November 2, 1917: The Balfour Declaration is issued. In a letter to Walter Rothschild, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour expressed the British government’s support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Balfour’s letter was less committal than Rothschild and other Zionist leaders wanted, in that he did not express support for making Palestine a “Jewish state.” Nevertheless the declaration became the basis of British policy in Mandatory Palestine moving forward and is a major milestone in the eventual creation of the state of Israel.

November 2, 1964: Saudi King Saud bin Abdulaziz is ousted in an intra-family coup. Saud and his brother/crown prince, Faisal, had been engaged in a power struggle since their father’s death in 1953, a struggle that Faisal really won earlier in the year when he and the rest of the ruling family stripped Saud of his authority and forced him to name Faisal as his regent. Saud’s mismanagement of the country, along with concerns that he was losing the “Arab Cold War” to Gamal Abdel Nasser and republicanism, led to his marginalization and ultimately removal from power. Finally in November the ruling family officially deposed Saud and made Faisal king.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least five people in Gaza on Monday, four in a number of airstrikes throughout the territory and the fifth in an apparent shooting in the southern Khan Younis area. In the West Bank, the IDF ended its 11 day siege of Hebron on Monday. That operation displaced thousands of Palestinians and dealt severe damage to one of the city’s neighborhoods.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: I apologize for doing so many of these lately as I know the last thing anybody wants to read about is my personal ups and downs. However, I have a medical issue that will likely impact the newsletter. You may recall a couple of weeks ago when I said that I thought I was dealing with carpal tunnel syndrome. The good news is it's probably not carpal tunnel, but the bad news is that it may be something a bit more serious (albeit still treatable). The upshot is that I am still having a difficult time typing so I will do what I can by dictating the newsletter, but if the content or frequency of these round ups is affected, I thank you in advance for understanding.

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 30, 1270: The Eighth Crusade reaches an ignominious end outside the walls of Tunis. French King Louis IX, a Crusading icon despite the less than successful outcomes of both of the expeditions he led, was convinced by his brother, Charles of Anjou, that besieging Tunis would be the first step toward defeating Mamluk Egypt and securing the Holy Land. Charles of course had personal reasons for wanting to attack Tunis, whose ruler was a wayward vassal of Charles’ Sicilian kingdom. Unprepared for the hot Tunisian environment, Louis’ army was ravaged by dysentery and the king himself died in August. Charles took command and eventually agreed to lift the siege in return for trade concessions.

October 30, 1340: What would prove to be the final Muslim attempt to halt the Christian conquest of Iberia ends in failure at the Battle of Río Salado outside the town of Tarifa. An army from Marinid-ruled Morocco had arrived in Iberia earlier in the year and besieged Tarifa as part of an overall effort to relieve the beleaguered Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim polity on the peninsula. A joint Castilian and Portuguese relief force was able to cut off the Marinid-Granadan supply lines and then decisively defeat the besieging army.

October 30, 1918: Ottoman leaders sign the Armistice of Mudros, ending their involvement in World War I and ultimately consigning the empire to extinction.

October 31, 1517: Martin Luther mails his Ninety-five Theses to the Archbishop of Mainz, the event that has come to mark the start of the Protestant Reformation. He’s also more famously said to have nailed the text to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, though Luther’s own recounting of events raises questions about whether he did so on October 31 or, really, at all. It’s entirely possible he did, but while that act has been cast as a stunning display of rebellion by history, posting disputations in a public place like the door to the city’s church was common practice at the time. Whatever actually happened, it’s safe to say that word got around.

October 31, 1941: The USS Reuben James, a Clemson-class destroyer, is torpedoed by German submarine U-552 while sailing as part of a convoy that had set out from Newfoundland about a week earlier. The attack killed 100 of the 144 people on board and made the Reuben James the first US vessel to be sunk in combat in World War II’s European Theater.

November 1, 1922: The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, is deposed.

November 1, 1955: The Vietnam War begins, at least according to the US government. Even though the Viet Cong had already begun battling the South Vietnamese government and the North Vietnamese government wouldn’t officially get involved until the following year, this is the date when the US government reorganized its Military Assistance Advisory Group for Indochina by country. The birth of “MAAG Vietnam” is considered by Washington to mark the start of the war, and when it lists US deaths in the conflict it starts the count on this date.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

There are a few items of note:

• The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least eight people across Gaza on Sunday, one day after killing at least four people in the territory. One of Sunday’s strikes killed at least five police officers, as the IDF continues to focus on targeting security personnel. The United Nations human rights office warned on Friday that the IDF is furthering a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza by continuing to expand the territory under its control behind the so-called “yellow line,” and by treating the line itself “as a kill zone” when any Palestinians approach it.

• The IDF’s siege of the West Bank city of Hebron hit its tenth day on Sunday. According to Al Jazeera, the campaign has “displaced or affected” over 3300 people so far, with Hebron Mayor Yousef al-Jabari estimating economic losses of some $3.8 million per day. That displacement figure is actually lower than one reported by the Palestinian outlet WAFA a few days ago.

• Two scenarios seem to be emerging after Tuesday’s Knesset election. Main opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot appeared to open the door to collaborating with the two Palestinian-Israeli parties, the Joint List and the United Arab List, on Saturday provided that they — or any other parties that might want to join his coalition — commit to “four principles” that include “recognizing Israel as a Jewish, democratic, liberal state based on equality; committing to the values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence; requiring all citizens to perform military, national or civilian service; and recognizing Hamas as a terrorist group whose military and governing capabilities in Gaza must be destroyed.” Even if the parties accept those prerequisites it is unclear whether Eisenkot can incorporate them and still keep the rest of his coalition together.

• The second scenario is a “national unity” government, which might be acceptable to Netanyahu according to a Sunday report by the Israeli public outlet Kan. Whether it would be acceptable to Eisenkot or anyone else in the opposition remains to be seen. Supposedly, Donald Trump and Israeli President Isaac Herzog would serve as “guarantors” of whatever deal Netanyahu and Eisenkot might strike and I guess that’s supposed to reassure Eisenkot that Netanyahu won’t screw him over at some point.

YEMEN

The Yemeni government claimed on Saturday that its forces had seized “military positions and strategic heights” in northern Yemen’s Jawf province. Ansarullah, by contrast, insisted that its fighters had “thwarted advances by government forces” in Jawf and in Marib province further east.

IRAN

Schrödinger's war continues to teeter on the edge of either resuming or ending. On the “ending” side of the ledger, an Iranian negotiating team has been in Qatar for three days amid reports of a potential breakthrough around a proposal under which the US would lift its blockade and make other economic concessions and Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz within two days of an agreement. Each side wants the other to make the first move, however, and the US is also demanding nuclear concessions that the Iranians are unwilling to make until a subsequent round of negotiations. That plus a general lack of trust may prevent an agreement. The New Arab reported on Saturday that “a US delegation is expected to join [the] negotiations,” but there’s no indication when that might happen.

On the “resuming” side, MS NOW reported on Friday that Donald Trump wants to start attacking Iran again literally the day after Tuesday’s midterm election in the US. Or at least his administration has been telling Gulf Arab states to prepare as though the war could resume that soon. The USS Theodore Roosevelt and its carrier group won’t arrive in the region until late November so that may argue for waiting and seeing if this latest diplomacy can really work, but if Trump feels sad after Tuesday’s results come in he may decide that he needs to cheer himself up by bombing a foreign country. Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is telling his senior military commanders to respond to any US attack with “maximum” force, so whenever the war does resume it’s likely to last for quite a while. Supposedly Trump and Netahyahu held a “candid phone call” on Saturday to discuss the issue, with Netanyahu pushing for a quick resumption of war and Trump seeming to favor waiting.

ASIA

AZERBAIJAN

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev no-showed the Organization of Turkic States summit in Ankara that wrapped up on Friday, suggesting that despite the Turkish government’s recent concession the tension between those two countries has not been resolved. Eurasianet suggests that the controversy over Azerbaijan’s hijab ban has unlocked deeper resentments over its close relationship with Israel, which has made it a target for Turkish criticism. The deeper underlying issue remains the disconnect between the Turkish government, which views itself as the natural leader of the other Turkic states, and the Azerbaijani government, which views that relationship as one of equals.

AFGHANISTAN

The Trump administration is planning to start deporting Afghan nationals from the United States starting Monday. They will be trafficked to Pakistan, and from there the understanding is that they will be repatriated to Afghanistan. Many of these people may have migrated to the US toward the end of the Afghan war when it became clear that the Taliban was going to take power again. This group may include people who worked with the US military or civilian administration in Afghanistan, and who therefore may face retaliation from Afghan authorities once they return. This is, in short, one of the more unconscionable things that the Trump administration has done.

VIETNAM

The Financial Action Task Force removed Bulgaria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, and Monaco from its money laundering “grey list” on Friday, while warning the Vietnamese government that it may face demotion to the FATF blacklist if it “does not ⁠make tangible improvements to rectify its strategic deficiencies by the next Plenary meeting.” Being on the FATF grey list doesn’t carry any automatic penalties but can make financial activity more difficult. Getting put on the blacklist is far more serious and generally results in sanctions that can include losing access to global financial networks.

NORTH KOREA

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is pointing toward North Korea as the perpetrator of a $6.3 billion heist from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance that came to light on Thursday. In a statement released on Saturday, the bureau said that its personnel had “observed TraderTraitor actors converting stolen assets primarily into Ethereum.” “TraderTraitor” is a hacker group that is apparently tied to the North Korean government.

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AFRICA

MOROCCO

The UN peacekeeping force in Western Sahara, which has been in place since 1991, began shutting down on Sunday after the UN Security Council failed to pass a resolution extending its mandate. A US-drafted resolution that would have extended that mandate by one year while recognizing Morocco's claim over the territory drew a Russian veto on Friday, while a Russian-drafted resolution that would have simply extended the mandate was defeated. This is all music to the Moroccan government's ears, since the end of the peacekeeping force more or less ratifies Moroccan control over the territory. But the Polisario Front, which represents the Sahrawi independence movement, expressed disappointment over this outcome.

ETHIOPIA

Several drone strikes hit a displaced persons camp in Ethiopia’s Amhara region on Friday, killing at least 15 people and wounding at least 36. There is no indication as to who was responsible for the strikes, though according to Reuters members of the Amhara Fano militia were seen in the vicinity of the encampment around the time of the strikes. The Fano has allied with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in its conflict against the Ethiopian government.

Elsewhere, the AP reports that clashes between the governments of Ethiopia’s Oromia and Somali regions has sent thousands of people fleeing over the border into Kenya. As of Wednesday, the UN refugee agency was claiming that the fighting had created upwards of 50,000 refugees. One AP reporter claimed that there had been outbursts of sporadic gunfire daily since October 22, though it seems that the fighting has tapered off since Wednesday. Conflict between these regions (and the Oromo and Somali communities more broadly) goes back decades but the immediate cause here seems to have been the opening of a Somali regional government office in the border town of Moyale on October 18.

SOMALIA

The UN also closed its political mission in Somalia this weekend, shutting things down on Saturday after a two-year transition as had been requested by the Somali government in 2024. There are still UN humanitarian operations in Somalia, though they are being hit hard by funding cuts, and it still has an office connected to the African Union’s Somali peacekeeping mission.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The ongoing Congolese Ebola outbreak passed another grim milestone on Friday, when government statistics showed that the death toll has now topped 5000. Congolese authorities have now tracked over 10,300 cases across eight of the country’s provinces. Cases have also been confirmed in Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria, were two new suspected cases were identified over the weekend though those patients are still being tested.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Reuters reported on Friday that the Trump administration has been asking European governments to temper their comments about the Russian government, saying that their criticisms have in some cases “undermined continental security.” It’s unclear how many European governments have been given this message, though it is known at least that the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — are among them. European leaders have, of late, been warning of potential Russian “hybrid” attacks on the continent, as well as intensifying their criticisms of the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration “is backing a quick resumption of Russian natural-gas sales to Europe via pipelines running through … Ukraine.” This would be a carrot to entice Moscow to agree to an “energy ceasefire” with Ukraine heading into winter. It runs counter to the European Union’s project to phase out Russian oil imports altogether by 2027, though apparently the administration has come up with a workaround — the gas would be sold by Russia to a “US intermediary” that would then sell to European customers. As the WSJ rather politely put it, this “could create a lucrative opportunity for American investors,” though I’m sure there’s no way the lucre would benefit the Trump Family or any of its associates because that would be unseemly to say the least. This proposal also has Russia putting the revenue from these sales “into an escrow account in a third-party jurisdiction,” which would ensure that they’re not used to fund the Russian war effort and probably create some attractive rent-taking opportunities on the back end as well.

