Everyone is posting about Ceuta. Almost nobody knows where... it is or why it exists, so let me fix that, because the history is the entire story. Ceuta is not in Spain. It is in Africa. It sits on the north coast of Morocco, an eighteen square kilometre wedge of Spanish soil surrounded by Moroccan territory and the sea. Population around 83,000. Together with Melilla to the east, it forms the only land border the European Union has with the African continent. Look at a map. The Strait of Gibraltar is fourteen kilometres wide at its narrowest. Eight and a half miles. The ancients called the two headlands guarding it the Pillars of Hercules, the Rock of Gibraltar to the north and Monte Hacho, which sits inside Ceuta, to the south. That gate has been the hinge of the Mediterranean world for three thousand years. Now the history, which people keep getting backwards. The Romans held it and called it Septem Fratres, the seven brothers, which is where the name Ceuta comes from. Vandals, then Byzantines. In 711 a Berber commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed that strait and began the conquest of Spain. The rock he landed at still carries his name. Jabal Tariq. Gibraltar. Then it turned the other way. Portugal took Ceuta in 1415, an event historians treat as the opening move of the Age of Discovery. When Portugal regained its independence from the Spanish crown in 1640, Ceuta alone chose to stay Spanish. Portugal formally ceded it in the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. So Ceuta has been Spanish for 358 years, and European for 611. Morocco, as a modern independent state, has existed since 1956. That matters, because Morocco claims both enclaves as colonial relics. Spain calls them integral national territory and EU soil, which legally they are. And here is the pattern nobody mentions. In 2002 Morocco quietly occupied a tiny uninhabited rock called Perejil, a few hundred metres off the coast. Spain retook it with helicopters and special forces. In May 2021, after Spain admitted the leader of the Polisario Front for medical treatment, Moroccan border guards stood back and roughly 8,000 people walked and swam into Ceuta over two days. Spain's prime minister called it a serious crisis for Spain and for Europe. In 2022 Spain reversed itself and endorsed Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara, and the border trouble stopped. Read that sequence again. The border opens when Madrid displeases Rabat. It closes when Madrid complies. There is a name for that. It is called instrumentalised migration, and the EU used the same language about Belarus pushing people at the Polish frontier. Whether it rises to an act of war is a lawyer's argument. That it is coercion using human beings as the instrument is not seriously disputed by anyone who follows the file. Now the current numbers, and I am going to be careful because everyone else is not. Ceuta's regional president says 60,000 entered, more than seventy percent of the city's population. Spain's Interior Ministry says close to 50,000 since Thursday, and that more than 48,300 have already been returned to Morocco. Al Jazeera reported 1,500 to 2,000 over ten days. Those figures cannot all be true. At least 18 people are dead, drowned or crushed at the breakwater. Some reports say more. Children are sleeping in parks. Spain has deployed the army. Italy is talking about extraordinary measures. The one number I am confident in is the dead one, and it will rise. So before the next hot take flies past you, remember what you are actually looking at. A European city on African soil, older in Spanish hands than the United States has existed, sitting on the narrowest gate between two continents, being used as leverage in a fight about Western Sahara. That is not a migration story. That is a border being used as a weapon, and people are drowning in it. 🦋show more

🚨🇪🇸 BREAKING: Cars are being set on fire near... Spain's Melilla enclave as unrest spreads along the border. -Reports describe Moroccan migrants burning vehicles near the frontier of Melilla, Spain's other North African enclave -It follows the surge at Ceuta, where more than 1,500 people swam around the barrier in a single day and local officials declared a migratory emergency -Melilla and Ceuta are Spain's two land borders with Africa, and pressure on one has historically spilled to the other within days -Nothing is confirmed yet on injuries, arrests, or the scale of the fires Source: CIG on TG / Writer: Danielshow more

BREAKING: Morocco has taken advantage of the stupidity of... Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who refused to declare a state of emergency and prevent the arrival of more than 40,000 Moroccan military-aged men in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla today. More military-aged men, including soldiers as well as pardoned criminals, are continuing to arrive in these enclaves. Tonight, they are climbing over the border fence, while the Spanish Army has only a symbolic presence there and is unable to prevent them from taking over the enclaves.show more

