its pharmaceutical counterpart, the European Medicines Agency, does not. “EMA distributes money to national agencies,” Url said. “We don’t. There’s less integration, less shared work. We rely on member states volunteering experts. We’re not in the same league.” A pesticide-free farm in in Gavorrano, Italy. | Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images Url didn’t sound defensive. If anything, he sounded like someone who’s been pushing against institutional gravity for a long time. He described EFSA as an agency charged with assessing a food system worth trillions — but working with limited scientific resources, and within a regulatory model that was never designed to capture the risks of chronic diseases like Parkinson’s. “We don’t get the support we need to coordinate across Europe,” he said. “Compared to the economic importance of the whole agri-food industry … it’s breadcrumbs.” But he drew a sharp line when it came to responsibility. “The question of what’s safe enough — that’s not ours to answer,” he said. “That’s a political decision.” EFSA can flag a risk. It’s up to governments to decide whether that risk is acceptable. Advertisement It was a careful way of saying what Bloem had said more bluntly: Science may illuminate the path, but policy chooses where — and whether — to walk it. And in a food system shaped by powerful interests, that choice is rarely made in a vacuum. “There are gaps,” Url said, “and we’ve said that.” But gaps in science don’t always lead to action. Especially when the cost of precaution is seen as an economic threat. THE DOCTOR WHO WON’T SLOW DOWN Evidence from the field is becoming harder to ignore. In France, a nationwide study found that Parkinson’s rates were significantly higher in vineyard regions that rely heavily on fungicides. Another study found that areas with higher agricultural pesticide use — often measured by regional spending — tend to have higher rates of Parkinson’s, suggesting a dose-response relationship. In Canada and the U.S., maps of Parkinson’s clusters track closely with areas of intensive agriculture. The Netherlands has yet to produce comparable data. But Bloem believes it’s only a matter of time. “If we mapped Parkinson’s here, we’d find the same patterns,” he says. “We just haven’t looked yet.” In fact, early signs are already emerging. The Netherlands, known for having one of the highest pesticide use rates in Europe, has seen a 30 percent rise in Parkinson’s cases over the past decade — a slower increase than in some other regions of the world, but still notable, Bloem says. In farming regions like the Betuwe, on the lower reaches of the Rhine River, physiotherapists have reported striking local clusters. One village near Arnhem counted over a dozen cases. “I don’t know of a single farmer who’s doing things purposely wrong,” Bloem says. “They’re just following the rules. The problem is, the rules are wrong.” To Bloem, reversing the epidemic means shifting the regulatory mindset from reaction to prevention. That means requiring long-term neurotoxicity studies, testing chemical combinations, accounting for real-world exposure, genetic predisposition and the kind of brain damage Parkinson’s causes — and critically, making manufacturers prove safety, rather than scientists having to prove harm. “We don’t ban parachutes after they fail,” Bloem says. “But that’s what we do with chemicals. We wait until people are sick.” Advertisement His team is also studying prevention-focused interventions — including exercise, diet and stress reduction — in people already diagnosed with Parkinson’s, in one of the most comprehensive trials of its kind. Still, Bloem is realistic about the limits of individual action. “You can’t exercise your way out of pesticide exposure,” he says. “We need upstream change.” Bloem has seen it before — the same pattern playing out in slow motion. “Asbestos,” he says “Lead in gasoline. Tobacco. Every time, we acted decades after the damage was done.” The science existed. The evidence had accumulated. But the decision to intervene always lagged. “It’s not that we don’t know enough,” he adds. “It’s that the system is not built to listen when the answers are inconvenient.” The clinic has grown quiet. Most of the staff have left for the day, the corridors are still. Bloem gathers his things, but he’s not finished yet. One more phone call to make — something he’ll take, as always, while walking. As we stand up to go into the hallway, he pauses. “If we don’t fix this now,” he says, “we’re going to look back in 50 years and ask: ‘What the hell were we thinking?’” He slips on a pair of black headphones, nods goodbye and turns toward the exit. Outside, he’s already striding across the Radboud campus, talking into the cold evening air — still moving, still making calls, still trying to bend a stubborn system toward change. Graphics by Lucia Mackenzie.