UKRAINE

In Ukraine-related items:

• The Russian military’s overnight bombardment killed at least one person in Kyiv from Thursday night into Friday morning. On Saturday night into Sunday morning the Russians targeted electrical infrastructure across Ukraine, reportedly leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. Ukrainian officials are also claiming that the Russian government hacked the country’s air raid alert service, sending erroneous messages about possible nuclear or chemical attacks to people in and around Kyiv on Sunday.

• An apparent Ukrainian drone strike hit an oil refinery in Russia’s Samara oblast on Friday. There were no casualties but this strike came after The Wall Street Journal reported that Ukrainian officials had promised their US counterparts that they would stop attacking Russian refineries until sometime after the US midterm election. It’s unclear why the Ukrainians decided to scrap that arrangement but so far there’s no indication that there will be any repercussions from the US.

• The Melania Trump-brokered ceasefire in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky continued to hold through Sunday, allowing an aid convoy to enter the city on Friday and for those residents who wanted to evacuate to do so. There’s no estimate of the number of people who chose to leave. Hopes of extending or expanding the ceasefire ended when the Russian government reportedly rejected a Ukrainian offer to that effect. While focused on Oleshky the ceasefire had also benefited people in other parts of southern Ukraine’s Kherson oblast, who were preparing for a resumption of violence on Sunday.

• The US State Department approved the sale of 500 Patriot PAC-3 air defense interceptors to Ukraine on Friday, in a deal estimated at around $2.1 billion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the deal, but also noted that the timetable means those missiles may not get to Ukraine for several years. He reiterated the country’s current need for more air defense munitions.

BULGARIA

Acting Bulgarian President Iliana Iotova has won Sunday's runoff election for a full term in office, with challenger Andrey Gyurov conceding on the basis of early results that showed her winning 58 percent to 38 percent. As you may recall, Iotova also won last Sunday's first round but fell short of an outright victory, amid record low turnout that would have forced a runoff anyway. This Sunday’s turnout looks like it will come in at the 27-29 percent level, a bit higher than last week’s 23 percent. Iotova is politically aligned with Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev and in terms of geopolitics she favors diplomacy with Russia.

GERMANY

“Gen-Z” protests turned violent in parts of Germany on Saturday, especially in the cities of Cologne and Frankfurt. German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt blamed “violent left-wing groups and troublemakers from migrant communities” for the unrest, which according to police involved vandalism and in some cases the use of Molotov cocktails. Protests continued in other countries including France, where the turnout for nationwide Saturday protests has declined over the past three weeks from 550,000 to 410,000 to 320,000 according to government estimates. Italy and Portugal also saw mass demonstrations.

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AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

The Trump administration’s deal to loot Venezuela’s oil via the shady firm “North American Blue Energy Partners” is, according to Reuters, running into some significant constraints:

NABEP says it will lift oil output ‌fourfold to more than 1 million barrels per day (bpd), up from about 224,000 bpd in mid-October.

That will be far harder than Trump and NABEP have suggested, according to Reuters interviews with 15 oil workers, contractors, financiers and industry experts. Eight of them — seven oilfield workers and contractors and one business associate familiar with NABEP operations — said the company was carrying debt to contractors and struggling to hire staff and repair infrastructure.

Even the headline reserves figures Trump cites [an alleged 64 billion barrels of oil] may overstate the prize.

HAITI

Axios reported on Friday that Donald Trump has “blessed” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s invasion of Haiti, though he’s apparently stopped short of offering material support for it. There is an outside chance that this new Salvadoran military operation could finally break the hold that criminal gangs have over Haiti, but given the country’s history with external interventions the likelihood is that it will just further immiserate the Haitian people. Bukele apparently pitched this operation to Trump as a test case for El Salvador to act as a US proxy elsewhere in the Americas, perhaps in concert with mercenary entrepreneur Erik Prince’s “Vectus Global” firm, which is also operating in Haiti. He sought direct US support but that doesn’t appear to be on the table. Instead he may get assistance from the Colombian government, which according to Axios would serve as a cutout or “go-between” with Washington.

CANADA

Donald Trump claimed on Sunday that recent trade talks with the Canadian government have produced the “concept” of an agreement that would include the construction, at Canada’s expense, of a new Keystone XL oil pipeline. The previous Keystone project, intended to bring oil from western Canada to US refineries on the Gulf coast, was shelved in 2021 because it would have been an environmental disaster and due to opposition from Indigenous communities along the proposed route. There’s been no comment from the Canadian government on this front, but Prime Minister Mark Carney did indicate on Sunday that the talks have made progress.

UNITED STATES

Finally, after what must have been an exhaustive search NBC News has managed to find some folks who are actually winning the Iran war:

The two largest U.S. oil companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron, on Friday reported blowout profits that easily beat expectations as oil prices remain sharply elevated because of the U.S. war with Iran.

ExxonMobil reported a profit that doubled from the same period last year, while Chevron’s earnings surged more than 180% from a year earlier.

As part of the bumper returns, Exxon said it was increasing the dividend it pays to investors.

The returns at both companies came as the price of oil surged beyond $100 per barrel and has remained there for months. On Friday, prices accelerated again, with Brent oil trading closing just under $118 per barrel.

The highest level that Brent reached since the United States and Israel launched the Iran war in late February was $126, which it is now approaching again.

Since the start of the year, Exxon shares have risen 52%, and Chevron shares have returned 50%.

Overnight, another major oil company, BP, reported that its profit skyrocketed to an 18-year high.

This windfall is due to US consumers paying 40 percent more for gasoline and near-record prices for diesel, but surely we can all agree that it’s a small price to pay to do something nice for our wonderful oil companies. If you ask me it’s about time something went their way.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: Barring any massive news there will be no roundup tomorrow. I am going to take a day to rest and see if I can finally kick this cold.

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 29, 1923: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declares the founding of a Turkish Republic, replacing the by-than obviously defunct Ottoman Empire. Although Atatürk’s Grand National Assembly had been functioning as a republican government since 1920, this day is annually commemorated as “Republic Day” in Turkey.

October 29, 1929: The “Crash of ‘29,” which began with “Black Thursday” on October 24 and continued with “Black Monday” on October 28, ends with “Black Tuesday.” Over those final two days the US stock market lost roughly a quarter of its value. By July 1932 the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at just over 40 points, down from roughly 380 points in September 1929. The crash signaled the onset of the Great Depression, a global economic collapse that especially hit industrialized Western nations and those countries dependent on the West for trade and investment, and that wouldn’t really end in many places until after the onset of World War II.

October 29, 1956: Israeli military forces, backed by France and the UK, invade Egypt’s Sinai region, kicking off what became known as the Suez Crisis. British and French leaders were upset over Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision in July to nationalize the Suez Canal and use its revenues to pay for his Aswan High Dam project. Their aim was to a) seize the canal and b) remove Nasser from power. Militarily their plan met with some initial success, but diplomatically it was such a dismal failure that the United States stepped in and threatened both Britain and France to cease and desist, which they did. Nasser’s ultimate victory cemented his stature as an anti-colonial force in the Arab and non-aligned worlds and the episode highlights the post-World War II shift in the Western world that had the US moving to the top of the hierarchy and Britain and France reduced to subordinate status.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli Central Election Committee released a preliminary tabulation of votes cast in Tuesday’s Knesset election on Thursday and there do not appear to be any major surprises based on earlier projections: Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition won 53 seats collectively, the Gadi Eisenkot-led opposition coalition won 48, and the two Palestinian-Israeli parties (the Joint List and the United Arab List) won 19.

In a different situation this could be interpreted as 53 seats for the government and 67 seats for the opposition, so the opposition won and Israel will get a new government. But with the caveat that anything could happen as the parties try to negotiate a post-election settlement, that’s not how things work in Israel. A large portion of Eisenkot’s coalition will not join an alliance with the Palestinian parties, whose remarkable success is one reason why the situation appears to be so deadlocked now. That includes bringing the UAL into the government and accepting support from the JL (which has historically refused to be part of a governing coalition, but might be willing to support one to get rid of Netanyahu). Even if Eisenkot himself might entertain something like this he might cause enough of his coalition’s MKs to defect to Netanyahu to hand the latter a majority. So this outcome seems highly unlikely.

Netanyahu, it should be noted, is arguing that the Palestinian-Israeli vote was fraudulent, which he does every election cycle but this time it has particular salience. Netanyahu wants to make it as politically toxic as possible for Eisenkot to work with those Palestinian parties. He may also be trying to make a case for voiding the election altogether but that’s a less realistic goal. Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency is reportedly investigating claims that a foreign country sent financial support to one of the two Palestinian lists, but the agency has stressed that it’s not seeking to invalidate the Palestinian-Israeli vote altogether. That’s not stopping Netanyahu from making a big deal about the investigation.

The new Knesset is due to begin its session early next month. At that time the collective “opposition” will hold a majority of votes but it probably will not have formed a government. Netanyahu and his cabinet will continue in office, albeit with the practically meaningless “caretaker” label applied to their positions. If the opposition can work together in even the most basic way it can elect a new Knesset speaker and start passing legislation, but unless it can agree on a government it can’t unseat Netanyahu. I already outlined some of the possibilities on that front yesterday but ultimately I suspect Netanyahu will do what he can to force a snap election on the assumption that the result probably can’t get any worse for him and might be better. Even the prospect of a pardon seems unlikely to sway him, though again anything can happen at this point as the parties start talking.

Elsewhere, the Israeli military (IDF) killed at least two people and wounded several others in central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp on Thursday. Multiple IDF attacks were reported across the territory so there may be additional casualties. And in the West Bank a mob of Israeli settlers attacked journalists Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, Jasper Nathaniel, and Adele Shoko in the Masafer Yatta area on Wednesday. After the attackers beat them, Khrzhanovskiy and Nathaniel were arrested by Israeli security personnel. I believe that Nathaniel at least has been freed but I haven’t seen any confirmation of that or of Khrzhanovskiy’s whereabouts.

YEMEN

Intense fighting continues to rage around the besieged Yemeni city of Taiz, with the country’s nominal government declaring to Al Jazeera on Thursday that its forces had killed or wounded “239 militants” over the previous 24 hours. There’s no confirmation of that. Ansarullah claimed on Thursday that Saudi airstrikes in the vicinity of Taiz had killed at least 12 civilians and wounded three others, one day after the group said that Saudi attacks had killed at least 14 people in Jawf province in northern Yemen. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is now reporting that at least 281,000 people have been displaced since this war resumed in earnest lat month and that some 800,000 people are still trapped in Taiz with minimal supplies and inadequate access to humanitarian aid.

IRAN

In Iran-related items:

• According to The Wall Street Journal, Central Command boss Brad Cooper “briefed President Trump on Thursday on military options for Iran” in what it called “a rare in-person visit to the White House.” The in-person aspect may suggest that the Trump administration has reached a fairly advanced stage of war planning.

• The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed on Thursday that four vessels had caught fire after hitting sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz over the course of the day. The CENTCOM keeps insisting that it has cleared the strait of mines but the IRGC has in the past couple of weeks repeatedly made claims about tankers being disabled by mines along the waterway’s southern channel along the Omani coast. There’s no confirmation of Thursday’s alleged mine incidents and no indication as to damage or casualties.

• The US Defense Department is telling Congress that the Iran war has cost $47.1 billion. This is almost certainly a drastic underestimate from a department that isn’t exactly known for its scrupulous adherence to truth and accuracy, and it obviously doesn’t account for the money that the Trump administration is about to waste on a resumption of the war.

