Let's Know Things

This week we talk about peaker plants, blackouts, and at-home battery backups.
We also discuss energy resiliency, solar panels, and hydro.
Recommended Book: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
Transcript
Peaking power plants, often just called peaker plants, are power plants that are only turned on during periods of high energy demand. That’s in contrast to a base load power plant, which is the sort of plant that operates more or less 24/7 to ensure there’s a steady amount of electricity available on the local power grid.
The necessity for peak-load energy varies depending on the time of year and which part of the world you’re looking at, but in general you tend to see more energy demand in the morning and evening, due to temperature fluctuations and lifestyle rhythms, like everyone being at home in the morning and returning home from work in the evening, at which point they all turn on their at-home ACs or heaters, all their TVs and lights and electric kettles and video game consoles, and that leads to an irregular surge in energy demand compared to the steady office and factory demand that was met throughout the day by the base load power plant.
When that energy demand peaks, approaching or going beyond what the base load plant can reliably provide, the peaker plant is spun up, and more energy is added to the grid to meet that demand, avoiding brownouts or blackouts—situations in which people lose access to power because there’s not enough to go around.
This also helps stabilize energy prices, because in most countries, pricing is used to manage scarce energy resources, so as a grid approaches the point where it’s running out of available electricity, prices go up in order to incentivize less energy use. Peaker plants keep those prices from going sky-high by increasing supply so that demand doesn’t push the prices into absolutely ridiculous territory.
Some peaker plants operate for a handful of hours basically every day; this is especially true in places with extreme temperature fluctuations, or in areas where the population or manufacturing activity has increased rapidly and the local infrastructure hasn’t caught up, the existing power supply supported by the backup more regularly because the base load hasn’t yet increased to meet that new, consistently higher demand.
And notably, peaker plants are often less efficient to run because they’re not meant to be used all the time. Consequently, if the base load power plant isn’t up to the task of providing enough energy for a region on a regular basis, energy can get a lot more expensive for everyone, all the time, because a power plant that was only meant to be used periodically is now being used constantly, and it wasn’t built to be efficient, it was built to come online quickly and to be used only at times of irregular, excessive need.
What I’d like to talk about today is an alternative to peaker plants that was conceived of decades ago, but which has only recently started to be deployed at scale in some areas.
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As I mentioned in the intro, a peaker power plant is meant to be turned on irregularly to meet above-average energy needs. Those periodic pops in energy demand are thus accounted for, and these peaker plants are built for that purpose, and are thus typically more expensive and often polluting compared to base load plants, as well, many of them using natural gas or coal to produce that extra electricity for the grid.
In the late 1990s, researchers posited that it might be possible to someday link energy production and storage sites together, creating a more flexible grid system they called a virtual power plant. Further research in the early 2000s expanded on this concept, looking specifically at renewable energy options and how they might be aggregated into a similar virtual power plant setup.
The basic idea here is to recreate the effect of a peaker plant—adding additional electricity to the power grid when it’s most needed—by aggregating power generating or storage assets and tapping them only when necessary. That aggregation of smaller assets, the management of that additional energy and making sure it arrives on the grid when it’s needed and at the necessary scale, is managed by software, and managing these assets in this way allows smaller production and storage infrastructure to recreate the impact of a larger peaker plant.
A German energy company called RWE launched the first real-world virtual power plant in 2008, linking nine of their hydroelectric plants together into a virtual 8.6 MW unit, the output of which could be virtually managed and deployed. A few years later in 2011, a Swiss energy company called Kraftwerke did the same with a slew of biogas, solar, and wind power infrastructure, scattered across seven countries.
This concept expanded to include demand-side residential energy assets in 2016, when the Australian city, Adelaide, enacted a program backed by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which saw 1000 battery systems deployed to homes and businesses across the city. Those battery systems were hooked up to solar panels, and the software managing the batteries allowed the energy stored in those batteries to act like a 5MW peaker plant.
The same general idea was then applied by Tesla across South Australia, where energy prices had long been volatile, beginning in 2018—that program reached 50,000 homes by 2022, and then the program was acquired by an energy company called AGL in 2025, which further expanded it until the virtual power plant had a capacity of 25 MW of peaker solar energy, and 37 MW of battery-stored peaker energy.
Now again, the idea here is that there’s a certain amount of energy available on the grid coming from standard base load production sources, including traditional coal and gas power plants, hydroelectric plants, and nuclear power plants. There are also solar and wind arrays that make up the baseline energy load in some parts of the world, and that baseline can be augmented by utility scale battery facilities that allow wind and solar overproduction to be stored, making those renewables more reliable as baseload options, because too much energy can be generated during the day or during especially windy periods, and the excess can be stored in those big batteries and used later, at night or when the wind isn’t blowing as hard.
What a VPP does is tackle the periods where whatever base load is available doesn’t measure up to the current demand. So when temperatures are especially high and everyone’s using their air conditioners more, and that gas plant or all those solar panels aren’t providing enough to cover that energy demand, the company operating the virtual power plant can pull energy from these scattered resources to cover that addition use. And in some cases that’ll mean pooling energy generated from small hydroelectric dams, in some cases it’ll mean pulling a previously agreed-upon percentage of the total energy stored in a home-owner’s at-home battery backup—maybe they have a battery that stores excess from their at-home solar panels, that they can use at night, but they also have an agreement with the VPP operator that allows said operator to pull some volume or percentage of energy from their battery, when necessary, onto the grid to help ease excessive demand burdens.
Often this agreement is also beneficial for the home owner who is sharing some of their excess energy with the grid in this way to help prevent blackouts and too-high energy prices. The cost of the battery installation and hardware might be subsidized, or maybe they make a small amount of money every time that energy is borrowed. There are also riffs on this model that provide the home owner or renter with a fancy thermostat that, at times of high demand, might automatically adjust their AC a degree or two higher when the grid is being crushed by demand on crazy hot days, which then ensures there’s enough to go around not by increasing supply of energy, but by reducing demand. Some of these models also made use of energy pricing arbitrage, automatically selling stored energy from these battery back-ups and then buying it when energy is cheap, which helps balance the overall grid’s energy load by contributing to it when energy is scarce and expensive, and restoring that sold energy back to the battery when energy is abundant and cheap.
