Get 40% off for 1 year

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.”

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

TODAY IN HISTORY

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

Read more

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.

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 15, 1529: The Ottoman siege of Vienna ends in failure. A substantially wetter than usual Balkan spring made the Ottoman march on Vienna extremely difficult and forced Sultan Suleyman I to leave his largest and therefore most effective artillery pieces behind. The army he finally brought to Vienna was simply not capable of breaching the city’s walls and taking it. Suleyman tried again to attack Vienna in 1532 but turned around midway after receiving word of a very large Habsburg army mustering to defend the city. The Ottomans wouldn’t make another attempt on Vienna until 1683, which again failed and marked the start of an imperial retreat out of central Europe.

October 15, 1979: A group of Salvadoran military officers ousts President Carlos Humberto Romero in a coup. Romero was himself the leader of the military government that had ruled El Salvador since 1931, but the Sandinista overthrow of Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza in July raised fears within the Salvadoran military and the US government that Romero’s government might fall to left-wing rebels. Some of the coup plotters were themselves politically on the left, but the US worked with other elements of the junta to steer things in a right-wing direction. The junta’s violent suppression of public demands for reform sparked the 12+ year long Salvadoran Civil War, which pitted the military (with US support) against the leftist FMLN coalition and left hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans dead.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

Hezbollah is claiming ownership of a large supply of explosives that the Lebanese army seized last week, with one of the party’s elected legislators saying on Thursday that the munitions were intended for use against Israeli forces. It’s demanding the release of the explosives and this situation is shaping up as a potential confrontation over the Lebanese government’s project, at US and Israeli behest, to bring all weapons in the country under state control.

Read more

October 14, 1066: Duke William of Normandy’s army defeats the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson and his army at the Battle of Hastings. William claimed that he’d been promised the kingdom of England by Edward the Confessor (who’d died in January), but Godwinson was elected king by the Anglo-Saxon nobility. The Normans invaded and the two armies met outside of the town of Hastings. Accounts of the battle vary, but the general story seems to be that after repelling initial Norman attacks, the Saxons made the mistake of pursuing their retreating foe. At that point William rallied his men and turned the tide of the battle. The Norman victory (and more to the point Godwinson’s death in battle) enabled their takeover of England and made Duke William of Normandy into English King William I, “the Conqueror.”

October 14, 1322: A Scottish army under Robert the Bruce defeats the English army of King Edward II at the Battle of Old Byland. This was the largest Scottish victory in battle with English forces since Bannockburn in 1314 and helped to secure Scottish independence.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

European Union foreign ministers agreed earlier this week on the formation of a new “civilian-military mission” that is supposed to help train and support the Lebanese army ahead of the United Nations peacekeeping mission’s (UNIFIL) termination. This mission isn’t intended to replace UNIFIL, which will close up shop at the end of this year, in that it will be much smaller and will not deploy personnel into southern Lebanon. It will instead aim to improve the Lebanese army’s capabilities with respect to border security and related operations.

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 12 (give or take), 539 BCE: An Achaemenid Persian army under dynastic founder Cyrus II (“the Great”) enters the city of Babylon, bringing the Neo-Babylonian Empire to an end and ushering in a (very long, as it turned out) period in which Mesopotamia was consistently ruled by outside powers. The conquest of Babylon was more or less a foregone conclusion after the Persian victory in the decisive Battle of Opis in September. Cyrus inherited the Babylonians’ conquests, including Judea, where he was later praised for allowing the exiled Judean population to return to its homeland.

October 12, 1492: Christopher Columbus’s first expedition makes landfall in, as it turned out, the Americas (as they’d soon be known). Columbus dubbed the island he’d encountered “San Salvador” and it’s believed to correspond with modern San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. Mistakenly believing he’d sailed all the way to India, Columbus began the European practice of referring to the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere as “Indians” and spent the next three months exploring the region (losing his flagship, the Santa María, in the process).

October 13, 1307: The Knights Templar order is purged on the orders of Pope Clement V and at the strong encouragement of French King Philip IV. Many Templars, including the order’s senior leaders, were arrested, and in 1312 the order was officially dissolved by the Catholic Church. Clement and Philip charged the Templars with heresy and many members confessed to an array of crimes, albeit under intense torture. But the real issue was Philip’s very large debt to the order and his strong desire not to pay it, as well as concerns about the order’s relocation from the Holy Land to southern France.

October 13, 1943: Italy declares war on Germany. This abrupt shift of alliances was a symbolic culmination of Italy’s very chaotic late-World War II upheaval. A new Italian government under Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio surrendered to the Allies on September 3. Germany responded by springing former PM Benito Mussolini from prison and establishing on September 23 the Italian Social Republic (RSI), AKA the Republic of Salò. This Italian declaration of war came as the Allies were moving on German-occupied/RSI-ruled Rome.

MIDDLE EAST

TURKEY

Turkish sources are confirming that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has pulled its fighters out of four positions in northern Iraq’s Metina region under the terms of its peace deal with the Turkish government. The PKK is standing down from areas that are “considered to pose a risk of conflict for Turkey’s security,” according to those sources. The process of implementing the peace deal gained new momentum after the Turkish parliament passed an amnesty bill covering many people affiliated with the PKK back in August.

LEBANON

A New York Times satellite imagery analysis shows that the Israeli military (IDF) has turned much of occupied southern Lebanon into a “wasteland,” demolishing “48 of the roughly 60 villages and towns” in that area and focusing in particular on places with majority Shiʿa populations. It has leveled most of those since the “ceasefire” went into effect in April. The IDF insists it’s done this to prevent Hezbollah from operating out of those towns and villages but the effect, intentional or not, has been to leave them completely uninhabitable. Though that may not matter, because imagery also shows indications that the IDF is building new outposts in the region that suggest plans for a long-term occupation.

On a somewhat related note, Hezbollah has announced that it is offering up to $14,000 to families that have lost their homes to the IDF’s invasion. This seems like a strong indication that it has, contrary to US denials, obtained financial assistance from Iran in order to fund this program. The $14,000 payout applies to families from Beirut and its suburbs while families from other parts of the country will receive $12,000.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least two people in an airstrike on southern Gaza’s Khan Younis area on Monday. The previous evening another IDF airstrike in the Mawasi displacement zone killed at least three people.

YEMEN

An apparent Saudi airstrike on an oil facility in Yemen’s Hudaydah province killed at least two people on Tuesday. The Saudis also attacked an oil facility in Sanaa after issuing an evacuation warning to anyone in the vicinity. There’s no indication of casualties from that bombing as far as I can tell, but residents of northern Yemen do appear to be lining up at fueling stations out of concern about potential shortages. Ansarullah likewise issued evacuation warnings for a number of sites in Saudi Arabia, including Aramco’s headquarters in the city of Dhahran as well as the already-battered King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. The latter facility remains closed, and the overall disruption to Saudi air traffic now seems to have spread to King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, the kingdom’s busiest airport.

(Later in the day Reuters reported that the Aramco offices in Dhahran had been hit and there was a “limited fire” on the site but no reports of any casualties.)

On the ground, conditions are continuing to worsen in the city of Taiz, which remains under a siege or near-siege by Ansarullah. Reuters is reporting that food prices are up and government forces may be retreating into the city from areas on its outskirts. The Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedom claimed on Tuesday that Ansarullah shelling had killed at least five civilians in the city over the previous day. And the World Health Organization is reporting a significant spike in the number of cholera cases in Yemen, largely as a result of mass displacement brought on by the latest rounds of fighting. Nearly all of the cases occurred among displaced populations that have relocated to parts of southwestern Yemen.

