The far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has swept the elections in Saxony-Anhalt, as all polls had been predicting for months, in a day with a record turnout of 75%. With 95% of the vote counted, the AfD has obtained 44.6% of the votes, more than double the support it gathered in the 2021 elections (20.8%), but it falls just short of an absolute majority.

White House emissaries, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, met this Sunday in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an attempt by the Trump administration to revive peace talks after more than half a year of deadlock, since the United States and Israel launched their offensive against Iran. It is the first time that the two White House envoys have set foot in Ukraine, while they have been to Moscow several times. This same Saturday they made a stop in the Russian capital to meet with President Vladimir Putin.

For Ray Downey, 9/11 was his last act of service as chief of special operations for the fire department. For his son Joe, also a firefighter, it was eight months among rubble and smoke searching for his father's remains. For his grandsons, Connor and Joseph, it is an inherited memory: that of their father, Joe, leaving them at a neighbor's house as he rushed toward the World Trade Center.

When the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed onto the asphalt and claimed nearly three thousand lives, a new geopolitical order began to be built. If today we are witnessing a gradual transformation of the world order, which is also disrupting old global structures, that was a clean cut, a turning point for the world that barely lasted two hours. The Bush Doctrine, which was promoted as a response, dealt the first major blow of demolition to international law, in the name of the so-called "war on terror." The strategy devised by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other neoconservative hawks surrounding George W. Bush imposed the concept of preventive war as a blank check for Western powers, basically the United States, to attack other countries unilaterally. A new type of war was then set in motion that was no longer between states but pitted governments against insurgent groups with international tentacles. And the era of surveillance also began, with state control over privacy in the name of national security.

The United States military attacked three Iranian oil tankers this Saturday, according to the Central Command (Centcom) in a statement, in which it justified the action as a response to attacks by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard against two US warships patrolling in the region's waters. This episode of cross-attacks represents an escalation of the conflict, which remains deadlocked after more than half a year.

"Europeans are facing a harsh truth: that this is the new normal." This sentence from the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, brings to mind that "new normal" of restrictions on individual freedom in favor of public health to which we had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic. The statement, however, is not from six years ago, but from this week. Now, the new normal to which we must get used to is that of systematic attacks by Russia. "We are in a new era of European security," insisted the leader of the EU executive. The message arrived after German authorities directly blamed Moscow for an attack with an explosives-laden drone at Leipzig airport at the beginning of August, one of the most serious sabotage attempts recorded so far on European territory, at a key NATO logistics center.

A quarter of a century has passed and the horror of that day still seems near. And that of the following ones, when in sleepwalking New York we breathed the ashes of the corpses carbonized and dissolved in the atmosphere.

After more than half a year with peace talks stalled due to the conflict in the Middle East, Donald Trump seeks to relaunch negotiations to reach an agreement that puts an end to the war in Ukraine. His emissaries, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, landed this Saturday in Moscow, where they met with Vladimir Putin, and this Sunday they will be in Kyiv for the first time to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The visit takes place in the midst of an escalation of long-range cross-bombardments and with the Russian president less willing than ever to make concessions. Despite this, both sides have ended up accepting a three-day ceasefire over the two capitals to ensure the safety of the American diplomats.

When last Saturday 38 people died near Kyiv in one of the deadliest Russian attacks of the entire war, many inevitably thought of the unstoppable destructive power of ballistic missiles. But what crashed into the ammunition depot in the suburb of Mila was not a fearsome Iskander, but a new-generation drone. The Geran-4 and Geran-5, the latest Russian evolutions of the Iranian Shahed, have also become the latest headache for Ukrainian air defenses, which see with impotence how, in addition to missiles, they now also have difficulties stopping this new Kremlin weapon.

