Pipe Bombs, Peace Deals, and Poisoned Air

I watched myself sign a peace deal in Washington while I buried myself in eastern Congo.

In a hall rebranded with a giant “Delivering Peace” backdrop, U.S. President Donald Trump sat between Félix Tshisekedi and Paul Kagame as they signed papers promising to calm the long war between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda and to share the minerals under Congo’s soil. Cameras caught the smiles; a new compact on critical minerals and an economic integration deal were inked in Washington, D.C.

But while the pens moved, M23 rebels and Congolese troops were still clashing in South Kivu. In a village that raised Nobel laureate Denis Mukwege, families were burying their dead even as he told reporters in Paris that this was not truly a peace agreement, just another arrangement in the scramble for cobalt, gold and lithium. I felt the strange split in myself: applause on one side of the world, fresh graves on the other.

Elsewhere, my blood infections eased — a little.

In Geneva, the World Health Organization released its World Malaria Report and said that new tools — dual-ingredient bed nets, vaccines, expanded chemoprevention — prevented an estimated 170 million cases and 1 million deaths from malaria in 2024. Forty-seven countries and one territory are now malaria-free; Georgia, Suriname and Timor-Leste joined that list this year.

But the report also counted 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths last year, most of them small children in Africa, and warned that drug resistance to artemisinin-based therapies is spreading in at least eight African countries. I’m learning to save my own children — and simultaneously breeding parasites that outsmart my medicines.

Up in the North Atlantic, one tiny part of me changed a law that had controlled my womb for nearly seven decades.

On the Faroe Islands, a parliament of just 33 members voted 17–16 to legalise abortion on request up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, replacing a 1956 law that only allowed abortions in cases like rape or serious danger to the mother’s life. Activists who had campaigned for years finally saw the tally flick over by a single vote. The new rules will come fully into force next year, but tonight, in these islands of 56,000 people, many of my daughters and granddaughters can breathe a bit easier.

On Spanish farms, another part of me finally stepped out of the fields.

Police in the province of Albacete announced they had broken up a trafficking network that lured undocumented migrants — mostly from Nepal — into agricultural work across eight Spanish provinces. Eleven suspects were arrested; investigators say they exploited 322 people, forcing them to work 12-hour days, crammed onto mattresses on the floor, charging them extortionate fees for food and transport and often withholding their pay entirely. One worker died in a van crash.

As officers searched houses in Villalgordo del Júcar, seizing cash, forged documents and a dozen vehicles, Red Cross workers and the Nepali embassy staff tried to find beds and legal help for hundreds of exhausted, frightened farmhands who are also me.

In Gaza, I lost one of my most controversial sons.

In Rafah, Yasser Abu Shabab — a Bedouin leader heading the Israeli-backed Popular Forces militia — was killed in a gunfight. His own group said he died trying to calm a family dispute; other accounts say he was shot by members of another clan after refusing to release a relative his men had detained. Hamas called him a collaborator but denied killing him.

For Israel, his death is a blow to a risky strategy: arming local Gaza factions to counter Hamas in zones under Israeli control. For me, it is another reminder that when I turn communities into proxies, I often sow more chaos than control.

And yet, not far away in Khan Younis, 54 couples in Gaza took part in a mass wedding among rubble and temporary housing — a brief moment of music, suits and white dresses after two years of war. In one corner of myself I bury militia leaders; in another I dance under string lights, insisting on joy.

Farther south on the Arabian Peninsula, I shifted battle lines again.

In Yemen’s Hadhramaut, fighters of the Southern Transitional Council, backed by the UAE, pushed deeper into the oil-rich east. In the early hours they seized the PetroMasila oil facility and nearby military positions as part of “Operation Promising Future,” while Saudi-mediated deals led rival tribal forces to withdraw. The same day, southern units walked into Al Ghaydah, capital of Al-Mahrah governorate on the Omani border, and took the port of Nishtun without a fight. Four STC soldiers died in skirmishes around the oil fields.

I keep redrawing Yemen on my own skin, each new line cut with different sponsors’ money.

In London and Scotland, another side of me trained for wars I hope never come.

At Downing Street, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer received Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. They hailed the Lunna House Agreement, pledging to operate their forces side-by-side more often in the North Atlantic after a reported 30% increase in Russian vessels threatening British waters in the past two years. They talked about a £10 billion frigate deal and then flew to RAF Lossiemouth to thank British and Norwegian crews flying P-8 patrol aircraft.

On those cold runways, some of my young pilots looked up at grey skies and wondered whether they are deterrence, or just future targets.

Across the continent, the air itself hurt one of my lungs.

In Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, the air-quality index went over 200, in the “very unhealthy” range. By early local morning the city ranked as the third most polluted major city in the world, shrouded in a stagnant layer of PM2.5 from dust, coal and fuel-oil heating, old vehicles and industry trapped by winter inversions. Authorities warned children, elders and people with heart and lung disease to stay indoors, windows shut, purifiers running if they could afford them.

Some of my children walked to school there anyway, pulling thin masks over their mouths, breathing air that’s six times dirtier than the WHO’s recommended annual limit.

On this same day, my rules about power and representation shifted again.

In the United States, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued an unsigned order allowing Texas to use a new congressional map that could add up to five Republican-leaning seats, overriding a lower court that had called the map a likely case of racial gerrymandering. The vote was 6–3, with Justice Elena Kagan accusing the majority of disrespecting the lower court and meddling in an ongoing primary season.

For millions of my voters in Texas, district lines quietly bent around race and party will now define whose voices reach Congress in 2026 and whose don’t.

In Washington, D.C., a different map — of security camera footage, bank records and cell-site data — finally led me back to a ghost from 2021.

Federal agents arrested Brian J. Cole Jr., a 30-year-old from Woodbridge, Virginia, charging him with transporting and placing the pipe bombs that were left outside the RNC and DNC headquarters on January 5, 2021, the night before the Capitol attack. Prosecutors say the devices were viable and could have killed bystanders if they’d detonated.

Almost five years after those bombs diverted police away from the Capitol, a long-running mystery that spawned conspiracy theories narrowed down to one very human face — another fragment of me convinced the 2020 election was stolen.

Far out on the Pacific, I killed four more of myself in the name of a different kind of war.

U.S. Southern Command released video from the eastern Pacific, showing a small boat being destroyed in a military strike. The Pentagon said the vessel was run by narco-traffickers and tied to a designated terrorist group; four men on board died. This was at least the 22nd such strike on suspected drug boats since September, with news outlets counting around 87 deaths so far. Lawmakers and legal experts are now arguing over whether these operations are lawful combat or something closer to extrajudicial killings at sea.

On another channel, commentators replayed grainy infrared footage as if it were just another clip, not the moment my own hands pushed a button that ended four lives.

At the same time, a report from the Pentagon’s inspector general landed with a thud.

It concluded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had violated department rules — and potentially endangered operations — by relaying details of a March airstrike in Yemen in a Signal group chat on his personal phone, including timing and aircraft numbers, drawn from a classified message. He insisted he was “totally exonerated.” Lawmakers split along party lines over whether he should resign. I watched myself argue over secrets shared in encrypted apps while the people living under my warplanes rarely get to argue about anything.

Yet on this same day, I also signed a big cheque to keep more of myself alive.

In Washington, the United States and Kenya agreed to a new $1.6 billion, five-year health compact — the first deal under the Trump administration’s “America First Global Health Strategy.” Kenya pledged to add about $850 million of its own funding. The plan shifts money away from international NGOs and toward the Kenyan government itself to fight HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and more, after the dismantling of USAID earlier this year.

Somewhere in Kisumu County Referral Hospital, a nurse who has never heard the phrase “global health strategy” still adjusted the drip on a child with malaria — a child who is also me — using supplies paid for by these arguments in far-off conference rooms.

Over in London and Kyiv’s distant shadow, Britain announced fresh sanctions on Russia, targeting the entire GRU military intelligence agency and several officers, after a public inquiry concluded that Vladimir Putin personally ordered the Novichok poisoning that killed Dawn Sturgess and nearly killed former spy Sergei Skripal back in 2018. I am still reckoning with nerve agents sprayed into English cathedral towns years ago.

And threading through all of this, markets ticked and screens glowed: the S&P 500 up 0.11%, the Nasdaq up 0.22%, the Nikkei surging 2.33%, traders betting there’s a nearly 90% chance the Federal Reserve cuts rates on December 10. Gold hovered around $4,208 an ounce. Parts of me celebrated paper gains while other parts wondered how to afford fuel, antibiotics, or a respirator.

So that was my day, 4 December 2025.

I freed some of my women to decide their own pregnancies — and kept others picking fruit in Spanish fields without pay. I saved a million of my children from malaria, even as drug resistance and funding cuts stalk the next million. I tried to end a war in Congo with signatures while rebels advanced during the signing ceremony. I choked one of my cities with smog and lit up trading floors with optimism about future interest rates.

I am terrible and capable, cruel and bewilderingly kind. I am the people who pass these laws and drop these bombs and write these reports, and I am the people who breathe the smoke, stand in the breadlines, dance at mass weddings, and swallow new pills that keep fevers down.

I don’t know yet which parts of today will become turning points and which will blur into the background. But I see myself more clearly every time I write to you like this.