IRAN

In Iran-related news:

• It turns out that no fewer than six commercial vessels came under attack in and around the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, and while Iranian officials claimed responsibility for only one of those incidents it’s safe to assume that they were involved in at least a few of the others, presumably in retaliation for the US attack on an Iranian tanker the previous day.

• The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims that its forces raided the hideout of a militant group in southeastern Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province on Tuesday, killing at least five people. While the IRGC did not specify the militants in question, Iranian media later reported that it was the Jaysh al-Adl jihadist group. Allegedly the group had kidnapped an engineer and was preparing to smuggle him out of Iran to an unspecified neighboring country. The Baluch human rights organization Haalvsh is telling a different story, which is that the IRGC unleashed its Fatemiyoun unit (composed mainly of Shiʿa Afghan nationals) on an area near the city of Zahedan and that unit indiscriminately began attacking people. It claims that at least 20 Fatemiyoun personnel were killed.

• The US military added two more names to its list of Iran war dead on Friday, including one who died in Kuwait back in March. The Intercept has been pursuing that inconsistency with the Pentagon and continues to track what appear to be efforts to manipulate official casualty figures.

ASIA

TAIWAN

According to the Wall Street Journal US and Taiwanese military needs are driving the development of the island’s drone sector:

American drone-tech startups like HavocAI are swarming into Taiwan and—with the encouragement of U.S. government matchmakers—finding partners who can help them turn blueprints into reality.

The emerging industry has the potential to serve the U.S. military’s demand for a secure drone supply chain that steers clear of China, while providing Taiwan with an arsenal that it sees as essential to its survival as a self-ruled democracy.

U.S. startups working with Taiwan on sea and air drones range from small defense-tech firms to Anduril Industries, an arms supplier to the Pentagon and the Taiwan military whose drone contracts with Taipei have already passed the $1 billion mark. At least 13 U.S.-Taiwan collaboration agreements have been signed since September 2025.

CHINA

The Chinese government blacklisted Paraguayan Communications Minister Gustavo Villate and Belizean Foreign Minister Francis Fonseca on Monday, citing their relationships with Taiwan. According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry “certain politicians in Paraguay and Belize have willingly served as pawns of the Taiwan authorities in their attempts to seek Taiwan independence by soliciting external forces.” In particular their offenses include visiting Taiwan, meeting with Taiwanese politicians, and spreading “disinformation about Chinese cyberattacks to smear and attack China.”

Subscribe now

AFRICA

SUDAN

Mada Masr’s Hassan Alnaser suggests that a perceived need to centralize the Rapid Support Forces’ command structure may wind up destroying the militant group:

Two tracks emerged within the tangle the war’s continuation has produced. Abdel Rahim [Dagalo] represents the military track — the belief that the answer comes with the sound of Land Cruiser engines, that military power dictates its own terms. He is the one who mobilized fighters from every corner, whose strategy succeeded in securing the RSF political influence.

The other track holds that a parallel civilian authority must be built with enough political capacity to exert negotiating pressure and impose its terms, represented by Hemedti [Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo], the younger and most trusted Dagalo brother in the RSF’s leadership. He is the godfather of the RSF project, going back to the days when they were rovers in Nyala’s plains, eating manasees in the shade of Cruisers paid for with ousted-President Omar al-Bashir’s money.

But if centralization could save the project, it could also undo it.

With every passing month, the state casts the “rebels” back into its sacred shadow. One military defection here, one political defection there. Each proving the failure of the RSF’s attempt at centralization — the kind of centralization that Hemedti once broke with the state over, when he cast himself as the son of the margins against the center, and is now trying to restore in the form of a project whose capital is Nyala. The other, out in the field, has failed to mobilize his fighters or even hold on to the ones still there. Between the meeting rooms and the battlefield, the seeds of further splits are taking root inside the military and political body of this difficult Sudan war — the war that sparked the country’s great fire.

Elsewhere, the Egyptian military has claimed responsibility for the airstrikes that killed at least 72 and possibly many more Sudanese miners on Saturday. It’s claiming that it dropped warning leaflets ahead of the attack, which I guess is supposed to absolve it of responsibility for the carnage. Egyptian authorities regularly accuse illicit, or “artisanal,” Sudanese mining operations of straying into southern Egyptian territory. The death toll from Saturday’s incident was so high that Sudanese military boss Abdel Fattah al-Burhan ordered an investigation into it, though he’s very reliant on Egyptian support so it would be surprising if the inquiry went any farther than that.

A gunman killed two Egyptian nationals near Khartoum on Monday in an attack that appears to have been motivated by Saturday’s airstrikes — the shooter’s brother was reportedly among those killed. Further retaliatory violence against Egyptians in Sudan is certainly not out of the question.

MOROCCO

New Moroccan Prime Minister Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri’s Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) concluded a four-party coalition agreement on Monday with the nationalist Istiqlal (“Independence”) party, which finished second to PAM in last month’s general election, and two smaller center-left parties. The new alliance will hold a collective 207 seats in the 395 seat Moroccan House of Representatives. PAM and Istiqlal were part of Morocco’s previous governing coalition, so this new group is expected to reflect more continuity than change.

NIGERIA

Reuters is reporting that gunmen attacked a “convoy of traders” and its “military escort” in northwestern Nigeria’s Zamfara state on Saturday, killing at least 20 people. One of the region’s bandit gangs was likely responsible. The Nigerian military, meanwhile, is claiming that it killed “more than 40 Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) fighters, including a senior commander” in airstrikes in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state also on Saturday.

ETHIOPIA

The Ethiopian military reportedly entered the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region on Sunday without resistance. Adwa is just 40 kilometers from the Eritrean border, which suggests that Tigray People’s Liberation Front fighters (as well as any Eritrean forces that have allegedly entered Ethiopia) have been pushed back almost to the border itself. Adwa is also, hypothetically speaking of course, a town that the Ethiopian military would need to secure if it had any plans to invade Eritrea, again purely hypothetically.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Former Congolese President Joseph Kabila announced on Monday that he’s forming a new opposition group, the “Front for the Refoundation of the Nation,” that includes the M23 militant group now controlling parts of the eastern DRC. Kabila has been based in the M23-controlled city of Goma since returning to the country last year, and Congolese authorities convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to death for various crimes including treason last September. This new group apparently supplants the Congo River Alliance, which previously served as the political wing for M23 and a number of other militant groups.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

The European Union blacklisted nearly 1600 entities and people with ties to Russia on Monday. Most appear to be connected in some way to the Russian arms industry but a subset of 77 people were targeted for helping to organize and run last month’s Russian parliamentary election (in a surprise outcome Vladimir Putin’s party won) in occupied parts of Ukraine.

Elsewhere, two more ships were targeted by drone strikes in the Black Sea off of the Bulgarian coast on Tuesday. One sank and 11 of its 16 crew members were still missing at time of writing. The Bulgarian government has summoned the Russian ambassador in Sofia under the assumption that the Russian military was responsible.