Increasingly, these sorts of systems also tap into other resources that are plugged into the grid in order to reduce demand or increase supply: maybe borrowing some energy stored in a home owners electric vehicle, which is left plugged in to charge, but which also acts as another at-home battery, and quite a large one. Or maybe by reducing the power being sent to heat pumps or water heaters. Each of these devices or other assets is treated as part of that larger virtual grid, which might be composed of thousands or tens of thousands of homes and all their connected assets, and that helps manage supply and demand in such a way that both black outs and dramatically increased energy prices are a lot less likely, even on days with bizarre weather or when other, larger energy assets like power plants aren’t operating at full capacity.
This is a huge win for resiliency, and it’s also often a lot cheaper than installing and operating a peaker plant, usually around 40-60% cheaper. These sorts of systems can also be installed and activated way faster than a full-on power plant, while also dramatically reducing the amount of land used for energy infrastructure, and the bureaucracy that has to be traversed in order to get something like a power plant or solar array installed and operating; those big chunks of infrastructure can take years or decades to get online, while a VPP can often be up and running within just a few months, with no new land required, and no new interconnections, in terms of cables or whatnot—it uses stuff that’s already there in most cases, though it can also be further empowered by deploying assets, like at-home batteries, that are also useful for other things, for the home owner. Kind of a win-win.
At the moment, virtual power plant capacity is mostly limited by regulatory approval, at least in most countries. Energy utilities don’t have a lot of incentive to help move these sorts of things forward, as they get paid for building and managing traditional sorts of power assets, and VPPs are not that; sometimes an energy company will run this type of program, but only if they get to sell the hardware and are paid for managing the software that keeps it all running smoothly. At-home batteries and other such assets are competition for them, otherwise, so they’re less inclined to allow these things to move forward, and even be legally installed without a fight.
That said, the major players in the VPP space right now are Sunrun, Tesla, Renew Home, Uplight, Next Kraftwerke, and sonnen, the latter of which is the largest VPP operator in Europe, and it has recently been expanding into the US, especially in Utah.
The majority of VPP deployment is happening in California, Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, in the US, across South Australia, in Germany, and in China, where the first gigawatt-scale residential VPP, which aggregates the ACs and water heaters across millions of households, has been launched.
This category of energy technology has been slower to roll out than originally anticipated, back when those early models were deployed in Europe and the outcomes were considered to be broadly beneficial, because of regulations—paperwork basically—and pushback from existing utilities that didn’t want the competition. VPPs were also bundled with other renewable energy infrastructure and thus saw a huge pushback in the US in particular, during both Trump administrations, which pulled support for renewables across the board, and in some cases has actively tried to kill these industries to make even more room for oil and gas companies.
In 2025 and so far in 2026, though, the blazing fast deployment of data centers has brought VPPs back into the conversation, as data centers require just a silly amount of energy to run, and energy grids in the areas where they’re being built have been strained as a consequence, dramatically increasing energy prices.
VPPs won’t solve that problem, but they could ease the issue in many ways, including by tempering energy use, making more energy available at peak times without necessitating the build-out of expensive power plants that might not be online for years or a decade, and they can do this while also reframing the use of VPPs so that they’re no longer seen as environmental efforts, but instead as economically viable means of addressing those data center-created energy shortfalls. Which could, in turn, lead to more VPP build-outs, because they’re no longer the target of anti-renewable energy legislation and politics.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2400097X
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/05/adelaide-charges-ahead-with-worlds-largest-virtual-power-plant
https://www.nrg.com/insights/energy-education/understanding-virtual-power-plants--a-guide-to-vpps.html
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/home-batteries-are-suddenly-cheap-and-everywhere-heres-why/
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/08/13/tesla-unveils-zero-down-powerwall-lease-program-with-retail-electric-plan-in-texas-touts-global-vpp-potential/
https://www.energy-storage.news/base-power-launches-100mw-vpp-programme-in-texas/
https://www.ess-news.com/2026/02/12/texas-lands-its-first-battery-only-virtual-power-plant/
https://nuwattenergy.com/en/virtual-power-plants-2026
https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/25/sunrun-tesla-renew-home-announce-plans-for-16-8-gw-virtual-power-plant-program/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484725003865
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/start-next-kraftwerkes-renewable-virtual-power-plant-stabilises-grid
https://www.energy.gov/edf/virtual-power-plants-projects
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/virtual-power-plant-capacity-expands-13.7-year-over-year-to-reach-37.5-gw
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/in-2026-virtual-power-plants-must-scale-or-risk-being-left-behind/810321/
https://ieefa.org/resources/case-virtual-power-plants
https://uplight.com/blog/virtual-power-plants-are-powering-the-grid-of-the-future-and-uplight-is-leading-the-way/
https://sepapower.org/knowledge/vpp-and-supporting-der-policy-developments-q1-2026/
https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/solar-and-batteries/south-australias-virtual-power-plant
https://whatisavpp.com/research/topics/enpal-flexa/
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/virtual-power-plants/rooftop-solar-industry-trump-budget-law
https://foleyhoag.com/news-and-insights/blogs/energy-and-climate-counsel/2026/july/virtual-power-plants-the-distributed-energy-revolution-has-arrived/
https://ieefa.org/resources/case-virtual-power-plants
https://sepapower.org/knowledge/vpp-and-supporting-der-policy-developments-q1-2026/
https://www.cesa.org/resource-library/resource/puerto-rico-virtual-power-plant/
https://www.energy.gov/edf/virtual-power-plants-projects
https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/solar-and-batteries/south-australias-virtual-power-plant
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/16/china-launches-work-on-its-first-gw-scale-residential-virtual-power-plant/
https://www.ferc.gov/ferc-order-no-2222-explainer-facilitating-participation-electricity-markets-distributed-energy
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/in-2026-virtual-power-plants-must-scale-or-risk-being-left-behind/810321/


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This week we talk about borders, trade wars, and belligerence.
We also discuss Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and nationalism.
Recommended Book: Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley
Transcript
The US and Canada share the longest international border in the world, totaling more than 5,500 miles, or nearly 8,900 km. The specific details of this border have changed over the decades, but the current delineation was largely in place following the San Juan Islands water arbitration of 1872, which brought a 12-year joint military standoff between the US and Great Britain, known as the Pig War, to an end, and fed into a 1908 legal framework that relied on modern mapping of the entire frontier, which led to the precise cartography of the current international border between the US and Canada.