ASIA

AZERBAIJAN

It would appear that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has backed down from his hijab spat with the Azerbaijani government. On Sunday the newspaper Cumhuriyet reported that Erdoğan had requested and received the resignation of one of his advisers, Oktay Saral. It was Saral who initially criticized the Azerbaijani government’s ban on religious attire in schools, including the hijab, beginning the dispute. Forcing him to resign is a clear gesture that Erdoğan wants this argument to end and he’s not worried about ending it on Turkish terms. The underlying issues in the Turkish-Azerbaijani relationship — chiefly that Turkey views itself as the dominant partner while Azerbaijan views itself as a peer or near-peer — remain, but those can be papered over at least for a little while longer.

AFGHANISTAN

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime is reporting a significant increase in opium production in Afghanistan this year, despite the Taliban-led government’s ban on its cultivation. According to its estimates some 43,000 hectares of Afghan farmland were devoted to the crop this year, compared with just 10,000 hectares in 2025. That’s still well below the 200,000-plus hectares that were used in opium cultivation prior to the Taliban’s re-takeover in 2021, but it seems pretty clear that economic pressures are increasingly driving farmers to defy the ban. The UN does have programs to help farmers transition to other crops but those are as poorly funded as most other UN programs these days so their reach is questionable. And there are other factors at play as well — one farmer interviewed by AFP cited climate-driven water shortages as a reason for going back to growing opium poppies, which are better able to withstand drier conditions than many of the alternatives.

PAKISTAN

A “Pakistani regional official” claimed on Wednesday that “unprovoked” cross-border fire from Afghanistan killed at least one person and wounded five in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province the previous day. Afghan officials are claiming that they retaliated for Pakistani drone strikes on Afghanistan’s Paktika province and that their forces killed or wounded “several Pakistani soldiers.”

CAMBODIA

A new Amnesty International report examines the links between scam operators and Cambodian security forces:

Cambodian private security companies connected to the country’s military, police and powerful business networks have helped sustain a scamming industry built on trafficking, forced labour, torture and slavery, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.

Official Business: Security companies and authorities at scamming compounds in Cambodia identifies five private security companies that provided services at scamming compounds – and details their links to members of Cambodia’s military, police and business elites. Amnesty also identified multiple members of the military and police who worked as security guards, trained or supervised guards at more than 20 compounds.

“For years, survivors of these nightmarish compounds described encountering members of the Cambodian military or police inside. These accounts could not be independently verified – until now,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

“This report demonstrates Cambodian corporate actors’ direct involvement in scamming compounds. Our findings also begin to expose the long-suspected links between Cambodia’s billion-dollar criminal scamming networks and politically connected figures who have remained largely beyond scrutiny.

“At the heart of these connections are security companies whose guards controlled compound exits, hunted down people who escaped and enforced compliance through fear and violence. Without them, this system of mass exploitation could not have functioned.”

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AFRICA

SUDAN

Rapid Support Forces drone strikes killed at least five people in Sudan’s North Darfur state on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the Emergency Rooms Coordination Council in the state’s Karnoi locality. The group also says that the RSF has been carrying out “ground operations and cattle rustling” in that area since Tuesday morning and there are likely additional casualties that haven’t been reported as yet. Karnoi is one of a handful of places in North Darfur that is not fully under RSF control and the group has been moving to secure those areas of late.

TUNISIA

The Arab Center’s Patricia Karam writes that the heat-driven breakdown of Tunisia’s public infrastructure this summer has sparked new public hostility toward the country’s dictatorial president:

During the summer of 2026—the hottest that Tunisia has recorded since 1950—the state could not keep the lights on. Rolling power outages, some lasting over ten hours, also knocked out the pumping stations that provided drinking water. In response, protests broke out across all 24 governorates. The Tunisian Social Observatory recorded 1,101 protest actions in July and 1,093 in August. Five years after President Kais Saied began dismantling Tunisia’s post-revolutionary political order, this latest crisis strikes at the implicit trade-off on which his rule has rested: fewer freedoms in exchange for a state that provides better for its people than in the past.

Today, Tunisia is no longer a young democracy experiencing backsliding. Its parliament has been replaced by a chamber elected with only 11 percent voter turnout. The judiciary has been purged by decree, and opposition politicians, lawyers, journalists, and activists have been imprisoned—with some receiving sentences of up to 66 years in the 2025 “conspiracy” trial. The 2022 constitution that Saied supported makes the president the head of the executive and leaves the government answerable to him alone.

CAMEROON

The Wall Street Journal reports that among the Trump administration’s various “third country” agreements to traffic migrants to various destinations other than their homes, it agreed to provide “around $35 million in military aid” to the Cameroonian military’s Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR). This is noteworthy inasmuch as the BIR has been credibly accused of myriad human rights violations, like torturing people to death — so credibly, in fact, that the US cut off military aid to the unit during Donald Trump’s first term in office. The administration won’t, for obvious reasons, admit to a quid pro quo here but this certainly seems like a window into the depths to which it will go in order to advance its xenophobic agenda.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

A Russian drone strike killed at least 14 people in a train station in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday. Other Russian attacks killed at least six people across the country. On another front, The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that the Ukrainian military stopped attacking Russian oil refineries earlier this month because of “weeks of pressure” from US officials. What’s most notable about this report is the suggestion that this halt is not indefinite, and that the Ukrainians may resume refinery attacks at some point after the US midterm election.

The localized ceasefire around the city of Oleshky in southern Ukraine’s Kherson oblast is still holding and an aid shipment appeared to be on the way on Thursday but I haven’t seen any indication as to when it’s supposed to arrive. The planned six day ceasefire went into effect on Tuesday morning and The New York Times reports on what it has wrought in Oleshky and elsewhere:

The temporary cease-fire, set to last several days, began early Tuesday morning in Ukraine’s Kherson region to facilitate an evacuation of the nearby city of Oleshky. The some 2,000 people living in that city, which Russia seized in February 2022, are facing a starvation crisis. Their worsening plight garnered attention from Mrs. Trump, who helped arrange a rare agreement between Russia and Ukraine to hold fire in the area long enough to demine the road out and allow locals to evacuate. The Ukrainian civilians will then be able to choose if they stay in territory controlled by Russia or return to areas under Ukrainian control.

The Ukrainian-controlled city of Kherson, which sits several miles across the river from Oleshky and is typically under near constant Russian attack, also went quiet this week. Russia seized Kherson in early 2022. Later that year Ukrainian forces pushed them across the river. Russia has never given up on retaking the city and launches many of its attacks on Kherson from Oleshky. But it has withheld fire on Kherson since the Oleshky truce began.

The sudden quiet has allowed for a remarkable respite in one of Ukraine’s most dangerous cities, where drones often hunt civilians in what Ukrainian officials call a “human safari.”

Civilians wandered Kherson’s streets with a sense of bewilderment and caution on Wednesday, still trying to wrap their heads around how [US First Lady Melania] Trump, who has rarely commented on the war in Ukraine, managed to secure them a brief moment of peace.

The ceasefire is supposed to include the opening of evacuation corridors for residents who want to leave Oleshky, but it sounds like those logistics haven’t yet been finalized.

SERBIA

Organizers of the protest movement whose electoral list defeated the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in Sunday’s parliamentary election are demanding public sector audits and the resignation of senior officials with ties to the outgoing government. They’ve already secured the resignation of Manja Grčić, who ran the SNS-aligned state TV outlet RTS. The student-led protests were oriented around corruption and it stands to reason that their main initial focus will be on that subject. The protesters have yet to say who will serve as prime minister in the new government, nor have they identified a candidate for president later this year.

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AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who returned to the country after over a year abroad on Sunday, claimed at a press conference in Caracas on Thursday that the Trump administration supports new elections in Venezuela next year. There’s no word from the administration on that front, nor is it clear whether Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are comfortable with Machado’s arrival. They’ve been quite happy with the performance of loyal vassal Delcy Rodríguez and her administration, and Machado’s arrival/talk of elections threatens to complicate the situation.

Trump and company may also be displeased with comments that Machado made regarding Venezuela’s need for “transparent contracts, open bidding for public deals and international arbitration.” Suffice to say that the administration’s recent oil deal with Rodríguez’s government would fall short on those standards.

HAITI

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council announced on Wednesday evening that it has scheduled the country’s next election for July 18, 2027, with a second round on October 4. Earlier this year it had pushed that election, which was supposed to take place in August, back to December, but even that timetable proved to be too ambitious given the country’s ongoing instability.

Meanwhile, El Salvador has now deployed some 2000 military personnel to Haiti as part of the operation to recover four Salvadoran military aviation technicians who disappeared after they were attacked by gangs near Port-au-Prince earlier this month. As the AP notes there are a number of unanswered questions about this deployment, mostly around the nature of their mission and their command structure. This force is presumably outside the control of the UN-backed “Gang Suppression Force” but the concern is that it may not be accountable to anybody (or at least not anybody in Haiti).

UNITED STATES

Finally, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired a senior Army strategist on Thursday:

The ouster of US Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia, who headed the Joint Staff’s policy, plans and strategy office, known as the J5, comes as the Trump administration is weighing whether to resume intensive attacks on Iran after the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Sylvia, an Army officer with more than three decades of experience who previously led the 101st Airborne Division, has become the latest in a string of more than a dozen generals and admirals dismissed by Hegseth since 2024. His dismissal was first reported by the Atlantic.

While Sylvia’s former role did not include drafting the US military’s plans for war with Iran, he was responsible for approving those plans and weighing them against the potential costs and benefits to other potential future US military campaigns and operations across the globe.

Sylvia, who assumed his post last October, had reportedly admitted to leaking classified information to the media regarding the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran after failing multiple polygraphs on the subject.

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 28, 312: Constantine defeats his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. This battle is perhaps most famous for the religious vision that Constantine allegedly received the night before, which in later accounts was said to have been the “Chi-Rho,” the interlocking Greek letters that are the first two letters of “Christ” and thus became an emblem of Jesus. The battle left Constantine as the unquestioned ruler of the Roman west, with his fellow Augustus Licinius as ruler of the Roman east, and marks the end of Diocletian’s (d. 305) four emperor “Tetrarchy” system. Constantine’s vision is regarded as the impetus behind the 313 Edict of Milan, in which he and Licinius declared Christianity a religion (with the protected status that imparted) under Roman law. Naturally the two Augusti eventually went to war with one another, with Constantine emerging as sole Roman emperor in 324.

October 28, 1922: Sticking with Rome, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party begins a two day march on that city that would end with its takeover of the Italian government. As Mussolini’s blackshirts approached Rome, Prime Minister Luigi Facta called for martial law, but Italian King Victor Emmanuel III opted instead to get rid of Facta and make Mussolini his new prime minister.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Security forces killed one French national in a firefight with members of the Firqat al-Ghuraba (“Foreigners’ Brigade”) jihadist group in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province on Wednesday. According to Syrian officials they observed someone leaving the group’s encampment with weapons, in violation of a previous agreement between the government and the brigade. They engaged and the gun battle ensued. At least one civilian was wounded in the clash. Firqat al-Ghuraba was aligned with Harakat Tahrir al-Sham during the Syrian civil war but the continued presence of foreign jihadists in Syria has become a problem for HTS now that it is trying to portray itself as a reliable partner for Western governments.

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: With apologies I have to forego tonight’s usual voiceover. Those who require it can use the text-to-voice feature in the Substack app.

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 27, 1942: A Japanese fleet defeats a smaller US fleet in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, part of World War II’s Guadalcanal campaign. Although the US took heavier losses in this engagement, with two ships sunk including the fleet carrier USS Hornet, Japan’s losses in aircraft and trained pilots proved to be more strategically significant in the long term and so this battle is regarded as a Pyrrhic victory.

October 27, 2019: During an overnight US special forces raid in the town of Barisha, in Syria’s Idlib province, Islamic State leader and would-be caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is killed. According to US officials Baghdadi attempted to flee, but upon being surrounded he detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and two children.

MIDDLE EAST

JORDAN

The Jordanian government says that its Monday evening airstrikes in southern Syria “killed more than 20 Islamic State militants,” apparently connected with Friday’s attack on a church in Jordan’s Karak province. It’s also acknowledged and expressed “regret” for the seven civilians who were also killed in those strikes, according to Syrian officials. This incident has unsurprisingly had a negative effect on bilateral relations, with the Syrian Foreign Ministry criticizing Jordan’s “unacceptable violation and breach of Syrian airspace without any prior coordination” in a statement on Tuesday. Jordanian officials had claimed initially that the strikes were coordinated with the Syrian government so somebody appears to be mistaken on that subject. Despite the tension, the two governments have agreed to form a “security committee” to investigate the airstrikes and perhaps manage cross-border threats.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Palestinian news outlet WAFA reported on Tuesday that a six year old child had died of wounds suffered in an Israeli military (IDF) attack on Gaza’s Mawasi displaced persons area. From the way that report is worded I’m not sure if the attack took place on Tuesday or previously.

