As the U.S. ramps up attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats, blowing up vessels and killing their crews, American allies across the Atlantic are waging their own at-sea fights with suspected narcotics smugglers.

“Europe is literally being flooded with cocaine,” Artur Vaz, Portugal’s narcotics police chief, told Fox News.

“Criminal organizations… acquire the drugs in Latin America, and then the price at which they place it in the markets… there’s a big profit margin here,” said Vaz, director of the National Unit for Combating Drug Trafficking at Portugal’s Judiciary Police.

The drugs come over in cargo ships, high-speed boats and, increasingly, low-budget, semi-submersible vessels known colloquially as “narco-subs.” These boats sail largely undetected with only the top of the craft visible — often painted, researchers say, in steely blues and grays to blend in with the stormy Atlantic waves and evade surveillance efforts.

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Portuguese authorities scored a notable capture this fall, intercepting a narco-sub in the mid-Atlantic with 1.7 metric tons of cocaine on board. But European authorities acknowledge that many others are making it past their defenses.

“The interdiction rates for these subs is between 10%, roughly, and maybe as low as 5%,” said Sam Woolston, a Honduras-based investigative journalist specializing in organized crime.

“Even if one or two get nabbed by the authorities, it’s not enough to dissuade them.”

European authorities mostly choose to intercept narco boats, stopping far short of the Trump administration’s policy of destroying them. Instead, the often low-rung crews are detained for interrogation, in the hope of shedding light on shady drug kingpins, gang operations and distribution networks.

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Officials tell Fox News, though, that they would like to do more.

“We must be more muscular — that is, with greater means and a greater capacity for intervention,” said Vaz. “But, of course, within the rule of law.”

As for the narco-subs, those vessels aren’t new, but they never used to cross oceans.

“It’s mind-boggling, the level of sophistication,” Derek Maltz, a former acting chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told Fox News.

“But it’s all about the money, and it’s all about the risk, and right now I don’t think these networks perceive Europe as a huge risk for them.”

Journalist Woolston says the transatlantic voyage is typically crewed by “desperate people,” given its perilous nature.

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“You’ll be locked up in a very small compartment for days, usually inhaling things like diesel fumes. There have been cases of narco submarines found with a crew of dead bodies.

“The kingpins would not get on these boats.”

Published on
10/12/2025 – 13:07 GMT+1

Trying to understand tech billionaire Elon Musk is like trying to assemble IKEA furniture in the dark.

Except we have no instructions, and the pieces keep changing shape.

Some Europeans dismiss him as a “barbaric cowboy”. We pride ourselves on being the educated adults in the room.

Well, if we are so clever, let us prove it and use Carl Jung to talk about Elon. This Swiss psychologist defined archetypes — the universal roles.

But there is a catch. For every positive one, there is a shadowy downside.

First, there is the Creator. As one, Musk is the visionary building rockets to take him to Mars one day. But his shadow is the Anarchist. He treats SpaceX explosions as “data” and he is willing to burn billions — and occasionally break laws — to see if his toys work.

Second, the Ruler. If money is the measure of success, he is the most profitable CEO in the world who just secured $1 trillion deal at Tesla to keep him.

But his shadow is the Tyrant. When he took over Twitter — now X — he did not just restructure the social media network, he decapitated it. He fired 80% of the staff in weeks, demanding “hardcore” loyalty just to prove he holds the crown.

And third, the Jester. The internet troll posts memes that make people laugh. But here, his shadow is the Nihilist, the cruel trickster who retweets posts comparing the European Union to the “Fourth Reich.”

He burns institutions not for a plan, but for the “lols” — because he believes nothing matters anyway.

Musk is a spectacle we cannot look away from. So, Mr Musk, which Elon are you today?

Watch the Euronews video in the player above for the full story.

Rod Paige, an educator, coach and administrator who rolled out the nation’s landmark No Child Left Behind law as the first African American to serve as U.S. education secretary, died Tuesday.

Former President George W. Bush, who tapped Paige for the nation’s top federal education post, announced the death in a statement but did not provide further details. Paige was 92.

Under Paige’s leadership, the Department of Education implemented No Child Left Behind policy that in 2002 became Bush’s signature education law and was modeled on Paige’s previous work as a schools superintendent in Houston. The law established universal testing standards and sanctioned schools that failed to meet certain benchmarks.

“Rod was a leader and a friend,” Bush said in his statement. “Unsatisfied with the status quo, he challenged what we called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’ Rod worked hard to make sure that where a child was born didn’t determine whether they could succeed in school and beyond.”

Roderick R. Paige was born to two teachers in the small Mississippi town of Monticello of roughly 1,400 inhabitants. The oldest of five siblings, Paige served a two-year stint the U.S. Navy before becoming a football coach at the high school, and then junior college levels. Within years, Paige rose to head coach of Jackson State University, his alma mater and a historically black college in the Mississippi capital city.

There, his team became the first — with a 1967 football game — to integrate Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, once an all-white venue.

After moving to Houston in the mid-1970s to become head coach of Texas Southern University, Paige pivoted from the playing field to the classroom and education — first as a teacher, and then as administrator and eventually the dean of its college of education from 1984 to 1994.

Amid growing public recognition of his pursuit of educational excellence, Paige rose to become superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, then one of the largest school districts in the country.

He quickly drew the attention of Texas’ most powerful politicians for his sweeping educational reforms in the diverse Texas city. Most notably, he moved to implement stricter metrics for student outcomes, something that became a central point for Bush’s 2000s bid for president. Bush — who later would dub himself the “Education President” — frequently praised Paige on the campaign trail for the Houston reforms he called the “Texas Miracle.”

And once Bush won election, he tapped Paige to be the nation’s top education official.

As education secretary from 2001 to 2005, Paige emphasized his belief that high expectations were essential for childhood development.

“The easiest thing to do is assign them a nice little menial task and pat them on the head,” he told the Washington Post at the time. “And that is precisely what we don’t need. We need to assign high expectations to those people, too. In fact, that may be our greatest gift: expecting them to achieve, and then supporting them in their efforts to achieve.”

While some educators applauded the law for standardizing expectations regardless of student race or income, others complained for years about what they consider a maze of redundant and unnecessary tests and too much “teaching to the test” by educators.

In 2015, House and Senate lawmakers agreed to pull back many provisions from “No Child Left Behind,” shrinking the Education Department’s role in setting testing standards and preventing the federal agency from sanctioning schools that fail to improve. That year, then-President Barack Obama signed the sweeping education law overhaul, ushering in a new approach to accountability, teacher evaluations and the way the most poorly performing schools are pushed to improve.

After serving as education secretary, Paige returned to Jackson State University a half century after he was a student there, serving as the interim president in 2016 at the age of 83.

Into his 90s, Paige still publicly expressed deep concern, and optimism, about the future of U.S. education. In an opinion piece appearing in the Houston Chronicle in 2024, Paige lifted up the city that helped propel him to national prominence, urging readers to “look to Houston not just for inspiration, but for hard-won lessons about what works, what doesn’t and what it takes to shake up a stagnant system.”