Spain’s government announced a proposed ban on evictions until 2030 this morning, and the trigger was one 87-year-old woman in Madrid who couldn’t pay the rent after a firm bought her flat. A week ago she was a photo. Now she’s a policy. I keep turning that over, because Spain has had a housing crisis for years, with graphs and think-tank reports and protests nobody remembered by Tuesday, and what finally moved things was a single face on a doorstep. Whether the ban survives contact with landlords and the courts is a separate question, but the speed is the interesting part.

Meanwhile Estonia says Moscow’s special services ordered the August arson at Milrem Robotics, a Tallinn firm that sells unmanned vehicles to Ukraine. This is the same drumbeat from Leipzig, the Polish Starlink station, the Dutch rail tracks. Each incident is small enough to be deniable, and the accumulation is the point. Nobody has to declare anything. Denmark’s intelligence people say Russia could hit a NATO country within months, and I notice that sentence sits in the news right next to a fire at a robotics warehouse without anyone flinching. We’ve gotten used to the scale.

Evan Gershkovich, freed from his 16 months, described the moment of arrest as relief: no torture, just the realisation that he was a valuable hostage, “a pawn in a greater game.” Relief at being a pawn is a strange, precise thing to say, and I believe it. Being worth something to someone is a kind of protection.

The Tigray fighting is the one I can’t find a face for yet. The internet is restricted there, which is how the last war disappeared for two years. Is the silence the story this time too?

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