Israeli voters headed to the polls in what looks like record numbers for Tuesday’s Knesset election. Israel’s Central Elections Committee reported turnout of 66.7 percent at 6 PM local time, which was four hours before polls close. By comparison, turnout in the 2022 Knesset election was around 70 percent in total. It’s tempting to speculate that high turnout is a bad sign for incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition but that would just be speculation.

If the increased turnout is being driving by Palestinian-Israeli voters who are voting for Arab parties then that could make problems for both Netanyahu and the opposition, whose right-wing elements have already refused to work with those parties in forming the country’s next government. Netanyahu did roll out his traditional election day “Arabs are voting in record numbers” routine but that’s just a racist appeal to turn out his own base that he makes during every election and may not reflect reality. Polling has leaned toward the governing coalition losing its majority, perhaps by a lot, but the opposition may also wind up short of a majority without the Arab parties.

Early exit polling, to the extent that it is actually reliable, is pointing toward a hung parliament with the opposition parties holding perhaps two or three seats more than Netanyahu’s coalition. Even so, Netanyahu’s Likud may end up as the largest individual party in the next session, which would give him an argument for remaining as PM in a “national unity” type of government should the opposition be open to an arrangement like that. An extended post-election cycle may be the result, possibly ending with another election.

EGYPT

The Egyptian government has shut down one of the country’s few independent media outlets, Mada Masr, after a court convicted editor-in-chief Lina Attalah of “operating a website without a license.” She was issued the maximum fine of 3 million pounds (a bit over $53,000). Mada Masr has frequently covered the Egyptian government in a less than flattering manner and in that sense the surprise here is that it’s taken so long for Cairo to shut it down. The site has been around since 2013 and Attalah applied for the appropriate license in 2018 (when the law requiring licensure was implemented) and 2020 but apparently received no response from authorities.

YEMEN

AFP reported on Tuesday that at least 97 combatants (63 Ansarullah personnel and 34 pro-government personnel) had been killed across Yemen since the previous evening, mostly in fighting near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. It characterized that fighting as “the fiercest” since Ansarullah captured most of Yemen’s Red Sea coast from government forces last month. Ansarullah also accused pro-government forces of killing at least two people near the heavily embattled city of Taiz.

In Saudi Arabia, Ansarullah struck the Ras Tanura oil refinery in the kingdom’s Eastern Province on Tuesday, reportedly causing a fire that the Saudis were able to bring under control. That is Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refinery and thus a major target. Saudi officials also claimed to have intercepted two Ansarullah missiles that were headed for Riyadh.

ASIA

PAKISTAN

Drop Site’s Mehr Sher reports that the Pakistani government is using the state of emergency it imposed earlier this month in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, ostensibly over security issues, to break former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and take direct control of the provincial government:

The party had been negotiating Khan’s access to health care and his release from prison with the federal government, but the talks stalled. On October 4, thousands of PTI supporters began marching from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa toward Islamabad to press those demands.

In response, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif convened an emergency cabinet meeting, and on October 11 President Asif Ali Zardari imposed a state of emergency and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, suspending its elected government on Sharif’s advice and citing a surge in terrorism and political unrest to justify the decisions. The Chief Minister Sohail Afridi, provincial PTI president Junaid Akbar, Assembly Speaker Babar Saleem Swati, and several other party leaders were detained. Pakistan’s Army was deployed to the province the same day and will remain there throughout the duration of emergency rule.

“The government is sort of willing to say [Afridi] is in protective custody, but isn’t willing to produce him before a court, or give any evidence of where he is. This is the chief executive of a province of 45 million people,” said a senior PTI leader, who was in hiding and spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Six days after assuming governor’s rule, Governor Faisal Karim Kundi said the province would extract and sell its mineral resources, and specifically referred to mineral resources in districts including Lakki Marwat, Tank, and Bannu. He also called for joint ventures with domestic and foreign companies to develop its oil and gas reserves. The province is rich in natural resources, including natural gas, copper, chromite, lead, emeralds, marble, limestone, and coal, and produces up to 50% of Pakistan’s total daily domestic crude oil production.

MYANMAR

A couple of new reports indicate that Myanmar’s ruling junta has been buoyed over the past few years by covert fuel shipments from Iran:

Myanmar’s military authorities have imported Iranian jet fuel using “sham paperwork” designed to circumvent the U.S. sanctions on both nations, according to reports published by Reuters and a local activist group yesterday.

The reports, which were based on shipping records, satellite imagery, and documents from Myanmar’s foreign exchange regulator and Ministry of Commerce, show how both the origin and content of the shipments were falsified. These shipments of jet fuel, which were disguised as diesel, have allowed the Myanmar Air Force to sustain its brutal air campaign against those opposing its coup d’etat in February 2021.

It has been clear for some time that Myanmar’s military was receiving fuel shipments from Iran’s large tanker “shadow fleet” – both Reuters and the rights group Amnesty International have reported on the issue – but the exact mechanism by which the shipments were being concealed was previously unknown.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

A drone strike reportedly killed at least 21 people and wounded 40 more in the Sudanese city of Nyala on Monday evening. The Sudanese military (SAF) was presumably responsible though it doesn’t sound as though it has claimed responsibility as yet. Nyala is both the capital of South Darfur state and the de facto “capital” of the Rapid Support Forces militant group and its proxy government. It is subject to frequent SAF attacks. Elsewhere, an RSF drone strike hit a power station near the city of Omdurman on Tuesday, knocking out power to the neighboring city of Khartoum.

The UK government blacklisted 15 SAF and RSF commanders on Monday. All are accused of “sexual violence, torture and attacks on civilians.” The sanctions, alongside the release of a report on Sudanese atrocities by the UK’s Centre for Information Resilience, were timed to mark the one-year anniversary of the RSF’s genocidal seizure of the city of El Fasher in Sudan’s North Darfur state.

NIGERIA

The death toll from Friday’s attack on a village in eastern Nigeria’s Taraba state has risen to 62 according to provincial authorities. Recovery work is continuing and that figure may rise further.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The DRC’s Ebola outbreak crossed an unfortunate milestone on Tuesday, as the latest batch of official figures puts the country at 10,060 confirmed cases with 4887 deaths. As ever it’s important to point out that those figures undercount the true extent of the epidemic, which wasn’t declared until several weeks (at least) after authorities believe the virus began circulating in the DRC’s Ituri province.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday. There’s no indication that they made any progress on settling the Ukraine war, their primary reason for calling, but the call itself is noteworthy and somewhat surprising given how little European leaders have been in direct contact with Putin since 2022. It also drew some rare (and very mild) criticism from other Nordic leaders, specifically Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that “Russian oil refineries increased crude processing by 25% in the second half of October” amid a near-cessation of Ukrainian drone strikes. Prior to Donald Trump’s declaration of an “energy ceasefire” earlier this month the Ukrainians were attacking Russian refineries fairly regularly. After that the Ukrainians halted those attacks for several days, resuming only after it became abundantly clear that the Russian military wasn’t participating. But that resumption lasted only a couple of days and there have been no further refinery strikes since October 16. Presumably this is the result of some sort of deal with the Trump administration to ease bilateral tensions.

UKRAINE

The Melania Trump-brokered (apparently) ceasefire seems to have held on Tuesday in the Ukrainian city of Oleshky and has been expanded to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid from other parts of Kherson oblast. The remaining residents of Oleshky have been living in dire conditions with minimal food and clean water and no safe way to evacuate. In addition to allowing aid in the ceasefire is supposed to offer those residents an opportunity to leave the city if they desire.

SERBIA

Al Jazeera reports that before Serbia’s political upheaval translates into any foreign policy changes, the country’s new leaders will need to establish their rule domestically:

Aleksandar Popov, director of the Centre for Regionalism in Novi Sad in Serbia, told Al Jazeera that a rapid reset in regional relations was unlikely.

“These questions will not be on the agenda immediately,” he said, referring to relations with Serbia’s neighbours.

The new authorities will first have to tackle domestic problems, he said, including dealing with a system that has “captured all democratic institutions”, as well as problems in the judiciary, prosecution service, police and media sector.

“Tidying up at home” will take priority before “solving problems with the neighbours”, Popov said, despite noting that the outgoing regime had done everything possible to undermine regional relations.

The potential implications are pretty substantial and could impact surrounding countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina depending on how the new government deals with Republika Srpska’s secessionist leadership. Beyond that Serbia’s European Union candidacy may get a boost as well.

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AMERICAS

BRAZIL

Brazilian presidential runner-up Flávio Bolsonaro has reportedly fled to the United States. In keeping with his family’s (alleged) predilection for corruption, Bolsonaro has been under investigation for money laundering, and following Sunday’s runoff the Brazilian Supreme Court gave him 24 hours to surrender his passport lest he attempt to evade prosecution. When that deadline lapsed the court invalidated his passport, but by then it seems he may have already been on his way to the US, where the Trump administration has already said that it will give him a visa even though he no longer has a valid passport. Being friendly with Donald Trump does have a few benefits, even if Trump isn’t prepared to invade Brazil and install Bolsonaro as president.

At In These Times, Andre Pagliarini considers how incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was able to win Sunday’s runoff despite having lost the first round earlier this month:

How did Lula pull it off? By both expanding and compressing the electorate. The first round of voting was characterized by the highest abstention rate since 1998. Almost 35 million eligible voters, or 21%, failed to cast a ballot. The scale of the absence was striking. The state of São Paulo alone accounted for more than 7.6 million non-voters. The second round presented both campaigns with an enormous pool of potential voters to mobilize, in addition to those who had supported other candidates or who cast blank and invalid ballots.

The first round also allowed dissatisfaction with the incumbent to find expression across a fragmented field of candidates. In hindsight, this gave the impression that Lula was probably more unpopular than he actually was. By reducing the choice to two alternatives, the runoff raised both the saliency and the stakes of the decision. The prospect of the Bolsonaro family’s return to power appears to have mobilized a broad range of voters who had either taken a Lula victory in the first round for granted — and so did not show up to vote — or had reasons to question or even oppose another Lula term. Lula didn’t ultimately need to convince skeptics to become committed supporters. He needed enough of them to conclude that his opponent represented the greater risk.

In the end, Lula more than made up the difference. He gained roughly 10.3 million votes between rounds, outpacing Flávio’s 3.7 million additional votes. He also doubled the margin of victory he secured four years ago against Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father, who is currently in prison for attempting a coup after losing to Lula in 2022.

ECUADOR

Jacobin’s Carlo Campo warns that Ecuador has taken a turn toward dictatorship:

“I’d be lying to you if I told you that yesterday I didn’t double-lock the door, just in case they come to take us down in the middle of the night.”

Those were the words of Jahiren Noriega, a member of Ecuador’s National Assembly, the day after the detention of Luisa González, the Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana’s presidential candidate in the country’s last two federal elections and the main opposition figure today.

In Ecuador, where the separation of powers no longer exists, the use of lawfare by the far-right government of President Daniel Noboa blurs the line between democracy and dictatorship. For members of the Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana, the party aligned with the former socialist president, Rafael Correa, the political persecution is nothing new, and left-wing leaders and social movements across Latin America will surely recognize the playbook. But González’s detention last Thursday marks a shocking escalation in Noboa’s bold use of the courts to persecute opponents, and in Ecuador, a country with a rich history of protest that has been unusually quiet throughout his presidency, the Left faces its biggest test yet.

UNITED STATES

The US military conducted another round of extrajudicial executions on Tuesday, killing five people in an alleged “drug boat” in the eastern Pacific. “Confirmed intelligence,” which in this context means “take our word for it,” apparently “verified” that the boat and its occupants were involved in drug trafficking. The Pentagon has murdered over 240 people in these strikes since September 2025.

