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.

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.

Public debt yields have experienced a significant climb in recent weeks, reaching levels not seen in two decades. Fears of inflation and, therefore, the forecast of new interest rate hikes have driven sales of these assets. The fact is that if the cost of living becomes more expensive, the fixed interest paid by a bond loses purchasing power and, consequently, investors sell the securities they hold in their portfolios and demand higher profitability on new issues.

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.

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.

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.

Iran has denounced that the United States allegedly committed "war crimes" after one of its missiles killed four people early this morning at a wedding being held in the south of the country. The Islamic Republic has also counted at least 68 injured following the crossfire that the Revolutionary Guard and US forces engaged in on Tuesday in a resumption of hostilities in the region.

Iceland was the coveted accession for Brussels. A quick and easy negotiation (despite the fisheries chapter), a new net contributor to the community coffers, and a strengthening of the Nordic dimension of the European Union at a time of strategic reconfiguration of the Arctic. But it will not be. Icelanders have rejected, by a narrow margin, the Icelandic government's request to restart accession negotiations with the EU, frozen since 2013. The result: 52.8% voted against and 47.2% in favor, with voters in the capital in favor of integrating into the Union and those in rural areas against. Icelanders have preferred to remain committed neighbors aligned with Europe, but without full accession. A resounding and painful message for an EU obsessed with the immediate future of enlargement.

Crossfire reignites in the Middle East after a month of relative calm. US President Donald Trump has promised that the military will respond to the missiles that Iran launched early this morning against two US bases in Jordan. "We will hit them hard," the Republican said in statements to Fox, where he confirmed that US forces intercepted six Iranian missiles. The Islamic Republic had opened fire early this morning against the US's Arab ally in retaliation for the US attack on Sunday against two Iranian platforms on the island of Larak, located near the Strait of Hormuz. In a statement released by the Iranian agencies Fars and Tasmin, the main military arm of the Islamic Republic specified that the attack was carried out with drones and left several dead and injured, although it did not specify how many.

"Just as Al-Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people." U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth referred thusly less than a year ago to the Latin American drug cartels against which the U.S. military claims to have been fighting since September 2025 with attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific. A year after the operation dubbed Operation Southern Lance began, the results are practically nil, and the Pentagon itself has admitted that the offensive has not served to stop the entry of cocaine into the United States. Nevertheless, the attacks continue and often people with no connection to drug trafficking die.

The director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, traveled secretly to Moscow on Tuesday to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin. The last time the head of the United States intelligence agency – then it was William Burns, a trusted man of Joe Biden – made a secret trip to Russia was at the end of 2021. Three months later, Russian tanks invaded Ukraine. If the precedent is little reassuring, the explanations given by the American president, Donald Trump, are even less so. On Thursday, the Republican said Ratcliffe's secret visit was "semi-routine" and assured journalists that Putin "will not attack any NATO territory." In the White House's diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine, the Russian president has already shown how much he listens to his American counterpart.

The trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman accused of killing her three children – five-year-old Cora; three-year-old Dawson; and eight-month-old Callan – in 2023 concluded this Thursday, and now it is up to the jury to deliver the verdict. The proceedings, which lasted four weeks, have become a deeper case where a more complex reality has been brought to the table: postpartum psychosis.

Canada has embarked on a war of attrition with Donald Trump to mark the limits of his power. When last weekend the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, left the negotiating table stating that he was not willing "to compromise the country's sovereignty", it was already clear that the dimension of the conflict was not merely economic. After a tariff spiral in which Carney responded with 50% tariffs to the 50%% that Trump had applied on Saturday to Canadian products, the US president has gone a step further and signed an executive order this Thursday to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America.

