Before I-10, before interstates, before driving across America became... ordinary, this chunk of coquina in St. Augustine, Florida marked the beginning of a road to San Diego. It’s the Zero Milestone of the Old Spanish Trail. The route was conceived in 1915 and eventually stretched roughly 2,800 miles across the southern United States. Getting there meant stitching together roads, bridges and ferries across some of the hardest country in America to build through. By 1929, motorists could follow it from the Atlantic coast of Florida to the Pacific coast of California. And this was Mile 0. I enjoy coming across old named highways. The Lincoln Highway. Dixie Highway. Old Spanish Trail. Before roads became numbers, people sold them almost like adventures. Most of the Old Spanish Trail eventually disappeared into newer highways. The road survived. Its name mostly didn’t. But the old coquina Zero Milestone is still sitting there in St. Augustine.show more

There is something about Patna. It’s like an old... energy that pulsates just beneath the chaos. Waiting to break surface and shine in all its glory. You see glimpses of it in pockets of old beauty and modern brilliance. The state of the art museum, the various art forms adorning the city walls, the aesthetics of sprawling old homes, the bridges across its many rivers, the delightful JP Ganga Path and most of all the gently flowing Ganga ji on whose banks this ancient city thrives. The singing of the koyal on flowering mango trees rises above the hum of a crowded city which surprisingly is very green. The roads leading out of Patna to rural Bihar are fantastic. Tree lined and some running alongside fertile green fields, nalas and across rivers. Culture sits comfortably here by way of gamchhas around men’s necks and aalta on women’s feet. Despite years of mis governance, apathy and policy failures the sheer resilience, hard work and natural intelligence of the people breaks through. If East will herald the new rise, Patliputra and Bihar with its young and smart population stand out as promising contenders to lead it. Hope it happens. #Patnashow more

10-year-old student & AI advocate Everest Nevraumont, one of... First Lady Melania Trump' SOTU guests: "It was incredible to be there and see everybody... these are almost all of the most important people in politics these days, and I was like right there in the middle of it—and it was amazing."show more

The truck driver who made an illegal U-turn on... Florida's Turnpike that led to the passing of 3 Americans, illegally entered the U.S. through the southern border in 2018. Harjinder Singh has been charged with three counts of vehicular homic*de. Singh got his Commercial Driver’s License in the state of California, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. “Three people lost their lives as a result of his recklessness, and countless friends and family members will experience the pain of their loss forever,” they said. The driver of the minivan was identified as a 30-year-old Florida City man. The two passengers were a 37-year-old Pompano Beach woman and a 54-year-old Miami man.show more

FACT CHECK: There is no Kijabe Dam and there... never has been one. Reports being circulated by mainstream media about a dam in Kijabe are totally inaccurate and misleading. The tragedy in Old Kijabe Town is not linked to a dam. A blocked tunnel under the old railway lines created a lake which eventually broke after days of build-up. You can see the aftermath in the videos. The incident was not caused by a dam burst but rather by the blockage of the railway tunnel, leading to the buildup of water that eventually broke through.show more

A bridge in the parish of St. Catherine, Jamaica... was swallowed by a swollen river on Tuesday as the eye of Hurricane Melissa closed in on the western coast of the country. According to See Jamaica, the channel that live streamed this footage, the bridge is a "vital link between Spanish Town and Linstead." Hurricane Melissa has since made landfall in Jamaica as a Category 5 storm. It is the most powerful hurricane to lash the island since record-keeping began 174 years ago and one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded.show more

Absolute nonsense! 🤨 Just heard this LBC caller Barry... claiming that as a nearly 50-year-old black man, people still cross the road and clutch their handbags whenever they see him walking towards them, holding it up as proof of everyday racism in Britain. Barry on LBC: “I’m a black man, and when I walk down the street, it doesn’t matter that I’m almost 50 years old, people will still cross the road. People still cross the road. They will still grab their handbags. I ask the question, are they being careful or are they being prejudiced?” No, Barry. That is not the everyday reality of Britain in 2026. Most people do not clutch their handbags or dart across the road at the sight of a middle-aged black man. Treating this as the normal experience of black men in this country is just not true. Britain is one of the most tolerant, welcoming, and least racist countries on Earth. We take in more people from every background than almost anywhere else, and the vast majority of us live and work together without drama. There are racists in every society, that will never fully disappear, but painting the average person on a British street as constantly prejudiced against black men is a tired exaggeration. Stop trying to make this country sound like some extreme racist dystopia. It isn’t.show more

