De Nederlandsche Bank shifted more than a quarter of its gold out of American vaults and into London between March and August. The bank confirmed it this week and gave a reason: rising geopolitical unrest. The official justification is that Bank of England bullion is the most tradable in the world and therefore the most readily available if a crisis breaks. That reason is true and also incomplete, which is normal for central bank communication.

Subject: Comune di Venezia, historic centre (centro storico) Assessment focus: Resident population decline and the policy response to visitor volume The historic centre of Venice has lost more than seventy per cent of its resident population since the early 1950s and now houses fewer people than a mid-sized market town, while receiving visitor volumes among the highest per resident of any urban area in Europe. Policy intervention to date has targeted visitor flow rather than the housing and employment conditions driving residents out.

I’ve spent years arguing that Spain gets written off too cheaply. The declinist take on Madrid — permanent stagnation, a country that never recovered from 2008 — has been wrong for most of a decade, and the people repeating it now are still wrong. The economy is growing at more than twice the eurozone rate. Employment keeps setting records. Tourism receipts are absurd. The public deficit is under control in a way France would envy.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine did something to European identity that decades of integration summits could not: it made the identity felt. Geopolitical pressure is, historically, the most reliable accelerant of collective identity formation. Europe had been drifting toward comfortable ambiguity about what it stood for. Russia’s decision to wage a full-scale territorial war on a European neighbor clarified the question with brutal efficiency. The response was not uniform. Hungary maintained its equivocal position, demonstrating that the pressure was not absolute.