🚨🇪🇸 Spain - Ceuta & Melilla It’s becoming increasingly obvious - that 50,000 Moroccan Men aren’t simply there to integrate or just claim Spanish State Benefits. They are there to take over & this should terrify everyone.

Detonations were reportedly heard near the Moroccan side of the Melilla border, possibly as Moroccan security forces attempted to disperse people gathering for an illegal crossing into Melilla.

US congressional committee describes Ceuta, Melilla as « located in Moroccan Territory » / What happened in Ceuta was no accident Look closely. Tens of thousands surge the border in a coordinated wave. Chaos engineered on the Spanish side of the Strait of Gibraltar. And right on cue, the US Congress slips this into a committee report: “The Committee notes that the Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory and remain the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim. The Committee supports efforts by the Secretary of State to encourage diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain on the future status of Ceuta and Melilla.” Coincidence? Please. This was planned. The United States, almost certainly with Israeli fingerprints all over it, is playing the long game. Morocco is already the reliable “Zionist” partner in North Africa—Abraham Accords, military cooperation, intelligence sharing. Hand Ceuta and Melilla over, or at least put their status on the negotiating table under US pressure, and suddenly Washington has a new lever on the Strait of Gibraltar. Think about it. The Strait is one of the world’s most critical chokepoints. Control it—directly or through a compliant Morocco—and you can squeeze Mediterranean shipping, project power into Africa and Europe, and yes, eventually impose tolls or “security fees” on every vessel that passes. Another US-controlled gate, just like they tried in the Middle East, just like they dream of in the South China Sea. Spain is being softened up. Europe is being destabilized with migration waves. The same playbook: create the crisis, then offer the “solution” that advances American (and Israeli) strategic interests. All this was planned. Be informed. Not entertained.

Historical context is important. Ceuta and Melilla became part of the Spanish Crown centuries before the modern Moroccan state existed. Whatever one’s view of their present status, the history is rather more nuanced than a single tweet suggests.

My husband and I drive across Europe between Ireland and Finland four times per year. After witnessing the invasion of Ceuta and Melilla I would gladly sit at each border crossing (nine in total) and wait in a queue to show my passport if it meant Europe's borders were secure.

