On 14 August 2026 President Donald Trump stated he would “pretty soon” declare the Strait of Hormuz a territory of the United States. Four days later he posted a map on Truth Social circling the vital waterway and labeling it “NEW U.S. Territory.” He simultaneously asserted that the strait is “open and operating” and that … Read more
Is the Strait of Hormuz Open Today? Short answer for today is here. Source: Straits The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed or severely restricted to normal shipping. As of the latest data (21–22 August 2026), this is approximately Day 174 of the disruption that began on 28 February 2026. Daily commercial transits are running … Read more
Just before 4am on Tuesday 11 August 2026, German federal police confirmed a drone at the southern perimeter fence of Hannover Airport — the second German airport drone incident in a week. Runways closed and reopened intermittently for the next 90 minutes. Six passenger flights left late. A cargo plane inbound from Paris was diverted … Read more
A drone carrying professional-grade explosives landed near the runway of one of Europe’s busiest cargo airports this week, next to a Ukrainian military transport plane. The Leipzig airport drone attack, as German officials are now treating it, has an interior minister describing an unprecedented escalation. Nobody has publicly named who sent it, but almost everyone … Read more
On Wednesday 5 August 2026, oil traders got two pieces of news within hours of each other. The first was good: the US, Iran and Oman were reportedly close to a 60-day deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The second undid most of the relief: Yemen’s Houthis said they had just attacked a Saudi … Read more
The Ceuta crisis looked like a story about a fence, a court ruling and a smuggling network. Underneath it sits a much older and much bigger question: who governs a stretch of desert on the Atlantic coast that Spain walked away from fifty years ago. Western Sahara rarely makes headlines on its own — the … Read more
The name keeps appearing in headlines with no explanation attached. Trump’s Board of Peace announced a deal. The Board of Peace says Hamas will disarm. A Board of Peace official confirmed the terms. Almost nobody stops to say what it is — and the answer is genuinely unusual. It is a transitional government for Gaza, … Read more
On 30 July 2026, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that his Board of Peace had reached a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. A senior Hamas official confirmed to the BBC that the group had agreed. It is the first time in the conflict that … Read more
In July 2026, Spain did two opposite things on the same fourteen-kilometre stretch of water. On 15 July, the fence at the Gibraltar frontier came down. Passport checks on the land border ended, and around 15,000 workers began crossing daily between La Línea and the Rock without stopping. Spanish officials called it the removal of … Read more
Updated 8 August 2026: the confirmed death toll has risen to at least 100, Spain and Italy are locked in a genuine diplomatic standoff over Italy’s continued border checks, and a separate crisis has emerged over unaccompanied migrant children still in Ceuta. On 30 and 31 July 2026, tens of thousands of people crossed one … Read more