Back at my mom’s house I was sitting in... the living room playing video games in my my underwear, I was around 12 years old and ever body was working until about 5pm so I still had a few hours before anybody was there. I usually kept the doors locked but the front door wasn’t locked, I just didn’t know that yet. I walked into the kitchen to grab a snack and a drink. I didn’t know that a family of three people just walked into the house. I came back holding a bag of chips and a drink and I saw two people standing there and another one just sitting on the couch like they were supposed to be there. My 12 year old brain couldn’t comprehend what was happening and I ran out of the house and to the neighbors house. I finally calmed down and told her what was happening, she grabbed her husband and went over there, I’m surprised they didn’t call the police first. The people in the house told the neighbor that they were friends of my dad and they were visiting from Pittsburgh. My neighbor called my dad at the restaurant and confirmed he knew them. He ended up leaving the restaurant and coming back early. His friends confused what days he was off from work and decided to come by and visit unannounced. He also told them it wasn’t a good idea to just walk in and that even though they were friends they should always knock on the door. I had never met these people before so I thought it was some kind of home invasion, it scared me. But from that point on I always made sure the doors were locked and that I was dressed decently just in case of unexpected visitors.show more

ALERT: 72-year-old man arrested for hitting a group of... cyclists after honking and heckling them for taking over the road in Georgia. Jerry Ross was driving when he pulled up behind a group of 10 cyclists in the road. He began honking and heckling the cyclists, and one of them started filming. Ross then sped around them while laying on the horn and hit 2 of the cyclists, causing minor injuries, before driving away. Ross, when confronted by police about the incident, blamed the cyclists for taking up the road and causing the collision. He was arrested and is charged with two counts of aggravated assault, hit and run, and reckless driving.show more

At first glance, it looks like a highway floating... in the sky. This graceful arc of road across Pingtian Lake in China's Anhui Province is flanked by water so still that it mirrors the clouds above. Now I'm curious what it feels like to drive between the sky and its reflection.show more

In a scene that reflects the scale of suffering... and deprivation in Gaza City, Israeli forces poured large amounts of cement into the streets east of the city, reaching residents’ homes and causing sewage drainage systems to clog. Yet amid this harsh reality, the cement barred from entering the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war became something people rushed to collect by any means possible. Young and old hurried to gather it before it dried. Some hoped to use it to pave a bathroom floor, secure the ground of a tent, or repair a wall damaged by bombardment. It is a scene that captures Gaza’s reality today: people searching for the most basic necessities among the rubble, trying to carve out a chance to live in the midst of immense hardship.show more

The U.S. teaches Plymouth as the “first Thanksgiving” in... order to erase the older Hispanic-Catholic roots of America. St. Augustine held a Catholic Thanksgiving in 1565, fifty-six years before the Pilgrims. Yet acknowledging this would require admitting that America was not founded solely by Anglo Protestants. As a result, the Spanish story is buried and the Anglo myth is allowed to dominate. In their need to crown themselves the “true founders,” the Anglo-Protestant ruling class erased an entire Catholic civilization that arrived a century earlier and created the first cities, missions, legal systems, and the first documented Thanksgiving in 1565 at St. Augustine. This erasure was inevitable. Recognizing the Hispanic-Catholic foundations of the continent would destroy the fantasy of America as a pure Anglo Protestant creation. It would show that Iberian, Indigenous, and African peoples were not background characters but co-authors of the early American world, and the Anglo narrative cannot tolerate that reality. So instead of admitting the facts, including the truth that the first Thanksgiving was Catholic, Hispanic, and shared with the Timucua, they constructed a fake origin story: English settlers eat a meal in 1621 and suddenly become the spiritual architects of a continent they barely knew. In short: they rewrote history in order to replace the Hispanic-Catholic world with a self-serving ideological illusion. The Anglo narrative requires purity. The Hispanic narrative produces mixture. The Anglo story whitewashes Indigenous extermination. The Spanish story incorporates the native. The Anglo tale needs a Protestant creation myth. The Spanish New World legacy exposes that myth as thin and childish. This is why Plymouth is so fiercely protected. If the truth were ever acknowledged publicly, the entire Anglo Protestant self-image would collapse under its own weight, because the oldest American city was Catholic, Spanish, and mestizo.show more

A remarkable story of determination has emerged from Ranchi.... On April 30, 2026, 7-year-old Ishank swam across the challenging Palk Strait, covering 29 km from Sri Lanka to India in just 9 hours and 50 minutes. With this incredible feat, he became the youngest swimmer ever to complete the route, setting a new world record at just seven years old.show more

Many people don’t know this, but before construction of... the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway began, a new Makoko-like settlement had already started forming along that corridor. The highway construction cleared that entire stretch, opening it up to what is now a beachfront. Some of the people still left are the ones seen around the coastal highway at night. If enforcement is not sustained, there’s a real risk of regrouping and the emergence of another informal settlement. The entire stretch now protected by shoreline works behind Orchid Road was once their settlement, as shown in the first video.show more