🚨🇪🇸 The crisis has jumped to Melilla, with crowds... scaling the fence tonight and some breaking through. -Large groups are climbing the border fence at Melilla, Spain's other North African enclave, trying to force their way into Spanish territory -Spanish security forces fired tear gas to push them back, and some people made it across -It follows the surge at Ceuta, where roughly 50,000 to 60,000 crossed by land and sea into a city of just 83,000, with 57 dead and around 48,000 already returned to Morocco -Cars were burned near the Melilla frontier earlier, and clashes broke out between Moroccan police and crowds still pressing toward the border -Madrid has called the mass crossing an attack on its sovereignty, while Italy restored some border controls and France ordered extra checks on its Spanish frontier Source: Tabz / Writer: Danielshow more

The first time people see this place, they assume... it is AI-generated. It is not. This wonder is real and it has stood in the sea for thirteen hundred years... It is called Mont Saint-Michel, a small island off the coast of Normandy, where a medieval abbey rises in tiers of stone straight out of the sea, climbing to a single golden spire nearly a hundred metres above the water. There is nothing around it. It stands alone in a vast bay, and the effect is so strange that the eye struggles to accept it: a whole city of stone, floating between the water and the sky. What makes it stranger still is that the sea around it disappears. Mont Saint-Michel sits in a bay with the highest tides in continental Europe. Twice a day the ocean retreats for kilometres, leaving the abbey stranded on a desert of wet sand, and twice a day it floods back in and turns the rock into an island again. The same place is, within hours, surrounded by ocean and surrounded by emptiness. For more than a thousand years, this rhythm has never once stopped. Victor Hugo, who loved it, described it perfectly in 1884: “Mont-Saint-Michel is to France what the Great Pyramid is to Egypt.” I started this newsletter because our past is extraordinary, and fewer and fewer people are showing us how to truly see it. Every week I try to. If that is something you would like to be part of, you can join at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible: Thanks for reading.show more

There is a room in Málaga that was built... to be the closest thing on earth to standing inside heaven. It is called the camarín of the Virgin of Victory, and it is hidden at the top of a tower inside the Santuario de la Victoria. To reach it, you climb and the ascent is the entire point... The building you are climbing through was completed in 1700, and it was designed as a single argument made in stone. At the bottom lies a crypt: a black chamber crowded with white plaster skeletons, a meditation on death and the brevity of life. From there a staircase rises, and as you climb it the light grows stronger and the imagery changes from bones to saints. The architects of the time understood this ascent as the soul's own journey, the dark crypt as the stage of penitence, the staircase as the stage of spiritual progress, and the room at the very top as the final stage: the union of the soul with the divine. That room at the top is the camarín, and its dome is one of the most extraordinary interiors in Spain... Every surface is covered in white and gold plasterwork. There is no empty space anywhere. The Baroque called this horror vacui, the horror of the void: the conviction that a space meant to represent heaven should not contain a single bare patch of stone. Out of that plasterwork emerge angels, flowers, birds, and mirrors. The mirrors are not decoration alone. They catch the light pouring in through the windows of the drum and throw it around the chamber, so that the gold seems to move and the whole room appears to shimmer and breathe. This wonder was built by people who believed that if you wanted to show a human being what heaven might feel like, you did not describe it to them. You built a room, and you let them climb into it... -- -- -- 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

