Five Absurdities the Region Produced So You Wouldn't Have To

1. THE HOUTHIS SEND ANOTHER INVOICE

Yemen's Houthis announced they attacked the Saudi Aramco refinery in Jazan, after which a fire broke out and was extinguished, and the Houthis declared victory anyway. A movement that controls no functioning state, no recognized currency, and no stable electricity grid has now, by its own accounting, degraded the infrastructure of one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet several times over. The world's most austere military organization continues to punch so far above its weight class that the weight class itself has filed a formal complaint.

2. EXPLOSIONS IN JUBAIL: THE MARKET RESPONDS BY CONTINUING

Separately — or perhaps not separately, sources were not entirely clear — an explosion was heard near Jubail, with fires reported at energy facilities along the Saudi coast. Analysts noted the situation with concern. Markets noted the situation with a shrug. The gap between 'this is alarming' and 'this is priced in' has become so wide that geopolitical risk now lives there rent-free, which, given Saudi real estate valuations, is the most alarming detail of all.

3. RIHANNA WINS A TRADEMARK CASE IN TURKEY

Rihanna filed a trademark lawsuit in Turkey and won. This is the sentence. Please read it again. A global entertainer who has not released an album in a decade, who is currently more famous for a halftime show and a cosmetics empire, spent legal resources pursuing intellectual property rights in Ankara — and prevailed. The Turkish courts, facing a backlog of actual jurisprudence, found time to rule that Rihanna's brand is, in fact, Rihanna's. The defendant was not named in available reports, which means somewhere in Istanbul there is a person who thought they could out-trademark Rihanna in Rihanna's own name, and that person has now lost, and must live with that.

4. UKRAINE'S 'COLLECTOR OF SOULS' AND THE ARITHMETIC OF GRIEF

Oleksiy Yukov, the Ukrainian volunteer who spent years recovering the bodies of soldiers killed in the war — a man his community called the 'collector of souls' — was himself killed doing that work. He died retrieving the dead, which means someone will now have to go retrieve him, which is the kind of recursive sorrow that war produces with industrial efficiency. There is no punchline here. The item is included because satire without a wound is just noise, and this wound is real, and his name was Oleksiy Yukov, and he should be remembered in plain language because plain language is all that is adequate.

5. RUSSIA DISCOVERS THAT WEATHER IS ALSO NOT NEUTRAL

A deadly storm struck Russia's Smolensk region, killing a child and an elderly woman — felled by trees as winds hit gusts of up to twenty meters per second — and leaving thousands without power. The Kremlin, which has spent years explaining that Western sanctions have no effect on Russian daily life, has so far not issued a statement attributing the power outages to NATO. The storm did not check with Moscow before arriving, did not submit the appropriate paperwork, and left without being debriefed. Russian meteorological sovereignty remains, as ever, entirely theoretical.