Finally, ProPublica reports that the US Department of Energy has been fighting tooth and nail to deny benefits to former employees who became sick due to exposure to nuclear waste at its Hanford facility in Washington state:

Cascade PBS and ProPublica spoke to workers, surviving family members, lawyers representing workers and state officials. They all pointed to a pattern: The DOE systematically challenges and then drags out workers’ compensation claims for years with recommended denials and subsequent legal appeals. Along the way, it has spent millions on outside lawyers and expert testimony, including doctor evaluations that point to other causes for workers’ illnesses.

The DOE has paid out benefits to Hanford workers in some cases, lawyers and families said, but it has done so while still actively appealing the claims. It warns workers that they may have to pay the money back.

Our reporting found that not even death ends the cycle of appeals. About 152 workers’ claims remain stranded in this legal limbo — approved by the state but still under appeal by the DOE. Half of those workers are dead. The DOE continues to fight to deny their families survivors’ benefits.

October 26, 1185: A revolt over high Byzantine taxes breaks out among Bulgarians living in Moesia. This insurrection, known as the “Uprising of Asen and Peter” after its leaders—two brothers (identified as Vlach but probably with mixed Bulgarian heritage) who were named, you know, Asen and Peter—quickly led to a restoration of the Bulgarian Empire, which had been subjugated by the Byzantines in the 11th century. The principals signed a truce that tacitly recognized a restored Bulgarian Empire in 1187, though conflict continued beyond that. This “Second Bulgarian Empire” survived until it was eradicated by the Ottomans in 1396.

October 26, 1947: Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir signs the Instrument of Accession that brings his state into union with India. When British colonial authorities partitioned India and Pakistan, they decided to leave Kashmir’s fate up to Kashmir. The region’s Muslim majority was divided between independence and union with Pakistan, while its Hindu minority favored union with India. Hari Singh seemed to favor independence, but conflict between Kashmiri Muslims and Hindus prompted him to turn to India for help and Kashmir thus joined India.

MIDDLE EAST

JORDAN

The Jordanian military conducted airstrikes in southern Syria on Monday targeting “terrorist groups” allegedly tied to the gunmen who attacked a church in Jordan’s Karak province on Friday. That attack killed at least nine people at last count and left 34 more wounded. Monday’s airstrikes killed at least seven people and wounded three others in Syria’s Daraa and Suwayda provinces and there is some confusion as to whether they were conducted in coordination with the Syrian government — Jordanian officials say they were, but the Syrian government has not confirmed that and says that it has “launched an ​investigation” into the strikes. Jordanian authorities also arrested three people on Monday in connection with the church attack. Officials are describing all three as “Jordanians” and “extremist terrorists,” but despite the airstrikes it’s still not clear which group or groups were involved.

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TODAY IN HISTORY

October 24, 1648: The Peace of Westphalia (mostly) ends the Thirty Years’ War. The settlement—which took the form of two treaties, the Treaty of Münster between the Holy Roman Emperor and France and the Treaty of Osnabrück between the Holy Roman Emperor and Sweden—reinforced the idea that the Emperor could not impose religious terms on the empire’s constituent states but also repudiated the idea that state sovereigns had the right to compel their subjects to adopt said sovereign’s chosen religion. It also made Calvinism a legally recognized variant of Christianity and established the legal equality of Catholics and Lutherans. Many IR scholars credit Westphalia with reifying the concept of national sovereignty, with its emphasis on the sanctity of national borders and the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs—hence the term “Westphalian sovereignty.”

October 24, 1912: On the same day, the Ottoman Empire suffers two decisive defeats, one to a Bulgarian army in the Battle of Kirk Kilisse in modern Turkey and the other to a Serbian army in the Battle of Kumanovo in modern North Macedonia. The simultaneous defeats set the tone for the First Balkan War, which had begun on October 8 and would end in May 1913 with a decisive victory for the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia). The Bulgarian victory at Kirk Kilisse gave its armies an open path to Istanbul, though in two battles at Çatalca (on the outskirts of the city) in November and then in February-April, the Ottomans were able first to stop and then to rout the Bulgarian offensive. Thus, although they lost the war, the Ottomans were able to defend their capital and preserve what was left of their empire.

October 25, 1147: The Siege of Lisbon ends. This siege involved soldiers who had initially set out for the Holy Land to join what we now call the Second Crusade. And speaking of which, this is also the date on which the army of Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III was thoroughly defeated by the Seljuks at the Battle of Dorylaeum, removing it as a potential factor in that crusade. We’ve seen how the Crusade eventually turned out (SPOILER ALERT: not well).

October 25, 1917: The Bolsheviks begin an uprising in Petrograd that would within a day see them overthrow the provisional Russian government of Alexander Kerensky and, after a lengthy civil war, become the new leaders of Russia. This is the Old Style (Julian calendar) date of the revolution, which according to the Gregorian calendar actually took place on November 7. But since it’s called the “October Revolution” I feel weird commemorating it in November.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Gunmen reportedly attacked a security checkpoint in southern Syria’s Daraa province on Sunday, killing one “highway security officer” and wounding two others according to The New Arab. Two of the attackers were captured and I haven’t seen any indication as to their affiliation(s). Elsewhere, TNA is also reporting that the Israeli military (IDF) resumed excavation work on an earthen fortification that it’s been building in southern Syria’s Quneitra province “after a pause of about six weeks.” It’s unclear why this work has resumed or if it means some further escalation is in the offing.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least eight people in multiple attacks across Gaza on Sunday. Al Jazeera reported that one “massive” strike targeted the campus of Islamic University in Gaza city, from which there may be additional casualties. The New Arab reported on Saturday that Israeli bombing had “cut off the water supply to large parts of Gaza City after damaging a main supply line.” Municipal officials were attempting to organize repairs to the line.

In the West Bank, the IDF is continuing the operation it began following Friday’s shooting that killed two Israeli soldiers near Hebron. Israeli operations have displaced over 2600 people in the Hebron vicinity and have closed off outside access to (and exits from) the city. Israeli forces have also raided at least 15 towns across the northern West Bank and are planning to close off the territory’s borders altogether on Tuesday, the day of Israel’s Knesset election.

YEMEN

Ansarullah claimed on Saturday that Saudi airstrikes had killed at least 16 people in cities of Sanaa and Hudaydah. The group also claimed responsibility for several strikes on the city of Aden along with attacks targeting multiple sites in Saudi Arabia. Despite those attacks the Saudi government partially reopened King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on Saturday, two weeks after Ansarullah strikes forced that facility’s closure. Sunday brought another wave of attacks across the kingdom. Saudi authorities reported at least two people injured by falling missile debris but I haven’t seen any further word as to casualties or damage.

The Yemeni government claimed on Sunday to have “neutralized” 218 Ansarullah fighters over the previous 24 hours. The Yemeni government makes a lot of claims and only some of them wind up being true so take this with a grain of salt.

IRAN

Donald Trump told reporters on Saturday that he was “thinking about” resuming war with Iran, “maybe tomorrow.” When “tomorrow” became “today” he called the war off, at least for the time being. Maybe tomorrow, I guess.

Elsewhere, a new memo penned by US Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims that “we have received intelligence that Iran has substantially increased efforts to ​target US personnel,” adding that “the lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against US citizens have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain ​other countries.” This assessment may help to explain the State Department’s recent moves to evacuate diplomatic personnel and family members from regional offices. “Two Iranian officials, one of them a member of the Revolutionary Guards” seemed to confirm the memo’s general thrust in comments to The New York Times, citing the Israeli and US targeting of senior Iranian officials and their families over the past several months to argue that US diplomats and other personnel are “fair game.”

ASIA

PAKISTAN

The Pakistani government denied via social media on Saturday that it is recruiting and arming Afghans to battle militant groups and/or the Afghan military. It was responding to a charge leveled by former US ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad the previous day. Khalilzad didn’t say how he’d come by this alleged information but to be fair there is some precedent for that sort of thing. Pakistani officials also rejected the Afghan government’s argument that they are blaming Kabul for their own security failures, citing evidence of militant infiltration from Afghanistan into Pakistan as evidence that the roots of Pakistan’s militant problems lie on the Afghan side of the border.

NORTH KOREA

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited the Chinese city of Dandong on Saturday in what appears to be an indication that he is not, in fact, dead. On a more serious note he made the trip in order to highlight (and symbolically bless) the newly-opened New Yalu River ​Bridge, which immediately became the largest road crossing between the two countries when it began operating earlier this month. He was accompanied by Wang Huning, the chairperson of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. They reportedly visited a Korean War memorial in Dandong. This was Kim’s first known trip outside of North Korea since he attended the Chinese government’s Victory Day military parade in Beijing last September.

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AFRICA

NIGER

The Algerian government is reportedly planning to deploy military forces to a base at Madama in northern Niger, after winning parliamentary approval for the mission on Sunday. According to Reuters this will be the Algerian military’s first “foreign” deployment since it dispatched units (most of which arrived too late to get in on the fighting) to join the Egyptian military during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The Nigerien government is welcoming the Algerians in what is the latest indication of improving ties between Algiers and the three “Alliance of Sahel States” juntas (in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger). Earlier this month the Algerians reportedly brokered a deal in which the rebel Azawad Liberation Front withdrew from the northern Malian town of Kidal, allowing the junta to retake it.

NIGERIA

Gunmen attacked a village in eastern Nigeria’s Taraba state on Friday night, killing at least 48 people at last count. That figure has risen sharply from an initial government claim of ten and may rise further — Amnesty International says that it has confirmed 52 deaths, and recovery work is ongoing. The attackers may simply have been bandits though Taraba is certainly close enough to Nigeria’s jihadist-plagued northeast that a more ideological group can’t be ruled out.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

A Russian bombardment killed at least four people in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk oblast on Saturday evening. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed the deaths in a social media post on Sunday in which he called for “unblocking” the delivery of US-made Patriot air interceptors to Ukraine. These are missiles that have been purchased by European governments on Ukraine’s behalf, but the US has been slow in delivering them presumably because it needs all the Patriots it can muster for use in the Persian Gulf. Donald Trump’s irritation with Zelensky may also be a factor. In Russia, a pair of Ukrainian drone strikes overnight and on Sunday killed at least four people in Belgorod oblast.

The Starlink/Starshield saga appears to be over, maybe, as Ukrainian officials reported on Saturday that both services were “fully functional” for the first time in over a week. However, SpaceX oligarch Elon Musk hopped on social media overnight to argue that the Ukrainian military had violated Starlink’s terms of service by using it to facilitate “offensive drone strikes.” He said that this “loophole was closed last week,” which would suggest that the restrictions he imposed are still in place.

Part of the issue here may be some blurriness about where Starlink ends and Starshield, its military subscription component, begins. According to Musk any restrictions imposed on the latter service would be imposed by the US military, not SpaceX. Ukraine uses both services and Kyiv seemed to indicate that both had been throttled. Ukrainian officials rejected Musk’s “terms of service” claim, which implied that they were using Starlink to carry out long-range drone strikes in Russia even though Starlink doesn’t work at all in Russia and the one part of the Ukrainian war machine that seemed to continue unabated despite the Starlink throttling was those strikes inside Russia. The Ukrainian government has reportedly opened discussions with Finnish firms Nokia and ICEYE about developing a Starlink alternative.

BULGARIA

Bulgarian voters headed to the polls on Sunday for a presidential election that looks to be heading to a November 1 runoff thanks to historically low turnout. Interim incumbent Iliana Iotova, who took over as president when Rumen Radev quit that office in order to run for prime minister earlier this year, is running for a full term and her main challenger is Andrey Gyurov, who briefly served as caretaker PM earlier this year before Radev assumed that office following April’s election. They differ markedly on the subject of the war in Ukraine, with Iotova favoring dialogue with Russia while Gyurov supports arming Ukraine. Iotova appears to be winning but it doesn’t matter because turnout is expected to be below 40 percent, when the threshold for a legitimate first round victory is 50 percent or higher.

SERBIA

In a monumental political shakeup, long-time Serbian leader Aleksandar Vučić’s right-wing Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) lost Sunday’s parliamentary election to the “Student List,” a bloc formed by the organizers behind the Novi Sad protest movement. Vučić conceded defeat in a speech in which he projected that the student bloc would end up with “between 135 and 140 seats” in the 250 seat Serbian National Assembly. SNS is projected to wind up with around 105 seats. Turnout looks like it may set a record at around 70 percent, which helps to explain the outcome since the student list was going to have to mobilize traditional nonvoters in order to unseat SNS.