Since then, after some issues with gold rush-era land rights were figured out in Alaska, and some treaties were signed regarding the disarmament of the Great Lakes, things have been pretty calm along this massive border. Trade hasn’t always been the most efficient and free—the early 20th century in particular was pretty fraught in this regard, as Anti-Americanism raged through Canada. That led to a dismissal of a proposed lowering of trade barriers by the Canadian Liberal government in 1911, anti-American sentiment flogged by the Conservatives, who rode their slogan, “No truck or trade with the Yankees,” to a Canadian nationalism-powered victory.
After the US entered WWI and the Allies tallied a victory, though, the US and Canada exchanged their first ambassadors, Warren Harding became the first US President to make an official visit the confederated Canada, visiting Vancouver in 1923, and things between these two countries were looking pretty good until 1930, when the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was a protectionist trade act that, among other things, raised tariffs on incoming Canadian goods in order to protect competing American business interests; making the local offerings artificially more competitive than the stuff coming in from Canada, basically.
The Canadian government hit back with their own higher tariffs and shifted more of their trade to other Commonwealth nations, which led to a decrease in trade between the US and Canada of about 75%; and this was happening during the Great Depression, which is why that Act was enacted, the US government was hoping to bolster their own economy, but instead of helping, it furthered those economic difficulties, because of that drop in trade and international custom—Smoot-Hawley is generally considered to have been an incredibly bad economic move, and US President Hoover signed it against the advice of senior economists, because it seemed politically expedient, US businesses were clamoring for advantages because they thought it would help them, but instead it worsened the Great Depression, and this Act is now taught as a cautionary example of why protectionist trade policies, while appealing in a nationalist sense, tend to be pretty bad, almost always, economically.
US-Canadian relations improved a bit in the WWII-era, and into the early decades of the Cold War. By the late-1960s, the US had become Canada’s largest export market, and that’s why Nixon’s 1971 decision to enact a 10% tariff on all imports, including those from Canada, hit the Canadian economy so hard. Overall US-Canadian relations soured during Nixon’s time in the White House, in part because the Canadian government pivoted toward Europe, rather than kowtowing to the US’ economic demands, and Nixon’s belligerence in the face of that pivot didn’t help matters.
When US President Carter stepped into office, however, things improved for a while, and though there were serious bouts of stagflation in both nations through his time in the White House, American investment in Canada increased, and relations continued to be friendly leading into the 1990s, at which point the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA was signed, in 1994. NAFTA created a common market in North America, between the US, Canada, and Mexico, and that meant the $19 trillion or so in trade between the 470 million people or so living in North America by 2014, would be entirely or almost entirely without barriers, no tariffs or very small, focused tariffs.
Though imperfect by many measures, NAFTA is generally considered to have been a major success, at least in terms of raw economic productivity in North America. And in 2020, is was replaced by the USMCA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is often called NAFTA 2.0, which is in many ways just a modernization of NAFTA that updates many of the earlier provisions and focuses more on digital trade and intellectual property than its precursor.
In July of 2026, however, the US government announced that it would not be renewing the USMCA, after Canada asked the US and Mexico to renew it for another 16 years. The pact remains in effect until it expires in 2036, though it can also be renegotiated or replaced before that. The US Trump administration pointed at rising trade deficits between the US and both Mexico and Canada as the rationale for not renewing it, and at loopholes in the agreement that allowed other nations, like China, to send car components to Mexico and then essentially get Chinese vehicles into North American markets, benefitting from the agreement despite not being a signatory of it.
What I’d like to talk about today is a new trade scuffle between the US and Canadian governments, and what it might mean for the two nations in the coming years if said scuffle becomes a more persistent trade war.
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In July of 2026, US President Trump threatened to invoke a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, that Act from 1930, the Great Depression, which was previously unused, to impose additional tariffs on Canada, despite the continued existence of the USMCA trade agreement.
Stepping back a bit, in his second administration, Trump has unilaterally imposed all kinds of tariffs on pretty much everybody, arguing that those tariffs would bring in more money and thus allow him to lower taxes on the wealthy and on businesses while still bringing in enough to reduce the federal deficit. This claim wasn’t backed by economists and the deficit has continued to increase at a record rate under his administration, but he’s continued to try this approach and make these claims, regardless.
The Supreme Court eventually stepped in to limit Trump’s ability to impose tariffs in early 2026, saying that the Presidency doesn’t have the power to create a bunch of tariffs and impose them on everyone, even when he points at the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as justification. That halting of Trump’s tariffs seem to have helped temper inflation in the US a bit, but now Trump is now taking another approach to try to accomplish the same, invoking this 1930, Great Depression-era act to try to give himself broad tariff-applying powers, once more, despite that Supreme Court decision.
As I mentioned in the intro, the application of Smoot-Hawley tariffs worsened the Great Depression, as the US applied all these tariffs on foreign goods to try to give its own industries an advantage, and that led to counter-tariffs from most of its targets. Within a few years, the people behind those tariffs were booted from office, and the bad taste it left in the US government’s mouth is part of what led to the wave of trade liberalization that happened post-WWII—everyone was done with the heavily tariffed trade environment because it kind of sucked for everyone, so free trade was the name of the game for decades.
Now at the time, even though the tariffs had a net-negative impact on the US, they didn’t exactly crush the US because international trade only made up about 10% of the US economy back then. Today, about 25-27% of US GDP relies on international trade. So still not a majority by any means, and the global average is about 63%, so the US is more capable of undertaking this sort of trade barrier strategy than many other nations, but that’s still a pretty substantial chunk of economic activity in the US that’s impacted by such efforts.
This declaration by Trump that he would be using this old Tariff act to apply new tariffs on Canadian goods arrived after trade negotiations between the US and Canada fell apart, reportedly mere minutes before a deadline, with both sides claiming to the press that the other side attempted to make a last-minute change that was untenable.