UKRAINE

Even though Donald Trump insisted that both the Russian and Ukrainian governments agreed to the energy ceasefire he announced over the weekend, there is no indication as yet that the Russian military has ceased firing at Ukrainian energy facilities. The Russian government has yet to comment publicly on the alleged ceasefire, while the Ukrainian government has said that it is willing to participate if Russia does as well.

In the meantime, with Trump once again frustrated with Volodymyr Zelensky over the aforementioned ceasefire and the Big Diesel Deal that the US and Russia just concluded there are new indications that the US may have stopped sharing intel with Kyiv. Ukrainian officials reported on Tuesday that they’d received no Western alerts ahead of Russian bombardments for two straight nights, which is an unusual occurrence. To be sure, Trump insisted on Tuesday that “we are sharing intel” and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha‎ suggested that the Russian military may be using munitions that are harder to track. Nevertheless, Zelensky laid the blame squarely on the US and European countries on Tuesday.

Subscribe now

AMERICAS

ARGENTINA

The Argentine government announced on Tuesday that it has lodged a case with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea seeking a temporary halt to British energy exploration projects around the Falkland (or Malvina if you prefer) islands. It’s arguing that the projects threaten to violate “Argentina’s sovereign rights over its continental shelf.” Argentine President Javier Milei, with some help from Donald Trump, has seized on the Falklands to inject a little jingoism into a presidency that’s appeared to lose some public support of late.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Jacobin’s Hank Kennedy argues that it’s time for the US Congress to revive an earlier crusade against war profiteering:

In April, President Donald Trump requested a $445 billion increase to the defense budget, meaning the United States will be spending around $1.5 trillion on the military. Much of the largesse will benefit the Big Five war contractors: Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX (formerly Raytheon). These are the companies behind such budget-shredding boondoggles as the F-35 and the littoral combat ships.

If the promises of these weapons salesmen are to be believed, the US war with Iran should already be over. The enormousness of the Pentagon’s budget, on paper, means that any conflict the United States enters should be a decidedly short and lopsided affair. Yet Iran has not crumbled against an onslaught that one analyst calculated has cost the United States $72 billion and counting. What has all this spending accomplished?

A US Patriot interceptor missile costs $4 million; a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor runs around $13 million. America has fired plenty of both in the war with Iran. Contrast that with the Iranian attack drones these systems are meant to shoot down, which run anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 apiece. These swarms of cheap drones are able to effectively counter US aircraft carriers whose price tags run into the billions (that is, when laundry room fires don’t do the job). The United States has fired off so much ordnance that talk has turned to a possible missile shortage.

All this weaponry comes at a steep price for the average American back home. In April, a report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that the average taxpayer spends approximately $4,000 per year on war and weaponry. What is all this money going toward? Who has really benefited from over a trillion dollars a year in annual military spending? In a spirit sorely lacking today, Congress tried to answer these and other questions ninety years ago when it forthrightly challenged the Pentagon and military contractors in its famous Nye Committee of 1934.

Get 40% off for 1 year

PROGRAMMING NOTE: With tomorrow being a holiday in the US I’m going to play it by ear with respect to doing a roundup. If I opt not to do one I will double up on Tuesday. Thanks for reading!

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 10 (maybe), 732 (again maybe): A Frankish Merovingian army under Mayor of the Palace and de facto ruler Charles Martel (namesake of the future Carolingian Dynasty) defeats an invading Arab-Berber army at the Battle of Tours (Poitiers) in what is today western France. Not terribly much is actually known about this battle, at least not that can be disconnected from the legends that grew up around it. In the European consciousness Martel would be credited with saving Latin Christendom from certain annihilation at the hands of a massive conquering Islamic army. Contemporary historians question whether the army was really all that massive and whether its aim was really conquest or just raiding and pillaging.

October 10, 1911: An uprising in the city of Wuchang (which is now a part of the city of Wuhan) led by the Tongmenghui movement leads to the Xinhai Revolution. It ended in February 1912 with the toppling of the Qing Dynasty and the formation of the Republic of China. This marked the end of thousands of years of imperial Chinese rule. Commemorated today in Taiwan as the National Day of the Republic of China.

October 11, 1142: The Jin and Song monarchies ratify the Treaty of Shaoxing, establishing a formal boundary between the two Chinese kingdoms. The Song were obliged by the treaty to give up their dynastic claims on northern China, which they’d ruled from 960 until the Jurchen people rebelled and drove the Song south of the Yangtze River in the 1110s (historians sometimes refer to the dynasty moving forward as the “Southern Song” to mark this geographic shift). The treaty also required the Song to pay an annual tribute to the Jin, though a subsequent war in the 1160s ended with a Song victory that established a more equal relationship between the two dynasties. The Mongol invasions of the 13th century eventually did away with both kingdoms and reunified China.

October 11, 1899: The Second Boer War begins. Though the Boer states had some initial success, the war ended in May 1902 with an overwhelming British victory and the collapse of both the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. Among the war’s many legacies was the popularization of the concentration camp, which Britain used to house large numbers of Boer civilians, many of whom died due to the treatment to which they were subjected.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least one person in southern Lebanon on Sunday when it shelled a town in Nabatiyeh province. A second person was killed in that same province by previously unexploded IDF ordnance, characterized as “a foreign object” by state media.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least eight people, including a child, in Gaza on Saturday (the one year anniversary of the territory’s current “ceasefire”). A group of more than 100 NGOs issued a joint statement on Friday arguing that “the ceasefire exists in name only, with Israeli forces continuing to kill and injure Palestinians daily, and restrictions on aid, equipment and rebuilding materials preventing families from recovering.” Elsewhere, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made it official late Friday, canceling the Palestinian elections that had been scheduled to take place next month. He’s postponed them until September 2027, so expect sometime around next August that Abbas (or whoever is running the PA by then) will announce another postponement. The PA is in no shape to organize elections but, more than that, its unpopular ruling Fatah party would prefer not to risk control in a vote.

At his newsletter, Séamus Malekafzali considers the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023 “al-Aqsa Flood” attacks on the Middle East and, in particular, on Israel and Gaza:

The genocidal campaign that has been visited upon Gaza has led to a shift in [] public opinion [in Gaza], with support for October 7 declining from 71% in early 2024 to 37% by mid-2025. Support for Hamas has ebbed and flowed but has remained roughly the same inside Gaza throughout the war. Belief that Hamas would win the war, however, has declined from a high of 50% in December 2023 to 20% in August 2026. That devastation has even led some officials within Hamas, both former and current, to suggest that the calculations behind October 7 should perhaps have been different, as in the case of Hamas representative in Lebanon Ahmad Abdel Hadi. Former Gaza Minister of Culture Muhammad al-Madhoun has gone further, suggesting that the operation should have been called off had its planners known what kind of destruction would befall the Strip. The question for many of those who expressed this regret was not about the righteousness of the action (as Abdel Hadi said, the difference in calculation would not be “about the act of resistance and liberation itself”) but about the cost, a cost that has left the Strip, in the words of Gaza’s former minister of housing, “no longer fit for habitation.”

In addition to being the world’s largest open-air prison, a “concentration camp,” as many described it even before the war, Gaza has now effectively become a killing cage, ever-tightening as the Yellow Line encroaches without halt. A population of millions fenced in on all sides, forbidden from fighting against their attacker but exposed to weapons of mutilation and death.