They started with 50. Now they say they’re 18,000... In 1996 there were fewer than 50 of them. Today, according to the organizers, up to 18,000 walked through Copenhagen. From Dronning Louises Bro to the Imam Ali Mosque. Look at the curve. This is how it happens. First a handful. Then a few hundred. Then it fills a bridge, a district, a capital. A little at a time, until it is no longer a little. And let me be fair, because fairness is the point. There is nothing strange about them holding this mourning procession. They have done it as part of their faith for more than a thousand years. It is theirs, and they believe in it. There is nothing strange about that at all. What should stop us is the other half. There is nothing strange about Europe allowing it either, and that is exactly the problem. Europe allows it because Europe has forgotten who it is. A people that remembers what it stands for does not need to ban anything, it simply knows where its own line runs. We have lost that. And so the issue was never them. The issue is us. Now look at what actually moved through the streets. Men in front. Women in the second row. That is not a detail, that is the whole point. It is a view of women set into a system and marched out into the public square, in a city where generations fought for women and men to stand as equals. The real question is not whether people may believe what they want. They may. The question is why our capital should cultivate a political law-religion that commemorates a 7th-century power struggle by dividing people by sex on Nørrebrogade. One of the organizers is the Imam Ali Mosque, repeatedly described as the Iranian regime’s extended arm in Denmark. The same regime that hangs women and young men from cranes. We are not importing culture. We are importing a system. And we let it grow, not because they are strong, but because we forgot why we were. First a little. Then a lot. Then too late.show more

We are already at war. Not with rifles or... tanks, but with replacement. This is conquest by other means, through the slow erasure of a people who no longer recognize they are being conquered. That is why I write—to remind my people that we are not living in peace, but in the midst of a war waged without banners. The invasion is not declared with armies but with flights and boats, birthrates and welfare rolls. It is demographic warfare, calculated, continuous, and increasingly irreversible. A people, and a civilization, does not need to be burned to the ground to fall. It only needs to be replaced. Throughout the Western world, we are witnessing not mere immigration but a deliberate population transformation, one that has been rationalized by moral cowardice and enforced by political elites who have long since abandoned the idea that their nations belong to their people. What you mock as conquest is already underway, and unlike the conquests of old, it comes with the full consent of those in power. But I do not write in surrender. I write as a warning, as an act of resistance. My writing is meant to exhort and to enliven, to reawaken what has been buried beneath shame and silence. It is a summons to remember, to reclaim, and to rebuild. We are in an existential struggle, not only for our land, but for our survival, and thus for the future itself. Those who sneer at the loss will one day find there is nothing left to sneer at. A people who forget that they exist will be replaced by those who do not. You may call this natural. So be it. Then let nature return, red in tooth and claw, and let the sons of Europe remember who they are.show more

Madain Saleh, also known as Al-Hijr, is a pre-Islamic... archaeological site located in the northwest of Saudi Arabia. It is one of the most important archaeological sites in the Middle East and was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008. Madain Saleh is a place of great historical and cultural significance, and it is a must-visit destination for anyone interested in the history and culture of the Arabian Peninsula. Madain Saleh was the second city of the Nabataean kingdom, which was established in 2nd Century BC. The Nabataeans were an Arab tribe who were known for their expertise in carving tombs and buildings out of rock. They were also skilled in agriculture, trade, and commerce. The Nabataean kingdom was centered in Petra, which is located in modern-day Jordan. Madain Saleh served as a strategic outpost for Nabataeans, and it was an important stop on the trade routes that connected the Arabian Peninsula with the Mediterranean world. Archaeological site of Madain Saleh covers an area of 13 square kilometers. It is located in a remote desert region, and it is surrounded by rocky mountains and valleys. The site contains around 130 tombs, which were carved out of the sandstone cliffs. The tombs are adorned with intricate carvings and inscriptions, which provide insights into the culture and religion of the Nabataeans. The most famous tomb at Madain Saleh is the Qasr Al-Farid, which means "the lonely castle." This tomb is located on a hilltop and is surrounded by a large courtyard. It is the largest tomb at the site, and it is considered to be one of the finest examples of Nabataean architecture. The tomb was never completed, and it is believed that it was abandoned after the death of the Nabataean king who commissioned it. Another important tomb at Madain Saleh is the Tomb of Lihyan son of Kuza. This tomb is located in the southern part of the site and is carved into a rock cliff. It features a large entrance hall, a central chamber, and a series of smaller rooms. The tomb is decorated with intricate carvings and inscriptions, which provide insights into the religious beliefs of Nabataeans. Madain Saleh is not just a site of tombs; it also contains a number of other important structures. These include the Al-Khuraymat and Al-Sabika temples, which were used for religious ceremonies and rituals. The site also contains a number of houses, wells, and cisterns, which provide insights into the daily lives of the Nabataeans. Madain Saleh was abandoned in the 3rd Century AD, after decline of the Nabataean kingdom. The site was rediscovered in the 19th Century by the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Since then, it has been studied by archaeologists from all over the world. The site is now managed by the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, which has carried out extensive restoration and preservation work. Madain Saleh is not just a site of historical and cultural significance; it is also a place of great natural beauty. The site is surrounded by rugged mountains and valleys, and it is home to a diverse range of flora and fauna. Visitors to the site can enjoy hiking and camping, as well as exploring the ancient ruins. Madain Saleh is a site of great historical and cultural significance, and it is a must-visit destination for anyone interested in the history and culture of the Arabian Peninsula. Ancient ruins at Madain Saleh provide a glimpse into the engineering and architectural skills of the Nabataeans, as well as their religious beliefs and cultural practices. However, as the site becomes an increasingly popular tourist destination, there are concerns about its preservation and the impact of tourism on the local environment. It is important that the Saudi government and local communities work together to ensure that the site is protected and that tourism is managed in a sustainable way. 🎥© Paris Verra #archaeohistoriesshow more