After Trump announced that additional 50% tariff on certain goods, the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announce that he would be matching those tariffs, dollar for dollar—a move that’s likely to hurt Canada more than the US, though many US industries, including those that are already hurting because of resource shortages that have been amplified by Trump’s war with Iran and the consequent shut-down of the Strait of Hormuz, not to mention all the uncertainties that have arisen because of his other tariff threats, those industries and businesses will suffer more than most; the US auto industry, for instance, relies on goods that pass back and forth across the Canadian border several times before eventually ending up in US-made automobiles. The US construction industry is likewise reliant on Canadian lumber products.
It seems like Canada has generally tried to work with the US government to come to a mutually beneficial and appealing compromise, but when that happens, the US then pushes for more, then blames Canada for fighting back when the US attempts to punish them for not just giving in. And this is something the Trump administration, and Trump himself, have become fairly notorious for, so it’s a decent assumption, even though we don’t know all the details here, yet, that this is what happened in this case, too.
And as a result, it sounds like the US will apply 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods coming into the US, including things like honey, seeds, and agricultural products, and some types of furniture, clothing, and fabric.
About 72% of all Canadian exports went to the US in 2025, and many of those exports, the ones to which this new tariff will be applied, will now be more expensive, because these costs are almost always passed on to the end-consumer, not just eaten by the business, which in some cases wouldn’t be able to afford to eat those higher costs and stay in business. This is part of why these sorts of tariffs often increase inflation rates.
Both sides of this conflict have publicly committed to not back down, and there’s political hay to be made in sticking with that sentiment; the US is not terribly popular in Canada, or in many allied countries, right now, due to the antagonistic stance the Trump administration has taken toward those relations, so the Canadian government might actually benefit from taking a hard line against the US, here. Likewise, Trump’s supporters might rally around his bullying of a neighboring nation, especially if the administration can successfully frame this as an effort to reduce the deficit or support US businesses, protecting them from foreign competitors are are unfairly competing.
There’s still a fair bit of fog of war on all of this, and we’ll know a lot more within the next few weeks, both in terms of the details of what happened, and in terms of what’s likely to happen next. Right now, though, it would seem that we could be headed for a new trade war between two of the world’s most deeply intertwined wealthy economies, and that could lead to a lot of global economic disruptions as some of that trade is rerouted, and as inflation continues to spiral.
Show Notes
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-us-trade-war-293908564c7a381ea58a61db6e9a8517
https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-tariffs-trump-857ef76b20a766e370d70176135b678e
https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-war-trump-carney-tariffs-4d18583fe52134ca8550652ad9772d2c
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/business/economy-trade-war-us-canada.html
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-illegal
https://access.heinonline.com/HOL/LandingPage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement
doi.org/10.1017%2FS0022050700019549
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_trade_relations
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/22/us-canada-tariffs-trade-trump-carney
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5941584/us-canada-tariffs
https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-trade-tariffs-trump-857ef76b20a766e370d70176135b678e
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgvyy4x2mvo
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/canada/carney-trump-canada-tariffs.html


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This week we talk about the liver, viral infections, and the NHS.
We also discuss blood scandals, needle usage, and Nobel Prizes.
Recommended Book: A World Appears by Michael Pollan
Transcript
The term “hepatitis” refers to the inflammation of the liver, which can result from all kinds of things, including environmental toxins, the consumption of alcohol, or autoimmune diseases. It can also result from viral infections, and the most prominent liver-inflaming viruses are called viral hepatitis.
There are five types of viral hepatitis, A, B, C, D, and E, and each of these viruses are distinct, not part of the same viral family, they’re just similarly named because they impact the same organ.
Hepatitis A and E are primarily spread through contaminated food and water, and generally resolve on their own, untreated, and cause relatively mild symptoms. Hepatitis B and C are spread through blood and other bodily fluids, and can linger in a host’s body for decades before even showing symptoms. Hepatitis D is a parasite of Hepatitis B, and thus only infects people who carry Hepatitis B.
Now again, these are all different conditions that just happen to inflame the liver, so impact and treatment also vary quite a lot. As I mentioned, A and E generally present with mild symptoms and tend to go away on their own, while B and C can stick around a long time. There’s a vaccine for B, but no cure; you can treat it, but that treatment involves suppressing it, and keeping it suppressed, forever. Hep C, in contrast, is curable, and has been since 2014 using what are called direct-acting antiviral pills, but these pills, which are taken for 8 to 12 weeks, are expensive—ranging from $22-95k without insurance, though that price is often reduced substantially for those with insurance, down to as low as $5. This category of drug coverage is often rejected by insurance companies, though, in part because they’re so expensive, that expense the result of little competition in this space; few companies make this type of drug, so those that do can charge more or less whatever they like.
Some people with Hepatitis C clear it on their own; about 30% of people who contract it, in fact, clear it within a few months, medication-free. Which is good, because our understanding of this virus is relatively new. Up until 1989, Hep C didn’t even have its own name: it was established as its own thing, not Hep A and not Hep B, back in the 1970s, and doctors knew that something that wasn’t those two viruses, that was being spread by transfusions, was causing hepatitis symptoms, but they didn’t know any real specifics, so they just called it “non-A, non-B hepatitis,” and that name stuck for more than a decade.
In 1989 the virus was cloned using molecular techniques (as opposed to simply growing the virus, which wasn’t proving fruitful in trying to isolate and identify the thing), and the folks who managed that cloning, and the person who later proved that the genome they cloned, alone, caused the disease, received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their efforts in 2020.
By 1991, antibody tests were available for Hep C, and many countries began screening donated blood for this virus, to ensure it wasn’t working its way into their blood supply.
And one instance of that screening process, or I suppose, an event that led up to mass screening, and the consequences that followed, are what I’d like to talk about today. The UK’s efforts in trying to eliminate Hep C, and England’s recently announced near-success in that pursuit.
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Hepatitis C is an RNA virus with high genetic variability that makes developing a reliable vaccine difficult. And though somewhere between a quarter and a third of all cases clear on their own, those that don’t clear on their own become chronic, lying in wait for twenty to thirty years, slowly accumulating fibrosis—thick scar tissue in the liver—which eventually results in cirrhosis, which means a liver that’s so heavily scarred that the organ is no longer fully functional and the damage is permanent. From there, infected people often experience liver failure or hepatocellular (huh-pah-toe) carcinoma, liver cancer.
