Brussels considers the housing crisis to have become an "emergency". In the last ten years, the purchase price has risen on average by more than 60% and rent by 20% across the European Union. While one million Europeans are homeless, 20% of the housing stock in EU territory is empty.

The now-famous report published by Mario Draghi on the competitiveness of the European Union revolved around one idea: if the EU wanted to remain an economic power, it had to modernize its economy and reduce its strategic dependencies on China and the United States. Two years to the day since the report's publication, most of the homework remains to be done. Of the measures proposed by the former president of the European Central Bank, Brussels has implemented a meager 15%.

The European Commission is preparing a regulatory framework to allow municipalities to restrict tourist rentals and the purchase of second homes, with the aim of combating the housing access crisis affecting the continent. Faced with the thousand-and-one recipes applied by member states to curb what is already the main concern of the community's citizens, Brussels will present the affordable housing law on Wednesday. The regulation will set the conditions under which local bodies will be able to apply these restrictions and will offer a common methodology to provide the measures with legal certainty.

After months of tensions and direct threats from Donald Trump to take control of Greenland, the European Union has decided to move from rhetoric to action. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced this Monday from Nuuk a 200 million euro investment agreement to shield the alliance with the Arctic territory and send a clear message to the White House: the future of the island "must be decided by the people of Greenland and Denmark. No one else".

The most feared forecasts for Brussels have come to pass. For the first time since the fall of Nazism, the German far-right has real options to govern a state. The results in Saxony-Anhalt have fallen like a bucket of cold water on the community capital, where the victory of Alternative for Germany (AfD) is read as a harbinger of the penetration of this intolerant ideology no longer into the hemicycle – where it has had a few reserved seats for some time – but into the front line of executive power. A reading contrary to that made by the most populist leaders, who see the results as a political springboard.

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.

The housing crisis affects all of Europe, especially in large cities and the most densely populated areas. According to a study by the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien), 44% of Europeans with an average income level can only afford to buy a property of less than 50 square meters, that is, the equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment or a studio.

The situation in Ceuta is not the result of any “migratory crisis”, as the left maintains, nor of a “sovereignty crisis”, as the right affirms. These two readings — one focused on the humanitarian drama; the other, on border pressure — are ideological and convenient interpretations. They do not take into account demographic dysfunction: the structural fracture between two realities advancing at completely different paces. On one side of the border, the risible birth rates in Spain and other European countries, such as Italy; on the other, the fertility of some regions of the Maghreb (4.63 children per woman in Mauritania, for example). Ceuta is, in this sense, a tense point of contact between two demographic systems that can no longer balance themselves. Everyone knows how tectonic plates work (we've had a few examples this summer): there comes a point when, underground, friction and pressure eventually generate an earthquake.In Spain, the fertility rate has remained below replacement level for decades. There is an accelerated aging, with an age structure that tends towards contraction and requires migratory flows to sustain the labor market, the pension system, and even the most basic social vitality. In Morocco, on the other hand, despite the significant decline in recent years (even more pronounced in Tunisia), the birth rate remains high compared to European standards, and the demographic pyramid is expansive. The average fertility rate in the Maghreb is 2.86 children per woman; in Spain, it is 1.10, and with an average age of maternity of 32.6 years, one of the highest in the world. This asymmetry generates an inevitable pressure: a young, abundant population, often without solid economic prospects, looks towards a neighboring country that continues to be fantastically perceived as a space of opportunities.Due to its condition as a physical and symbolic border, Ceuta has become the showcase for this tension. When thousands of young people crossed the border a month ago, they were not experiencing a "migratory crisis" in the classic sense, nor an attack on Spanish sovereignty, nor an invasion. They were corroborating in an abrupt, but non-violent, way the relentless logic of the imbalance that has been developing for decades in that precise context (it doesn't have to be this way in others). Administrations can try to contain it with honeyed speeches or threatening fences, but the underlying vector is subterranean: the difference between societies that are growing in population but not in resources, and societies where the opposite is happening.

Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Romania, Lithuania, and now also Germany. Incursions and drone threats in NATO territory have become more frequent in recent months and have intensified. In early August, a drone loaded with explosives impacted a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport without detonating, in one of the most direct sabotage attempts recorded so far at a key NATO logistics center and further into European territory. After nearly a month of investigations, this Tuesday, for the first time, the German government has directly blamed Russian intelligence services for the incident.

Only about fifty members and sympathizers of the ultra group Save Europe Act attended their call this Saturday in Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona, a figure that contrasted with the approximately 200 demonstrators of the anti-fascist counter-demonstration. In this way, the scene of this double mobilization of opposite signs showed from the first moment the fizzle of the extreme right, which had chosen the Catalan capital for its first stop in Spain with a rally at 7 p.m. In response, collectives such as the Barcelona Anti-fascist Coordinator and Som Antifeixistes (We are Anti-fascist) had called to "face them" in the same place, starting an hour earlier, at 6 p.m.

The far-right, which claims the primacy of the "autochthonous" and "white" population in Europe, puts Barcelona on the map of its continental offensive. The Save Europe Act movement – which calls on the European Union for the forced "remigration" (expulsion) of non-European migrants to protect the "ethnic continuity" of the continent's "native peoples" – will make its first stop in Spain this Saturday, August 22, in Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona. The event is part of a tour that has already passed through Brussels, Utrecht, Lyon, and Lille, and comes at a time when immigration management – with the Ceuta crisis as a backdrop – is at the center of European political debate.