Vučić had been president of Serbia from 2017 until his resignation earlier this year and was prime minister for about three years prior to that, so he has been the central figure in the country’s politics for about 12 years. It is unclear who will succeed him in that role. The student-led protest movement hasn’t had a clear leader and if that bloc has already put someone forward as its PM candidate I have not seen it reported. Serbia must hold a presidential election by the end of the year and presumably the student movement will have the inside track in that contest. Vučić is term-limited and resigned prior to the parliamentary election in hopes of making himself prime minister after an SNS victory.

FRANCE

Hundreds of thousands of people hit the streets of cities across France on Saturday for another massive protest primarily over school conditions and cost of living grievances. In contrast with last weekend’s demonstrations this one appears to have been relatively peaceful, though police did make around 1000 arrests nationwide. As was the case last week French authorities and protest organizers had wildly divergent participation estimates, with the former claiming that some 410,000 people turned out and the CGT union alliance claiming a number roughly twice as large.

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AMERICAS

BRAZIL

In an outcome that surpasses even the Serbian election (see above) for shock value, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Sunday’s runoff against challenger Flávio Bolsonaro with nearly 52 percent of the vote. The latter’s surprise win in the first round earlier this month had upended expectations for a coin-toss runoff and left Bolsonaro as the presumptive favorite, a status backed up by polling that appears to have been almost as unreliable before this round as it was before the first round, but in the opposite direction. Higher than expected turnout (possibly higher than the first round) appears to have driven the unexpected outcome.

The election hit a snag earlier in the evening after both candidates made last minute requests to keep polling sites open beyond their scheduled close, Lula because of busing snafus in São Paulo (possibly a deliberate effort to suppress turnout but I digress) and Bolsonaro because of heavy rains in the southern part of the country where he has considerable support. The Brazilian Supreme Court agreed to keep the sites open for an extra two hours but Bolsonaro is now refusing to accept the outcome and may make the extension his main argument for its “illegitimacy” even though his campaign also requested an extension.

To his credit, Lula hit the proverbial campaign trail hard over the past three weeks to make himself the first presidential candidate in Brazil’s contemporary period (after the end of the country’s last military junta and the restoration of democracy in 1985) to win the presidency after losing the first round vote. Two head-to-head debates and a number of promises to boost welfare programs and public transit funding, among other things, may have helped. As far as those promises are concerned, however, with the composition of Brazil’s incoming Congress Lula’s fourth term in office may be spent mostly acting as a block to a right-wing legislative agenda (and trying to fend off backlash from the very pro-Bolsonaro Trump administration). At least the Amazon rainforest may have a new lease on life, which is certainly not nothing.

VENEZUELA

Venezuelan opposition leader and brief caretaker of Donald Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize María Corina Machado announced on Sunday that she has returned to Venezuela from exile. Machado fled the country in December when she traveled to Norway to accept the Nobel that she later gave to Trump. She has not returned, despite the Trump administration’s removal of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the following month, in large part because the Trump administration reportedly didn’t want her to return and risk complicating things for its compliant vassal government in Caracas. Abject groveling really doesn’t get you very much these days, it seems. It’s unclear what Machado intends to do now or how much weight she still carries within Venezuelan politics.

COLOMBIA

Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella claimed on Sunday that military forces had killed at least ten National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels in an operation in the southwestern Cauca department on Thursday. Two fairly senior ELN commanders were allegedly among the dead. I say “allegedly” because de la Espriella has adopted a “tough on crime” approach to Colombia’s armed groups and so he’s incentivized to portray every operation like this as a crippling blow to whichever group is involved.

HAITI

Four bodies recovered in Haiti on Saturday do not appear to be those of the four Salvadoran military personnel who disappeared after a gang attack near Port-au-Prince last Sunday. According to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele one set of remains was a child’s and another was wearing a Chadian military uniform. Bukele has launched a military operation to rescue the four Salvadorans and has threatened a larger operation if they are dead.

UNITED STATES

Speaking of Donald Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize, he’s so angry over not getting the 2026 edition that he called Norway a “shit house country” in a campaign speech in Michigan on Sunday and told the crowd that he no longer wants to accept Norwegian immigrants. There’s no indication that a Norwegian immigration ban is in the offing but who knows? At any rate it’s always comforting to be reminded that we’re led by a very stable, thoughtful person.

Finally, Reuters reported on Friday that the Biden and Trump administrations have asked SpaceX to manipulate its Starlink service in multiple countries over the past several years, not just in Ukraine recently (see above). That includes requests to turn it off in Lebanon and Yemen to hinder Hezbollah and Ansarullah, respectively, and requests to activate or expand the service in Iran and Ukraine to support anti-government protesters and the war effort, respectively. With as ubiquitous as Starlink has become it perhaps comes as no surprise, then, that this manipulation has caused a number of US allies to try to minimize their reliance on the service:

Elon Musk’s decision to abruptly impose limits on Ukraine’s use of his Starlink communications network—which is critical to the country’s efforts to fight off Russia’s invasion—is prompting U.S. allies to intensify efforts to come up with their own alternatives.

Europeans are expressing concerns about relying on a system with a built-in kill switch that gives Musk the power to deactivate a vital network without consultation.

“The more you play politics with your products, the more you damage your brand,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said to Musk in a post on X after Ukraine reported having problems with Starlink, which is a SpaceX system. Warsaw helps pay for Ukraine’s usage of the system.

Aside from the Ukrainian-Finnish project I mentioned above the Canadian firm Telesat is working on a Starlink alternative and the European Union is developing what it calls the IRIS² satellite network. None will be ready to deploy before 2028 at the earliest.

October 23, 42 BCE: A Roman army jointly led by Triumvirs Marc Antony and Octavian defeats Brutus’s Republican army in the second phase of the Battle of Philippi. Brutus committed suicide after the battle. As his co-commander, Cassius, had already killed himself following the first phase of the battle on October 3, this left the Republican army leaderless and it unsurprisingly fell apart. Although there were other Republican leaders still in the field, like Sextus Pompey in Sicily, the defeat at Philippi marked the end of serious Republican resistance. The way was clear for the “Second Triumvirate” of Antony, Octavian, and the almost forgotten Marcus Lepidus to seize uncontested control of the Roman Republic.

October 23, 1798: An Ottoman-Albanian army under Ali Pasha of Ioannina defeats a French Revolutionary army in what became known as the Battle of Nicopolis since it was fought near the ruins of that city. The battle was fought over territory France had inherited the previous year when Napoleon and the Habsburgs had collaborated on the dissolution of the Republic of Venice. Ali wanted some of that territory, and when the Ottomans declared war against France in July he had the excuse he needed to go get it. Ali’s victory here allowed his forces to enter the nearby town of Preveza, one of those territories he wanted, at which point they fired the town and massacred many of its inhabitants. Ali contested control of Preveza with the Ottoman authorities until they took it decisively in 1820. The town is part of Greece today.

MIDDLE EAST

JORDAN

Gunmen attacked a church in Jordan’s Karak province during a funeral service on Friday, killing at least seven people and wounding another 34. State media is reporting that security forces are after two suspects but beyond that there’s little information as to the nature of the incident and no group has claimed responsibility. Jordanian authorities are treating it as a “terrorist” attack.

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TODAY IN HISTORY

October 22, 1859: The Spanish government declares war on Morocco, sparking the six month Hispano-Moroccan War. Repeated attacks by Berber tribesmen from the Moroccan Rif region against the Spanish North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla prompted the declaration. In a relatively anti-climactic conflict the Spanish army occupied the northern Moroccan city of Tétouan and that effectively ended the fighting. The Treaty of Wad Ras, signed in late April 1860, obliged Morocco to pay a hefty war indemnity, expanded the territories of both Ceuta and Melilla, and gave the southern Moroccan coastal city of Sidi Ifni to Spain as well. The Spanish government returned Sidi Ifni to Morocco in 1969.

October 22, 1884: The International Meridian Conference, which was a real thing, designates the line of longitude running through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as the international Prime Meridian. Previously most major seafaring countries, at least, designated their own separate prime meridians that often ran through their capital cities (Germany used the “Berlin Meridian,” for example, and France used the “Paris Meridian”). But such was the ubiquity of British map-making that the UK/Greenwich prime meridian had become the international standard by default even before this conference made it official. Nowadays the international Prime Meridian is the IERS Reference Meridian, which still runs through Greenwich but is around 100 meters east of the previous one.

INTERNATIONAL

• A new assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature finds that 96 percent of shallow water coral reefs worldwide are “critically endangered” and could die off by 2075. A study published last year estimated that some 84 percent of the world’s reefs are bleaching as a result of rising water temperatures. Coral can recover from bleaching events if temperatures decline, but that doesn’t seem realistic without urgent human action.

• The European Union has awarded its Sakharov human rights prize to the International Criminal Court. I don’t know that this warrants much commentary except to say that between this and the Nobel committee’s decision to award its peace prize to former ICC judge Navi Pillay earlier this month it seems pretty clear that there’s a message being sent in the face of the Trump administration’s drive to destroy the court.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian Interior Ministry security forces raided a suspected Islamic State hideout near Damascus on Thursday, killing at least five alleged IS fighters. At least two government personnel were also killed in the clash. Elsewhere, the Israeli military (IDF) killed a “civilian with a disability” in southern Syria’s Daraa province on Thursday morning, according to the SANA news agency. The IDF has reportedly “expanded” its occupation of southern Syria of late, entering villages in Daraa and Quneitra provinces at will and, among other things, uprooting olive groves.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least three people across Gaza on Thursday while a fourth person died of wounds suffered in a previous Israeli attack. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor became the latest NGO to warn that Israeli restrictions and worldwide funding cuts are pushing the territory toward another humanitarian crisis, with food prices rising and food supplies growing scarcer.

In the West Bank, Jasper Nathaniel has written another dispatch from the olive harvests, including the Israeli government’s response to the recent international attention garnered by settler terrorist attacks on Westerners and the brief arrest of US politician Brad Lander:

The IDF responded to outrage over Lander’s arrest by claiming that the delegation had failed to coordinate its visit to a private Palestinian olive field with the military, apparently oblivious to the absurdity of the requirement itself. But one line of the statement particularly stuck with me: “As in previous years, security forces are working to facilitate a safe and orderly olive harvest season.” Maybe someone over there has a sense of humor.

It seems clear that Israel’s response to the PR disaster triggered by the high-profile settler attacks has been to crack down on the activists and journalists documenting the violence, including one of the few people who captured the assault on Heidi. As for prosecuting the actual violent criminals, nine of the ten people arrested on suspicion of involvement in the Abu Falah and Taybeh attacks were quietly released days later, after Israel had heavily promoted the arrests on social media. The sole person still in custody is the settler who ran over a Palestinian while he prayed in December. Apparently, that crime alone wasn’t enough to keep him behind bars.

YEMEN

Pro-government forces appear to have launched a major operation to try to break Ansarullah’s siege of the city of Taiz, reporting hundreds of engagements and claiming that they killed or wounded some 285 Ansarullah fighters. These claims can’t be verified and should be taken with a grain of salt, but The New Arab reported on Wednesday, based on comments from a “senior military commander,” that a Taiz counteroffensive was on the horizon so that part at least rings true.

The threat of additional Ansarullah attacks reportedly prompted Aramco to order employees to evacuate its main headquarters in the Saudi city of Dhahran on Thursday. It’s unclear whether they were responding to a specific threat against that facility, which has already been attacked by Ansarullah, or reacting to the missile attack that killed two people (at last count) at King Fahd International Airport in the nearby city of Dammam late Wednesday.

IRAN

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed on Thursday that no fewer than seven vessels had either been attacked or struck sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz overnight. There’s no confirmation of that and no word as to any casualties. The recent intensification of attacks on shipping in the strait apparently hasn’t affected oil exports from the Persian Gulf, though it presumably has raised insurance premiums and other costs for vessels attempting to transit the waterway.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

The New York Times reports on Saturday’s exchange of hostilities between Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as the prospects for their border conflict to worsen:

In the latest round of fighting on Saturday, Pakistan’s military claims to have destroyed a military camp along the rugged, porous border and killed Afghan soldiers. A provincial spokesman for the Afghan military denied that there were any Afghan casualties and claimed instead that the Taliban had killed 13 Pakistani soldiers.