So this virus is a sleeper, and unless it’s caught by accident somewhere along the way, it slowly causes damage over time until the damage is too severe to reverse. About 80% of people who have it don’t know they have it, and in some parts of the world medical injections are the most common transmitter, but in higher-income areas, it’s usually transmitted by injectable drugs.
Pre-2014 treatments for Hep C were pretty horrible, involving a combination antiviral therapy called pegylated interferon plus ribavirin that was injected weekly for six months to a year, and this was terribly tolerated by pretty much everyone, causing anemia, depression, and flu-like symptoms for the duration. It also only cured about 50% of people who received the full treatment, and a lot of people had to stop because it caused such ridiculous side effects.
Another antiviral called Sofosbuvir (so-FAS-buh-vir), which kept Hep C from replicating in its host, hit the market in late-2013, and that led to a series of direct-acting antivirals that reduced the treatment period dramatically, allowing most people, 95%, to cure their Hep C entirely by taking generally well-tolerated pills for 8 to 12 weeks.
These pills were staggeringly expensive from the get-go, with an entire treatment course initially costing about $84,000, or $1,000 a pill. This led to rationing, and saving these pills for the worst-impacted people who already had severe liver damage. There were also pretty stringent requirements attached to their distribution, including that people who received them could no longer drink alcohol, because it was considered a waste to give these crazy expensive, liver-saving drugs to people who would just go and hurt their liver more, anyway.
In the UK, the demand for this treatment type was different than in most other countries, in large part because of something that happened back in the 1970s and 80s.
The UK’s publicly funded healthcare system, the NHS, was in the midst of a shortage of clotting factor, which are plasma proteins and ions that help blood clot and which are used for medical purposes. So they imported a bunch of plasma products from the US, and those products were sourced from the blood of paid donors—and that donor pool included prisoners and people who used injectable drugs. Just one Hep C contaminated blood donation could contaminate an entire batch of blood, and remember, they only started screening the blood supply for Hep C in 1991, and they didn’t start treating their blood supply for Hep C until a little before that, 1985, so this was well before they had any idea what was in those blood products they were importing and administering.
Consequently, between 1970 and the early 1990s, more than 30,000 NHS patients received transfusions or other blood product treatments contaminated with Hep B, Hep C, or HIV, and about a tenth of those people, around 3,000 patients, have since died of those conditions.
The UK government leaned on denial and a refusal to look into the details of this for years, but in 2017 it announced an independent public inquiry into the matter, and in May of 2024, that inquiry concluded that this whole scandal was avoidable, that patients were knowingly exposed to “unacceptable risks,” and that there was a big cover up by government officials, doctors, and other people working with the NHS.
As of mid-2026, only a little over 3,200 people of the more than 18,500 who registered claims, demanding compensation from the government because they were impacted by this scandal, have been paid out. The expected total expense for the UK government is on the order of 12.8 billion pounds, but a lot of people who are probably due a payout, and who are in poor and deteriorating health as a consequence of all this, don’t yet have a sense of when they’ll receive their payment.
Back in 2016, before all that came to a head, the UK set itself an aggressive goal: to eliminate Hep C by the WHO’s 2030 target, or before. It then ran a competitive tender for antivirals, inviting medical suppliers to submit competing bids, resulting in the largest single medicine procurement program in the NHS’ history. The pharmaceutical companies that won their bids were also obliged, as part of the agreement, to help fund efforts to identify undiagnosed but infected patients, in addition to supplying antiviral pills, and this combination of investment and application led to the deployment of new tests and scanning machines, free postal test kits, the hiring of specialists, and services that focused on prisons and drug users.
The impact of all this has been significant: a more than 61% decline in infections from 2015 to 2024, nearly half of all drug users with Hep C had cleared the virus in that time, and deaths from Hep C are down 36% over the past decade.
The WHO treatment-coverage target—the percentage of people who are diagnosed getting treatment—was 80%, and England has hit 81.5%, which was recently announced to much fanfare. It hasn’t yet hit the diagnosis target, however, which is to diagnose 90% of people who are estimated to have Hep C; they’ve hit 84.6%, which is still quite a lot of progress, even if they’re not yet where they’d like to be. That’s all based on models, of course, as are the assumed number of infections among people who use injectable drugs, which is also a spot where England is currently flagging; there’s no centralized system in England to monitor needle and syringe provisions, and reinfection rates are around 8.8 per 100 person-years among people who had injected within three years of receiving treatment, and that rate is even higher for people who have ever been to prison, around 9.4 per 100.
What that means in practice is that the English government overall has done a pretty astounding and effective job at negotiating their relationships with pharma companies and getting detection on track at that scale, but on more ground-level issues that are, interestingly, a lot cheaper to implement, but at times more politically complicated because of public sentiment about drug use and drug users, they’re doing a lot less well—and important to note here is that these outcomes vary a bit across the four programs being run across the UK. Scotland and Wales are doing relatively better and worse in some regards compared to England, for instance.
Also worth noting here that while England is broadly doing a great job with Hep C diagnosis and treatment, they aren’t the first to achieve those WHO-set goals: Egypt reached Gold tier status according to the WHO’s Hep C guidelines in October of 2023, at that point having diagnosed 87% of people who have the virus, and treating 93% of those who were diagnosed. They managed to cut incidence of the virus by 97% in just 8 years, leaning on a system of high-yield testing—they tested more than 60 million people during those 8 years—alongside a production scheme that included local manufacturing of antivirals, making them more available and affordable.
All of which are generally good signs about where Hep C testing and treatment is going, at least in these regions. And it paints a optimistic picture for other countries that might want to replicate some of what’s working within their own borders.