🌞 GM MAGA - Quick geography lesson, and a... swift bitch-slap for twisting the truth you lying sacks of shit. It was Ceuta — a tiny Spanish territory in North Africa that borders Morocco, and is separated from actual Spain by 20 MILES OF WATER. 50,000 mostly young Moroccan men crossed and 48,300 of them turned around and left (Trump leaves that part out because it doesn't fit his narrative). They never invaded Spain. They never invaded Spain. They never invaded Spain. They never even reached European mainland. But Trump & his lackeys saw an opening to sell a false narrative — THE INVASION OF SPAIN — pushing dozens of mislabeled videos claiming “this can happen here” to justify his waste of $110B+ to fund ICE. DONALD TRUMP IS THE GENERATOR OF FAKE NEWS. DONALD TRUMP IS THE GENERATOR OF FAKE NEWS. DONALD TRUMP IS THE GENERATOR OF FAKE NEWS. 🤥 Trump called it a “catastrophe” and an “invasion of a country.” 🤥 Vance blamed “radical left-wing policies.” 🤥 Stephen Miller and the machine looped the videos nonstop. 🤥 Elon compared it to World War Z. The footage was pure gold for the propaganda machine. This is how the FAKE NEWS MACHINE works: 🤥 Manufacture the crisis. 🤥 Sell it as an invasion. 🤥 Ignore the truth. 🤥 Double down THERE WAS NO INVASION OF SPAIN.show more

There has been a fortress on this rock since... at least the year 547. It is older than England, older than Islam and older than the Vikings who would eventually destroy it... This is Bamburgh, on the Northumberland coast, standing on volcanic rock 150 feet above the North Sea. The Britons had a stronghold here called Din Guarie, possibly the capital of the kingdom of Bernicia from around 420. In 547 an Anglian warlord named Ida took it, and that is the moment Bamburgh enters written history. Around the year 600 his grandson Æthelfrith gave the fort to his wife, Bebba. It became Bebbanburh, Bebba's stronghold, and eventually Bamburgh. The castle is named after a woman almost nobody remembers... It became the royal capital of Northumbria. Vikings destroyed it in 993. The Normans rebuilt it, and in 1464 the Earl of Warwick turned cannon on those walls and broke them, in what is usually described as the first time an English castle fell to artillery. It sat as a ruin for the next two hundred years, until a bishop's fortune turned it into a charity, with a free school and an infirmary running inside the walls. In 1894 the armaments magnate William Armstrong bought the wreck for £60,000, spent over a million rebuilding it, died before the work was finished, and left it to his family, who own it still. Nearly fifteen hundred years of kings, raiders and cannon fire, and people are still living in it...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