A charismatic 35-year-old man travels through the towns of a German state aboard a blue 1975 Simson, the legendary motorcycle of the former East Germany. At every stop, thousands of followers with his face printed on their t-shirts shout his name and queue up to get a photograph or an autograph before he climbs back onto the bike and resumes his journey. What might seem like a rock star's tour is, in reality, the election campaign of Ulrich Siegmund, the politician who aspires to make Saxony-Anhalt the first German state governed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The Donald Trump administration has launched five retro-style video games to promote its agenda where, among other things, one can chase and capture immigrants. The White House is gamifying raids eight months after two U.S. citizens in Minnesota died at the hands of anti-immigration agents and shortly after ICE announced it will no longer publish the deaths of immigrants who die in detention centers.

In Metula, there is not much time to react. When a siren sounds, the inhabitants know they have between fifteen and twenty seconds to reach the nearest shelter. If they do not reach it, there is only one last instruction that everyone knows by heart: lie down on the ground, protect your head with your hands, and hope that the shrapnel does not fall too close.

It has been 25 years since the 9/11 attacks in New York that changed the world we live in. There is already a whole generation of young people who have not experienced what the world was like before the "war on terror".

When it was already starting to seem almost impossible, it happened. This Friday, nine days after the great flood that devastated Nepal, two workers trapped in a tunnel of a hydroelectric infrastructure have been rescued alive. The men have reported that there are more people alive inside the infrastructure.

"We are not at war, but we are a daily target of hybrid warfare." This is how German Foreign Minister Alexander Dobrindt summarized on Tuesday the moment that one of the main European powers is going through, and which is extensible to a good part of the region. After Dobrindt's words, Germany has recorded three violent acts in the last two days, which coincide with the German government's accusation against the Kremlin of being responsible for the attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport on August 4th. Amidst the uncertainty and waiting for police investigations to progress, Germany and Europe are debating between avoiding an excessive escalation that worsens the situation or taking a stand given the gravity of the incident in Leipzig.

Let's talk about Ceuta, a European border, a sensitive point for the entire European Union. And here comes the first paradox: from the beginning, a cornered Pedro Sánchez has insisted on interpreting the massive crossing of July 30th as a European crisis. His European allies have done precisely the opposite: reiterating that, above all, it is an internal affair, a Spanish crisis.

After a record duration of 286 days at sea, the United States aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln docked this Wednesday in Thailand. The U.S. military personnel will now spend five days at a hotel in the tourist city of Pattaya, about 150 kilometers southeast of Bangkok, known for its nightlife and where U.S. soldiers also stopped during the Vietnam War.

The drone attack at the beginning of August on the German airport of Leipzig has put the European Union and NATO on alert, who view with concern how incursions with military aircraft into European territory are becoming increasingly frequent. The day after German authorities held Russian intelligence services responsible for the Leipzig incident, this Wednesday the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance, Mark Rutte, met urgently in Brussels, and they have pledged to increase pressure on Moscow.

Volodymyr Zelensky is looking for new ways to pressure Vladimir Putin to stop the war in Ukraine. In the last few hours, the rhetorical escalation has reached a new level after the Ukrainian president issued a warning to international airlines that still maintain flights to Russia. “Russian airspace will become completely unsafe,” he stated on Tuesday night. While clarifying that Kyiv “does not threaten civil air transport nor does it threaten a single aircraft,” Zelensky holds the Russian authorities responsible for how they manage their airspace from now on, taking into account that “there will be drones in the Russian sky to a dimension that must be considered”.

Last week was the CIA director's secret trip to Moscow, John Ratcliffe. Now, it has been the surprise appearance of the Russian finance minister, Anton Siluanov, at the G-20 meeting being held this week in Asheville, North Carolina. Siluanov's presence at the meeting of central bankers and ministers of the group of nations has infuriated European members, who are already on edge due to the White House's secrecy about the latest moves with Russia that are glimpsed behind the scenes. It had been four years, since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, that the Russian finance minister had physically attended the meeting. Coincidence or not, the last time a CIA director had traveled to Moscow before now was in November 2021.