With Pope Francis in hospital with pneumonia in both lungs, the world is on high alert for an extraordinary news event: The death of a pontiff. Francis, who lost part of a lung to a respiratory infection in his youth and has been plagued by ailing health recently, last year approved a stripped-down funeral for himself, eschewing some of the more arcane rites and rituals that take place when a pope passes away. But his death, whenever it happens, is still set to immediately kick off a tightly choreographed series of events, refined over centuries and hundreds of dead popes. Some Vatican traditions date back to Ancient Rome. At the end of the spectacle, a new leader of the Catholic church will be selected in a high-stakes election dramatized in the Oscar-nominated thriller “Conclave,” with progressive and conservative cardinals vying for control of an institution with a billion followers globally. THE DEATH It is traditionally the job of the camerlengo (a senior Vatican official) to confirm the death of a pope. Currently, that position is held by Irish-born Cardinal Kevin Farrell. If tradition stands, it will be Farrell who visits Pope Francis’ body in his private chapel and calls out his name to rouse him. Nowadays, this is largely ceremonial, as doctors will have confirmed the pontiff’s death through more standard medical means. (An oft-repeated myth holds that the camerlengo also gently taps the pope’s head with a silver hammer; the Vatican has long denied this.) When the pontiff does not respond, according to tradition, his signet ring that acts as the seal for official papal documents is defaced or destroyed, signifying the end of his reign, and the papal apartments are sealed off. The camerlengo informs the College of Cardinals, a governing body of senior church officials, that the pope has died, before his death is announced to the world in a Vatican statement to the media. THE MOURNING PERIOD The pope’s death will trigger nine days of mourning known as the Novendiale, originally an Ancient Roman custom. Italy also typically declares a period of national mourning. His body will be blessed, dressed in papal vestments and exhibited in St. Peter’s Basilica for public viewing, where hundreds of thousands will line up to pay their respects, including foreign dignitaries and world leaders. In the past, the pope’s corpse was displayed on a raised platform called a catafalque, but Francis’ simplified funeral rites will see him lying in an open coffin without so much pomp and pageantry. Historically, popes were often embalmed and some had their organs removed prior to burial — a church near the Trevi Fountain in Rome holds the hearts of more than 20 popes in marble urns, preserved as holy relics — but these practices have fallen out of favor. As Pope Francis lies in state, daily prayer services and Requiem Masses will be held at St. Peter’s Basilica and throughout the Catholic world. Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years. | Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images Meanwhile, the Vatican will enter a transitional period called sede vacante, meaning “the seat is vacant,” during which the rule of the church is temporarily handed over to the College of Cardinals — though no major decisions can be made until a new pope is elected. THE BURIAL The pope’s funeral will most likely be held in St. Peter’s Square, with mourners packing into the Vatican for the service. It will be led by the dean of the College of Cardinals, currently 91-year-old Italian Giovanni Battista Re. Traditionally, the pope is then buried in the Vatican Grottoes, the crypts beneath St. Peter’s Basilica. Almost 100 popes are entombed there, including Pope Benedict XVI, Francis’ predecessor, who resigned in 2013 and died in 2022. But Francis said in an interview in 2023 that he had picked the Santa Maria Maggiore basilica in Rome, one of his favorite and most-frequented churches, as his final resting place, making him the first pope in a century to be interred outside the Vatican. Past popes were entombed in three coffins: one made out of cypress, one of zinc and one of elm, nested inside each other, but Francis has ordered that he be buried in a single coffin, made of wood and zinc. When Benedict XVI was buried, his coffin also contained coins minted during his reign, as well as a metal tube enclosing a rolled-up paper scroll, called a rogito — a 1,000-word document retelling his life and reign. Francis will likely be buried with his own rogito detailing his unique papacy. THE ELECTION Two to three weeks after the pope’s funeral, the College of Cardinals will convene in the Sistine Chapel to hold a conclave, the highly secretive process of electing a new pope. In theory, any baptized male Roman Catholic is eligible for the papacy, but for the past 700 years, the pope has always been chosen from the College of Cardinals. The vast majority of the 266 pontiffs elected throughout history have been European. Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, is the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years. Unlike in regular politics, candidates for pope do not openly campaign for the position. Vatican watchers have deemed cardinals who have a good shot at becoming pope papabile, meaning “popeable.” On the day of voting, the Sistine Chapel, with its famed ceiling painted by Michelangelo, is physically sealed off and the cardinals, who have taken an oath of secrecy, are locked inside. Only cardinals under the age of 80 are eligible to cast ballots. Around 120 will vote in secret for their chosen candidate, writing their name on a ballot and placing it in a chalice atop the altar. If no candidate receives the required two-thirds majority, another round of voting takes place. There can be up to four rounds per day. The conclave that elected Pope Francis in 2013 took about 24 hours and five ballots, but the process can run longer; a conclave in the 13th century took about three years, while another in the 18th century took four months. During the conclave, the Sistine Chapel, with its famed ceiling painted by Michelangelo, is physically sealed off. | AFP via Getty Images Once ballots are counted, they are burned in a stove inside the Sistine Chapel, installed ahead of time by Vatican firefighters. A second stove burns a chemical sending up a smoke signal through a chimney to the outside world: Black smoke means a new pope has not been selected, white smoke means one has. THE NEW POPE Once a pope is chosen, a representative from the College of Cardinals reads out the Latin announcement Habemus papam, meaning “We have a pope,” from the main balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica overlooking thousands of eager faithful. Then the freshly elected pope, having chosen a papal name (most likely one honoring a saint or predecessor) and donned a white cassock, steps out onto the balcony to give his first address to the public. And with that, the Catholic world has a new leader. Along with setting the church’s teachings and morals, the pope wields significant diplomatic and political power in world politics, acting as a mediator in global conflicts and guiding humanitarian efforts. Most popes serve until the day they die. Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned in 2013, aged 85, because of declining health, was the first pontiff to step down in 600 years. Ben Munster contributed to this report.

In the wake of NATO-skeptic President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, backers of the alliance are taking comfort in a year-old U.S. law that says he can’t withdraw unless Congress approves. But Trump may have a way around it — and it’s a method he has used before. In 2023, Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) authored legislation requiring that any presidential decision to exit NATO must have either two-thirds Senate approval or be authorized through an act of Congress. Lawmakers passed the measure as part of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law. Legal experts warn that Trump could try to sidestep Congress’s NATO guardrail, citing presidential authority over foreign policy — an approach he used before to bypass congressional restrictions on treaty withdrawal. The law is “not airtight,” said Scott Anderson, a Brookings Institution scholar and senior editor of Lawfare who has argued for firmer restrictions on a president leaving NATO. What it does do, he said, is set up a direct constitutional conflict with Congress if a president does try to withdraw. “This is not open and shut, this is about Congress telling you you can’t do this, and if you ignore Congress, you’re going to have to fight us in the courts over it,” Anderson said. If Trump simply declared he was pulling out of the alliance, it’s unclear whether Congress would have the legal standing to sue him for ignoring the law, according to Curtis Bradley, the Allen M. Singer distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago Law School. The Supreme Court has generally held that institutional conflicts between the branches are political questions best resolved through the political process rather than through judicial intervention. “For the issue to be litigated, there would need to be someone with standing to sue,” Bradley said in an email. “The only party I can think of who might have standing would be Congress itself, but it is not clear that the Republicans in Congress (who will at least control the Senate) would support such a suit.” Anderson said lawmakers should strengthen the law by adding language explicitly authorizing litigation, which would improve Congress’ chances of establishing standing in court. He also explains that while Congress has the strongest standing to sue over a presidential withdrawal from NATO, service members or private individuals — such as Americans who own property in NATO countries — may have potential arguments, but those are less certain. Another possibility, he said, is that one of the chambers could try to sue, if both don’t agree. Even if the Supreme Court took up the case, it’s not clear who would win because the constitutional question is murky. Congress has never mounted a direct legal challenge to a president withdrawing from a treaty. “It’s very contested legal terrain, and it’s not 100 percent clear,” Anderson said. That doesn’t mean a withdrawal, if Trump were able to pursue one, would happen quickly. Under the NATO treaty, a member state would have to submit a “notice of denunciation” to inform the other members of the decision. The country’s membership wouldn’t officially end until after a one-year waiting period. Meanwhile, Trump could undermine NATO without formally leaving. Democratic lawmakers have warned that he could refuse U.S. support by withholding ambassadors or keeping troops from participating in military exercises. While several lawmakers in February called for new legislative measures to guard against these risks, nothing serious has materialized since. “Following Trump’s threats in his first term, the Congress — recognizing the vital importance of NATO — acted on a bipartisan basis to prevent