As I sit here in DC this week, we... are closer to something I was not sure I would ever see. I have been working in this industry since 2015. For most of those years, the defining feature of crypto in Washington was not policy. It was the absence of it. A gray zone where serious people built serious things under a constant cloud, never quite sure which rules applied or whether the ground would move beneath them. This week the CLARITY Act sits on the Senate calendar. A federal framework for digital asset market structure, the thing this industry has wanted for the better part of a decade, is closer than it has ever been. It is not law yet, and there are real hurdles left. But the distance between where we stood a few years ago and where we are sitting today is hard to put into words. I keep thinking about the work that got us here. Over the past year I watched Chainlink move from outside these conversations to inside them. Sergey at the White House for the signing of the GENIUS Act. The Department of Commerce putting government economic data onchain. Meetings with the SEC that became real interpretive guidance. Conversations with the lawmakers now writing the rules. None of that happens by accident. It happens because people keep showing up, year after year, and make the case in rooms where it is not yet obvious. And there is something fitting in it. The entire premise of what we build is verification. Making truth provable. Removing the question of what is real. The work here in DC is the same thing in a different form. Trading a decade of ambiguity for something the industry has never actually had. We are not at the finish line. But sitting here, it is hard not to feel the weight of it. The gray zone is ending. What comes next is something this industry has never had. Clarity.show more

This is a statue of the only man in... Troy who saw the trap. He tried to warn everyone, and this is what the gods did to him because of it... His name was Laocoön, a Trojan priest. When the Greek army vanished and left a giant wooden horse outside the city gates, all of Troy celebrated. Only Laocoön refused to believe it. He warned his people the horse was a trick and, to prove it was hollow, hurled his spear into its side. In Virgil's telling, he spoke a line that has outlasted almost everything else about Troy: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." He was right. The horse was packed with soldiers, and Troy was hours from destruction. This sculpture shows what he got for it. Two enormous sea serpents rise out of the sea and coil around him and his young sons, dragging all three down together. The father's whole body is knotted in the struggle, every muscle straining, his face locked in a scream. The gods wanted Troy to fall, and Laocoön was in the way. The Trojans watched him die in agony and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: they decided the gods were punishing him for attacking a holy gift. So they pulled the horse inside their own walls, and that night, Troy burned... The statue is called Laocoön and His Sons. It is the work of three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and dates to the Hellenistic period, making it well over two thousand years old. Buried for more than a thousand years, it was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo rushed across Rome to see it the day it was found. It has been called the single greatest depiction of human suffering in the history of art, but it endures because of what it is really about: the man who sees the truth, says it out loud, and is destroyed for being right while the crowd watches... It is one of the oldest patterns there is, and it has never stopped repeating. There is nothing new under the sun.show more

China's central bank has now bought gold for 19... months straight, the largest official buyer on earth. And this week, as gold broke 4,000 dollars, China's biggest banks moved to push ordinary Chinese out of leveraged gold trading, with at least one warning it will liquidate any position not closed by month-end. Both are true at once, and together they explain what this crash really is. Start with what is being banned, because the words matter. ICBC and a string of other banks are shutting down retail trading in what the Chinese themselves call paper gold, the margined, leveraged contracts where you bet on the price without ever owning a bar. Some banks lifted the margin requirement to 140 percent to choke the leverage off before closing the products outright. Physical gold, meanwhile, stays wide open. Coins, bars, savings plans, ETFs, all fine. It is only the paper, the leverage, the casino, that is being shut, the last step in a five-year retreat that the crash just finished. Officially this is about protecting small investors, and that part is real. The same kind of leverage wiped out a wave of Chinese retail in a 2020 commodity blowup. But set the ban beside what the state is doing and something larger comes into view. While its citizens are pushed out of the paper, the People's Bank of China has spent those same 19 months buying the physical metal, more than two thousand three hundred tonnes of it now, accumulating straight through a 28 percent crash that scared everyone else out. Beijing is not trading gold. It is hoarding it. That is the strategy in one frame. China looked at the two things both called gold, the paper bet and the physical bar, and made a choice no Western government would make. It is taking the metal for the state and closing the casino for everyone else. The reason sits in a single date. 2022, when Russia's reserves were frozen with a keystroke. That taught every country outside the Western system one lesson: dollars in an account can be switched off, gold in your own vault cannot. So China is building its monetary independence out of the one asset nobody can freeze, and it does not want that foundation in the hands of leveraged traders who panic-sell in a crash, or priced by a paper market it does not control. Watch this month and the two worlds split in real time. Western investors were forced out of their gold by margin calls and a rate scare. China's central bank bought that exact dip with both hands. One side treats gold as a trade. The other treats it as the floor under a currency. The West is selling paper gold and calling it a crash. China is buying physical gold and calling it a foundation. In ten years, only one of them will look like it understood what gold was for. The metal is already moving to that side.show more