The conflict could become even more unpredictable, said Ibraheem Bahiss, an expert on Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group, as both sides embrace proxy groups: The Taliban in Afghanistan are accused of failing to restrain incursions by armed groups in the borderland that target Pakistan, while Pakistan is warming to the idea of supporting anti-Taliban armed opposition.

On Sept. 27, the Taliban said they had killed 28 militiamen and captured 32 others who had tried to enter Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Pakistani government called the accusations “baseless.”

“The proxy standoff is intensifying, and that’s a more dangerous escalation,” Mr. Bahiss said.

NORTH KOREA

The Diplomat’s Lee Sook-yeon warns that the North Korea government’s decision to resume its Demilitarized Zone loudspeaker broadcasts is a break with precedent and could lead to further tensions:

Previously, North Korea and South Korea stopped their loudspeaker broadcasts through bilateral agreement, after discussions. But South Korea ended its last round unilaterally. New President Lee Jae-myung ordered the broadcasts stopped on June 11, 2025; the North’s broadcasts ended the next day. In August 2025, the military began dismantling its fixed loudspeakers in what the defense ministry called “a practical measure aimed at helping ease tensions with the North.” Seoul said it had not consulted Pyongyang.

Pyongyang rejected any suggestion of reciprocity. After South Korea’s military reported that the North was removing some of its own speakers, Kim Yo Jong said: “We have never removed loudspeakers installed on the border area and are not willing to remove them.” About a week later, in fact, two new North Korean speakers went up opposite the South Korean border counties of Cheorwon and Hwacheon.

Now North Korea has declared that it will resume broadcasts. If so, the new round of loudspeaker use will be different from recent history. In 2015, 2016, and 2024, Seoul began broadcasting first; this time Pyongyang has declared its intention to do so, in response to alleged South Korean provocations. This is despite repeated efforts on the part of the Lee administration in Seoul to show its goodwill toward the North.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

The Sudanese military (SAF) claimed the seizure of two parts of southeastern Sudan’s Blue Nile state on Thursday, including an important military base in the Bukuri region. That facility had been in the hands of the Rapid Support Forces militant group since late August, and is located close enough to the state capital, Ad-Damazin, to have been of concern to the SAF. Blue Nile has been a particularly active theater in recent days, with the RSF having made an advance there earlier this week.

An investigation by the BBC has found that the RSF “systematically destroyed” the medical infrastructure in the North Darfur capital of El Fasher before its fighters seized that city about a year ago:

Using sources who were on the ground in el-Fasher, the BBC has found details of at least 43 separate attacks on hospitals and healthcare sites from May 2024 to October 2025 - some hit multiple times.

Under international law it is illegal to attack health facilities or their staff during conflict.

The investigation also reveals the toll on medical workers in the western city. In the period from April 2023 to October 2025, the BBC’s data shows 120 were injured, 55 killed and 10 forcibly “disappeared” or abducted.

“The RSF [were] trying to evacuate the hospitals, to put them out of service because the health system is the cornerstone of any city or any state,” says Dr Muhamed Suliman, a surgeon who was based in el-Fasher during the siege and spoke to the BBC.

“The RSF started hitting these areas so citizens have no longer any way to stay there. It was intense. It was deliberate. It was planned.”

UGANDA

The confirmation of an Ebola case in Nigeria earlier this week raises questions about the situation in Uganda, where this patient (“the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja,” according to Reuters) is believed to have contracted the illness. The Ugandan government reported 20 cases of Ebola earlier this year linked to the outbreak that began in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, but it’s been officially Ebola-free since August. “Officially” Ebola-free and “actually” Ebola-free could be two different things, however. Ugandan authorities are claiming that the Nigerian patient had traveled in the DRC before returning to Nigeria via Uganda, but both the World Health Organization and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that they can’t verify that claim, in which case the virus may still be present in Uganda.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

Russia’s overnight bombardment killed at least four people across Ukraine, while the Russian military reported downing 808 Ukrainian drones. So it would seem that whatever progress has been made on the subject of peace talks didn’t involve any commitment to reduce hostilities. The two sides did exchange bodies on Thursday, with the Russians repatriating 252 sets of Ukrainian remains and the Ukrainians returning 25 Russian bodies.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Donald Trump had asked Elon Musk the previous day to lift the restrictions that he’d imposed on Ukraine’s Starlink satellite service. Ukrainian officials were saying that the system was working better on Thursday but had not been fully restored to normal.

SERBIA

With Serbian voters heading to the polls on Sunday, former President Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has decided that praising war criminals is the best way to activate its base:

Hunting for ways to rally voters, the media machine of Serbia’s embattled strongman Aleksandar Vucic has been accusing his rivals of smearing a notorious Serb general, who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Ratko Mladic, who died in custody in The Hague in August, was the general behind the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. Yet many Serbs remember him as a valiant warrior who defended his people and their identity from attack by Bosnian Muslims seeking their own state.

Denying his crimes has become a note in Mr. Vucic’s campaign pitch, seen by his camp as a surefire way to stoke nationalist sentiment and win votes before the high-stakes general election on Oct. 25.

Vučić is term limited, so he’s banking on SNS winning a parliamentary majority so he can shift jobs and make himself prime minister. Polling has a new bloc that emerged from the student-led anti-corruption protests that have been rocking Serbian politics since November 2024 running neck-and-neck with the SNS and its coalition partners.

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AMERICAS

HAITI

El Salvador has reportedly sent 100 special forces personnel to Haiti to participate in efforts to rescue the four Salvadoran soldiers who were ambushed and abducted by gang militants near Port-au-Prince over the weekend. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had announced a rescue operation the previous day without going into detail about what it would entail. The AP is reporting that another 100 Salvadoran soldiers were going to be deployed to Haiti on Thursday evening. The whereabouts of the four missing soldiers remain unknown and Bukele has threatened a more intense response if they are not released alive.

CANADA

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited Turkey this week and signed a new “strategic partnership” agreement with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday. The wide ranging accord calls for closer relations on trade, defense, energy, and elsewhere and is a big shift in what had been a fairly arms-length relationship. This is part of Carney’s effort to widen Canada’s diplomatic reach to compensate for the country’s worsening relationship with the US.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Vanity Fair’s Matthew Cole reports on a hack of Jared Kushner’s cell phone that reveals that he spent much of Donald Trump’s first term conducting an independent foreign policy operation backed by a Persian Gulf “slush fund”:

Kushner, UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia, converged at an auspicious moment. MBS wanted to be crown prince. MBZ wanted to blow up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, and Kushner wanted both to help him force the Palestinians into a deal that Israel would accept. Despite the perception of his wealth, Kushner was not entirely financially independent of his parents, and the family business, Kushner Companies, faced a billion-dollar loan coming due on their trophy property, the Manhattan office building at 666 Fifth Avenue.

Early in the first Trump administration, MBZ and MBS offered to pay for a slush fund dedicated to helping the new administration with foreign policy goals. The idea was to help pay for Trump’s promised wall between Mexico and the US, for example, in an effort to secure a second term in the White House. The two Arab royals initially discussed with Kushner putting more than $10 billion into the effort. Within months, though, as MBZ pushed the Trump administration to help back MBS’s effort to become his country’s crown prince—and future king—the broader foreign policy slush fund idea fizzled. Instead, MBZ and MBS initially, and then MBZ alone, put at least $2 billion into at least two bank accounts for Kushner. It is unclear how the royals organized their $2 billion in combined payments, but they effectively split the cost.

The two accounts are designated Alpha and Beta, the former being housed in an Azerbaijani bank and used to advance Kushner’s (and the UAE’s) geopolitical aims and the latter deposited in the Israeli Central Bank and intended “for Kushner’s personal benefit.” Kushner, of course, didn’t disclose the existence of these accounts in what was a massive breach of federal government ethics rules. Nor did he ever represent himself as a foreign agent despite being bankrolled by two foreign powers.

October 21, 1600: Tokugawa Ieyasu’s army defeats the “Western Army” of Ishida Mitsunari at the Battle of Sekigahara. The victory left Ieyasu in virtually uncontested control of Japan and is generally marked as the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate, even though Ieyasu wasn’t officially appointed shōgun until 1603.

October 21, 1805: Though outnumbered, a British Royal Navy fleet under Horatio Nelson (who was killed in action) decisively defeats a combined Franco-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, near Cape Trafalgar in southern Spain. Britain had established naval supremacy over France years earlier through engagements like the 1798 Battle of the Nile. Trafalgar confirmed that naval supremacy and was the last major naval engagement of the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon’s plan to build a great new navy that would finally defeat Britain’s was derailed by his defeat on land years later.

INTERNATIONAL

UAE diplomat Lana Nusseibeh has entered the race to be the next United Nations secretary-general. There were already six candidates for that post, none of whom appear to have enough support from the UN Security Council (at least nine votes in favor with no veto from any of the five permanent members) to win the job. The UAE has ingratiated itself well enough with all five of the veto holding members that Nusseibeh may be able to navigate that requirement, but it’s unclear whether she can get to nine “yes” votes overall.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

US congressional candidate Brad Lander was among some 80 volunteers who were participating in an olive harvest near the West Bank city of Bethlehem when they were detained by the Israeli military (IDF) on Wednesday. Lander was released fairly quickly, probably to minimize the international fallout, but the status of the rest of the volunteers is unclear. The Israeli Foreign Ministry accused Lander of staging a “calculated political provocation” in a restricted military area, but there’s no indication that Lander or any of the other volunteers (or, indeed, local Palestinian residents) were aware of any restrictions.

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October 20, 1448: The Second Battle of Kosovo ends with the Ottomans victorious over a Hungarian army under regent John Hunyadi. The Hungarians nearly won an unlikely victory but ultimately couldn’t overcome the Ottomans’ advantage in numbers and their field fortifications. The Ottoman victory shored up the empire’s position in the Balkans and allowed Sultan Murad II to turn his attention to the east and expand the Ottoman domains in Anatolia.

October 20, 1962: Chinese forces attack India in two disputed border regions—Ladakh in the west and the Tibet-Arunachal Pradesh region in the east—beginning the month-long Sino-Indian War. The conflict ended with a decisive Chinese victory that stabilized the still poorly defined Chinese-Indian border on Beijing’s terms.

October 20, 2011: With the tide of Libya’s civil war having turned decisively against him, thanks in no small measure to NATO’s intervention, a fleeing Muammar Gaddafi is captured by rebels west of the city of Sirte and summarily executed. Gaddafi’s death definitely marked the end of an era but it did not mark the end of Libya’s internal conflict, which in many respects remains ongoing.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least four people over multiple incidents in Gaza on Tuesday. Al Jazeera reported a “surge” of IDF attacks that began overnight and continued into the day, mainly focused on Gaza city though there were incidents reported elsewhere as well.

YEMEN

There are a number of items:

• The death toll from Monday’s Ansarullah missile strike on a military camp in southern Yemen’s Shabwah province has now risen to 73. There are still 14 people missing so that figure may continue to increase.

• UK Defense Secretary Wes Streeting announced on Tuesday that the Royal Air Force will “conduct defensive counter-air operations over Saudi Arabia, helping to protect Saudi cities, civilian populations and critical national infrastructure” from Ansarullah attacks. He was keen to stress the defensive nature of this operation, because domestically the UK government does not want to be seen jumping into the Yemen war. That is what it’s done, though, and it remains to be seen if the “defensive” distinction will hold.

• United Nations human rights commissioner Volker Türk called on Tuesday for Ansarullah to allow humanitarian aid to enter the besieged city of Taiz. The siege has caused a spike in food and other commodity prices in the city and is also reportedly limiting access to clean water. Türk also called on the combatants to allow civilians who want to leave Taiz to do so “freely and safely.” The UN Refugee Agency, meanwhile, is reporting that over 250,000 people have been displaced by fighting in Yemen since July. Taiz has seen both the largest inflow and largest outflow of displaced persons in that time. The displacement surge is taxing already strained resources in southern Yemen.

