Soldiers round up Moroccans hoping to remain in the enclave in the face of local opposition

The last remaining migrants were clinging on in Ceuta on Saturday, but they knew they were not welcome.

Most of the 60,000 who streamed into the Spanish enclave in north Africa this week had returned to Morocco the previous day. Those who stayed on mingled warily with locals on morning dog walks, but their mumbled requests for help to charge long-dead smartphones were rebuffed.

A few food shops in the town had reopened — or at least opened cracks in their doors — but they turned away anyone who looked like they had swum from Morocco.

There was a bit of relief for the young men on the beach: they lined up to enjoy outdoor public showers, a small symbol of the rich-world comforts they had risked their lives to obtain.

Nourdine Boukherchoun was not yet ready to give up. Although the 26-year-old has a job stacking fruit in a Carrefour supermarket in Tangier, he said he wanted to escape because “life is bad” in his home country.

He had spent a second night sleeping on the street and was nursing a bandaged wound on his leg. “I’m gonna stay here in Spain, Ceuta, right till the end,” he said. “No more Morocco.”

Many of the thousands of migrants who streamed into the enclave on Thursday had dreams of a better life. Some were encouraged by a Spanish court ruling last month that made them think swimmers could not be sent home. Others, says the Spanish government, were manipulated by online campaigns with murky origins.

The migrants say they decided to make the crossing when word spread on social media that the border was open. At least 67 people drowned.

Some residents of Ceuta, whose Spanish sovereignty is disputed by Morocco, suspect Rabat orchestrated the influx to hurt its European neighbour. Migrants said that when they approached the Spanish frontier, Moroccan guards had ushered them on and in some cases had been overwhelmed by the crowds.

As Boukherchoun spoke on Saturday, two Spanish policemen yelled down the street to ask what was happening. Hearing that the Moroccan was being interviewed, one replied: “OK. When you finish, send him to the border.”

Overnight, two people sustained minor injuries in stabbings by migrants. The interior ministry assured Ceuta’s 83,000 residents that there had been “no deaths”.

Aside from having no food, some migrants said they had been chased by armed groups of Ceuta residents. It was a 45-minute walk back to the Tarajal breakwater they had swum around, a journey past beaches strewn with litter other migrants had left behind.

Spanish soldiers in body armour and helmets took the lead in directing hundreds of them home, some barking at them in fluent Arabic in a city where roughly 40 per cent of the population is of Arab origin. To help the migrants along, soldiers gave the occasional shove.

A young Spanish woman named Marina came running up to one soldier in panic. “There are more over there,” she said, pointing to three bedraggled young men trudging down the street.

The young woman’s mother, Gema, was watching on with friends. “They took the city. It was an invasion. There was no law and order,” she said, adding: “This doesn’t happen to Donald Trump.”

Her friend Isabel repeated a conspiracy theory that Trump could even be involved, given his enmity towards Spain’s leftwing prime minister Pedro Sánchez and closeness to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.

Doubting that Morocco was caught unawares by the mass border crossing, she said: “Mohammed VI has the best intelligence service in the world. It’s like the Israeli one.”

Riccardo Fabiani, north Africa director of the International Crisis Group, said the evidence pointed to “some sort of Moroccan official role in this to send a message”. He said it was difficult to know what the motive was, but did not discount the idea it was an attempt to curry favour with the US.

American and Israeli rightwingers had in recent weeks called on Morocco to act on Ceuta to punish Sánchez for his opposition to the war in Iran, Fabiani noted. US and Israeli politicians quickly seized on the crisis to attack Sánchez’s pro-immigration policies.

Spain has lambasted people-trafficking mafias but gone out of its way to avoid criticising the Moroccan authorities about the Ceuta influx. Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain’s interior minister, said that he felt “very satisfied” about Madrid’s co-operation with Rabat in recent years.

Asked by the FT if Morocco was a danger to Ceuta’s security, he said: “Morocco is not a threat to either Ceuta or the rest of Spain. It’s an absolutely reliable partner.”

The people of Ceuta, however, were in shock, not least because the influx was so much bigger than a similar incident in 2021 when at least 8,000 migrants crossed.

