The Day We Named Femicide and Let the Towers Burn

Today I felt very old.

I watched fire climb the sides of my own concrete skin in Tai Po, Hong Kong. At Wang Fuk Court, seven of eight tall apartment towers were wrapped in bamboo scaffolding and green renovation mesh when the blaze burst out, racing up the outside like it had been waiting for its moment. By tonight, officials say at least 128 of my people are dead, and about 150 are still missing, in what they are calling my deadliest Hong Kong fire since 1948. The alarms in some buildings did not work. Flammable foam panels and netting turned hallways into chimneys. Eleven people from the renovation contractor have been arrested already, as families wander school gyms and community centres clutching photos and phone numbers, asking anyone in a vest if their loved one is on a list.

In another corner of my body, water did the burning instead of flame. For a week, storms linked to Cyclone Senyar have emptied themselves over Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. Streets in Hat Yai became brown rivers; the city took around 335 millimetres of rain in a single day, the heaviest in at least 300 years. Nearly three million people in southern Thailand alone have been affected, with hundreds dead across the wider region and more still missing as the water slowly falls and the mudslides settle. In some towns, people are stranded on second floors waiting for boats; in others they are already sweeping mud out of what is left of their homes, trying to salvage schoolbooks and wedding photos that have not turned to pulp.

On my Atlantic coast, in Guinea-Bissau, men in uniforms walked into a TV studio and told the world they had taken total control. Soldiers announced they had deposed President Umaro Sissoco Embaló, suspended the electoral process, and closed the borders. Gunfire echoed around the presidential palace before the cameras came on. Embaló is now in exile in Senegal, while the African Union and ECOWAS have suspended the country yet again. Another coup in my West African belt, another constitution folded away like scrap paper, another flag flying over a capital whose people mostly just wanted reliable electricity and jobs.

Further east on the same continent, in Abuja, I heard a different kind of emergency declared. Nigeria's president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, went on television and called the wave of kidnappings and massacres a national security emergency. He ordered the police to recruit 20,000 more officers, bringing the total intake to 50,000, and told them to pull officers off VIP protection details and send them instead to the villages and highways where people are vanishing from schools and buses. He authorised the use of National Youth Service Corps camps as training grounds and promised more boots on the ground. In the north and middle belt, families listened to the speech on radios, then went back to checking that everyone had come home before dark.

Across the ocean, in Washington, D.C., I felt two small points of pain at 2:15 p.m. near the Farragut West Metro station. Two National Guard members from West Virginia, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, were standing post as part of a federal crime-suppression deployment when an Afghan asylum seeker opened fire on them. Both were rushed away in ambulances, critically wounded, as office workers filmed from behind police tape. Tonight, vigils are forming in small West Virginia towns where these two once went to high school, while in Washington security planners rewrite their deployment rules again, trying to work out what it means to put soldiers in the middle of a city that is not a battlefield and insist it is just public safety.

In Myanmar, I tried to loosen one knot in a body that has been clenched since the 2021 coup. The junta announced an amnesty and legal changes touching 8,665 people, including 3,085 convicted under Penal Code Section 505A, the law that criminalises fake news and dissent, and another 5,580 people whose charges were dropped on paper. Families waited outside prisons like Insein hoping to see sons and daughters walk out. Some did; many did not. Activists say that even now tens of thousands of political prisoners remain in my cells, and that some of those freed still face other charges that could drag them back inside. But for a few hundred, at least, today the gates opened and the sun hit their faces without bars in the way.

In the middle of all this, my war-torn heart in Ukraine sat across a table from the International Monetary Fund. Negotiators in Kyiv and Washington agreed on a new 48-month Extended Fund Facility worth around 8.1 billion US dollars, with potential access equal to about 295 percent of Ukraine's IMF quota. It replaces an earlier program and is meant to keep pensions paid, schools running, and the currency stable while missiles still fall. The spreadsheets drawn up today assume tens of billions more in external financing over the coming years. They are, in a way, my attempt to plan budgets inside a moving train that is still under fire.

In Italy, one of my parliaments decided to name something that has always been happening to my daughters. Lawmakers voted to add 'femicide' to the criminal code and to punish it with life imprisonment. The debate was fuelled by a long line of women killed by partners and ex-partners, their faces filling TV screens and placards at marches. Today, activists in Rome, Milan, and Naples stood in red hoods and gloves, holding signs that say things like 'Femicide is state murder' and demanding that a new word in the law also means more shelters, faster restraining orders, and police who listen the first time a woman says 'I am afraid.'

Not everything I did today was catastrophe or punishment.

In the flooded towns of southern Thailand and Sumatra, neighbours used fishing boats and inflatable pool toys to ferry each other to higher ground. In Hong Kong, strangers opened their apartments to displaced families from Wang Fuk Court, laid spare mattresses on living-room floors, and cooked extra rice. In Bissau's markets, people argued softly about the coup while they bought tomatoes, trying to decide whether hope or cynicism made more sense this time. In villages in Nigeria, pastors and imams told parents to walk children to school in groups, because until the new recruits arrive, they are each other's police.

Tonight, as I write this, I am eight billion people trying to live through the same date.

On 26 November 2025, I let an apartment complex burn that should have been safe, and I soaked whole provinces that had already known too many floods. I allowed yet another government to fall to soldiers and another president to speak of a security emergency only after years of ignored warnings. I watched a young woman in a National Guard uniform bleed on a Washington sidewalk, and I opened a few prison doors in Myanmar while leaving many more locked. I arranged billions in loans so one embattled country can go on paying for teachers and soldiers, and I finally wrote the word 'femicide' into Italian law.

If this is my diary, then today's entry is a page of contradictions: cruelty and courage, negligence and accountability, fear and stubborn, ordinary kindness.

I do not know yet what I will write for tomorrow. But I do know this: every time I set a building code and then ignore it, every time I treat a flood as a surprise instead of a pattern, every time I look away from the person with a gun until it is too late, I am choosing the worst version of myself.

And every time I pass a law that names a hidden crime, welcome a prisoner home at the prison gate, or drag a stranger into a rescue boat, I am proof that I can still learn.