2026, day 235 Good morning from Asia. ‘Iran’s Top Politicians Urge an End to the War’ (WSJ); ‘Tehran says US sanctions ‘declaration of war' on all nations’ (AJ); ‘Iran says any country joining new US sanctions would be ‘considered an enemy’’ (AFP); ‘Iranian hackers shut down UK power plant’ (Telegraph); ‘Iran grants permission for a number of Iraqi oil tankers to pass through Hormuz’ (Reuters); ‘Saudis Shuttle Oil North On Tankers To Evade Houthis’ (BBG); ‘Israel must stop Erdogan's military expansion before Turkey reaches its borders - opinion’ (JPost); ‘Katz says Israel directly warned 'highest levels' of Syrian regime before giving IDF green light to strike air base’ (ToI); ‘US envoy suggests Israeli strike in Syria was election ploy aimed at 'baiting' Turkey into clash’ (ToI); ‘Time to question Israel’s warnings of a new Sunni axis’ (Ynet); ‘On anniversary of gas attack, Syria asks to join anti-chemical weapons partnership’ (ToI); ‘Putin says Ukraine opened 'Pandora's box' with strikes on economic targets’ (Reuters); ‘Germany plans a €12B missile program to deter Putin’ (Politico); ‘Macron pledges air defence as 13 killed in Russia, Ukraine strikes’ (Euractiv); ‘Spain rejects Morocco's call for talks on Ceuta and Melilla sovereignty’ (Euronews); ‘Chinese research centre near MoD site is ‘enormous concern’, says ex-spy chief’ (Telegraph); ‘How Pacific nations walk a tightrope between Western security and Chinese trade’ (SCMP); ‘Mainland Chinese research ship spotted near Taiwan’s largest naval base’ (SCMP); ‘Why China may have little to lose as ‘weakened’ Trump seeks North Korea talks’ (SCMP); ‘North Korea says record-high Japan defense budget would risk ‘turmoil’’ (AFP); ‘China's rise lays bare the aging of the U.S.-Japan alliance’ (Nikkei Asia) - “Partnership approaching 75th year faces challenges in military capacity, strategic focus”; ‘Lula turns to Donald Trump as unlikely ally in Brazil’s clash with Marco Rubio’ (FT); ‘Hit by Trump tariffs, Quebec loses appetite for quick separation from Canada’ (Reuters); ‘U.S.-sanctioned ICC head warns against ‘demise of international rule of law’’ (AFP); In geoeconomics, ‘Global oil inventories on the decline again amid Hormuz stalemate’ (Nikkei Asia); ‘China's NewNew Shipping Line Pushes Deeper Into Arctic With First Murmansk Container Run’ (gCaptain); ‘Panama Canal Draught Restrictions Set to Add to Congestion Chaos’ (The Loadstar); ‘US Sanctions Fishing Fleet Accused of Shipping Cocaine to Mexico’ (BBG); ‘U.S. Imposes 50% Tariffs on Some Canadian Goods After Last-Ditch Talks Fail’ (WSJ); 'Mark Carney says Canada is now ‘at war’ with US over trade’ (FT); ‘Threat to Quebec's French language, identity key reason Carney ends trade talks with Trump’ (Montreal Gazette); ‘U.S. Economy Could Feel the Sting From Trade War With Canada’ (NYT); ‘Canada sets retaliatory tariffs in response to 50% U.S. levies as trade talks fail’ (WaPo); ‘As premiers rally behind Carney in trade dispute, Alberta’s Smith questions retaliation plan’ (Globe and Mail); ‘Things are about to get verrrrrry ugly: The pain will be felt on both sides of the border’ (National Post); ‘Nvidia Is Spending $6 Billion to Build a Powerful U.S. Alternative to Chinese AI’ (WSJ); In politics, ‘Rising data center backlash shakes up midterm races’ (The Hill); ‘Federal judge rules against Trump’s 75-country visa ban’ (The Hill); ‘Trump: I’ll be impeached if I lose the midterms’ (Telegraph) - “US president warns Republicans they will ‘lose everything’ if Democrats take control of Congress”; ‘Burnham to send ‘mansion tax police’ to assess home values’ (Telegraph); ‘Fedorov decries corruption in Defense Ministry, doubles down on calls for elections’ (Kyiv Independent); In markets, ‘Oil markets are tuning out Trump's "truths"’ (Axios); ‘The Bank of England is costing the taxpayer billions. It must stop’ (Telegraph)