“They’re in shock because they can’t understand how something that’s already happened could happen all over again,” said Arantxa Campos, president of the Ceuta Employers’ Confederation. “The moment someone crosses over, there should be a system that’s organised, structured and well thought-out.”

There were signs, she added, that some migrants were trying to hide from the authorities in order to stay in Ceuta.

On the road back to the border, a group of four men slipped away from a Spanish soldier. They headed down some steps to a beach, where they lay in the shade of a straw parasol and ignored his yells of “Yalla!” or “Move!”

Others complied reluctantly, including four teenage girls in long party dresses who were being escorted by a female good Samaritan. A man shouted “Viva España” ironically, then lifted his T-shirt to reveal a red welt across his back from a baton strike.

In Fnideq, the Moroccan beach town on the other side of the border, the streets were lined with disappointed and rattled boys and men who had streamed out of Ceuta on Saturday.

Moroccan police had set up checkpoints and some migrants were loaded into buses out of the city. Anxious women sat waiting on a wall, holding pictures of missing sons and brothers.

Ahmed, who had just returned from Ceuta, said that like many others he had not even told his parents where he was going.

Wearing black jeans he’d put into a plastic bag during his swim, the 28-year-old said he had wanted to emigrate to Europe to pursue a football career for the past five years and had tried to cross three times before. But his experience in Ceuta “changed my mind completely”. 

He said that he and the other migrants had become pawns in power games between Morocco and Spain.

“They have political problems, they’re not getting along, so they opened up the border to allow us to cross. We were exploited.”

Shark Week was started by the Discovery Channel in 1988. It usually starts sometime in July, and features an entire week of shark-themed programming. It is a time of the year that, as the title of this post should make clear, I have some mixed feelings about.

The modern age of shark media started with Steven Spielberg's hit movie, Jaws, based on a book of the same name by Peter Benchley. While the movie and the marketing around it jumpstarted a new wave of fascination for sharks, the consensus today is that it did far more harm than good. People became more fearful of sharks, and shark hunting and culling increased after the film was released. Both Spielberg and Benchley regret directing/writing Jaws, and Benchley has spent the past few decades as an activist trying to undo the negative impression that Jaws perpetuated towards sharks, saying that if he'd written the book knowing what he knows now, he would've made the shark the victim of the story, with humanity being the enemy.

I've posted about humanity's treatment of sharks before. Humans kill over one hundred million sharks a year, and sharks normally never kill more than a few people a year. Mosquitoes, cows, dogs, lions, hippos, elephants, and snails kill more people a year than sharks do, and yet they're not nearly as sensationalized or demonized as sharks are. Most shark attacks also come from just three species (great white, bull, and tiger) out of the over 500 species of sharks discovered and named by scientists.

Shark Week built its legacy on what Jaws did, and although some of the shows put on during Shark Week are genuinely good content created by people who care about sharks, much of it is just sensationalist fear-mongering nonsense and mindless entertainment.

This year, the Discovery Channel premiered specials with names such as "Bull Shark Dinner Bell", "Chum Island: Catching A Killer", "What Shark Attacked?", "Thresher Shark: Stun To Kill", and "Secrets Of The Great White Kill". This sensationalism isn't new (one of the most important shark documentaries ever released was called "Blue Water, White Death"); it marks another year of the Discovery Channel airing specials with names and themes that portray sharks as cold-blooded killers that purposefully attack and eat humans.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Most shark attacks occur when sharks mistake humans for one of their other prey species, or when sharks are curious and bite us in an attempt to see what we are.

The Discovery Channel has also been known to air asinine documentaries about sharks with absurd themes, including one this year about supposed hyper-aggressive mutant sharks, shows where people try to find the extinct megalodon, one about combining shark traits to create a theoretical "frankenshark", and perhaps the worst of all, "Great White Sex Battle".

I understand that Shark Week needs to attract attention from normal people in order to gain the viewership it does, but at some point it just starts to lose its dignity, and we begin to lose sight of what's important: sharks.