The Jewish past of Beirut, peeking out from the... ruins An American tourist is standing at a traffic light and comes across an old, beautiful, abandoned house. The house has two rounded windows featuring Stars of David. The tourist wonders — what is this? How come there are Stars of David here? The answer: This was once the Wadi Abu Jamil neighborhood. Until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, around 15,000 Jews lived there. Almost all of the Jews eventually left Lebanon. Many of the houses were destroyed during the civil war because they were located right in the center of the city, on the front line between Muslim West Beirut and Christian East Beirut — the two sides shooting at each other through the Jewish homes. Many of the remaining houses were abandoned and gradually began to crumble. Some were demolished to make way for high-rise towers. Every now and then, one of these old houses still peeks out, bearing witness to the fact that Jews once lived here too.show more

🚨 SKY EXPLODES WITH A MASSIVE FIREBALL OVER EUROPE... ☄️🌍 A brilliant fireball meteor lit up the evening sky across western Europe on March 8, 2026, shocking thousands of people across Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Luxembourg. Around 7:00 PM local time, the glowing object tore across the sky like a blazing comet before breaking apart mid-air, leaving a fiery trail visible for miles. Phones, dashcams, and security cameras captured the moment the meteor fragmented high above the horizon. According to the International Meteor Organization, more than 1,400 eyewitness reports flooded in within hours. ⚠️ Some fragments are believed to have fallen in parts of Rhineland-Palatinate, with reports of minor roof damage near Koblenz. Thankfully, no injuries have been reported. Astronomers say this may be one of the brightest fireballs seen over the region in years, turning an ordinary evening into a moment people across Europe will never forget. 🌌 Events like this happen when small asteroids enter Earth’s atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour, burning up in spectacular flashes of light.show more

METAL SNAPPED LIKE BONE: 190-Foot Bailey Bridge Tears Apart,... Truck Smashes Into Sutlej’s Churning Hell - Congress Neglect Turns Highway Into Death Trap In a split-second of raw terror on Tuesday, the 190-foot Bailey bridge in Himachal Pradesh’s Kinnaur district didn’t collapse it exploded in a violent, grinding shriek of twisting steel and shattering concrete. The truck was midway across the narrow, overloaded span on National Highway 5 (Old Hindustan-Tibet Road) between Reckong and Tapri near Urni Dhank when the entire structure gave way. Metal panels ripped apart like wet paper, the deck buckled and dropped, and the heavy vehicle was hurled sideways into a sickening free-fall. It smashed into the violent, rock-strewn Sutlej River nearly 200 feet below with a thunderous, bone-crushing impact that sent water and debris exploding upward. For several horrifying seconds the truck was half-submerged and battered by the freezing, merciless current before the driver somehow clawed his way out of the wreckage with only minor injuries - alive, but staring straight into what should have been his grave. This was no random accident. It is the direct, predictable result of the ruling Congress government’s years of criminal neglect and cost-cutting in Himachal Pradesh. Under Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, the state has allowed these dangerous, temporary Bailey bridges - never meant for heavy, long-term use - to remain on one of the most treacherous mountain highways in the country. Instead of replacing them with proper permanent structures, the Congress administration has gambled with countless lives, prioritising everything except the safety of people forced to travel these killer routes every day. The twisted wreckage hanging over the gorge and the crushed truck in the Sutlej are not just the remains of a bridge. They are proof of a government that has failed its most basic duty: keeping citizens alive on the roads it claims to maintain.show more

One of the oldest cities in Spain is split... in two by a 120 meter gorge. In the 18th century, a bridge was built across it. Hidden inside that bridge is a prison cell whose window opens onto the drop... The city is called Ronda, in the mountains of Andalusia, and it has been continuously inhabited since prehistoric times. The Romans called it Arunda. The Moors held it for seven centuries. In 1966, the Spanish state declared its historic centre a national heritage site. The gorge that cuts it in two is called El Tajo. On one side stands the old Moorish quarter, La Ciudad, with roots in the 8th century. On the other stands the newer town, El Mercadillo, built outside the medieval walls when Ronda outgrew them. For most of the city's history, the only way between them was a long descent to the river below, and a long climb back up. In 1735, King Philip V of Spain ordered a bridge to span the chasm. The first attempt collapsed in 1741, killing about fifty people. A second project began in 1759 under the Spanish architect José Martín de Aldehuela. It took thirty-four years. The bridge was finally inaugurated in 1793. It is 98 meters tall, made of solid stone, and it has never moved. Above the central arch, the architects built a chamber of about sixty square metres. For most of the bridge's history, this chamber served as a prison. The prisoners could see the river through a small barred window in the floor of their world. Ernest Hemingway visited Ronda repeatedly in the years before and after the Spanish Civil War, and the most harrowing chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls — the village massacre Pilar describes, with men beaten by their neighbors and pushed off a cliff — was likely set in this town... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.show more