#truestory

Rust. A Philippine Navy ship, deliberately run aground on Second Thomas Shoal, sits on a submerged reef in the Spratly archipelago, kept there as a military outpost. China's coast guard has repeatedly blocked attempts to resupply the marines aboard.

On 12 July 2016, at The Hague, the Permanent Court of Arbitration handed down its ruling in the case brought by the Philippines against China. The tribunal found that none of the Spratly features claimed by China were capable of generating an exclusive economic zone. It classified Taiping island, the largest feature in the Spratlys, as a rock. Two days earlier, Taiwan's navy had sent a 2,000-tonne coast guard vessel to that same island.

Rust and salt water are one context; money and territory are the deeper one. The sea carries roughly $4.5tn of ship-borne trade each year, spread across some 3.5 million square kilometres of open water, shoals and coral atolls. Beijing claims about 90% of it. The claim rests on the nine-dash line China drew in 1947 after the surrender of Japan, a U-shaped mark Vietnam likens to a hungry cow's tongue. The same waters, though, are claimed in overlapping pieces by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, six parties in all.

In 2012 China seized Scarborough Shoal and sent its coast guard to harass the foreign fishing vessels working there. In the years that followed it dredged coral atolls into airfields ringed with radar towers and weapons, and US officials counted an extra 800 hectares built across its occupied outposts in eighteen months. Paul Reichler of Foley Hoag coordinated the Philippines' legal team as the case moved toward the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

Long before the tribunal convened, China had said it would "neither accept nor participate in the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines." The tribunal ruled that this refusal did not deprive it of jurisdiction, and it heard the case without Beijing in the room. At 11:00 the Permanent Court of Arbitration released its findings.

It concluded there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources within the nine-dash line. It found China had violated the Philippines' sovereign rights by interfering with fishing and petroleum exploration inside the Philippine exclusive economic zone, by constructing artificial islands, and by failing to stop Chinese boats fishing there. The Chinese Coast Guard, the tribunal said, "had unlawfully created a serious risk of collision when they physically obstructed Philippine vessels" near Scarborough Shoal. It condemned the land reclamation at seven features in the Spratlys and found the dredging had caused severe harm to the coral reef environment.

As the ruling landed, President Xi Jinping was in Beijing, meeting European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The tribunal's ruling was binding, and it stood. By January 2025, twenty-seven governments had publicly called for it to be respected, eight had rejected it outright, and none of the Philippines' Southeast Asian neighbours had formally endorsed it.

Pines standing over old graves. In the small Quebec town of Oka, a municipal golf course was already cut into the ground, and the plan was to make it larger.

In 1989, the municipality of Oka proposed expanding that golf course into land that touched Mohawk burial traditions. Mayor Jean Ouellette, the man who sparked the crisis, pushed the plan forward. Mohawks from the nearby Kanesatake reserve protested it. The dispute set native people against the town, and behind the town stood the provincial police and, eventually, the Canadian army.

The Mohawks of Kanesatake, whose reserve sat beside the town of Oka, were the people at the center of this. They had lived next to that golf course for years, and now the municipality wanted to push it deeper into the pines. The land the course would take touched their burial traditions, so in 1989 they protested the plan. When the town did not back down, the Mohawks put up a barricade. Behind the town stood more than a mayor. Jean Ouellette asked the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police, to remove the protesters, by force if necessary. The Mohawks answered by demanding that the expansion be cancelled and their land claims finally addressed.

It is the summer of 1990 when the Sûreté du Québec move on the barricade in the Pines. The raid begins the stand-off, and as it does a shot is fired into the face of Corporal Marcel Lemay of the provincial police. Lemay dies of the wound. Who fired the shot that killed him is never established.

Through the summer the confrontation holds, and in August the Canadian army is brought in to take down the blockades at Oka. The standoff runs seventy-eight days. In late September the Mohawks at Kanesatake decide to surrender, and after the surrender the army moves in to dismantle what remains of the barricades.

The crisis draws worldwide attention and pushes native land rights into the spotlight, but the broader questions of Mohawk land rights at Kanesatake stay open once the soldiers and the barricades are gone.

A barricade stands to keep the pines from being cut, and by the end of the first raid a police officer is dead in them. Corporal Marcel Lemay took a shot to the face during the assault in the Pines, and the man behind that shot was never identified. The stand-off gave the death a place and a date, and left the one fact that would settle it missing.

A crank turned. The Confederate battle flag slid down the thirty-foot flagpole on the grounds of the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina.

It was July 2015. The flag had first flown over the Capitol dome in 1961, and in 2000 it was moved from the dome to this pole a few steps from the Statehouse, where it had flown since. The day before, Gov. Nikki Haley had signed legislation calling for the flag to come down and be sent to the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. Now it was being lowered for the last time.

The flag was more than a leftover from 1961. It had been kept flying as a stand against the Civil Rights movement, and for years African-Americans and other activists had called for it to come down. Those calls went nowhere.

Then, the month before, a gunman walked into a historically black church in the state and opened fire. Nine people were dead. In the weeks that followed, both chambers of the South Carolina legislature and Gov. Nikki Haley reached agreement on a bill to pull the flag from the Statehouse grounds and send it to the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum.

The House debate ran more than thirteen hours. Dozens of amendments came to the floor, each one a chance to stall. Jenny Horne, a 42-year-old lawyer from Summerville and a descendant of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, took the floor for four minutes. "I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday," she said. The last stalling amendment failed after a nearly hour-long delay.