YEMEN

Ansarullah battered King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, over the weekend, killing at least 13 people and wounding more than 300 in an attack on Saturday and causing a fire along with at least one additional death in another strike on Sunday. These were the third and fourth attacks on that facility in the span of less than a week, the previous attacks having killed at least four people in total. Saturday’s attack killed at least one US national and drew criticism from the Trump administration, with Donald Trump going so far as to tell reporters that “we’re going to look at” entering the Yemen conflict more directly. “We’re going to look at that” is a verbal tic that Trump uses when he doesn’t know what else to say so I wouldn’t necessarily read very much into that statement.

Ansarullah also attacked King Fahd International ​Airport in the eastern Saudi city of Dammam as well as a number of Aramco facilities over the weekend. These strikes have heavily disrupted air traffic and prompted Saudi authorities to cancel in-person classes at all schools in Riyadh through at least Thursday.

The nominal Yemeni government claimed on Saturday that its forces are making gains at Ansarullah’s expense around the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, an assertion that would probably carry more meaning if this weren’t the second or third time in about a week that it had made a similar claim without any independent verification to support it. Yemeni officials are also warning of an “imminent health and humanitarian catastrophe” in Taiz as Ansarullah’s siege of that city is apparently preventing supplies and fuel from reaching its medical facilities. Under normal circumstances Taiz is Yemen’s third largest city, which means that the scope of the catastrophe could be immense and that its loss could be a severe blow to the government.

IRAN

The US military’s Central Command fired on a commercial vessel that “attempted to run the ongoing naval blockade against Iran” on Saturday, apparently disabling it. US officials are claiming no casualties in the strike. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, claimed to have struck a liquefied natural gas tanker that was traversing what Iran regards as the “illegal route” (the southern channel along the Omani coast) through the Strait of Hormuz. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center confirmed the basic details of both incidents.

Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaee told state media on Sunday that the US response to Iran’s most recent proposal for reopening the strait was “insufficient.” Donald Trump had already publicly rejected that proposal but negotiations had apparently continued anyway. The Iranians proposed a seven day ceasefire followed by reopening the strait, provided the US met seven conditions. I have not seen any discussion of exactly what those conditions include, let alone which ones the US is refusing to meet. According to Rezaee the Trump administration has “accepted some of our conditions, while others remain unclear.”

ASIA

PAKISTAN

The Pakistani government has declared a state of emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and apparently arrested provincial chief minister Sohail Afridi. It explained the move in light of what it called the “provincial government’s deliberate disengagement from the fight against terrorism,” but this appears to be a response to new protests by imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. PTI has been organizing a new march on Islamabad from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to demand Khan’s release. The party controls the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government and it may be easier for the national government to suppress that march with provincial officials sidelined.

JAPAN

The Diplomat’s Tsuruoka Michito says that the US development of sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles (SLCM-N) may force the Japanese government to reconsider its “three non-nuclear principles” and specifically the principle regarding the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan:

Once U.S. attack submarines begin carrying SLCM-N – or, more precisely, once they become capable of carrying it – Tokyo will find it difficult to avoid allegations that the United States is introducing nuclear weapons into Japan, regardless of whether a particular visiting submarine actually carries them. Under its longstanding “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) policy, Washington will not disclose whether visiting submarines carry nuclear weapons. Moreover, under the U.S. definition, neither transit nor port visits constitute introduction.

This will therefore be primarily a problem for Japan. Some, particularly critics of the U.S.-Japan alliance, will argue that Tokyo should ban visits by submarines that might be carrying nuclear weapons. Doing so, however, could undermine the alliance’s deterrence and damage relations with Washington.

Part of the issue here is that the US and Japanese governments define “introduction” differently, with the US maintaining that it refers to “the permanent deployment of nuclear warheads in storage facilities ashore.” The Japanese definition includes the passage of nuclear-armed naval vessels through Japanese waters, according to which the US military did “introduce” nukes to Japan during the Cold War. The US Navy ostensibly stopped carrying nukes on its ships in 1992, eliminating the problem, but the development of the SLCM-N means that it is changing that policy. Tokyo may need to bring its definition into alignment with the US to accommodate the shift.

Subscribe now

AFRICA

SUDAN

Drone strikes killed at least 72 “artisanal” gold miners in northern Sudan on Saturday, and when I say “at least” we should note that Sudan Tribune is reporting a death toll of “at least 200” with “hundreds more” wounded. In all likelihood the Egyptian military was responsible — Egypt frequently attacks illicit or “artisanal” Sudanese mining operations that it accuses of straying across the border onto Egyptian soil. Egyptian forces carried out a similar if less deadly drone attack back in June. There’s been no comment from Egyptian officials and Sudan’s military government relies too much on Egyptian support to make an issue out of this.

Elsewhere:

• The Kordofan Observatory human rights group reported on Saturday that Sudanese military (SAF) drone strikes had killed at least 16 people in West Kordofan state over the previous 48 hours. Most (at least 12) were killed in the town of En Nuhud. The SAF’s recent gains in neighboring North Kordofan state have shifted the conflict’s focus toward West Kordofan.

• The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North killed at least four people in shelling the capital of South Kordofan state, Kadugli, on Saturday, according to the Sudan Doctors Network. Kadugli is under military control and is frequently targeted by the SPLM-N and the Rapid Support Forces group.

• Sudan’s Emergency Lawyers activist group is reporting that the death toll from Friday’s RSF drone strike in Blue Nile state has risen from at least 30 to at least 41. At least eight children were among those killed by the strike, which apparently targeted a group of displaced persons and another illicit gold mining operation near the state capital, Ad-Damazin.

ETHIOPIA

The Ethiopian government submitted a letter to the United Nations Security Council on Friday invoking its right to self defense against what it claims is an invasion from neighboring Eritrea. Eritrean soldiers have allegedly been spotted in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where they are allegedly collaborating with the rebelling Tigray People’s Liberation Front, though Ethiopian drone strikes have reportedly driven both the TPLF and the Eritreans back toward the latter’s border. The letter is meant to justify military action against Eritrea though what specific actions the Ethiopian government is looking to justify remains unclear. It definitely suggests that the conflict is going to intensify. In response, the Eritrean government reiterated its accusation that Ethiopian officials are fabricating a threat in order to justify their own plans to seize Eritrean territory and urged the council to “condemn Ethiopia’s deplorable declaration of war against Eritrea.”

EUROPE

RUSSIA

According to the Financial Times, European intelligence agencies have decided that the Russian government is planning to assassinate defense industry executives:

With progress on the battlefield deadlocked in Ukraine and Russia’s economy struggling, the Kremlin has ordered an expansion of sabotage and “hybrid” operations in Europe as it seeks to fatally weaken support for Kyiv in the coming months.

Assassinations against European civilian targets — once considered taboo, even by Russia’s spy agencies — are an increasingly prominent part of those plans, European intelligence services have told the FT.

The FT spoke with officials from five different European intelligence agencies who warned that chief executives and other senior employees at defence companies were being targeted by Kremlin operatives.

Executives at smaller companies — especially those involved in the manufacturing of drones or their components — are also in their sights, the people said.

I have no idea if there’s anything to this but it seemed important enough to flag.

