The righties are apoplectic that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey famously portrays a Black Helen—displaying their ignorance of the actual intercourse between Africa and the ancient Greek world. But apart from the cultural politics of the movie, the geopolitics of the Trojan War have all too much to say about the contemporary world crisis. Then, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles constituted the strategic chokepoints at issue, just as the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb do today. And the Bosphorus & Dardanelles could suddenly become critically strategic if Turkey becomes embroiled in either the Middle East war or the Ukraine war—or both. Finally, the movie itself has become embroiled in a geopolitical dispute: Nolan shot his cinematic spectacle partly in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara—not, as the film credits say, "Morocco." This is another near-forgotten conflict that now shows signs of re-escalating—and may have been at issue in the recent deadly incident at the Spanish North African exclave of Ceuta, situated just within the strategic Strait of Gibraltar. The current world crisis could bring about a civilization collapse far more decisive and complete than the Bronze Age Collapse that followed the Trojan War.

The United Nations reported on Aug. 7 that the cost of key foods increased in July as a result of searing heatwaves and ongoing geopolitical instability, which have affected crop yields and global energy prices amid persistent hunger risks in multiple countries.

The US will launch a diplomatic campaign aimed at dismantling the International Criminal Court, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced July 6. In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio wrote that the US will work alongside allied governments to take the Court apart "brick by brick, if necessary," using all tools at the government's disposal. He said the campaign's message to other governments will be a choice of "sovereign states over globalism," and pledged that the administration will protect US service members from ICC jurisdiction.

The Pechersk Lavra, one of the most important historical and religious sites in Ukraine, was hit in Moscow's latest barrage of drone and missile attacks on Kyiv overnight June 14-15, in what President Volodymyr Zelensky called "one of Russia's most serious crimes against Christian culture to date." Images circulating on social media show flames rising above the UNESCO World Heritage site, which contains structures dating from between the 11th and 18th centuries, including the gold-domed Dormition Cathedral. The head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Epiphanius, confirmed that the roof of the cathedral caught fire in the attack, calling the strike another Russian crime "against humanity, against history, against Christianity." Some 42,000 Kyiv residents spent the night in the capital's metro stations to escape the aerial assault on the city. (EuroNews)

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on May 26 reported that Russian authorities are unlawfully seizing civilian property belonging to Ukrainians in occupied areas of the country, in violation of international law. The laws of war prohibit the unlawful confiscation of private property unless strictly justified by military necessity.

The administrative subpoenas issued for Hasan Piker and Medea Benjamin over their participation in the Cuba caravan are to be opposed—in part because the subpoenas will only give their sinister politics greater cachet among neophyte activists! Piker's shameless shilling for the dictatorships of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin invisibilizes the victims of their ethno-supremacist detention states—such as the Uyghurs of Xinjiang and the Crimean Tatars. This more critical point is obscured in the endless outrage over his supposed anti-Semitism. And with Xi and Putin joining with Trump to build a fascist world order, Piker's brand of campist pseudo-opposition (however overheated) is compromised from the start, mirroring what it ostensibly opposes—subpoenas notwithstanding. In Episode 330 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks it down in his typically unsparing manner.

With aid from the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development (EBRD), Ukraine has opened a special fund for the restoration of the protective structure over the entombed reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The €30 million agreement was signed on April 26 during a Chernobyl International Conference on Recovery & Nuclear Safety, actually held at the site of the disaster that took place on that date in 1986. The "New Safe Confinement" structure has since 2016 provided a second layer of protection over the "sarcophagus" that Soviet authorities built to entomb the exploded reactor after the disaster. It was breached by a Russian drone strike on the site in February 2025.

A $106 billion EU emergency loan is now on its way to Ukraine, following the fall of Hungary's strongman Viktor Orban, who was holding it up. However, as a condition of the loan, Kyiv is obliged to re-open the war-damaged Druzhba pipeline, which sends Russian oil through Ukrainian territory to Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Germany. Kyiv is cooperating in getting the pipeline operational again—but is meanwhile drone-bombing Russian oil facilities on the Baltic and Black seas, in hopes of diminishing how much petrol Moscow will have to export through that pipeline. The strikes have caused "apocalyptic scenes" in the Black Sea port of Tuapse—air thick with toxic fumes, a huge column of smoke blotting out the sun, black rain falling from the sky. Russia, unwilling to sacrifice its own oil revenues but seeking to punish Europe for backing Ukraine, has announced that it will cut off the flow of oil from Kazakhstan through the Druzhba pipeline. (PRI, Al Jazeera, Reuters, E&E News, The Moscow Times)