any future presidents from unilaterally withdrawing,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “While Trump may resort to his old tricks, we’ll continue working to shore up NATO and stand ready to fight back against any attempts to undermine the strength of this alliance.” Asked to comment, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “The American people re-elected President Trump because they trust him to lead our country and restore peace through strength around the world.” It wouldn’t be the first time Trump’s team ignored legal requirements on treaty withdrawal. In 2019, amid a debate over the Open Skies Treaty, Congress included a provision in the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act requiring the defense secretary and secretary of state to notify Congress at least 120 days before withdrawing. The 34-nation pact allowed reciprocal surveillance flights between members to monitor military forces and weaponry. Arms control advocates and internationalists in Congress supported the Open Skies Treaty because, with Russia and countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and France as parties, it promoted transparency and trust. But the Trump administration and some congressional Republicans argued Russia was violating it and that satellite imaging technology made the flights obsolete. In May 2020, the Trump administration announced its intention to leave the Open Skies Treaty and ignored the legal notification requirements. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, at the time led by Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, issued an opinion arguing that the notice requirements infringed on the president’s constitutional authority over foreign affairs. “The President’s power to withdraw from treaties flows from his constitutional role as the ‘sole organ of the nation in its external relations,’ granting him discretion in conducting foreign affairs and implementing or terminating treaties without congressional constraints on diplomatic decisions,” Engel wrote in the administration’s final days. Asked about congressional guardrails on a president leaving NATO, Bradley said the Trump administration’s argument in 2020 that Congress has no regulatory authority isn’t necessarily on solid footing because Congress has a history of regulating treaties. “I think there should be a heavy burden on presidents to show that a statute is unconstitutional before acting to disregard it, given that our checks and balances depend on presidents having to follow the law, and I don’t think that burden has been met here,” he said. A NATO spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment. Because NATO runs on the confidence of allies, former alliance officials said that signaling an exit is as good as leaving. “De facto the day you send the letter it is in a way effective immediately,” said Camille Grande, a former NATO assistant secretary general and now a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Because what you’re saying is ‘I’m no longer committed.’” Beyond the legal aspects of withdrawing, the United States would have to figure out what to do with more than 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Europe — a number that has grown by one-fifth since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. The Defense Department might also have to pull out of NATO’s military command structure, which has been run by an American general dating back to its establishment under then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in 1949. “We are not sort of having a discussion in very quiet times where there is a guy in the White House who’s not a strong believer in alliances and in old-fashioned NATO,” Grande said. “We have a war in Europe. We have a serious concern for many Europeans that the confrontation with Russia might escalate in some shape or form, and then where are we?” Trump repeatedly criticized NATO allies during his first term for not meeting defense spending targets, openly suggesting reduced U.S. support and even hinting at withdrawal. At a rally this year, he recalled telling allies, “If we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us? … Absolutely not.” Trump hasn’t said publicly that he would pull out of NATO, but reportedly has discussed it repeatedly in private. He did say on the campaign trail that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies who don’t spend enough on defense. Trump told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in 2020 that the U.S. wouldn’t come to Europe’s defense if it was attacked, POLITICO reported. He has said NATO countries subsequently spent “billions and billions” of dollars on their defenses in the wake of his threat. While critics argue the strong rhetoric is undermining the alliance, some Republicans view it as effective pressure that prompted NATO members to increase military funding. Both Trump and pro-NATO advocates stress the need for allies to meet defense spending targets, but Trump has at times framed it as a condition for U.S. support. Those allies appear to be relying on the law to bar Trump from taking extreme measures. “Congress passed legislation according to which you cannot leave NATO without the consent of Congress,” former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview on Wednesday. “And during my visit to U.S. Congress, I have seen a very strong bipartisan support for NATO, staying in NATO. Obviously, a U.S. president can, as a commander in chief, make life difficult for NATO, but to see the U.S. leave NATO? No.”