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\n Spain has held Melilla and Ceuta since the 15th and 16th centuries respectively, despite being pushed out of the rest of north Africa over the years. Francisco Franco launched the Spanish civil war from Ceuta in 1936, having flown there from the Canary Islands where he was Spain\u2019s military commander. <\/p>\n The two enclaves remain an open sore in relations between Spain and Morocco, explains Parvati Nair<\/a>, a professor of Hispanic, cultural and migration studies at Queen Mary University of London. And the events of July 30 will not have made things any easier \u2013 Ceuta\u2019s authorities have already accused its neighbour of deliberately loosening border controls on its side, something Morocco denies.<\/p>\n Nair charts the controversial history of Ceuta and Melilla as colonial hangovers which now play a key \u2013 and contested \u2013 role in the enforcement of Europe\u2019s southern border.<\/p>\n \n This role, and the ability of the European Union generally to control its borders, are now the subject of intense debate for the EU\u2019s 27 member states. An emergency video conference was held on August 4, prompted by a letter signed by 22 members including Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Denmark, which made a number of claims about shortcomings in EU border controls. <\/p>\n One was that domestic policies of countries such as Spain acted as \u201cpull factors\u201d for irregular migrants. Another was that the movement of such migrants through EU countries is being facilitated by the Schengen agreement, which provides for free movement of people through member countries. Karla Zeravcic and Marco Mauer, researchers at the European University Institute, point to problems with these assumptions<\/a> as they relate to EU law.<\/p>\n \n The UN has reported that in the 300 days since the ceasefire in Gaza came into force last October, at least 300 children have been killed. It\u2019s a shocking statistic which gives urgency to the latest roadmap to peace unveiled by the US president, Donald Trump, at the end of July.<\/p>\n But that deal now looks to be dead in the water after Israel\u2019s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his country would not withdraw its troops from the Palestinian enclave until Hamas is completely disarmed. Hamas has already said it will not disarm until Israel withdraws its military. So it\u2019s stalemate \u2013 once again.<\/p>\n This was not unexpected, writes Julie Norman<\/a>, whose book Gaza: The Dream and the Nightmare \u2013 co-authored with American political scientist Maia Carter Hallward \u2013 charts the enclave\u2019s history and chronicles the devastation of the past three years of war. Norman has just returned from a month of fieldwork in the West Bank, where settler violence and land seizures are spiralling.<\/p>\n She believes that events in Gaza and the West Bank are \u201cinextricably linked\u201d \u2013 and that the likelihood of any peace deal in Gaza is far outweighed by the very real prospect of out-and-out conflict in the other, much larger Palestinian territory.<\/p>\n \n In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and the Russian president\u2019s commissioner for children\u2019s rights, for the crime of unlawful deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.<\/p>\n Now, a disturbing report prepared for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has revealed the forcible indoctrination and militarisation of these children<\/a>, and also children in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.<\/p>\n The report\u2019s authors, Stefan Wolff, El\u012bna \u0160teinerte and Herv\u00e9 Ascensio, found detailed and distressing evidence of children being force-fed propaganda and given military-style training in schools which were deliberately preparing them to fight against their own country. This, they stress, is a crime under the Geneva Convention.<\/p>\n \n It was revealed at the end of June that Donald Trump made US$2.2 billion (\u00a31.63 billion) in the first year of his second presidential term. Much of this reportedly came through his investments in cryptocurrency, including the $TRUMP meme coin he launched days before his inauguration, which has since lost much of its value.<\/p>\n The revelations prompted much discussion about the rights and wrongs of a president doing business while in office. Historian Benjamin Quail, of Queen\u2019s University Belfast, gives us a rundown of the financial fortunes<\/a> of previous inhabitants of the White House, and finds that while it\u2019s not unusual for a president to make a fortune after leaving office, Trump\u2019s amassing of such a fortune as president is without precedent.<\/p>\n
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\n How the Ceuta border crossing incident immediately played into the hands of Spain\u2019s far right<\/a>
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\n Ceuta and Melilla: how the colonial legacies of these cities have shaped migration in the region<\/a>
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\n Ceuta migrant crossings: are calls for stronger border controls from 22 member states in line with EU law?<\/a>
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\nWest Bank violence, Gaza famine<\/h2>\n
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\n How Israeli conduct in the West Bank could derail Donald Trump\u2019s latest peace plan for Gaza<\/a>
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\nStolen childhood<\/h2>\n
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\n We investigated Russia\u2019s military indoctrination of Ukrainian children in occupied territories \u2013 what we found was more shocking than we could have imagined<\/a>
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\nDonald Trump\u2019s midas touch<\/h2>\n
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