At one in the morning, Senate Bill 897 passed the House 94 to 20, past the two-thirds majority the measure needed. Haley signed it into law that Thursday, July 9.

At ten o'clock the next morning, July 10, state troopers marched in formation to the flagpole on the Statehouse grounds. They cranked the flag down, folded it, and rolled it up before a crowd of hundreds. The crowd chanted "USA! USA! USA!" while Haley watched from the steps of the Statehouse, flanked by lawmakers both black and white.

Among the nine dead was Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of the church and a sitting state senator. He had held a seat in the same Statehouse whose grounds the troopers now cleared of the flag. His desk on the Senate floor had been draped in black since June.

I recently accompanied Scotty the NJ Medium on an investigation at the Sayreville Historical Society Museum...enjoy!!

The story behind a Gilded Age socialite and the moment that changed everything. Beneath the glamour, wealth, and extravagant parties was a life shaped by ambition, social pressure, and unexpected consequences. Discover the true story behind one of history's most fascinating high society figures.

Thirty-eight centimetres. That was the width of the crevice near Sam Yaek Junction, the tightest point on the whole escape route, and a 25-year-old Thai navy SEAL had to take off his air tank to crawl through it, feeling the edges of the hole on both his back and his chest.

At 5:40 p.m. on Sunday 8 July 2018, the first boy came out of the Tham Luang cave wearing a full-face scuba mask, hours ahead of even the most optimistic predictions. The cave runs beneath the Doi Nang Non mountains in Chiang Rai province, in northern Thailand near the border with Myanmar, a flooded labyrinth six miles long with a sign at its mouth warning against entering during the rainy season. The second boy followed ten minutes later. Both had been carried out through water that round-the-clock pumping had only partly drained, more than a million cubic metres of it hauled from the cave before the dive-out could even begin.

On Saturday 23 June, twelve boys from the Wild Boars academy team and their 25-year-old coach, Ekaphol Chantawong, cycled to the Tham Luang cave after football practice. Sudden monsoon downpours rose behind them and cut off the exit, forcing the group deeper onto higher ground inside the flooded network. A mother reported her son missing that day, and bicycles and football kit were found at the cave entrance. The search grew into an international operation, drawing specialist divers from Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States alongside around 1,000 Thai rescuers led by the navy SEALs.

Late on the night of Monday 2 July, British divers John Volanthen and Rick Stanton found all thirteen alive, huddled on an elevated rock nearly two miles inside. The relief did not last. A former Thai navy SEAL died on Friday 6 July when he ran out of air underwater, with oxygen in the chamber falling to around 15%.

With oxygen in the boys' chamber down to fifteen percent, and medics warning that coma would set in at twelve, the options had narrowed. A plan to drill some six hundred metres down from the jungle above had foundered because engineers could not work out where to put the hole. That left the water, which had been called "definitely the scariest option." Each boy would be tethered to a diver for the first 1.7 kilometres, then strapped to a stretcher on a pulley system for the last 1.5.

The operation launched inside the cave at ten in the morning on Sunday 8 July. At about half past two, a diver surfaced holding the first of the boys at Pattaya Beach, an elevated mound in the cave's third chamber that rescuers had first hoped would shelter the group, only to find it flooded. A third boy came out at 7:40 that evening, a fourth at 7:50. At nine o'clock Narongsak Osatanakorn, the former governor of Chiang Rai who was leading the operation, called a press conference and confirmed that four boys had been freed.

Saman Kunan was a former Thai navy SEAL, and on Friday 6 July he ran out of air while delivering oxygen tanks inside the cave. He had come to carry breathable air to the boys. He did not come back out.

Rain on tin. It came down over Kerr County in the dark, and it did not let up. By the small hours the water had a sound of its own.

Before dawn on July 4, 2025, rain gauges in Kerr County, Texas, were logging what would total more than eleven inches. The reports began stacking up after four in the morning, hour by hour. Northwest of San Angelo, gauges read higher still, past thirteen inches. The county had not yet woken to what the numbers meant.

The Hill Country in central Texas floods easily. Its dry, dirt-packed ground lets rain skid along the surface instead of soaking in, and the creeks and rivers rise fast. Heading into the Fourth of July weekend, the Texas Division of Emergency Management activated state response resources, anticipating heavy rainfall across West and Central Texas. Nim Kidd, the Texas Emergency Management Chief, urged people to "Turn Around, Don't Drown." The National Weather Service issued a flood watch midday Thursday, July 3. The warnings went out. Not since 1976, when the Big Thompson Canyon flood in Colorado killed 144 people, had inland floodwater in the United States been this deadly.

The storm dropped most of its twelve inches of rain in the dark early morning hours of July 4, while people slept, and the runoff sent rushing water down into the Guadalupe River, which cuts through the Hill Country outside San Antonio. Around 4 a.m. the National Weather Service office issued an urgent warning, raising the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life. The river rose twenty-six feet in forty-five minutes. By 5:20 a.m., residents in the Kerrville area said the water was getting alarmingly high.

Along the river sat Camp Mystic, a century-old all-girls Christian summer camp. Two days earlier, on July 2, Texas inspectors had signed off on the camp's emergency planning. At least twenty-seven campers and counselors died there. Richard "Dick" Eastland, the camp's director, died trying to save some of the young girls.

Searchers found the bodies of eighty-seven people in Kerr County, thirty of them children, and fatalities in nearby counties pushed the total to at least 118. More than 160 people were believed missing, many of them staying in the area but not registered at a camp or hotel. It was the deadliest inland flooding in the United States since 1976, when Colorado's Big Thompson Canyon flood killed 144.