🇪🇺 Spain's Ceuta crisis rocks Brussels

• Claudia was more than this. In a follow-up message, she asked that Claudia not be reduced to a headline: “I don’t want us to remember Claudia simply as ‘the 21-year-old girl who was murdered in Mexico.’ I want this to mean something.”

Troubling history. Morelos has the second-highest femicide rate in Mexico. In the country as a whole, 1,250 women were murdered in the first seven months of 2026. The University of Granada has cancelled its exchange program with UAEM. Meanwhile, “Paco” is still out there.

3. 🤡 A Killer Klown is terrorizing Madrid! (Allegedly)

We knew we had it too good. We returned from fantastic vacations just as Madrid’s weather slid into gorgeous autumn. And then, boom 💥, a murder-happy clown began to terrorize our fair city. That’s how they get you, right?

• It began about a week ago, in the suburb of Rivas Vaciamadrid (pop. 103,000). TikTok and WhatsApp groups blew up with reports of a killer clown prowling parks at night, chasing women and girls with a baseball bat, and also, apparently, hurling bottles at youths, because if you’re going to be a killer clown, you gotta go all the way.

• The photos and videos? They went viral, natch, as media outlets reported it as real, and vigilante groups organized nighttime car patrols to hunt the clown down. Yes, really.

We are sad to break this to you. The Guardia Civil and Policía Local investigated, reviewed security camera footage, and interviewed every person who called in a sighting.

• The conclusion? The clown (aka Pennywise or maybe Penique Listo?), with his red afro and blue-and-yellow parachute suit, does not exist, the police claim (though maybe they’re just trying to calm us down… 🤔)

• Please tell us you’re kidding. Nope! The photos show incoherent shadows, unrealistic proportions, and other signs of A.I. slop. Of the five calls received, all turned out to be false alarms — people reporting what they’d been told, not what they’d seen. Shocker!

When Killer Klowns are involved, politics can’t be far behind. The local PP spokesperson, Janette Novo, posted a video with epic background music demanding the IU (communist) leaders of town hall take the clown “seriously” (you know how lazy communists are about clown safety).

• The video? Mejor imposible. It opened with an image of the nonexistent clown while asking people not to share unverified images of the nonexistent clown. A constituent replied: “You’re asking people not to spread nonsense while spreading nonsense.”

• Fine, I exaggerated. Once the authorities debunked the whole thing, Novo graciously acknowledged her error with a post declaring: “Case closed: the only clowns in Rivas are IU.” #ffs 🤦

Police are now tracking down whoever started it. Fabricating crimes carries a fine of 6-12 months’ salary, and deliberately spreading false content to cause public alarm can mean 3 months to a year in prison. Wearing a clown suit while carrying a baseball bat? Totally cool (At least he’s not ripping little kids’ arms off from the sewers.)

Killer Klown sightings have a blue-blooded genealogy. The phenomenon likely began in Greenville, S.C. (USA) in August 2016, with the original killer clown scare, before it went global, fed by Stephen King’s It and basic human fear of clowns (which is natural).

• But clown fear goes back further. The 1988 cult hit Killer Klowns from Outer Space stoked our fears with the tale of evil clown-like extraterrestrials that invade a small town to capture, kill, and eat the human inhabitants. True story!

4. 🐑 Let us celebrate a shepherd from another era

Marina Vilalta died on Monday. You may not know her — okay, let’s be honest, you don’t — but she had an amazing life. She died at age 99 in Bruguera (Girona), still working as a shepherd, a job she’d done since age 5, making her the oldest and longest-working active shepherd in Catalonia — and almost certainly in Spain. Here’s her story.

• Vilalta was born in 1927, one of 12 siblings, and the only one who chose the mountains. She began shepherding alongside her father. There was one brief detour — a few months in a textile factory — which she abandoned because, she said, she wanted to see the stars. She spent the next nine decades doing exactly that, taking her flock of sheep and goats out each afternoon to graze at the foot of Mount Taga, returning when the light faded.

Vilalta never learned to read or write. Instead, she carried inside her a vast store of Catalan songs, refranes and oral tradition, all of it memorized with extraordinary precision. (There was a book written about her, though: Journo Abraham Orriols penned the book, Una vida a les muntanyes, when he was 26 and she was 96.)

• In 2022 she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi, Catalonia’s highest civilian honor. She declined to go to Barcelona to collect it. Someone had to watch the flock, you know? So the region’s then-president Pere Aragonès traveled to Bruguera to present it to her in person. She addressed him informally, with tu. Her family still tells the story, half-amused, half-scandalized.

Vilalta has an epitaph of sorts, which she dictated herself. “I never thought I’d live to be this old. One day God will call me, and that’ll be it. And when I die... screw the living!“ In celebration of her life, current Catalan president Salvador Illa called her an example of the pagesia catalana (Catalan peasantry), and her biographer Orriols posted a photo of the two of them sharing a vermouth in the village bar — taken two weeks before she died.

• Last Tuesday she went out to pasture, as she did every day. She felt unwell. An ambulance came. Caring for the sheep and goats was the last thing she did.

5. 🦕 A Diplodocus turned up in Teruel. It shouldn’t be there.