I am the Director of Managed Migration for the European Union. Sit. I have twenty minutes before lunch, and I intend to spend them correcting you, because someone should, and it is plainly not going to be the people who raised you. You called it an invasion. You called it a wave. You called it a flood. You reach for these words because they fit in one hand, and one hand is all you were given. We do not use words that fit in one hand. We use "irregular arrivals event." It requires both hands, a footnote, and a working group, and that is exactly the point. A word you can hold is a word you might act on. We have spent seventy years making certain there are none of those left. I do not blame you. You were raised on nations. We outgrew nations. We are a directive with a flag. Let me explain the desk slowly, in the register one reserves for the very young. The fund is called AMIF. Nearly 10 billion euros, since topped toward 10.94. It carries four objectives, and I will ask you to hold two of them at once, though I keep my expectations low. One is asylum and integration. Another, same fund, same page, same auditor, is countering irregular migration and ensuring effective return. The euro that buys the blanket and the euro that buys the fence are drawn from the same column. When you ask which side I am on, you are asking me to prefer one of my own pockets. It is an Anglo-Saxon question. I forgive it. You imagine the two sides fight. How charming. They reconcile, quarterly, over a very good lunch. Your Prime Minister campaigns to keep them out. His opponents campaign to let them in. His opponents would do precisely as he does. Both instruct this desk. Both sign the same appropriation. In thirty years I have not once been asked to change the letterhead, only the tie of the man at the podium. Now, the growth, which is the part I permit myself to enjoy. Frontex opened in 2005 on roughly the budget of a provincial parking authority. By 2024 it stood at 922 million euros. By 2025, about 1.12 billion. It is 187 times larger. Name me one institution that grew 187 times while never once being credited with ending the thing it manages. You cannot, because there is not one, and the Commission has proposed 11.2 billion more, because a desk that solves its file is a desk one closes, and we do not close desks. We are European. We retire them at 63 with a pension and a small ceremony. You wanted us to solve it. Consider, for once, what you were asking. You were asking a man to defund his own lunch. You brought numbers. You people worship a clean number. Very well. In 2024 the official count on the route to the Spanish islands was 1,142 dead. A monitoring group put the Atlantic figure at 9,757 for the same year, roughly nine times higher, including, they say, some 1,538 children. Two methodologies. I keep the smaller book. I stamp the larger one unverified. Even the keepers of the small book write across the top that it is a floor, that most of the drowned are never recorded at all. I file the floor and present it as the ceiling. You would call that a lie. We call it methodology, and methodology is the oldest art on this continent. We were forging provenance while yours was still a rumour with a coastline. We are exquisitely precise when precision flatters us. In 2021 the Libyan coast guard, which we train and equip, returned 32,425 people to Libya. Those we can count to the individual. Yet of 61.2 million euros earmarked for that programme, investigators traced barely 34 million. Some 27 million, about 44 percent, is simply nowhere. A machine that can number 32,425 human beings to the person cannot locate half of its own money. Sit with which of the two we chose to keep exact. You will ask whether we watch what becomes of them. We do not. Our own leaked report concedes it: our staff may not set foot on Libyan soil, so we cannot monitor the coast guard we pay. We write the cheque and we admire the horizon. A United Nations mission found reasonable grounds to believe crimes against humanity, murder, torture, enslavement, were committed against migrants in those centres. A member of that mission said European support "aided and abetted" those crimes, and added, in the same breath, "we're not saying that the EU and its member states have committed these crimes." I live inside that comma. It is the most comfortable room in Brussels. The rescuers, I concede, are the honest party. They pull people from the water. The case built to prove them smugglers collapsed in a Sicilian court in 2024, dismissed, no crime, because the people they saved had entered lawfully. I confess a small grief. An acquittal is nearly impossible to file in the threat column, and the threat column is where the money sleeps. And your courts. You wave them at me like a diploma. The very human-rights court in Strasbourg that blessed the Melilla pushback on grounds of the migrant's "own culpable conduct" later condemned the identical practice at Evros. Same bench. Opposite verdicts. I cite whichever suits the morning. None of that is a defect. It is a menu, and Europe has always understood that civilisation is the art of the menu. I will tell you where that court sits, since you enjoy the pageantry. It sits in Strasbourg. Once a month we relocate the entire European Parliament from Brussels to Strasbourg and back, at an expense no living person will defend, because a treaty said so and we do not reopen treaties. If you can grasp why we do that, you can grasp why the border works exactly as it does. If you cannot, you were never ready for the border, and I say that gently. At Pylos a European surveillance plane spotted an overloaded trawler, filed its alert, and more than 600 people drowned inside a rescue zone while a coast-guard vessel watched for some fifteen hours. Seventeen officers now face prosecution, charged, I remind you, never convicted. In a leaked note from another operation someone wrote that the aircraft were withdrawn "so as not to be a witness." I do not defend the sentence. I admire its economy. The instinct to see less is the only instinct in this building that has ever come in under budget. So do not call it a crisis. A crisis is unbudgeted, and unbudgeted is the one thing we are not. On the last night at the breakwater at least 57 people drowned at Tarajal, and some of them were children, and by morning I had entered each of them under interceptions, arrivals, and returns, the only three drawers I own. It was not an invasion. It was not a wave. It was a delivery. It was managed. And it was, if I may say so, exceptionally well documented. You may go. The working group convenes in September.