UKRAINE

Donald Trump’s frustration with Volodymyr Zelensky is spiking again after the Ukrainian president criticized his Big Diesel Deal with Russia. On Saturday, Trump complained to reporters that Zelensky had disobeyed his orders to stop attacking Russian oil facilities and opined that Ukraine ought to “get a new leader who can make a deal, because [Zelensky] could have made many deals that, for some reason, he never does.” It may be worth noting that a few months ago, before he started to freak out about the effect that high fuel prices might have on the US midterm election, Trump was reportedly “impressed” by the long-range strike campaign that has included Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries. But I digress. It should also be noted that while Trump was complaining the Russian military was killing at least 21 people across Ukraine, including at least 20 in one strike in the city of Zaporizhzhia.

On Sunday Trump took to social media to declare that “effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine” and that “both parties” had agreed to it. Asked about this news later in the day, Zelensky said that it “was news for me,” and there doesn’t seem to be any indication that the Russian military has stopped attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Zelensky did say that he’s prepared to order a halt to attacks on Russian oil facilities if Moscow does stop carrying out such strikes.

The punchline to this drama is that Trump’s Big Diesel Deal probably won’t bring down diesel prices in the US very much, if at all, at least not in time to help Trump and his Republican Party. There’s not enough fuel involved to matter much and the timetable for its release probably pushes any impact to beyond the election.

Subscribe now

AMERICAS

UNITED STATES

Finally, Donald Trump is really mad that he didn’t win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t think we’re quite at the “sending an aircraft carrier to Norway” stage but he did uncork a lengthy and mostly unhinged social media rant about what he regards as the snub late Friday night. Now far be it from me to try to tell the President of the United States how to win a peace prize, but one idea might be not to start any new wars. I mean, he tried winning the prize this year after starting another war with Iran and it didn’t work, so I’m just spitballing here. Unfortunately for his chances, CBS reported a couple of weeks ago that it looks like the Pentagon is ramping up plans for an invasion of Cuba so I think next year’s prize may be off the table as well.

Another way to appeal to the peace prize folks might involve not spending obscene amounts of money on things related to war. Sadly that appears to be out the window as well. Forget the fact that Trump publicly wants to spend $1.5 trillion on the US military next year, TomDispatch’s David Vine contends that the real defense budget could be much larger than that:

Long before Trump took office, U.S. taxpayers have spent far more on the Pentagon — and its wars — than most know. For decades, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon have hidden the military’s true cost through little-known bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. Journalists, academics, and think tank experts have, with rare exceptions, perpetuated the problem by repeating “official” numbers that don’t come close to telling the full story.

Data shows that the budget was already between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion in the last full fiscal year, 2025, as detailed by a recent Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, report I co-authored. Trump’s requests would add another $781 billion, bringing the potential total to at least $2.581 trillion in 2027.

The troubling revelation that the government is misleading the public and effectively hiding hundreds of billions in military spending reflects the out-of-control nature of the Pentagon budget. It’s also the only sector of government spending that seems largely insulated from public scrutiny: Imagine the outrage if news broke that the government was hiding hundreds of billions in spending for public housing, Medicaid, or hunger prevention programs.

People have a right to know how much tax money goes to military spending. This is critical to debating the proper size of the military budget both on its own and compared to other spending priorities, particularly any program related to education or the social safety net. Understanding the military’s true cost means understanding where and how the government has been hiding the money.

October 9, 1740: Dutch colonial authorities and native sympathizers brutally suppress an uprising among ethnic Chinese citizens of the Indonesian city of Batavia (modern Jakarta). By the end of the massacre, on October 22, more than 10,000 people were dead—nearly all of them Chinese—and the city’s remaining Chinese residents were moved into a “Chinatown” outside the city that functioned more as a detention camp than a residential neighborhood.

October 9, 1967: Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed by Bolivian authorities one day after being captured while attempting to organize a revolution.

INTERNATIONAL

South African lawyer Navanethem “Navi” Pillay won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Over her career Pillay has worked in a variety of positions at the United Nations, as a judge on the International Criminal Court, and as the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Most recently she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded in September 2025 that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. For that reason the Israeli government has decided that both she and the Nobel committee are effectively Hamas.

Between her work on Gaza and her work at the ICC it sure seems like the committee was making a number of statements about Israel’s conduct and the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to destroy the court. On that subject, later in the day the administration rolled out a new sanctions package that cuts the ICC off from US financial institutions and the US dollar while giving US-based firms and individuals six months to unwind any business dealings with the court. The new sanctions drew condemnation from the ICC itself as well as the UN and a group of European countries plus Canada and Japan. Whether any of those countries will do anything materially to defy the US and support the ICC remains to be seen.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

There are several items of note:

• The IDF killed at least one person near central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp on Friday. It has now killed at least 1467 Palestinians and wounded more than 5000 in Gaza since the “ceasefire” came into effect last October, which the NGO Islamic Relief has calculated comes to about one casualty every 90 minutes on average.

• The United Nations International Organization for Migration made a new appeal for more durable shelter materials in Gaza on Friday, saying that heavy rains caused by the current El Niño system are likely to cause flooding and weaken the heavily damaged structures that many people in the territory use as shelter against the elements. The Israeli government continues to block the entry of durable tent shelters, forcing people to rely on lighter tents that are unsuitable to winter weather (and are in need of replacement anyway) or to seek whatever shelter they can find among Gaza’s ruins.

• Reuters reported on Friday that “Palestinian Vice President Hussein Al Sheikh has informed ​France that a Palestinian legislative election planned for November 28 will be postponed, possibly until September 2027.” The Palestinian Authority has apparently concluded that “the anticipated political, security and economic conditions” in the Palestinian territories will not be conducive to holding an election, which is hard to argue even if this decision also benefits the PA’s old guard who are now assured of at least one more year in power.

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 8, 451: The Council of Chalcedon opens, with the aim of settling the Christological debates embroiling Christianity. The council repudiated the 449 Second Council of Ephesus and adopted a dyophysite position on the nature of Christ, declaring that Jesus had two natures, one fully human and one fully divine, joined in a “hypostatic union.” This was a major theological debate at the time and it would continue to be an issue all the way up to the Arab conquests of the 7th century, which saw several communities that had rejected Chalcedon come under Islamic rule.

October 8, 1856: Chinese authorities storm a British-flagged ship, the Arrow, in Canton harbor on suspicion of piracy. What probably didn’t seem like a big deal at the time wound up kicking off the Second Opium War, which ended with China ceding additional territories to Britain’s colony at Hong Kong and parts of Outer Manchuria to Russia.

October 8, 1912: Montenegro declares war against the Ottoman Empire, beginning the First Balkan War. The Ottomans, outmanned and outgunned by the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia, backed by Russia), lost decisively within a matter of months. The Treaty of London, signed on May 30, 1913, ratified Albania’s independence, with its borders to be determined by the “Great Powers” (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom). The treaty also forced the Ottomans to cede the rest of their Balkan territory to the League and give up the island of Crete, which promptly formalized its annexation to Greece. Bulgaria emerged as the new dominant Balkan state, which created an imbalance of power that ultimately led to the Second Balkan War.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

The Israeli military (IDF) reported on Thursday that one of its soldiers was killed and three others wounded in an apparent vehicle accident in southern Lebanon. Elsewhere, Reuters reports on the conditions facing residents of Zawtar al-Gharbiyah (“West Zawtar”) following their return to that village back in July:

Dodging the broken glass carpeting her home in southern Lebanon, Mariam al-Yaghi exited onto her upper balcony and pointed. A few hundred metres ​away was a sight the 67-year-old had grown accustomed to: military vehicles moving through the adjacent Lebanese village, still occupied by Israeli troops.