Show Notes
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75gk620r22o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infected_blood_scandal_in_the_United_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_hepatitis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_B
https://www.healthline.com/health/hepatitis-c/treatment-costs
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-c
https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-of-hepatitis-c-in-scotland/surveillance-of-hepatitis-c-in-scotland-progress-on-elimination-of-hepatitis-c-as-a-major-public-health-concern-2025-update/
https://www.emro.who.int/media/news/egypt-becomes-the-first-country-to-achieve-who-validation-on-the-path-to-elimination-of-hepatitis-c.html
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hepatitis-c-in-england-and-the-uk/hepatitis-c-in-england-2025
https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-treatment-to-cure-deadly-hep-c-virus-on-nhs-in-just-ten-years/
https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2019/04/hepatitis-c-trust-welcomes-elimination-deal-hepatitis-c-and-calls-government-backed/
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10099/
https://www.who.int/teams/global-hiv-hepatitis-and-stis-programmes/hepatitis/reports/global-hepatitis-report-2026


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This week we talk about Evo 2, bacteriophages, and antibiotics.
We also discuss AI models, medical innovations, and the Red Army.
Recommended Book: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Transcript
A bacteriophage, sometimes just called a phage, is a type of virus that only infects bacteria. “Phage” means to devour, and that’s what bacteriophages do—they infect and replicate within bacteria that they target, injecting their own genome into that target’s cytoplasm, which are all the materials contained within the bacteria’s cell membrane.
Phages are super-abundant, by some measures more abundant than every living organism, including bacteria, on earth, combined. And they’re interesting in that they range from incredibly simple to quite complex, and have at times been used as alternatives to antibiotics, because they attack and feed on bacteria.
The use of phages to counter bacterial infections was all but abandoned in the mid-20th century when antibiotics were discovered and commercialized, their production industrialized and the substances themselves proving a lot easier to mass-produce, and a lot more predictable in their utility than phages. Phages were kinda sorta almost understood, but we didn’t really get what they were doing or why, so their application often felt more like folk remedies than real-deal science, despite the actual science underlying the practice.
Also, phages were primarily used as antibiotic treatments by the Red Army, the Soviet Union’s military. So throughout the West, which was rapidly scaling its production of antibiotic treatments, the use of bacteriophages was associated with Stalinist communism, and so the Red-scare, the demonization of anything associated with the Soviet Union, was partially responsible for the shelving of this approach and this realm of research, at least for a while.
Much of that existing research was also done in the Soviet Union, and the published documents were thus published in Russian or Georgian languages. And because much of the rest of the scientific publishing world was reorienting around English at this time, that meant these published works were often either ignored or unintelligible to the rest of the scientific community.
As with much of our microbiota, the invisibly small viruses, bacteria, archaea, and so on that make up the human microbiome, we have a general sense of how bacteriophages interact with some of what makes us, us, but only a general sense. We know that healthy individuals tend to contain a host of bacteriophages that people who have chronic conditions, like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis are less likely to have, for instance, and there’s a chance that this lack is associated with those conditions—though each person’s body composition is unique, and this facet of biology is still relatively obscure; we really don’t know for certain what does what, because of how complex these interactions are.
What I’d like to talk about today is a recent development in the world of bacteriophages, and why the researchers behind it are both celebrating their accomplishment, and warning about potential dangers associated with the same.
—
Back in 2025, a nonprofit called the Arc Institute, which has a stated goal of accelerating scientific progress and understanding the root causes of complex diseases, announced the release of a new language model, a new AI system, called Evo 2.
The Evo family of foundation models—a foundation model being a type of AI model that’s been trained on a huge corpus of data, but which is applicable for all sorts of purposes, including serving as the foundation of large-language models like ChatGPT or Claude—this family of foundation models is open-source and trained on raw genetic sequences, something like nine trillion nucleotides-worth of such sequences, making it distinct from other models in this space that have been trained on descriptions of biological systems, using human language.
The initial version of Evo was released in early 2024, and the newest version, Evo 2, which is an upgraded version of the Evo 2 model that is more efficient, so it can be run on less powerful hardware, was released in February of 2026.
So while many of the AI systems that non-biologists interact with on a regular basis have been trained on human language-based libraries, showing relationships and interactions between the words we use to communicate, these models have been trained on the fundamental building blocks of life; the nucleotides, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine, ATCG of DNA, if you remember that from biology class, that are strung together into 64 different possible three-letter combinations. Chains of these nucleotides instruct cells to build proteins out of amino acids, and from that baseline, we get life.
We also get non-living things like viruses, which have no cells, metabolism, or independent reproduction, and phages are viruses.
And while other AI models have been shown to be great at designing proteins, before 2025 there was little evidence that such systems could design viable genomes: the combination of genetic information that makes up a complete, fully functional organism.
That’s what Arc decided to tackle with this Evo AI model. And back in 2025, Arc announced that it had successfully validated the first viable genome designs, created using generative AI.
These designs were for 16 bacteriophages, which were modeled on a virus that infects E. coli bacteria, and some of them worked just as well or better at infecting E. coli when compared to the actual, real-world phage they were modeled on. They were produced in the real world, a bacteria coaxed into producing them, and then they went on to successfully gobble up the E. coli test subjects they were meant to gobble up, demonstrating that they worked in practice, not just theory.
And a new paper published in early August of 2026 by the Arc Institute and Stanford University expounds upon this research, showing the results of an attempt to create entirely new viruses, not just altered existing viruses.
Rather than mutating that E. coli gobbling phage, as with the last experiment, tweaking an existing virus, this time they tasked Evo 2 with modeling how that E. coli attacking and eating process works, and then told it to come up with entirely new viruses that operate on the same premise, but which are structured differently; new viruses that eat the same thing in a similar way, but which are distinct from the original model.
Ultimately, it gave them 16 viable viruses of very different sizes and structure, all of which were created in a lab and successfully ate the targeted E. coli strain, as intended.
This is being seen as a pretty big deal, because while creating viruses in a lab is very modern technology, and mutating those viruses shows a lot of potential for manipulating what we already know works and then tweaking virus behaviors to, perhaps, help us create new medical treatments, the ability to generate, from scratch, entirely new viruses that hold together, with genomes that don’t just fall apart when they come into contact with the real world, and which can still do things, like attack bacteria—that opens a lot of new doors, potentially giving us the ability to say, okay, this bacteria is no longer responding to antibacterial drugs that we have available, so let’s make a virus that will kill the bacteria instead, and let’s make one that won’t harm the human that’s housing that bacteria.
