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
Ceuta, a tiny Spanish autonomous city on the North African coast, occupies one of the most geopolitically complex spots on Earth. Perched directly across the Strait of Gibraltar and sharing a 6.4-kilometer (4-mile) land border with Morocco, Ceuta—along with its sister city Melilla—represents the only physical land border between the European Union and the African … Read more
On 31 July 2026, Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni said Spain should be excluded from the Schengen area after tens of thousands of people crossed into Ceuta from Morocco. She called the images shocking and said Italy was ready to act, including by suspending the Schengen agreement with Spain. Searches for “Schengen” spiked immediately. The … 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
Look at a map of Spain and you will not find it. Look at a map of Morocco and you will find a small notch on the northern coast that Morocco does not control: Ceuta Spain. That notch is Ceuta: a Spanish city of about 85,000 people sitting on the African continent, roughly 14 kilometres … 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
Update, July 27, 2026: The manhunt is over. Police shot and killed suspect Abdul Ballout on Sunday evening after he charged at officers with a bladed weapon. The original reporting on the attack itself remains below; the “How Did the Manhunt End?” section covers what’s new. A van tore through the crowd at Berlin’s Christopher … Read more
Russia’s most advanced fighter jet just crashed outside its own capital — and Russia’s own military bloggers are the ones suggesting Russia shot it down. Here’s what actually happened to the Su-57 on July 23, 2026, and why the explanation matters so much. What Happened to Russia’s Su-57 on July 23? Around 1:50 p.m. local … Read more