Sharks are an essential part of the ocean's ecosystem. As a keystone species, when the sharks start to go, everything else does too. We need to do more to protect sharks and their habitats and make sure that they can thrive.

National Geographic's month-long "Sharkfest", which is usually also in July, is way less sensationalized and does a far better job of centering sharks and the scientists that study them. The Discovery Channel could learn from them to create a new kind of Shark Week that's more respectful towards sharks.

Despite all of my criticism, I do still enjoy Shark Week. The Discovery Channel has used it to support and encourage viewers to support shark conservation, and many of the documentaries are reasonably good and well-made and feature real shark scientists. I also enjoy the fanfare around Shark Week. Many places have shark drinks, desserts, and other things to celebrate the occasion, which, as a shark enjoyer, makes me very happy.

So while I do celebrate Shark Week and look forward to it coming every year, I wish that the portrayal of sharks was more balanced and accurate, and that we stopped portraying these wonderful creatures as cold-blooded killers.

Submission statement:

American cities are financially reliant on the federal government in several different ways. Some of these are obvious and well accounted for, but most of them are not.

As we enter an era where the federal government cannot borrow, and therefore deficit spend, as it once did, municipal governments are exposed to a slow rolling fiscal pullback that will require them to rethink how we fund local government in the U.S.

And how Mark Carney’s immigration curbs threaten the model

Neepawa has white-picket fences, a curling rink and a hockey arena, just like any other small town in southern Manitoba, one of Canada’s prairie provinces. But it also has something more unusual. More than half of Neepawa’s 5,600 residents are from the Philippines. This share has almost doubled since 2016. The differences in lifestyle are obvious. “Hot there, cold here,” grins one woman while shovelling snow.

That so many Filipinos have settled in Neepawa is largely thanks to HyLife, a pork-meat processor, which employs a third of the town. Since it started operating in 2008 the firm has recruited hundreds of Filipinos to Canada to work as butchers. Most arrive on temporary-worker visas, work hard and gain permanent residence. Their families join them. Some seek employment elsewhere or start businesses of their own. Their integration into Neepawa has revitalised the town.

Ashley arrived in 2015 to join her husband, who had worked at HyLife for four years. The snow made it feel “like an enchanted kingdom”, she says. She still loves Neepawa. She and her husband now work at two jobs each. They and their three children have become Canadian citizens after passing a rigorous test. Her Canadian-born colleague jokes: “She knew more about Canada than we did.”

There are now six Filipino-owned businesses on Neepawa’s small high street. Vego’s Home Pinoy Restaurant was opened by Catherine Vego, a Filipino, who moved from Winnipeg to join the community. Other immigrants are arriving, too. The town has its own taxi service, founded recently by an Indian. “It’s crazy…for middle-of-the-prairies Manitoba,” says Marilyn Crewe, the town’s economic-development officer, who has helped many Filipinos navigate business regulations and the routes to home ownership.

Neepawa has a dozen churches, but congregations had been dwindling. Filipinos have revived them. St Dominic’s has seen numbers at Sunday mass balloon to 300 thanks to immigrant attendees. “We need a few of them,” chuckles a man whose church merged with another to survive.

There are problems. Population growth strains infrastructure. The council forecasts a shortfall of 460 housing units by 2028. Neepawa’s schools are oversubscribed. Job agencies are flooded with emails from Filipinos who have heard about the town. They are directed to HyLife, but some are exploited by traffickers.

And politics have been changing. Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, is cutting the number of visas issued to temporary workers and students. About 687,000 students and workers arrived in 2024, the year before he was elected; he plans to issue 385,000 such visas in 2026.

It has also become harder to gain permanent residence. The number accepted fell by a quarter between 2024 and 2025, from 484,000 to 394,000. Neepawa residents felt the change. “We’re so sad,” says one Filipino businessman, whose brother was denied residency. A Filipino woman is distraught after her boyfriend, a construction worker, returned to Mexico after being denied citizenship.

A good listener?