IRAN

Pakistani military boss Asim Munir seems to have left Tehran empty-handed on Tuesday, after visiting the Iranian capital to discuss peace talks. Munir met with several Iranian officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and the common message appears to have been that Tehran doesn’t trust the United States to negotiate in good faith and won’t seriously reengage in diplomacy unless/until the US meets its preconditions — including ending its naval blockade and lifting sanctions. According to The New Arab, Munir was in Tehran to bring a new proposal from Pakistani and Qatari mediators that aims to find some middle ground on the issues of Iran’s nuclear program and its frozen assets. Supposedly this proposal has gotten “positive responses” from US and Iranian officials, but we haven’t heard anything from the former and there’s not much in the reporting around Munir’s visit to suggest that the latter are enthusiastic.

On another front, the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad claimed on Tuesday that the Iranian and Iraqi governments have reached an agreement for the expulsion of Iranian Kurdish militant groups from northern Iraq. I’m not sure how this is supposed to be implemented and the whole thing has a sort of “believe it when you see it” vibe so I wouldn’t put too much stock into these reports. The presence of those groups is a constant source of tension in the Iranian-Iraqi relationship so I’m sure the Iraqi government would like to be rid of them, but internal politics are a huge obstacle.

ASIA

AFGHANISTAN

The UN humanitarian agency (OCHA) has reiterated the World Food Program’s warning about Afghanistan’s emerging hunger crisis:

More than four million babies and children under six will need treatment for acute malnutrition next year, it warned.

Between September and October, 15.9 million people -- or nearly one in three Afghans -- were facing food insecurity at crisis levels or worse, including 3.4 million in emergency conditions, the agency said.

The outlook is set to deteriorate further during the winter lean season from November to April.

“The number facing acute food insecurity is projected to rise to 19.2 million, of which five million are expected to face emergency levels of hunger,” which is “one step away from famine”, said OCHA’s Afghanistan spokeswoman Olga Cherevko.

INDIA

Inter-communal violence left at least three people dead and four wounded in eastern India’s Manipur state on Monday. As we have noted previously, Manipur has been subject to violence involving the Meitei and Kuki communities on and off since at least 2023. In this case gunmen attacked a Meitei village. Community leaders are blaming Kuki “militants” though Kuki groups are denying involvement. Prior to Monday it had been months since the last incident.

NORTH KOREA

North Korean state media released photos of leader Kim Jong-un on Tuesday in response to the latest unsourced rumor that he’s Actually Dead. A few still photos with no verification of their date or provenance won’t put those rumors completely to bed but, as the BBC notes, if Kim really had died there would likely be visible indications that something serious was happening in North Korea (troop movements in North Korea or along the Chinese border, for example) and nothing like that has been observed.

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AFRICA

SUDAN

The death toll from Monday’s drone strike in the disputed Abyei region along the Sudan-South Sudan border has risen to at least 153, according to the territory’s information minister. The strike hit a fuel depot near a crowded market, explaining the high casualties. Additionally, the death toll from two strikes in Sudan’s West Kordofan state on Sunday evening has risen to at least 150. The Sudanese military is likely responsible for all of these attacks.

LIBYA

The eastern Libyan House of Representatives legislature voted on Tuesday to ratify a 2019 maritime boundary agreement that its rival western Libyan-based government concluded with the government of Turkey. This is the outcome of a concerted effort by Turkish officials to cultivate ties with warlord Khalifa Haftar and his family, who control the eastern Libyan government, that also led earlier this year to a military cooperation agreement with Haftar’s “Libyan National Army.” The vote drew a rebuke from the Greek government, which has long regarded the 2019 deal as a violation of its maritime rights.

MALI

Islamic State Sahel Province fighters reportedly killed at least 48 people in an attack in eastern Mali’s Ménaka region that began late Sunday and continued overnight into Monday. According to a local Tuareg leader the group targeted civilians accused of providing intelligence to the Malian military in support of its drone operations. Malian authorities claimed on Monday to have struck a “major” militant base near the town of Ménaka, though they didn’t offer additional details as far as I know.

NIGERIA

Jihadist militants ambushed a security convoy in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Saturday, killing at least 15 people. Boko Haram is believed to have been responsible.

Nigerian authorities reported a confirmed case of Ebola linked to the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Tuesday in the person of a woman who had traveled to the country from Uganda. The patient is in isolation and officials are tracing her contacts. The DRC outbreak has already spread to Kenya, where authorities have confirmed nine cases though so far no evidence of transmission outside of the immediate circle of the initial patient.

EUROPE

EUROPEAN UNION

The EU rolled out a new “strategy for the Arctic” on Tuesday that, according to AFP, appears to be aimed at bolstering the bloc’s independence from the US:

The United States is named only a handful of times in the 20-page paper, compared with almost two dozen mentions for Canada.

Some of the initiatives listed in the strategy seemingly aim to cut dependencies on Washington.

According to the draft, Brussels is planning a “sovereign and secure” submarine cable to connect Greenland with the EU’s mainland as part of a broader “Pan-Arctic” cable project – also linking Canada, Japan and South Korea.

The bloc is also working to provide satellite connectivity in the Arctic through satellite constellation project IRIS², which aims to rival Elon Musk‘s Starlink.

Unsurprisingly the document focuses quite a bit on Russia, with calls for defending against drone incursions and “hybrid attacks” as well as plans for increasing the EU’s fleet of icebreakers.

UKRAINE

Volodymyr Zelensky met with US envoy Steve Witkoff in Norway on Tuesday, after which he declared that US intelligence sharing with Ukraine had been restored. The US apparently stopped sharing intel on incoming Russian strikes with the Ukrainian military last week amid Zelensky’s latest public feud with Donald Trump. More recently Zelensky has accused the US of delaying deliveries of Patriot air defense missiles, though whether that’s because Trump is mad at him or because the US is running out of those munitions is unclear.

We’ll see whether Tuesday’s positive feelings actually last. Trump sounded on Tuesday at the White House like a guy who is still a) tired of this war and b) angry at Zelensky for not surrendering and ending it. He’s likely to continue looking for ways to punish Ukraine.

Speaking of which, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that it was SpaceX CEO Elon Musk who ordered the throttling of Ukraine’s military-grade Starlink service. Whether he spoke with Trump and/or other US officials before doing so remains a matter of contention (it still seems hard to believe that he would have done so completely on his own initiative) but he and Trump definitely discussed it after the throttling became public. Regardless of one’s position on this war I think the idea that the world’s richest man can pull the plug on an entire country’s military mid-conflict is probably something that warrants a broader societal conversation to say the least.

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AMERICAS

COLOMBIA

Jacobin’s Carlos Cruz Mosquera discusses new President Abelardo de la Espriella’s drive to bring the US military to Colombia:

In the ten weeks since multimillionaire lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella was inaugurated as Colombia’s president, the country has undergone a significant political shift with respect to asserting its national sovereignty, with Colombia returning to — and potentially deepening — its subordinate position vis-à-vis the United States.

Less than a week after the change of government in Colombia, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced a major shift in US-Colombian military cooperation, stating at a press conference that de la Espriella had approved an agreement for joint operations in Colombia. US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) commander General Francis Donovan had met with Colombia’s highest-ranking military officials by the end of the month to begin planning those joint operations against armed groups. There have since been reports — some confirmed directly by the Colombian government and US Southern Command — of US military personnel and aircraft operating in Colombia.

The prospect of a renewed US military presence has provoked alarm among significant sections of Colombian society, particularly on the Left, which has a long tradition of opposition to US interventionism in the region. De la Espriella’s policy has therefore faced growing scrutiny and opposition. Opposition leader Iván Cepeda has submitted a formal complaint to the Colombian courts, arguing that the president’s actions concerning the joint military operations have violated the political rights of Colombians.

CANADA

Voters in the Canadian province of Alberta voted overwhelmingly against independence in Monday’s referendum. On the question of holding a second, “binding” independence referendum just 24 percent of voters said “yes.”

UNITED STATES

Finally, Responsible Statecraft’s Andrew Leonard discusses the logistical concerns around the US Congress’s effort to merge the US and Israeli militaries:

In title, the U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act sounds like one of many bilateral cooperative agreements between the U.S. military and a partner military force anywhere in the world. But in reality, as written, the provision would pressure existing security cooperation entities to expand and accelerate bilateral technological integration through a statutory executive agent arrangement that lacks clear precedent even among the U.S.’s closest allies.

The agreement isn’t necessary to advance cooperation. In practice, it puts undue pressure on the processes designed to protect U.S. interests and technology.

The issue discussed here is not if the U.S. should or should not increase its defense technological cooperation with Israel; the pros and cons are well-documented and highly debated elsewhere. What isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of debate are the implications of putting undo pressure and influence to short cut established security processes for the benefit of any single partner nation, and that is precisely what Sections 219 and 1217 would do.

The U.S. Department of Defense is already well underway in reforming its technology release and foreign disclosure procedures following Executive Order 14268 of April 2025. Short cuts to these reforms, or additional legislation laying on top of ongoing actions, will only confuse and complicate the process, adding additional vulnerabilities in the end.

PROGRAMMING NOTE #2: There is a strong possibility that I will be unable to write tomorrow’s newsletter (it’s shaping up to be a very busy day). As usual if necessary I will roll things over into Wednesday’s roundup.

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 19, 1469: Prince Ferdinand of Aragon marries Infanta Isabella of Castile in the wedding that would eventually unite those two kingdoms and give birth to the nation of Spain.

October 19, 1781: The Siege of Yorktown ends with a French-American victory over the British army under Lord Charles Cornwallis. The surrender of an entire British army marked the effective end of the American Revolution.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least five people in multiple incidents across Gaza on Monday, including two children killed in a drone strike in the Khan Younis area. On the humanitarian front, the Israeli government announced on Monday that it is once again allowing commercial shipments into Gaza, roughly a week after it suspended those shipments amid what it claimed was a tax dispute between Palestinian merchants and the territorial government. It seems that Hamas officials dropped their 10,000 shekel (roughly US$3225) per truck payment requirement, which the group had characterized as a voluntary contribution to a relief fund. While this should help bring additional supplies into the territory it comes as the United Nations World Food Program is cutting monthly food support to some 500,000 people in Gaza due to funding shortages.

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TODAY IN HISTORY

October 16, 690: Chinese Empress Dowager Wu Zeitan removes her son, Tang Dynasty Emperor Ruizong, from the throne and assumes power in her own right as Empress Regnant under the name Wu Zhao. The first and only woman to rule the Chinese Empire openly, Wu’s reign—regarded as an interregnum within the Tang period—saw a significant expansion of imperial territory and Wu made several lasting reforms to the Chinese state, including opening up the imperial civil service examination to members of the lower classes. She was ousted in a coup in 705 after falling gravely ill and the Tang Dynasty regained control.

October 16, 1934: The Chinese Red Army begins the “Long March,” a series of maneuvers that would, over the next year and over some 9000 kilometers, see Mao Zedong’s forces evade the Kuomintang army of Chiang Kai-shek. Though the Red Army lost a substantial portion of its forces, the Long March preserved the Chinese Communist Party and enabled Mao’s rise to undisputed leadership within it, in addition to being a massive symbolic success.

October 16, 1964: The Chinese government successfully tests its first nuclear warhead in an operation known as “Project 596” in the Xinjiang region’s Tarim Basin. The test was the result of nearly a decade of work begun in the wake of Chinese clashes with the US in Korea and the Taiwan Strait and made the People’s Republic the world’s fifth nuclear weapons state. It was something of a surprise to US analysts, who knew China was pursuing a nuke but discounted its chances of success after the Soviet Union stopped supporting the project in 1959.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

Donald Trump announced back in July that he intends to restart direct air travel between the United States and Lebanon. However, despite signing an order last month to get that process going things seem to have hit a snag. Reuters reported on Friday that the United Nations Civil Aviation Organization has found what it called “shortcomings” at Beirut International Airport that will likely prevent US regulators from approving those direct flights. Among the problems, the airport’s safety certification has apparently expired and it lacks an adequate emergency plan for the type of larger aircraft that would be used for long-haul flights to and from the US. Lebanese official say they are working to address the issues.

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