🇺🇸 DALLAS IS ABOUT TO BECOME THE CAPITAL OF... THE AMERICA FIRST MOVEMENT! For the first time in party history, Republicans are holding a midterm convention. Not a debate stage. Not a press conference. A full blown convention, September 9th and 10th, right in the heart of Dallas. The Democrats aren't ready for this! Trump called it exactly what it is. "It has never been done before, and will be a truly Historic Event." Think about that for a second. Presidential conventions happen every four years like clockwork. Midterm conventions do not happen at all, because most parties do not have anything worth celebrating in the off year. The GOP just decided they do. RNC Chairman Joe Gruters is already calling it Trumpapalooza. That is not a typo. That is the energy level we are talking about. This is not just a rally. It is a two day showcase of the Great American Comeback. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. Falling oil prices while the administration denuclearizes Iran. A border that finally has a lock on the door. Trump is not asking Republicans to imagine the wins. He is putting them on a stage in Texas and pointing at them. And Texas is not a random choice. It is the epicenter of this year's fight for Congress, with Ken Paxton battling for Senate and multiple House seats hanging in the balance. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson called it exactly right, an event that will "energize our party, strengthen the conservative movement, and help build momentum." Now look across the aisle. Democrats floated the idea of their own midterm gathering. Then they quietly shelved it. No unifying message. No standout headliner. No comeback story to tell voters, because they do not have one. That is the difference in one sentence. Republicans are throwing a party because they have something to celebrate. Democrats are staying home because they do not. Midterms usually punish the party in power. Trump just decided to rewrite that rule in Texas, in front of the cameras, with the whole country watching. Buckle up. Trumpapalooza is coming, and the other side has nothing on the calendar to answer it with.show more