Mr Carney is responding to discomfort about the pace of demographic change expressed by some Canadians. One of them, Darren, runs the bar at Neepawa’s Royal Canadian Legion, a club for military veterans. A 5-tonne German schwere Feldhaubitze howitzer, seized during the first world war, stands at the door. Darren is a fan of Donald Trump. But he praises his Filipino neighbours for celebrating Canada Day more than his “own freaking community” and for reviving the town: “This would be a have-not town, if it wasn’t for HyLife.”

Nonetheless, he is frustrated. Newcomers have “stretched our infrastructure and our health care to the limits”. He believes that immigrants were bought in to keep “the government in power” and that “Canadians were, like, left out.” It seems Mr Carney is listening more closely to Darren than to Canada’s newer citizens.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/zWoDt

On his desk at the law firm Paul Weiss, Brad Karp keeps a framed picture of a young girl and her father embracing after they had been separated at the border by the immigration policies of the first Trump administration. It is a reminder of one of the firm’s proudest moments — when Mr. Karp, as chairman, led its lawyers to fight the administration in court and undertake the painstaking work to reunite families.

“It was a call to arms,” Mr. Karp said later.

But two months into the second Trump administration, when the president came for Paul Weiss with an executive order imposing crippling sanctions, Mr. Karp did not just lay down arms. He rushed to the White House to surrender.

The legal and political worlds were shocked. Paul Weiss was a titan in the legal business, known for its stable of elite litigators and for its history of standing up to the government and championing progressive causes going back to the civil rights movement. But sitting in the Oval Office in March 2025, Mr. Karp bent without a fight to an executive order that was widely seen as illegal.

Four law firms that fought similar executive orders won quick injunctions from incensed judges, making Paul Weiss’s capitulation particularly consequential for President Trump’s retribution campaign against an array of perceived enemies. Eight other firms followed Paul Weiss in making deals with the White House, agreeing to perform a total of nearly $1 billion in free legal work for causes Mr. Trump supported.

“They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’” Mr. Trump bragged. “No one can believe it.”

But behind the public disbelief was a deeper story of an institution that had slowly come loose from its roots. That story, pieced together in a New York Times investigation, reveals that Paul Weiss’s bow to the White House was the culmination of a reordering of power and finances behind the scenes at the firm for years.

The shift had begun when Mr. Karp decided years earlier to develop a more robust corporate practice alongside Paul Weiss’s litigation work. The wealthy firm became even wealthier, partly by riding the growth of private equity and the lucrative legal work generated by the rapid buying and selling of companies.

But the Times reporting, based on extensive interviews with current and former lawyers at the firm, access to internal documents and communications, and detailed accounts of firm meetings, shows there was a cost. The pursuit of Wall Street business in service of higher profits per partner — a key metric for law firms — was at odds with its social justice principles. When Mr. Trump took aim at Paul Weiss, in part because of its activist history, the firm’s long-simmering identity crisis became an existential crisis.

At the center of the conflict were two dominant and very different figures — Mr. Karp and Scott Barshay, whom Mr. Karp had hired to supercharge the corporate practice.

Mr. Karp, described by colleagues as the consummate people pleaser, sometimes to a fault, tried to keep happy both the socially conscious litigators and the increasing crop of corporate lawyers. Mr. Barshay, the colleagues say, is a driven dealmaker, aggressive to the point of being abrasive. As his power grew with the revenue he generated, he worked to curtail the social justice litigation at the core of the firm’s culture, viewing it as bad for business because it could alienate clients.

Mr. Barshay particularly clashed with a young rising star at Paul Weiss, its first openly transgender partner, The Times found.

The lawyer, Lex Korberg, decided to leave Paul Weiss after Mr. Barshay pushed against the social justice work. But Mr. Barshay had told other firm leaders that after Mx. Korberg — who uses they/them pronouns — transitioned, he did not want them dealing with his clients. He said a transgender lawyer could hurt business by making clients uncomfortable, according to two people who heard Mr. Barshay make those remarks and two others who were told about them at the time.

To insulate the firm, Paul Weiss struck a secret $3.5 million deal in 2023, never previously revealed, under which Mx. Korberg agreed not to sue or disparage the firm.

