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CEUTA, Spain — Spain on Saturday installed a 1,600-foot-long barrier on the sea border between its North African territory of Ceuta and neighboring Morocco after tens of thousands of migrants breached the frontier earlier in the week.

At least 67 migrants died, including some who drowned and others who were killed in a stampede to cross a breakwater barrier, the Spanish government said Saturday.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez slammed the reaction of some other European Union leaders to the events in Ceuta, saying calls for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s borderless Schengen zone were “driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest.”

A handful of exhausted migrants who swam to Ceuta’s urban Tarajal beach Saturday morning were met by soldiers who escorted them across the border. Most of the 50,000 to 60,000 migrants who entered the territory between Thursday and Friday soon went back.

“We are relentless against those who break the law,” Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told journalists Saturday.

Questioned how the massive border breach could have happened given the heavy security on both sides of the border and whether Morocco posed a threat to Ceuta, Marlaska defended the government in Rabat.

“The events require an evaluation by Spain and Morocco,” he said. But it was the cooperation with its neighbors that allowed Spain “to revert the situation in 24 hours.”

“Morocco is not a threat to Ceuta, or to the rest of Spain. It is a reliable partner,” Marlaska emphasized.

EU leaders call for coordinated response

The leaders of 22 EU countries called for a coordinated response to the situation. In a letter to top EU officials, released Saturday by the Danish prime minister’s office, the countries asked the EU’s current Irish presidency to urgently convene a videoconference of interior ministers.

“We cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalization of migration, or other hybrid threats to create the perception that illegal entry into the European Union is possible. That a migrant’s illegal entry can turn into legal stay,” the letter said. “Such a perception would encourage further attempts, undermine confidence in our common migration policy and have repercussions for all Member States.”

Leaders of Italy, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Sweden signed the letter.

Sánchez also asked for a videoconference of EU interior ministers to “enable us to establish a common response to situations of this kind and reaffirm that the security of our external borders is a shared responsibility of all Member States, and not only of those on the Union’s front line.”

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni has threatened to suspend Italy’s open-border Schengen agreement with Spain, and Italy was reimposing border controls for people arriving from Spain by air and sea.

“In the current international context, the European Union cannot afford this kind of selfish, polarizing, and unlawful reaction,” Sánchez wrote in his letter.

Migrants head back into Morocco

Hundreds of migrants returned to Morocco on Saturday. Some told an Associated Press reporter they were returning “of their own free will” after what they described as degrading treatment on the Spanish side of the border.

Migrants walked along a long stretch of wave breakers before slipping into Morocco through a small breach in the border fence that had become an informal entry point. Moroccan police and soldiers watched. Most of the migrants were Moroccans, while a smaller number were from sub-Saharan Africa.

Hungry and angry, some barefoot or shirtless and others nursing visible injuries, those who returned said they had “seen hell in Ceuta.”

“I decided to come back on my own,” said Ouail Lamzeiz. “I spent eight days in Ceuta, and I was about to get a bed at the migrant center, but I hadn’t eaten for days. Even the Moroccans there didn’t help,” he added, showing a document supporting his account.

His friend, Salah Eddine El Arrage, said he decided to return to Morocco after, he said, Spanish police beat him.

Migrants said they spent their nights sleeping in the forests around Ceuta because they could not find shelter, and that they often fought over food.

One, Othmane El Merzoug, asked passersby for a phone call so he could reach his family and ask them to send money for the journey back to his hometown, about 189 miles from the border.

Along Ceuta’s Tarajal beach, sunbathers largely ignored the streams of migrants walking toward the border.

Ceuta resident Mohamed Abdelatif, 21, said the border rush had ruptured the city’s peace.

“The reality is, it’s not good,” Abdelatif said, before wading into the water with his girlfriend.

The road linking the Moroccan town of Fnideq to the border crossing bore the scars of the unrest. Burned-out vehicles sat along the roadside, while the acrid smell of smoke still hung in the air. Police barriers channeled traffic toward the crossing, and water cannons remained stationed nearby.

“Life in this city has been disrupted as a result of the border incident,” said Ceuta President Juan Jesús Vivas. “The return of people has begun satisfactorily but the process must be completed.”

In the Moroccan city of Tangier, about 46 miles west of Ceuta, the main railway station was busy with people returning. Some slept on the ground.

“I tried to cross, but I failed. I stayed near the border with Ceuta for two days, but I couldn’t find anything to eat,” said Abdalah, an aspiring migrant who asked that his last name not be published out of fear of retaliation for trying to cross illegally.