Not long ago, Turkey was running a neo-Ottoman project... across the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood was the tool. Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, the Gulf media wars. Western analysts called it one of the defining threats to the regional order. They were right! That era is over! It did not end through Western pressure. It ended because Saudi Arabia spent a decade building the economic, religious and diplomatic weight that made accommodation with Riyadh worth more to Ankara than confrontation. Investment. Mediation. Religious authority. Doors quietly closed. Soft power in its least glamorous form, and its most effective. I think we should be grateful for that. We rarely are. Turkey is now moving toward the Arab world, not away from it. On 7 August, in Mecca, Erdoğan, Mohammed bin Salman and Shehbaz Sharif signed a joint defence agreement: an attack on one is an attack on all three. It did not come from nowhere. Ankara joined a Riyadh-led maritime coalition in late July, one of fourteen founding members. The 2023 drone contract was Turkey's largest defence export deal at the time. This is the Middle East Western analysts spent fifteen years asking for. Two days before the signing, Steven A. Cook published a column in Foreign Policy arguing that strategic blunders have plagued Saudi Arabia's approach to the region. The verdict arrived before the ink was dry. Read it closely and it collapses. Cook says Riyadh has no strategy. Then he lists it: protect the economic transformation, avoid a wider war, lower tensions with Iran, stop armed factions from imposing facts by force, tie normalisation with Israel to a Palestinian state. That is not the absence of a strategy. That is a hierarchy of priorities. His real objection is that it is not his strategy- one that would have Saudi Arabia tolerate the STC, hold the UAE partnership regardless of conflicting aims, welcome an Israeli foothold in Somaliland, and stand as the front line against Iran. He says the Sanaa runway strike was unnecessary. In the same breath he concedes Mahan Air is tied to the IRGC, and that the Houthi delegation may have carried more than pistachios and carpets. He accepts the violation, then faults the attempt to stop it. He also assigns the strike to Riyadh. Saudi Arabia never claimed it. Yemen's internationally recognised government announced it. Then the pattern. Restraint is weakness. Action is recklessness. De-escalation is buying calm. Interdiction is provocation. Cook recommends retreat, then cites the retreat as proof there is no strategy. And he blames Riyadh for the Houthi escalation - as if the Houthis had not been firing at Saudi cities for years, as if Iran's proxy project began this July. A possible Saudi miscalculation does not absolve Iran and the Houthis of their own violence! Underneath all of it sits the oldest false narrative in the file: that Saudi Arabia is weak. Remember Yemen. The Kingdom had the capability and the intent to end the Houthi project militarily. What constrained it was Western political pressure in the name of human rights - war powers votes, suspended munitions, withdrawn targeting support. Riyadh was told to stop. It stopped. Then it absorbed years of missiles and drones on its airports, its cities and its oil infrastructure while holding a truce it was never legally obliged to hold! You can argue the restrictions were right. You cannot impose them, watch the adversary rearm through the corridor you protected, and then call the result a Saudi failure. Restraint imposed by allies is not incapacity. Saudi Arabia is not the architect of this crisis. It is the state repeatedly asked to carry the cost of other people's strategies - and it is now building, with Ankara and Islamabad, an architecture that reduces its need to. The criticism came before the agreement was a week old. That says less about Saudi strategy than about how hard it is for some analysts to read an order they no longer write.show more

SPAIN IS BEING OVERRUN AND SANCHEZ OWNS THIS🚨 Today,... thousands of migrants stormed the border into Ceuta from Morocco. This did not come out of nowhere, Pedro Sanchez’s government spent months pushing a massive regularisation scheme that was supposed to cover around 500,000 illegal migrants where over a million applied. Meanwhile to make the situation worse, temporary work permits have already been handed out to hundreds of thousands while applications are processed. The message the Sanchez government sent is clear, Spain will regularise large numbers of people who entered or stayed illegally. When a government signals that illegal presence can lead to papers, more people will obviously come, it’s not rocket science to figure it out. Sanchez and his ministers own the policy choices that created the incentives and the weakened deterrence. They own the repeated preference for regularisation and “integration” rhetoric over firm border control and rapid returns. They own the gap between talking about returns and the reality of overloaded facilities and uncontrolled crossings at Ceuta. Two things need to happen ASAP: ▪️Sanchez resigns, a government that promises pathways that function as magnets, then watches the border collapse under the resulting pressure, has lost the authority to continue ▪️New leadership must prioritise the deportation of every person who entered or remains illegally, starting with those who crossed today and those already in the system without legal basis. Borders that are not enforced stop being borders Spain is a sovereign country but sovereignty requires control of who enters and who stays. What happened in Ceuta today is the predictable result of policies that prioritised regularisation over enforcement. Responsibility sits with the government that designed and defended those policies.show more

