Do you ever wonder how the Gaza tunnels were built? Using children. Since Hamas seized Gaza in 2007, the territory has been one of the most heavily subsidized patches of earth on the planet. Official development assistance to the West Bank and Gaza has routinely run at roughly $2 billion a year, and by conservative tallies, the Palestinians have received well over $40 billion in international aid since the mid-1990s. Reconstruction summits piled pledge upon pledge — $7.7 billion in Europe after Hamas took power, $4.5 billion in Sharm el-Sheikh after the 2008–09 war, more than $5 billion after 2014. Qatar alone sent more than $1.1 billion between 2012 and 2018, at times $30 million a month in cash. UN agencies spent nearly $4.5 billion in Gaza from 2014 to 2020. The excuse was always the same — schools, hospitals, jobs, dignity. The punchline arrived underground. What donors called development, Hamas treated as inventory. Cement, steel and dual-use materials that were supposed to put up school buildings became lining for the so-called ‘Gaza metro’, a military and smuggling labyrinth Hamas itself put the length at more than 500 kilometres in 2021, with later estimates ranging from 560 to 720 kilometres and some accounts stretching toward 800. Analysts and Israeli intelligence have put the construction bill in the hundreds of millions to more than a billion dollars over fifteen years, plus thousands of tons of concrete and metal siphoned from civilian shipments. The network had ventilation, electricity, blast doors, workshops and command rooms. Above ground, Gaza stayed poor, aid-dependent and short of power. Below ground, the governing faction built a private subway for rockets, commanders and, later, hostages. The international community kept writing cheques and issuing statements about ‘the children of Gaza’, as if the accounting were someone else’s problem. The least fashionable chapter is who did the digging. A 2008 documentary filmed children working night shifts in commercial tunnels to Egypt, eight hours in heat and bad air, paid a pittance, dropping out of school because a collapsed shaft paid better than a diploma. Reporting from the period recorded child labour in those passages and deaths from cave-ins, gas and flooding. A widely repeated 2012 figure of ‘160 children killed’ was later corrected by the journal that printed it: the toll cited by Hamas officials was about 160 people in total by then, and a Gaza rights group counted nine children among 235 commercial-tunnel deaths by early 2013. That correction should have produced a serious investigation. It produced a shrug. Youth were still recruited into excavation after 2014, the work remained dangerous, the funerals were folded into the usual rhetoric of martyrdom. The world that can recite casualty lists by the hour has shown a peculiar lack of curiosity about children sent under the earth to build the infrastructure of the next war. Some subjects, it turns out, are excellent for fundraising. Others are merely true.

Shareholders of The New York Times have filed a lawsuit against the paper’s parent company, arguing that its board failed in its fiduciary duty to protect the brand’s most valuable asset—credibility. The suit, brought by Florida’s state pension fund and a conservative policy group, seeks internal records the company has withheld for months, most of them tied to coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. A Jewish former video-desk employee who spent nearly a decade at the paper alleges she raised concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias at least fifteen times between 2019 and her departure in 2026. Those complaints, she says, were ignored or met with the suggestion that she find a workplace whose 'values align with yours.' The petition cites documented errors, late and evasive corrections, and a pattern of framing that critics say systematically downplayed Israeli casualties while amplifying Palestinian ones. The same pattern of perceived institutional capture is visible at CNN. President Trump recently barred the network, along with MS NOW and Politico, from the White House, calling their reporting 'fiction and lies.' CNN labeled the ban an 'illegal assault' on the First Amendment and sued. Simultaneously, financiers aligned with the administration—Paramount Skydance, backed by Larry Ellison and partners including funds linked to Jared Kushner—have moved to acquire Warner Bros. The deal has been accompanied by talk of an independent journalism board, possible sale of the network, or a shift toward the more restrained editorial approach already applied at CBS. Staff describe the atmosphere as funereal, ratings have already fallen sharply from the first Trump term, when the network’s partisan intensity produced a temporary 'bump' that later evaporated. Both episodes illustrate the commercial and reputational cost of abandoning the appearance of impartiality. The slogan 'go woke, go broke' captures a measurable reality—audiences and investors punish news organizations that treat journalism as activism. When a paper’s own standards desk and human-resources channels become instruments for enforcing a single worldview, or when a cable network’s coverage is widely viewed as opposition research, trust erodes, subscriptions and ratings decline, and shareholders eventually treat the newsroom as a liability rather than an asset. The press does not become less powerful by becoming less impartial, it simply becomes easier to ignore or to take over.