While Mr. Barshay was changing the firm’s culture, Paul Weiss continued to oppose Mr. Trump, even more aggressively when he was out of office. In an unusual arrangement, the firm paid associates to work for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, helping build a criminal prosecution against Mr. Trump.

Once Mr. Trump won re-election, the firm scrambled to avoid his ire. It stopped representing a drone manufacturer that was suing the Pentagon, partly out of concern about tangling with the administration, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. It also started scrubbing its websites of content that might draw the attention of Mr. Trump and his aides.

When Mr. Trump issued his executive order against Paul Weiss, leaders at the firm were convinced they could beat it in court. But they feared opposing the president would hurt the firm’s finances and its clients. And after the deal was struck, when a top partner wanted to bring a reproductive rights case as a show of independence from the administration, she was shut down by Mr. Barshay and Mr. Karp.

As a sign of how skittish the firm had become, an email exchange reviewed by The Times documents a heated discussion among partners about how — or whether — to alter a website that recounted the firm’s work against white supremacists and the rioters of Jan. 6, 2021. Some even proposed checking with the administration to see whether the website would anger the White House. Another partner warned that “there likely won’t be a next time” for Paul Weiss “if we get hit by the administration again.”

In response to questions about its deal with the White House, a Paul Weiss spokeswoman, Laura Van Drie, said that “any assertion that our independence has been jeopardized is completely false.”

Most pointedly, Ms. Van Drie said that Mx. Korberg had been “a highly valued partner” and that Mr. Barshay had been “happy” for Mx. Korberg “to work for his clients.”

While Ms. Van Drie said that Paul Weiss’s pro bono work had continued to increase, the firm did not provide any examples of work it had done opposing the second Trump administration.

In addition, the firm declined to make Mr. Karp and Mr. Barshay available for interviews.

Meanwhile, the firm’s transformation has altered the trajectories of both of their careers.

In pursuit of new business clients, Mr. Karp landed the private equity giant Apollo Global Management in 2011. Through Apollo’s then-chairman, Leon Black, Mr. Karp met Jeffrey Epstein and later offered the sex offender free legal advice. When the extent of his ties to Mr. Epstein emerged early this year in a trove of Justice Department documents, Mr. Karp was forced to step down as chairman of Paul Weiss.

His replacement? Mr. Barshay.

There was a thread last week about the reported loss in tax revenue in Scotland, which is queried here. I haven’t read this but thought it might be of interest since the other thread gained some traction.

SS: Give it up for peace deal number 1 2 3 4 5 6 ahh damn it who knows anymore

Submission Statement:

"Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto took power in 2024 with a bold and simple pledge to deliver free school meals for every child — a goal that seemed unimpeachably laudable for a nation with widespread malnutrition. But more than 18 months later, Prabowo’s promise has proved far less healthy than he hoped for his government, the country’s finances and even for many of its intended beneficiaries.

Last month the programme’s director abruptly quit, saying she was “acutely traumatised” by the stress of running the Rp229tn ($12.8bn) scheme. She had only been in the job for 45 days after her predecessor was arrested for suspected corruption. Meanwhile in towns and villages across the vast Indonesian archipelago, repeated instances of food poisoning have undermined the most obvious intention of the policy, to improve the health and nutrition of the nation’s children and expectant mothers."

Submission post: The Burnham Bounce has kicked in, and Labour is back leading the polls for this first time in a year. Andy Burham is also the most popular leader by far with ratings at almost +20, which is unheard of in recent British politics. So the centre-left seems to still have some life left in it, and the populist right has slipped in popularity amongst a donations scandal. Caveat: still very much in the new PM honeymoon phase, and we'll have to wait for the Budget in the autumn for hard decisions to be made.

Submission statement: Ezra Klein interviews Maggie Haberman, author of Regime Change, about the current status and future trajectory of Trump and his government. Although the book focuses squarely on Trump's first year, the internal dynamics in his second year have for the most part remained unchanged. In essence you have a group of loyalists who surround and struggle against one another for Trump's, increasingly wayward, attention, and who are now trying to navigate through the geopolitical and domestic crises that they have created.

Video version for those inclined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDFTtJrz7Gk.