But some who made it to Ceuta were determined to stay. Among them was Mohamed Hatri, a 23-year-old Moroccan.

“They’ve closed everything down so that we can’t buy anything to eat, to force us to return to our country,” he said, adding that he and others were determined to stay “whether we’re hungry or not.”

DUXBURY, Mass. — Jurors walked through the Massachusetts home where Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children, a rare visit Friday that let them see firsthand the place where an outwardly ordinary family life unraveled into tragedy.

After being driven past two businesses relevant to the narrative of the January 2023 killings, jurors were escorted in groups of six to view the inside of the house, including the basement where the children died. During the roughly 40-minute visit, the jury also saw the yard where Clancy was found after jumping from a second-story window.

Journalists were kept away by a police barricade, but court officers could be seen through the trees escorting jurors to and from the bus along the site of the Clancy family’s former driveway. The home now has a new owner.

Clancy herself did not attend the visit to the home, which she hasn’t seen since the day of the killings. Her lawyers argue she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation, and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.

Jurors in U.S. criminal cases often are expressly told not to visit the scene of the events in question. There are a number of rationales for not doing so — among other things, the site may have changed in the interim between an alleged crime and a trial.

But courts sometimes allow juries to make a supervised excursion as a group, for reasons that can include assessing distances or features that aren’t thought to come across fully in photos.

Such excursions have happened in a number of high-profile cases, including the 2023 murder trial of South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh, the 2022 sentencing trial of Parkland, Fla., school shooter Nikolas Cruz, the 2015 Massachusetts murder trial of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez, and the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson.

Jurors in Clancy’s trial retraced the route her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, took when she asked him to pick up takeout food and medicine for daughter Cora on the night of the killings. He returned to find the children dead and his then-wife badly injured and bleeding in the yard.

The panel was driven past the restaurant — about 5.5 miles from the family’s former home in Duxbury, a town south of Boston — and the pharmacy, about a mile from the house.

Prosecutors say the errands were a ruse to get her husband out of the house. They say Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, acted intentionally and is criminally responsible for the deaths of children Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months.

Her lawyers don’t dispute that she killed the children, but they say she had bipolar disorder and her condition worsened while she was on antidepressants prescribed after the birth of her third child. She believed a voice was telling her to “kill the children so you can kill yourself,” according to her lawyers.

Lindsay Clancy remains paralyzed from the waist down after using multiple methods to try to end her life that night.

If convicted of murder, she faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.

CAMP DAVID, Md. — President Donald Trump took Friday’s cabinet meeting on the road to Camp David, using the historic rustic backdrop of the presidential retreat to boast of his administration’s achievements while seizing on a migrant crisis in Spain to make his case for why voters should keep the Republican Party in power.

The cabinet meeting, the 13th such gathering of Trump’s second term, came just three months before the November midterm elections that could serve as a check on his power if Democrats take control of one or both chambers of Congress. His warnings about Spain echoed language he used ahead of the 2018 midterms, when he warned of caravans of migrants headed to the southern U.S. border.

“You know, I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place. It looks like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people,” Trump said. “And that same thing is going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected. Except worse, much bigger.”

Some 60,000 migrants crossed from Morocco into Spain’s tiny Ceuta territory over the past 24 hours. Roughly half of them have already made their way back voluntarily, according to the Spanish government, but at least 57 have died on the journey.

Separately, he deflected blame for a series of cyberattacks that targeted 30 water systems in Minnesota on the state’s “grossly incompetent” Democratic leadership. Officials have not publicly identified who was behind the attacks, though the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and other agencies warned in an advisory last week that Iranian hackers have been targeting water and wastewater systems and the operational controls of other critical infrastructure sectors.

“They blame it on Iran,” Trump said, without offering evidence. “I don’t think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent.”

The president regularly convenes his cabinet throughout his terms as a setting to promote his administration’s policies while fielding questions on the news of the day, but what made Friday’s meeting unusual was that it was at Camp David, the government-owned retreat nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, where Trump held one cabinet meeting during his first term.

Trump began the meeting by noting it was “something very unique.” The White House called it the first-ever televised cabinet meeting from the presidential retreat.

“It’s Camp David, and this room is a very, very special room,” Trump said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were among the cabinet officials who spoke before Trump took questions from journalists. The public portion of the meeting ended after about an hour.

Trump fields questions on Iran, Hamas deal, and Blanche confirmation

In the lengthy question-and-answer session, Trump commented on the latest developments regarding the war in Iran and a deal he announced Thursday that he said would lead to the disarmament of the Palestinian group Hamas.

