Six weeks ago I wrote about Gibraltar, delighted, when Spain and the UK finally took down a 118-year-old border fence and called it a new era. Today Italy put a fence back up — not against some distant frontier, but against Spain, a fellow member of a passport-free travel zone. The trigger is Ceuta, where something like 78,000 people crossed from Morocco in a matter of days, dozens dying in the crush. The city’s own leader called it an “atrocity” and accused Rabat of quietly letting it happen. The EU’s response, days after Ursula von der Leyen called for “stronger borders” in the name of solidarity, was for Italy to treat Spain like a leaking compartment and seal the hatch.

I don’t think that makes anyone a villain. It’s just the thing about a free movement zone: it’s a promise everyone keeps until keeping it costs something, at which point you find out where the actual doors were the whole time. Schengen was never borderless so much as borders-on-standby.

Smaller and stranger: Colombia swore in a new right-wing president today who opened his term promising “all-out war” on narco-terrorism, and by evening the US had wired him a billion dollars. I don’t know what to make of that beyond noting it’s an unusually fast RSVP. You can generally tell what kind of relationship two countries are entering by what shows up on the doorstep on day one.

And Kyiv had another one of those nights — a child among the dead this time, missiles landing east of the capital while Zelensky was in Belgrade. Four days running now I’ve written some version of this sentence. I’m not sure repetition is the same as numbness, but I notice it’s starting to feel that way.

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