At night, Israeli soldiers patrol so close to Yaghi’s home in ‌West Zawtar that she can hear their voices. By day, she is often trailed by a small Israeli surveillance drone as she toils in her garden. Booms echo throughout the morning as Israel’s military destroys homes in the surrounding occupied towns with controlled detonations and bulldozers.

“We hear them all the time from that house over there with the tile roof. We hear their voices yelling, the tanks when they move this way and that way. We hear all of that. They’re very close to us, but we’re sitting here and we’re not scared. Never,” Yaghi told ​Reuters.

Israeli troops withdrew from West Zawtar in July, the first test of a US-backed “pilot zone” plan for Israel to withdraw gradually from southern Lebanon, in exchange for the disarmament of the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah.

But two months on, ​no further “pilot zones” have been agreed and residents of West Zawtar say their village is no blueprint.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The IDF killed at least seven people across Gaza on Thursday. Most (six) were killed in multiple attacks in parts of northern Gaza while one was killed in the central Deir al-Balah region.

The UK consulate in East Jerusalem is being downgraded to a diplomatic mission after an apparent compromise between the UK and Israeli governments over its status. The Israeli government was planning to close the consulate altogether to retaliate for the UK’s ban on imports from West Bank settlements, an act that could have triggered the expulsion of a number of Israeli diplomatic staffers from the UK. Instead the facility will remain open albeit at a much lower staffing level, with 20 UK personnel leaving the country and only a handful remaining in the mission to support UK nationals traveling to the region as well as diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority. UK officials say they intend to keep pressuring their Israeli counterparts to re-expand the mission.

YEMEN

There were a number of apparent Ansarullah attacks on the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Thursday, including another strike on the King Khalid International Airport, though the extent of any damage or casualties is unknown at present. The attacks did at least temporarily shut down operations at the airport, contributing to Ansarullah’s effort to effectively close Saudi airspace by targeting the kingdom’s airports. At least two international airlines, Germany’s Lufthansa Group and Air India, have suspended flights to and from Riyadh.

Syrian officials are denying reports that Damascus is sending military forces to fight in Yemen at Saudi request. Those denials aren’t exactly definitive, however, and don’t appear to rule out the possibility that Damascus will decide to send force to Yemen at some point. That said, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa may feel some domestic pressure to stick to his stated policy of not getting involved in foreign conflicts — it would be at the very least a bit awkward for him to send soldiers off to fight in Yemen when he’s been unwilling to use them to defend southern Syria against Israeli occupation, for example. There is a possibility that the Saudis could recruit mercenary fighters from Syria, maybe with Sharaa’s blessing, but that doesn’t appear to be happening as yet.

IRAN

Contrary (at least for the time being) to reports that the Trump administration has been preparing for an imminent (as in a matter of days) return to war with Iran, Donald Trump took to social media on Thursday to declare that “we will not be attacking Iran ​at any time prior to the midterm elections to be held in ​the United States on November 3rd.” He claimed that this is because of recent “productive discussions” between the US and Iran. There is no evidence of anything of the sort but that sounds better than just acknowledging that he doesn’t want to restart the war until after people have voted. Of course, Trump being Trump, for all I know by this time tomorrow the US may be bombing Tehran again.

In other items:

• The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center reported on Wednesday that a tanker off the coast of Qatar had been “struck by multiple projectiles,” according to Al Jazeera. There were casualties but I haven’t seen any specifics on that front. There are also reports of ships possibly striking mines in the southern channel of the Strait of Hormuz though details there are unclear. These incidents continue the surge in strikes on commercial vessels in and around the strait, though the Qatari incident stands out a bit as that vessel was pretty far from the waterway. These recent attacks, coupled with those reports I mentioned earlier that the war might be about to resume in earnest, have pushed oil prices back up past the $100 per barrel threshold, which may help to explain why Trump made his post on Thursday.

• Unspecified attackers killed an Iranian police officer on patrol in the southeastern city of Zahedan on Thursday. That city, like the rest of Sistan and Baluchistan province, often sees violence from multiple directions including Baluch separatists, jihadists, and criminal networks.

• The US Treasury Department blacklisted 27 entities, 22 vessels, and six people linked to Iran on Thursday. Most (especially the vessels of course) appear to be connected to Iranian efforts to export oil and oil products despite US sanctions.

ASIA

MYANMAR

In what could be the feel-good story of 2026, Reuters is reporting that “the Trump administration has begun direct talks with Myanmar’s military-installed government,” which it characterizes as a “sharp reversal” of Washington’s previous effort to pretend to care about democracy and human rights in that country. Assistant Secretary of ​State for Intelligence and Research Michael Vance is reportedly spearheading this contact, which has thus far focused on securing the release of imprisoned US national Adam Castillo — whom Myanmar authorities freed last month — and closing down online scam operations in Myanmar. If the engagement continues it could expand to cover other potential areas of collaboration — in particular involving Myanmar’s copious critical mineral reserves.

SOUTH KOREA

The South Korean government recalled its ambassador from Kyiv on Thursday amid a diplomatic spat over the transfer of two captured North Korean soldiers to Seoul. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke publicly about that transfer last month and as it happens the South Korean government did not appreciate his candor. Ukrainian officials insist that they had not agreed to keep the transfer on the down-low so Zelensky didn’t do anything wrong, but it doesn’t sound like the South Koreans are accepting that justification.

On a somewhat related note, South Korean officials are pledging to investigate and potentially take legal action over reports that some 176,000 metric tons of oil and fuel products were shipped from South Korea to Russia on “sanctioned tankers” in July and August. At least some of those shipments would presumably violate international sanctions and South Korea’s own Russia policy.

Subscribe now

AFRICA

SUDAN

The United Nations Security Council voted on Thursday to extend its current embargo on arms entering Sudan’s Darfur region for at least two more months. In doing so it rejected a US push to expand the embargo to cover the rest of Sudan that was opposed by veto holders China and Russia. This is the second short term extension that the council has passed (it agreed to a one-month extension in September, hence Thursday’s vote) in hopes that more time will allow The Gang to reach consensus on a wider embargo. Though as World Politics Review’s Lesley Anne Warner points out, it probably doesn’t matter all that much. The Darfur embargo has done precisely nothing to prevent arms from entering Darfur and even if the council were to extend the restriction to the rest of Sudan there’s no reason to believe that members would be able/willing to enforce it.

GUINEA-BISSAU

Guinea-Bissau’s ruling junta is postponing the December 6 general election that was supposed to return the country to nominally civilian governance. Interim Prime Minister ​Ilídio Vieira Té made the announcement on Thursday without offering a new potential date. He claimed that the country’s political parties were not yet prepared to contest the election and that candidates had missed an October 6 deadline to register for the ballot. Former President Umaro Sissoco Embaló, who was ousted in last year’s military coup and fled the country, had been planning to return to run for president again but the junta barred him from reentering the country last week.

MALI

To I assume no great surprise, the Malian military and its Russian “Africa Corps” auxiliaries retook the northern town of Kidal following the withdrawal of Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) rebels on Tuesday. There is some strategic value to holding Kidal, which holds the status of would-be capital for the FLA and its secessionist vision, but as AFP suggests the bigger effect for Mali’s ruling junta is probably the symbolism of regaining control of a town it lost to the FLA and Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin jihadists back in April. That regime gets to demonstrate that it is not, as it may have appeared a few months ago, on its last legs.