A little more than two months before the legislative elections, the Supreme Court of the United States has issued an emergency ruling that only promises to add more uncertainty to an election day that is already expected to be critical. The conservative majority has lifted the judicial blockade on an executive order that President Donald Trump had signed in March to restrict mail-in voting. The magistrates, for now, allow the tycoon to continue with his plan while they deliberate whether the executive really has the powers to dictate how Americans vote. Furthermore, the decision comes while there is still another judicial suspension on one of the sections of this same order.

It doesn't seem like the military front advances, in the Gulf –the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln of the United States set sail last week for home amidst troop unrest – so the White House is returning to the old strategy of economic pressure; now, baptized with the concept of "economic war". Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced this Monday an "unprecedented campaign" of sanctions against Iran, for which he was unable to set a timetable.

For some time now, a background murmur has been heard that speaks of an involution regarding women's rights. Among the notes of this cacophony, there are two that particularly concern me and are closely linked: discourses that question the necessity of women's suffrage and the phenomenon of tradwives (traditional wives) and stay-at-home girlfriends, girls who stay at home. Since the newspaper ARA already spoke about tradwives in 2024 in a pioneering way, I will focus on the former, which also seems the most dangerous to me. These involutionary discourses originate in the United States, but they are spreading like wildfire through Latin America and are beginning to reach Europe, as was seen in July at the foundational meeting of Mulheres Conservadoras de Portugal, a movement linked to the far-right party Chega and evangelical movements. Women's suffrage seemed a definitively established right since it began to be implemented, not without many struggles, at the end of the 19th century. Setting aside curious cases, such as that of 1776 in New Jersey, where the use of the word "person" instead of "man" in the suffrage law led some clever women to join in until the "mistake" was corrected, women's suffrage was generally achieved in the first half of the 20th century, with some bloody exceptions like Switzerland, where women did not gain federal voting rights until 1971. As for Spain, the controversy that pitted Clara Campoamor against Victoria Kent and which ended up establishing women's vote in 1931 is well known.Now, however, this right, which is basic for the construction of women's public voice and for their civic autonomy, has been called into question for the first time in more than a century. Ultraconservative groups in the United States, such as that of the evangelical preacher Doug Wilson, are attacking the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution, the one that legalized women's suffrage in 1920, considering it a "cancer of individualism." Curiously, when individualism guarantees universal male suffrage nothing happens, but when a law allows women to be considered individuals and grants them a voice, the forces of hell are unleashed.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has achieved virtually unanimous support among Canadian political leaders following the breakdown of trade negotiations with the United States. It should be recalled that the leader accused Washington of having entered into "war" with its northern neighbor after imposing 50% tariffs on a multitude of Canadian products – around 5% of all trade flows, ultimately – following the failure of talks between the parties. Among the clearest endorsements Ottawa has received is that of Doug Ford, premier of the province of Ontario, who has placed himself at the disposal of the national executive and has called for politically loading the retaliatory tariffs that Canada plans to activate in early September.

The debt of the United States has surpassed the threshold of 40 trillion dollars, above its gross domestic product (GDP), that is, the value of all the wealth it generates in a year, which exceeds 30 trillion. In the second term of President Donald Trump, which began in January of last year, about 4 trillion has been added due to the costs of the war with Iran. And the tariffs he had imposed globally stopped being collected after the Supreme Court annulled them. The solution will not come through other revenues, through tax cuts for companies and large fortunes. All of this, together with Trump's unpredictability, raises doubts about the economy of the world's leading power. Uncertainty has costs and is expensive.

The U.S. military appears to have found a way to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz despite the Iranian blockade. Navy ships have managed to find a corridor along the Omani coast through which some vessels are successfully navigating a route that has become highly dangerous due to Tehran's attacks. As happens with so many other operations in this war, it is successful in its tactical objective, but Washington does not achieve a strategic victory. The United States is getting some oil barrels through the strait, although the pre-war pace has not yet been recovered.

In a world dominated by uncertainty and with a completely unpredictable President of the United States, public debt, which countries issue to finance themselves, has soared to yields like those of 20 years ago, in a crisis phase.