The Circle 🐜 Nobody told the ant about the... circle. That, as far as anyone can tell, is the whole problem. A researcher named Kostowski – this was in the early 1970s, at a laboratory in Warsaw that smelled permanently of formaldehyde and institutional coffee – discovered quite by accident that if you draw a continuous line around an ant using a felt-tip pen, the ant will not cross it. It will walk right up to the line, pause with what appears to be genuine philosophical unease, and turn back. It will do this indefinitely. For hours. Sometimes for days. The ant is not stupid. Let’s be clear about that. The creature you are looking at in this photograph – this tiny, improbable machine of chitin and chemical signals, this six-legged marvel that can carry fifty times its own body weight and navigate by polarized light – has a brain roughly the size of a pinhead, and yet that brain contains approximately 250,000 neurons dedicated entirely to making sense of the world. It has survived as a species for 130 million years. It watched the dinosaurs arrive, flourish, and disappear, and then went back to work. And yet here it is. Trapped by a drawing. The reason is chemistry, not cognition. Ants navigate by pheromones – volatile chemical compounds that their legs read like a blind man reads braille. When they encounter the solvent in a felt-tip pen, something in their nervous system fires an alarm. The signal says: boundary. The signal says: edge of the known world. And the ant, loyal to its chemistry in the way that all of us are loyal to ours, obeys. This is the part that stays with you if you think about it too long. The ant’s prison has no walls. No bars. No lock. It is made entirely of information – a chemical whisper laid down by a felt-tip marker – and the ant cannot see past it, because it has no framework for doing so. The circle is not a circle to the ant. The circle is simply: where the world ends. I find myself thinking about this more than is probably healthy. We are, most of us, walking around inside our own circles. They were drawn for us gradually, by parents and teachers and early disappointments, by the limits of what we saw done and the boundaries of what we were told was possible. We bump up against them occasionally – in those moments when a job offer from another city seems too frightening, or a new idea feels somehow presumptuous – and we turn back. Not because anything is stopping us. Because the world, as far as we can tell, simply ends there. The ant in the photograph is walking the inner edge of its circle with a kind of purposeful calm that is almost admirable. It has not given up. It is still looking. It is still moving. It simply cannot conceive of a direction that leads out. Kostowski, for what it’s worth, eventually just picked the ant up and moved it. Sometimes that’s what it takes. Gandalv / Gandalvshow more

It doesn't take understanding rocket science to acknowledge that... one group isn't in any mood to give up what it is up to and it is the Kuki community. The Kukis are preparing and assembling weapons to attack the Meiteis and right under the watch of GoM and GoI. With the sole objective of inflicting a genocide on the indigenous Meitei people, they are committed to launching unabated attacks on the Meiteis. The central government is pretending as though Manipur and the Meiteis do not exist at all. The PM is so keen in resolving the Ukraine crisis while shirking his responsibilities towards bringing an end to the Manipur fiasco. He is cosying up to a nation that has never failed to offend Bharata, what Ukraine is. But he has maintained a studied silence on the escalated violence and bloodshed that has gripped the Northeastern border state for more than 16 months now. None from the Saffron regime is saying anything at all about the Manipur crisis, let alone actuating measures for its lasting settlement. On top of that, the mainstream media is pushing its partisan perspective of the crisis that falsely projects the Meiteis as the aggressors. #SaveMeiteis #SaveManipur #ManipurFightsBack #MeiteisUnderAttack #KukiWarCrimesshow more

As a gynecologist, one of the most frequently asked... questions is about the ''hymen''. The hymen is not a structure located deep inside the vagina. It is a thin, flexible fold of tissue situated very close to the vaginal opening, anatomically at the entrance of the vaginal canal. It is typically found about 1–2 cm inside the vaginal opening, but in many women, it is almost at the surface. Therefore, the common belief that it is located deep inside is incorrect. One of the most important points is this: The hymen is not a closed membrane. It naturally has openings that allow menstrual blood to pass. Additionally, the structure of the hymen varies from person to person. Its thickness, elasticity, and shape are not standard. In some women, it may be very thin and elastic, while in others, it may be minimal or barely noticeable. This is completely a normal anatomical variation. A common misconception is that changes in the hymen occur only due to sexual intercourse. In reality, factors such as certain physical activities or tampon use can also lead to stretching or changes in this tissue. Therefore, the hymen is not a reliable indicator of a person’s sexual history or “virginity.” In summary, the hymen is a small and variable anatomical structure. The meanings attributed to it are largely shaped by sociocultural beliefs rather than medical facts.show more