One sentence of what happened: at midnight Saturday, Spain began checking documents on air and sea arrivals from Italy — payback for the month of checks Italy slapped on Spain a week ago, after roughly 78,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta. Here's how the BBC headlined day eleven of Europe's biggest border crisis in a generation: "Spain imposes border controls against Italy as row over Ceuta migrant influx intensifies." * "Row." Two days ago we flagged France 24 filing this exact story under that exact word, while nearly 1,400 stranded children waited in paragraph 19. The BBC's Saturday upgrade: the row now "intensifies." A row is what neighbours have about a hedge. What is actually happening, per the BBC's own article: two EU members suspending Schengen against each other, Finland and Denmark backing Rome, and the Czech Republic openly calling for Spain's membership to be suspended. The stakes have been promoted twice this week. The vocabulary is still on its trial shift. * Now scroll down the same BBC piece. Past the airport queues. Past a passenger named Elisa who had to show her passport. Down around paragraph seventeen, you reach this sentence: "One hundred are believed to have died during the crossing." When this story began, the toll was 57. It is now one hundred human beings, delivered mid-scroll, in the passive voice of belief — "are believed to have died" — one paragraph above the update that the children are still there. A hundred deaths did not intensify anything, apparently. The paperwork did. * A word on grammar, because grammar is doing shifts here too. "Spain imposes border controls against Italy" — Spain is the actor, "against" is the preposition of attack. In a story where Italy started the checks a week earlier and Rome says they'll run until at least 15 August. Compare the Guardian's Friday headline: "Spain to introduce temporary border checks on visitors from Italy" — pure admin-speak, no combat preposition, nobody's the aggressor. Neither is false. But whoever moves last gets the hostile verb, which means the aggressor of this crisis rotates by news cycle. * And here's the part that actually deserves the font size: the best journalism in the BBC's article is hiding at the very bottom. BBC Arabic found dozens of Facebook posts calling for a second crossing into Ceuta in mid-August — six of the groups behind them with over 100,000 followers, some posts advertising swimming equipment for sale. That is original reporting with predictive value about the thing everyone claims to be bracing for. It's buried beneath the passenger vox pops. If the second wave comes, the BBC will technically have told you first — from the basement of a story about boarding-gate queues. * This is the pattern we keep hitting in this arc: when institutions fight, the press covers the fight, because the fight issues press releases and the drowned don't. Day eleven of Ceuta is now a story about EU paperwork with a hundred bodies in the footnotes. The row, we're told, is intensifying. Something certainly is.