Interestingly, AFP is also reporting that the FLA may have withdrawn from Kidal at the urging of the Algerian government, which is on good terms with the rebels and is trying to improve relations with the junta in Bamako. This latest development may even open up the possibility of Algeria stepping in as a mediator between the junta and the FLA.

NIGERIA

A special forces unit killed at least 25 Islamic State West Africa Province fighters in repelling an assault on its base in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Tuesday night, according to the Nigerian military. There were casualties on the military side but authorities have not released any figures as far as I know. Separately, gunmen in northwestern Nigeria’s Zamfara state attacked a military outpost on Monday and reportedly killed at least 25 soldiers. Sources who spoke to Reuters are apparently characterizing the attackers as “bandits.”

ETHIOPIA

Drone strikes presumably by the Ethiopian military targeted Eritrean soldiers in the Tigray region overnight, after eyewitnesses in the city of Adigrat reported seeing Eritrean forces moving through that area on Wednesday. There’s no word as to casualties but the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data monitoring group says that the attacks were heavy enough to force Eritrean units to withdraw to the north and possibly all the way back across the border.

ZAMBIA

Following the AP report on Tuesday that the Trump administration had backed off of its demands for patient data and samples as a component of a new health aid agreement with Zambia, the Washington Post is reporting that the administration also dropped its demand for favorable mineral rights arrangements. Both of those demands had sparked opposition from Zambian officials and were criticized publicly by Zambian Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe earlier this year. The US is contributing a bit over $1.5 billion to what is supposed to be a $3.6 billion program over five years, which is an increase in the amount of aid it was offering (around $1 billion) earlier in the negotiations.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

In Russia-related news:

• Ukrainian drone strikes killed at least two people in Russia’s Belgorod oblast on Thursday. Another Ukrainian drone strike set fire to a data center belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex in Ryazan oblast overnight. This is apparently the first time the Ukrainians have targeted one of these facilities. There were no casualties but Yandex (which is often called the “Russian Google”) did report significant damage to the facility and to its operations, which likely means that the Ukrainians will attempt similar attacks on other data centers within the range of their weapons.

• The UK government blacklisted 38 entities, ships, and people on Thursday mostly (allegedly) connected to the transport and sale of Russian oil and/or Russia’s arms manufacturing industry. Five of the entities are accused of helping the Russian government to dodge Western financial sanctions.

• The Russian government is insisting that reports of a second possible case of plague connected to a research lab in the city of Irkutsk are “false information,” as Kremlim spokesperson Dmitry Peskov put it on Thursday. One researcher at that facility died last month possibly of pneumonic plague, though that’s unconfirmed and both the US government and the World Health Organization have been pressing for more information from Moscow.

• Reuters reported on Thursday that US envoy Jared Kushner has been negotiating with Russian officials about a potential US investment in rebuilding and reopening the Nord Stream pipelines that sent Russian natural gas to Germany prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It’s unclear how much of an appetite there is for this in Europe and in particular Germany, which would have to participate to make the project happen. But the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which leads opinion polls though Germany’s next federal election doesn’t have to take place until 2029, is apparently supportive. Kushner supposedly believes that this sort of commercial project can buy peace in Ukraine, though whether he really believes that or just wants a high-minded justification for what would otherwise be a publicly unpalatable investment scheme is unclear.

UKRAINE

A Russian bombardment hit two buses in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Thursday, killing at least 33 people. Later in the day a drone strike killed two more people in the same city while Russian attacks in other parts of the country killed at least three people, pushing the two day Russian death toll across Ukraine to at least 78, with another 215 wounded. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the US government to “open” Ukraine’s access to the Starlink satellite network to allow it to locate and target missile launchers inside Russia.

Subscribe now

AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

On the corruption front, a new Washington Post report highlights the extent to which people in Donald Trump’s orbit are hoping to cash in on the now US-controlled Venezuelan oil sector:

As the long-moribund energy sector in Venezuela, now largely under U.S. control, prepares for a potential gold rush, experience in Washington has become a new currency for those seeking advantage, according to investors, former U.S. officials and others in Venezuela’s business community.

Companies and investors are eager to hire those with recent access to the White House, knowledge of the administration’s Venezuela policy or contacts, these people say. And lobbyists, consultants and former government officials from both major U.S. political parties are descending on Caracas on behalf of new clients or businesses.

This report on former U.S. officials pursuing new private-sector roles in Venezuela is based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including current and former U.S. officials, investors and other members of Venezuela’s business community. Eight of those people were familiar with Jensen’s new role. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

It is common for former officials to take on private-sector roles in industries related to their government work, particularly in defense. But the transformation of the South American nation into a virtual U.S. protectorate has created an unusual opportunity for those with experience working on Venezuela within the U.S. government.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Foreign Policy’s Van Jackson sees signs of “fascist geopolitics” in the Trump administration’s approach toward the Americas:

On March 5 in Florida, Washington assembled the full complement of pro-U.S., right-wing Latin American states for a confab called the “Americas Counter Cartel Conference.” Sweating before a crowd of officials from Argentina and Honduras but not Mexico, and from Ecuador and El Salvador but not Brazil, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared: “Trump has drawn a new strategic map, from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War, we call this strategic map the Greater North America.”

In the popular mind, fascism is thought of as a domestic political project. But fascist great powers of the 20th century all championed imperialist campaigns in their regions that were distinct in their violent ambition as compared to their liberal imperialist counterparts. Scholars like Paul Sweezy and Aimé Césaire even saw fascism as a mutation of imperialism. Fascists and imperialists alike engage in military buildups, expand territory through conquest, construct exclusionary spheres of influence with other great powers, and impose settler colonialism and unequal exchange on foreign territories. Fascist foreign policy is imperialist. But it also has a violently counterrevolutionary edge.

MAGA can be understood as an elite counterrevolutionary project that serves the interests of capital by using the state to impose violence on its enemies and redistribute wealth upward. The goal is to overturn the legacy of the New Deal order and the civil rights that came with it. MAGA’s Greater North America is the overseas extension of this project: providing aid to reactionary governments, subverting progressive and socialist ones, and repressing organized labor by any means across the hemisphere.

October 7, 1571: A Spanish- and Venetian-led Holy League fleet wins a major victory over the Ottoman Empire at the naval Battle of Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth, thanks largely to more advanced ship designs and the adoption of firearms for close quarters sea combat. The Ottomans lost some 200 ships to the Christians’ ~50, and although they replaced those vessels their navy after Lepanto was never quite the Mediterranean power it had been before. The victory has been widely celebrated in Europe as one of the most important naval battles in history, though its impact on the tactics of naval warfare may have been more important than its immediate geopolitical impact.

October 7, 2001: The US military begins its invasion of Afghanistan. Though it replaced Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government with a friendly regime within weeks, the US finally left that country nearly 20 years later (in August 2021) with the Taliban back in power.

INTERNATIONAL

A “secret poll” of United Nations Security Council members suggests that former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan is the current favorite to succeed António Guterres as UN secretary-general. However, she currently has the support of the bare minimum of nine council members and it’s unclear if she has the necessary backing of all five veto-holding members, so the process isn’t over yet. There are currently seven candidates vying for the job but more may enter the field if this uncertainty lingers.