I. Mas afinal quanto vale o negócio da imigração em Portugal? Há um detalhe que o discurso oficial raramente admite em voz alta — em Portugal, a imigração deixou de ser um fenómeno pontual e passou a ser uma indústria de milhões, com orçamento, organigrama, relatórios anuais e uma vocação quase milagrosa para descobrir, a posteriori, que afinal temos mais imigrantes do que se pensava. Entre 2017 e 2025, a população estrangeira residente passou de cerca de 422 mil para 1.585.854. Quase quadruplicou. Os brasileiros continuam a ser cerca de um terço. Depois vêm angolanos, indianos, ucranianos, cabo-verdianos, nepaleses e bengalis. O país acordou um dia e descobriu que 14% da população já não nasceu em Portugal. O interessante é que parte deste ‘crescimento’ não foi só imigrantes a entrar. Foram pessoas que já cá estavam e que, oportunamente, as estatísticas oficiais só apanharam quando a AIMA começou a varrer gavetas, pendências e manifestações de interesse. Em 2023, o número foi revisto em alta em mais de 260 mil pessoas. Vamos a valores. Não existe um número limpo, único e honesto do tipo ‘nos últimos 15 anos o Estado português gastou X milhões em imigração e refugiados’. Quem promete essa cifra redonda está a vender um engodo. O dinheiro encontra-se fatiado por dezenas de rubricas — orçamento da AIMA (e, antes, do ACM e do SEF), Fundo para o Asilo, a Migração e a Integração (FAMI), Segurança Social, SNS, educação, habitação, municípios, IEFP, centros de instalação temporária e protocolos com IPSS. O que se consegue documentar, com fontes públicas: — No Orçamento do Estado para 2026, o Governo reservou 91 milhões de euros para o programa ‘imigração regulada e humanista’: 74 milhões para regular, 16 milhões para ‘acolhimento e integração humanista’ e 1 milhão para ‘atração de talento’. —O FAMI 2021-2027 atribuiu a Portugal uma envelope na ordem dos 64 a 75 milhões de euros de fundos europeus, com cofinanciamento nacional. No ciclo anterior, só entre 2016 e 2019 o Ministério da Administração Interna aprovou mais de 109 milhões em projetos FAMI e Fundo para a Segurança Interna. — A Cruz Vermelha, só a título de exemplo, teve projetos FAMI com investimentos elegíveis de 2,4 milhões (resposta a requerentes de asilo) e quase 700 mil noutro programa de acolhimento. Não é ‘a Cruz Vermelha’, no singular, é uma fatia visível de uma rede muito maior. — Em 2025 o Governo teve de puxar 30 milhões do Orçamento do Estado para centros de instalação temporária depois de perder o timing do PRR. O resto — rendas, rendimentos sociais, escolas, urgências hospitalares, mediadores, CLAIMs —, está enterrado em contas de ministérios que não gostam de ser somados. Quem quiser o exercício completo tem de ir ao Relatório de Migrações e Asilo da AIMA, ao Observatório das Migrações, ao portal FAMI e às propostas de OE. Ou seja, o dinheiro é muito, espalhado e difícil de somar, não é fácil seguir o rasto e chegar a um número redondo. A seguir vamos analisar as dez maiores organização a trabalhar a questão da imigração.

Good morning ☕️