We might also be able to create phages that eat other things, or which in some other way help the human body, or other biological entities, fight off chronic conditions, or recover or rebalance; there’s a lot of potential here, because this suggests AI systems trained on the right materials, on the building blocks of life, could generate all sorts of viable biological systems that we can then actually create. It’s a huge step forward, compared to systems that are also impressive, but which mostly help us understand the biological world better—like Alphafold, which solved the protein folding problem.
Those involved with this research have also been been flagging potential dangers with this development, though, including the potential for creating new viruses and other biological systems that could trigger unpredictable outcomes in other biological systems. There are a lot of potential hazards with this sort of research, and they’ve been very careful up till this point, sticking with test subjects that only target E. coli, but not everyone will necessarily be so careful, which might mean accidents, or it could mean people with less than benevolent intentions using these techniques to develop highly infectious viruses or other such pathogens; starting from smallpox to produce even more contagious and deadly ailments, for instance.
The optimistic view of this research is that it could contribute to the surge in new discoveries and technologies that we’re seeing around the world right now, that are resulting in new medical approaches and in some cases entirely new medical fields, which could help us do all sorts of things, including big-sky ambitions like curing cancer and doing away with chronic illnesses entirely.
Like most major scientific developments, though, these are also big developments for those who might want to do harm, and it also creates new opportunities for very serious, dangerous, deadly accidents, which means we’ll probably have to develop and implement more stringent safety protocols and regulatory efforts if we want to enjoy the full benefits of these innovations, without suffering significant new downsides, in the process.
Show Notes
https://press.asimov.com/articles/ai-phages
https://arcinstitute.org/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/06/safety-fears-as-scientists-make-first-viruses-designed-by-ai
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/health/ai-viruses-bacteriophages
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-07/ai-models-design-viruses-not-found-in-nature-for-first-time/107007854
https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-used-ai-to-create-16-new-viruses/
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_(AI)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/science/ai-viruses-bacteria-arc.html


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This week we talk about Melilla, hybrid warfare, and migration.
We also discuss Morocco, civil conflict, and immigration politics.
Recommended Book: Playground by Richard Powers
Transcript
Ceuta is a Spanish-owned territory located in northwestern Africa, along the top of Morocco. It’s small—about seven square miles—and is unusual because it is a city owned by a European Union member state that isn’t located on the European continent; it’s bordered by Morocco and the Mediterranean, and is located at the entrance of the Strait of Gibraltar, which is the strait that separates the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean.
Ceuta is one of two territories that Spain still holds in Africa, the other being a smaller, just 4.7 square mile city called Melilla, which is located further west but still along the Mediterranean coast, bordered by the sea on one side, and by Morocco on the other.
Spain has held both of these territories for hundreds of years: Ceuta since 1580 and Melilla since 1497, so it’s actually held them far longer than Morocco has been an independent state, in 1956. The populations of these territories, just over 85,000 people in each, also heavily identify as Spanish, despite many residents having Moroccan ancestry, so theres a cultural component here, too.
That said, Morocco officially claims both areas as their own, considering them to be occupied territories, a bit like the Crimean peninsula has been militarily held by Russia since 2014, but it’s still claimed by Ukraine as an occupied territory. So the Moroccan government isn’t thrilled about having these small chunks of land, autonomous cities that are technically part of Spain, right there in the midst of their own territory. But these cities have been part of Spain for so long, and the residents are all Spanish citizens, with the same rights and sense of culture as the rest of Spain and Europe, that simply handing them over to Morocco has never seemed terribly feasible or desirable to the Spanish government, despite neither territory providing much strategic or economic value to Spain. So they remain a point of contention between these two governments.
They’ve also served as migration hot-spots in recent decades, because they are the only two European territories that border an African country. And this is important because, in some cases, under some governments and in accordance with some laws, if you can make it across a border and into another country, you might be able to enter the system and eventually become a citizen, maybe claiming asylum or maybe getting slotted into some other path to citizenship. Or failing that, there’s a chance you might be able to just fade into the background, working and living in that country, despite not legally being there.
What I’d like to talk about today is a recent surge in migrants crossing the border from Morocco into Ceuta, and the larger state of play, migration-wise, globally right now.
—
On the last day of July, 2026, an estimated 50-60 thousand African migrants illegally crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, some of them swimming to bypass the 20-foot-high border fences, others climbing those fences, or piling into overflowing boats, arriving in Ceuta en masse and overwhelming the guards who tried to stop them, though generally just trying to run past them, not attacking the guards—this wasn’t an attack, it was a rush to get into Spanish territory.
Eventually the guards were reinforced by police and the Spanish military, and they started to push the waves of migrants back using water cannons and tear gas. But despite the less-lethal crowd control methods that were applied, at least 67 people, that’s the number as of the day I’m recording this at least, it’s been updated many times over the past few days, 67 people died as a result of stampedes, either headed inland or back into the sea, away from the gas and water cannons, or they drowned while trying to cross over the water.
By the following day, the wave of migrants had become just a trickle, mostly a few stragglers who tried to swim to Ceuta, and who were swiftly returned to Morocco by local law enforcement. Almost everyone else who illegally crossed the border also returned to Morocco moved on by police or of their own volition, and though, again, this wasn’t some kind of violent incursion, to get a sense of the scale of this wave of humanity, Ceuta only has about 85,000 people living there, and this wave of migrants was about 60,000 people strong. So the locals mostly closed up all their shops and locked their doors, the people who arrived found themselves unable to get food or water, and law enforcement told them they need to leave, so most did. As of the day I’m recording this there are still several hundred migrants hiding in the nearby hills and lounging on the beach, exhausted and still hopeful they’ll be able to enter the asylum system—many of them saying they fled conflicts further south, like the ongoing civil war in Sudan, and so anything, even starving on the beach in Ceuda, is better than going back.
This isn’t the first time Ceuta has faced this kind of humanitarian crisis; back in 2021, the Moroccan government stopped enforcing its border controls and around 8000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta over the course of just two days. That was sparked by the Spanish government’s decision to allow the head of a militant group in Western Sahara, a breakaway portion of Morocco that the Moroccan government claimed in 1975, but which itself still claims independence with some international support, they let that militant leader into Spain for medical treatment, and Morocco allowed thousands of migrants to flow across the border as punishment.
