Corradino Mineo “I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts” (“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”). Laocoön tried in vain to stop the destruction of the city walls to admit that strange gift from the Greeks. Today it is Giorgia Meloni who embodies the Trojan horse being used to try to destroy Europe, reopening the wounds of the twentieth century’s civil wars and calling into question rights and protections won over the past 80 years. On 23 August, the New York Times presented her as the face of “a post-fascist Italy opening the door to power for the far right,” explicitly referring to the possibility that, after her, Marine Le Pen might win the 2027 presidential election. ...

Roberto Bertoni Let us hope we are wrong, that we are being too pessimistic — but watching the tragic affair unfolding between Iran and the United States, which at times takes on almost grotesque proportions, one gets the impression that the world no longer knows how to live without war. And given how things have unfolded in Ukraine, with the continuation of the Russian occupation (let us not forget that Putin’s rise is also a consequence of globalisation’s limits and of the West’s betrayal of an honest statesman like Gorbachev) and Zelensky still ordering long-range missile strikes against Russian targets, along with the failure of any prospect of a truce after four years of conflict, the bitter feeling is that the Old Continent has slipped back to 1913 — the year of the “sleepwalkers,” those who drifted into barbarism without even realising it. ...

Chloé Maurel An emblematic monument showing the tensions between heritage preservation and tourist exploitation Situated at an altitude of 1,570 metres in the southern part of the Sinai Peninsula, at the foot of Mount Horeb, identified by biblical tradition as Moses’ Mount Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, also known as the Monastery of the Transfiguration, is an Orthodox Christian place of worship and one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastic institutions in the world. Founded during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I between 548 and 565, this fortified complex represents an exceptional religious, historical, artistic, and geopolitical heritage. Yet today it is under serious threat. What conflicts are crystallising around it, symbolising the recurring tensions between religious, heritage, economic, and geopolitical concerns? ...

Grégory Herpe On the night of May 23-24, 2026, I watched the sky over Kyiv. The sirens had sounded shortly after midnight. I was in my hotel room working on the photos I had taken during the day, and I stepped out onto the terrace – the instinct not to miss what the walls of an apartment would have hidden. The sky seemed pierced by the luminous trails of falling missiles, glowing like flashes of fire. Then the dull detonations in the distance, the closer explosions whose blast you felt in your ribcage before you even truly heard them. As if waves of pressure were passing right through us. The anti-aircraft batteries chattering in bursts. Then the drones – small, fast points, humming discreetly, before the total conflagration of the sky, of the city. ...