This summer has already left a series of human tragedies and on the landscape that invite us to think about the material conditions of our time. Thermodynamic and geological phenomena – such as high temperatures that force us to re-adapt to the environment, or the spiral of fires across the sub-European territory – and social dramas such as the massive flows of migrants arriving from Africa – and xenophobic reactions, this summer in Ceuta, last summer in Torre Pacheco – overlap in space and time. It is the time of heat and scarcity of the Earth.

This summer doesn't smell of the sea. It smells of ash, of loss, of destruction. Ask the thousands of people displaced from their homes or those who have lost everything, even a family member. And they are right: it is not climate change. The unbearable temperatures, the deaths from the heatwave, and the thousands of hectares scorched are not the result of climate change. It is us. We have already changed the climate and now we are living in full emergency.

Last week, 186 passengers on a river cruise ship from the company Viking Cruises had to be evacuated by Bulgarian border police after the ship Viking Ullur ran aground on a sandbank in the Danube. The incident took place near the Bulgarian town of Gomotartsi, in a context of exceptionally low water levels that continue to disrupt river navigation and freight transport in much of Central Europe.

Within Homer's Odyssey, one of the most beautiful characters – allow me to put it that way— is Eumaeus, or Eumeos, depending on the different versions (it is fascinating work, which obviously does not belong here, the comparative reading between the magnificent Catalan translations of the Homeric poem: that of Carles Riba, that of Joan Francesc Mira, and the recent one by Pau Sabaté, which do not confront each other, but rather add to and complement each other). Eumaeus is the swineherd of Ulysses or Odysseus, to whom he has remained loyal during his twenty-year absence. Along with Penelope and Telemachus, Eumaeus is the only one who still believes that Ulysses will one day return to Ithaca. He is the first to recognize him, but first he welcomes him into his home, convinced that he is a poor old man wandering without a home, without direction, and without identity. Eumaeus barely asks him questions; he sees someone in need and shares what he has with him: shelter, food, and a place to spend the night under cover. It seems little, but it is a lot: it is human dignity. In one of the most memorable passages of the Odyssey, Eumaeus converses with his guest and informs him of the misfortune of Ithaca and the difficult situation in which Penelope finds herself, cornered by a multitude of greedy, cunning, and parasitic suitors. He also tells him his own story: Eumaeus himself was of royal blood, son of Ctesius, king of the island of Syros. However, a slave girl handed Eumaeus over, when he was still an infant, to some pirates, who sold him as a slave to Laertes, Ulysses' father. Since then he has been the palace swineherd (the "divine swineherd," in one of the Homeric epithets associated with him), and his lofty origin serves as a reflection of Ulysses' own destiny, who left for the Trojan War as a king and warrior and returns to Ithaca, twenty years later, as an old beggar, dispossessed and uprooted, whom everyone presumes dead. Everyone except those who still love him. Eumaeus's intervention is one of the most delicate parts of the Odyssey. If you want to see a good film adaptation (without judging Christopher Nolan's, which I haven't seen yet), the 2024 film The return, directed by Uberto Pasolini and starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, and Claudio Santamaria as Ulysses, Penelope, and Eumaeus, respectively, is well worth it.

Junts per Catalunya formalized this Monday its integration into the European Democratic Party (PDE), an adhesion that had been being finalized for months as the ARA advanced. With this step, the party led by Carles Puigdemont closes a long period of political orphanhood on the Old Continent, which dated back to 2018. It was that year when the PDECat was expelled from the Party of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) under pressure from Ciutadans and in a context marked by accusations of corruption against the formation then led by David Bonvehí for the 3% case.

The United Arab Emirates are everywhere, whether publicly or in the shadows, but always very close to where influence, money and important decisions are made. The latest most media-friendly example we have is in one of the major controversies of this Football World Cup. The president of FIFA's disciplinary committee, who agreed to withdraw Folarin Balogun's red card without consulting any of the other committee members and at the request of Donald Trump, is Mohammad al-Kamali, a lawyer and former member of the Parliament of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Another much less media-friendly and much less frivolous example is Sudan, where a war has been going on for years that is already the largest humanitarian crisis in the world according to the United Nations.

1. We have seen ridiculous things in the history of football – a suitable territory for egos needing recognition to let loose – but Donald Trump asking President Infantino to withdraw a red card for Balogun, a forward for the United States team, and the order being immediately executed breaks records for frivolity and indecency. It's not surprising from Trump, because he has been showing off for years and prioritizing his conviction that anything is permissible for him, that there are no limits for him, but it seems to be a vice that contaminates. The anecdote comes at a time when the contradictions his uncontrolled ego has led him to are generating accelerated disrepute that is already directly impacting the United States, where awareness of the president's irresponsibility is spreading. The way he acts, doing and undoing, means that, for example, in Venezuela he today supports those he wanted to overthrow yesterday, or that in the Middle East the impasse his delusions have led him to is giving life to the totalitarian regime of the Iranian ayatollahs, who have abruptly curbed his excesses by exposing him for what he is.

Europe is facing a new climatic reality. Extreme, long, and historic heatwaves are becoming increasingly frequent and are one of the most evident faces of a climate crisis that demands urgent responses. The episode of high temperatures affecting a large part of the continent this June (also in places where it was previously unthinkable) is breaking records in several countries and is the result of global warming caused by human activity and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. And it is no coincidence: Europe is the continent that is warming fastest on the planet and the impacts are already visible on health, agriculture, ecosystems, and water availability.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange platform, has hit the wall of European regulation. As the Reuters agency had already reported, the company will not receive permission to operate under the European crypto-asset law, MiCA, before the transition period ends on June 30. The company founded by Changpeng Zhao, it should be remembered, sought to obtain regulatory clearance in Greece, where market sources assure that it expected to find institutions "more lenient" in their application of the European directive.