He also lamented that a $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund to compensate his allies was “dead” and appeared to back off a pledge he made earlier this month to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air defense systems.

“I don’t think this would ever happen, but, you know, there’s people that, you give that technology, they can someday turn on you,” Trump added. “You look at war, that’s happened a couple of times over the years, right? So we have to be very careful.”

On the Hamas agreement, Trump acknowledged that the agreement that would also lead to Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza will have “ups and downs.” Still, he called it a “great breakthrough” that has been helped along by the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, which has served as Hamas’ prime backer.

Trump also remarked on the anti-weaponization fund that is holding up the confirmation of Todd Blanche as his attorney general, saying the pot of money is “dead” and that “I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you.”

The president continued to defend the people who could potentially benefit from the fund, mainly those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over him.

“Their families have been ruined,” Trump said. Those people “wanted to go to a rally or an event and ended up spending the rest of their lives in horror.”

Trump said Blanche has been a “pawn in this whole thing.” Blanche, who was present, did not speak in the public portion of the cabinet meeting.

Camp David has been a retreat for presidents since FDR

The camp’s primary purpose is to provide presidents a place to rest, relax, and recharge. It was established in 1942 during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and has been used by every president since.

Roosevelt had enjoyed relaxing aboard a presidential yacht, but the military and the U.S. Secret Service began to worry about his safety on open water during World War II. As a result, Roosevelt asked the National Park Service to find sites within 100 miles of the White House that he could use for rest.

He chose what is now known as Camp David. He gave it the original name of Shangri-La, from James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. President Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Camp David, after his grandson and father.

Trump spent more weekends at the retreat in his first term but has visited sparingly in his second, most recently in June for Father’s Day.

In 2019, during his first term, Trump announced on social media that he had canceled a secret weekend meeting at Camp David with Taliban and Afghanistan leaders — scheduled for just days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — after a bombing in the capital of Kabul killed a dozen people, including a U.S. soldier.

Presidents throughout history have turned to Camp David when they needed security and privacy for sensitive diplomatic talks with foreign leaders. Jimmy Carter took the leaders of Egypt and Israel there in 1978 for talks that produced the Camp David Accords, a peace agreement between the two countries.

The 180-acre retreat, which is run by the Navy and guarded by Marines, has a cabin named Aspen that’s reserved for the president, plus about a dozen other cabins for guests. A main lodge has conference rooms, a dining room, and an office for the president.

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Hungary’s only nuclear power plant will shut down for the first time in its history due to record-low water levels on the Danube River, Prime Minister Péter Magyar said Friday, adding that the plant may not come back online for several weeks as the river is expected to continue receding.

The Paks nuclear plant, located around 50 miles south of the capital Budapest, is operating at less than half its normal capacity, producing 965 megawatts of power rather than the usual 2,000.

The plant uses water from the Danube to cool its reactors, but the exceptionally low water level has tested the ability of pumps to bring sufficient quantities into the plant.

Speaking at a news conference at the plant on Friday, Magyar said further reductions in output were imminent later Friday and that the entire plant will likely be powered down by Tuesday or Wednesday. He stressed that the shutdown can be performed safely and poses no risk to the public or environment.

The Soviet-built, four-reactor plant at Paks accounts for nearly half of Hungary’s electricity production. If it is powered down, it will be the first time in its 44 years of service.

Hungary and much of Central Europe has been in a prolonged period of drought in recent months, disrupting tourism, agriculture, and industry and confronting residents with the realities of climate change. Water levels are not expected to rise on the Danube in the coming days or even weeks as no significant rainfall is forecast.

Magyar said Friday that the Danube’s water level has only risen on three occasions in the month of August in the last 20 years, and added that the level at Paks could recede to as low as negative 57 inches — far below the previous record of negative 39 inches set in 2018.

A level of negative 52.7 inches requires the full powering down of the plant, he said. A negative reading means the river has fallen below the gauge’s zero reference level, not that the river is empty.

Hungary’s government has requested that companies that consume large quantities of energy voluntarily reduce their consumption to help stabilize the energy supply, particularly in peak demand hours between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m.

Magyar said Hungarian energy conglomerate MOL had committed to reducing its electricity needs by 65 megawatt-hours, a decrease of 40% from its normal consumption.

Magyar announced Friday that his party had recommended suspending parliamentary sessions planned for Monday and Tuesday in the interest of conserving energy. He also ordered that all state institutions turn off decorative lighting by Monday.