This more recent crisis is much larger, and the cause isn’t clear at this point. Spanish officials have said that Moroccan security forces were working alongside Spanish forces to keep people from crossing the border, so it seems unlikely this was stoked by the Moroccan government, and claims that this wave of people were motivated by an ongoing effort by the Spanish government to grant amnesty to immigrants who don’t currently have residency permits, but who can prove they’ve been living in the country for at least 5 months and arrived before January 1 of 2026 also seems unlikely, as those arriving in this wave obviously wouldn’t be part of that amnesty.
There’s a chance that this surge was triggered by a Spanish court ruling that was intentionally misconstrued by migrant smugglers in order to gin up more business. A bunch of social media posts claimed that this ruling said migrants who arrived via sea couldn’t be immediately deported, not without due process, but those who arrived via land or by climbing border fences, could—crossing a physical barrier was the big no-no, according to this misinformation, so people who swam or crossed in boats would stand a better chance of being able to stick around and eventually become Spanish citizens.
This was pure misinformation, but there’s a chance it played a role in sparking this large migrant wave. And many of the people who were interviewed, those who tried to cross and were sent back, have echoed the sentiments of other migrants who have attempted these sorts of crossings at borders elsewhere around the world: essentially, things are very bad, worse than you can possibly imagine, in the country they’ve left, and the only option seems to be getting away as fast as possible, even taking chances that might kill them, because that’s still better than staying.
These waves of mass migration often result in humanitarian crises because people are hurt or killed by border security forces, are hurt or killed by being trampled or drowning, or they’re hurt or killed while making the journey through dangerous areas, like the infamous Darién Gap that stretches through mountains and rainforests along the border between Colombia and Panama, and which spans the only gap in the Pan-American Highway, which connects Central and South America.
Spanish authorities have said they’ll be building even higher fences in Ceuta following this recent mass incursion, will string a floating buoy fence along the waters where people are crossing, and will be upping security, though like in most other popular border areas, security is already significant: tall fences, barbed wire, security cameras everywhere—these are not vulnerable spots, they’re just not capable of handling 60,000 motivated people all at once.
This episode in Ceuta is not happening in a vacuum.
The Spanish prime minister has established a pro-immigration stance, positioning the country as a modern melting pot, which is part of why that aforementioned effort to give about half a million undocumented legal immigrants legal status is happening to begin with. Many countries right now are adopting anti-immigration stances as new technologies and changing demographics ripple through the economy, and mostly conservative, in some cases far-right conservative political movements frame those changes as the consequence of allowing too many foreigners into the country; these bad things aren’t happening because of technology or economics or demographics, they claim, it’s happening because there are too many people who are different from us crossing our borders and living here. Which for some, is a compelling rallying cry.
Consequently, migrants are positioned as big bad enemies in many parts of the world, used to flog support for anti-immigrant parties, and to decry opposing governments. That has forced many pro-immigration governments to temper their stances, even to the point that formerly pro-immigration Europe has become a lot less so in recent years.
Migrants are also used as pawns in hybrid warfare efforts. Morocco’s previous decision to allow thousands of migrants to surge across the Spanish border in response to Spain’s government doing something they didn’t like is a tame version of this. More aggressive versions have been conducted by Russia against Finland and other neighboring NATO nations, the Russian military bussing migrants from elsewhere to their opponents’ borders, intentionally creating a humanitarian and security crisis, while also putting pressure on centrist and left-leaning governments by providing ammunition for far-right and other more authoritarian governments throughout the region, who can then cry foul on how that migrant surge is handled. This tends to create more allies for Russia in the region, but it also keeps these neighboring countries busy, forcing them to tighten their borders and become more insular, which then leaves Russia freer to exercise its will throughout the region.
It’s also worth remember here that most migrants are leaving horrible situations at home, meaning war, famine, severe and persistent drought, in some cases they’re trying to avoid having their children kidnapped and made into child soldiers while all of the women are sexually assaulted as part of the ongoing war.
The number of people fleeing such conditions, who are currently on the run, their homes no longer safely habitable, is massive. There are an estimated 304 million migrants globally right now, which, if that population of people were their own country, would be the fourth most populous in the world, just after the United States.
And this population is expected to just keep growing as global climate change continues to mess with previous water cycle and weather norms, and as all those earlier mentioned variables continue to mess with economics and technology and leadership and everything else, creating more violence and fear and famine and so on.
This was a significant migrant wave in Ceuta, in other words, but it’s just one example of something that’s happening all over the place right now, and which will likely continue to happen, perhaps at even greater scales and with more regularity.
Show Notes
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-to-know-about-the-spanish-enclave-of-ceuta-as-migrant-arrivals-from-morocco-spike
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/30/spanish-enclave-of-ceuta-raises-alarm-as-thousands-cross-morocco-border
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/7/31/spain-deploys-military-to-ceuta-after-migrant-surge-what-we-know
https://abcnews.com/International/57-dead-after-thousands-migrants-cross-ceuta-officials/story?id=135254045
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/31/europe/spain-ceuta-migrants-intl
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/07/31/most-migrants-who-crossed-into-ceuta-have-returned-to-morocco-as-death-toll-rises-to-34/
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/g-s1-136507/morocco-spain-migration
https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world-africa-14114627
https://www.britannica.com/place/Ceuta
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/ceuta-spain-north-africa
https://theconversation.com/ceuta-claves-para-entender-el-laberinto-de-una-crisis-migratoria-permanente-288843
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/2/western-sahara-independence-leader-brahim-ghali-back-in-algeria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Morocco%E2%80%93Spain_border_incident
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/world/europe/ceuta-spain-morocco-migrants.html
https://apnews.com/article/migration-spain-ceuta-morocco-d76c6dc9d2da828907a1c04e1d482bbe
https://apnews.com/article/migrants-spain-ceuta-morocco-d564354dd54e92debf43ce5fe22299f9
https://apnews.com/article/spain-migration-ceuta-morocco-facts-50baa964ecfb07a2d19223d7ec375b91
https://apnews.com/article/spain-morocco-immigration-european-union-8f023984a310276c619929102b4f909a
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/europe-migrants-ceuta.html
http://nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/ceuta-spain-morocco-migrant-holdouts-beach.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/spain-ceuta-far-right.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/world/europe/spain-ceuta-migrants-morocco-border.html


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