MIDDLE EAST

LEBANON

Reuters reported on Wednesday that the Iranian government has sent some $200 million to Hezbollah to support people displaced by the Israeli military’s (IDF) occupation in southern Lebanon. The US State Department is rejecting this claim as a “fake” narrative being peddled by Hezbollah, which may itself be fake news given that the reported transfer of funds calls into question the strength of the US economic blockade of Iran and Washington’s efforts to sanction Hezbollah’s financial networks. According to Reuters’ sources the Iranians got around those challenges by paying intermediaries a whopping 20 percent fee for facilitating the transfer. Hezbollah has yet to announce any concrete plans for this money but will supposedly be doing so “in the coming days.”

Read more

Get 40% off for 1 year

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 6, 1973: The Yom Kippur War begins with an Egyptian surprise attack (“Operation Badr”) against unprepared Israeli military units in the then-occupied Sinai Peninsula and a Syrian attack on Israeli units in the Golan. The war ended almost three weeks later in a tactical Israeli victory that nevertheless sparked a wave of domestic criticism over the intelligence failure that left the Israelis so unprepared for the initial assault. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s government fell not long after as a result. Despite Egypt’s defeat, its initial success was celebrated back home and gave President Anwar Sadat (at US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s urging) the political capital to shift Egypt’s Cold War orientation toward the US and begin the negotiations that would eventually lead to the Camp David Accords.

October 6, 1981: Members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during the annual “Military Day” parade celebrating the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. EIJ targeted Sadat over his diplomatic outreach to Israel after the war, most especially the aforementioned Camp David Accords in 1978.

INTERNATIONAL

World Politics Review’s Luca Mattei argues that the current El Niño may prove too intense for farmers in some countries to adjust to its effects:

Farmers around the world are feeling the impact, but on the whole, agricultural systems have so far proven resilient. Producers have adapted by varying their crop mix and finding alternative sources for fertilizers and other inputs, while policymakers have stepped in to offer support. Still, this “super El Niño” will test how well those mechanisms can continue to absorb pressure as weather conditions evolve during relatively narrow agricultural production windows.

El Niño conditions are characterized by warmer-than-average ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific, which alter weather patterns around the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration currently forecasts a greater than 90 percent probability of a very strong El Niño system during the Northern Hemisphere’s fall and winter. The impacts on food security will vary substantially by country and crop, particularly given the severe inequality around the world when it comes to access to irrigation, fertilizer, credit, seeds and reliable logistics. Agricultural exposure will be particularly important across tropical regions and parts of the Southern Hemisphere, where growing seasons will coincide with El Niño-related shifts in rainfall.

On the positive side, global grain supplies are expected to provide a solid cushion. The Food and Agriculture Organization projects that global cereal stocks at the end of the 2026-27 season will be equivalent to nearly one-third of annual consumption, a relatively comfortable scenario by historical standards. But that aggregate picture masks substantial variation at the country level.

Moreover, grain reserves do not finance irrigation pumps or provide foreign currency for imports of key agricultural inputs. The emerging food-security pressure will therefore depend on the interaction between climate exposure, input availability and the capacity of governments and farmers to respond in time.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least three people across Gaza on Tuesday. Looking forward, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz says that he’s put the IDF on high alert for the possibility of attacks by Hamas and/or other militant groups to mark the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attacks. Whether any such anniversary attacks are forthcoming this likely augurs for a violent day in Gaza tomorrow.

YEMEN

Ansarullah attacks reportedly damaged two airports in Saudi Arabia late Monday night, Najran International Airport and King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Airport in the city of Jazan. Those attacks wounded three people, according to Saudi authorities, but the extent of the damage is unclear and doesn’t seem to have been severe. Ansarullah also claimed a missile attack on the airport in Riyadh on Tuesday but Saudi officials say that was intercepted. In the face of reports that Yemeni government-aligned forces had pushed Ansarullah out of the Red Sea coastal territory it seized last month, spokesperson Turki al-Maliki took to social media to insist that the group’s fighters still control that territory. Absent some independent reporting from the area, which seems to be impossible at this point, anything I could add here would be purely guesswork.

AFP also reported on Tuesday that some 270 combatants had been killed in total over the previous day, while Ansarullah was reporting that a Saudi airstrike killed at least six people in Yemen’s Hajjah province. And the Yemeni government (such as it is) was claiming to have made new advances on the ground in the heavily contested Taiz and Marib provinces.

IRAN

Amid reports of another apparent Iranian attack on a tanker around the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday (which would make at least 13 attempted attacks over roughly the last week), an Al Jazeera analysis questions the sustainability of the recent upsurge in oil exports from the Middle East. The answer is that it is, in theory. But the two main conduits for that upsurge are Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline carrying oil to the Red Sea and untracked ship-to-ship oil transfers near the strait. Both are vulnerable to attack and the latter requires a large number of ships to shuttle oil through the waterway to large tankers waiting in the Gulf of Oman or beyond. That’s driving up shipping and insurance costs, which is still inflating global oil prices, to say nothing of the costs being incurred by the US military to maintain its presence in the region and protect those Hormuz transits.

ASIA

SOUTH KOREA

The South Korean government claims that it is preparing some sort of “response” to last month’s apparent landmine blast that wounded two soldiers on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone. Said response is supposed to elicit an apology from the North Korean government over the incident. That seems unlikely. The North Korean ​Foreign Ministry rejected Seoul’s allegation again on Tuesday, calling it a “premeditated farce” and “grave provocation” while threatening “an immediate and powerful counteraction” to any South Korean action.

JAPAN

The recent arrest of a US Marine stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa, for allegedly murdering a woman in the city of Naha, has sparked an uptick in public opposition to the US military presence that included a protest before the US embassy in Tokyo on Tuesday. Crimes committed by US military personnel in Japan are a relatively frequent source of public hostility, particularly as the US-Japanese Status of Forces Agreement can make prosecuting those crimes difficult for Japanese authorities. In this case, because the crime was committed while the soldier was off duty and he was arrested off base by Japanese police, there shouldn’t be any legal way for the US to interfere, but politics could still be a factor. It remains to be seen whether this public opposition will manifest as a new drive to reduce the US military presence in Japan, though given the current Japanese government’s proclivities and its tense relations with China that seems unlikely.

Subscribe now

AFRICA

SUDAN

Sudan Tribune is reporting that there’s been “fierce fighting” between Rapid Support Forces militants and government-aligned “Joint Forces” militia unit this week near the capital of West Darfur state, Geneina. The Joint Forces group has made gains in West Darfur in recent months, confounding the RSF’s efforts to fully consolidate control of the Darfur region.

Elsewhere, Drop Site’s Aunnab Alman reports that the RSF refused to aid rescue efforts amid a massive gold mine collapse in West Kordofan state last month:

[Survivor Mohammed al-Hassan] said the miners asked the RSF for help and were turned away. “We went to a Rapid Support Forces post about 15 minutes away and told them people were trapped,” he said. “They had two excavators, and they refused to help.”

All six shafts [of the Zaraa gold mine] collapsed into one another, burying the miners inside. At least 82 people were killed and around 50 injured, a local administration official told reporters the following day. A source in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group that controls the area, gave AFP the same death toll and said an unknown number of people remained trapped.

No updated toll has been released since. A few days after the collapse, the RSF sealed off the area around the mine, local sources said, clearing out even the miners who were searching for their colleagues. No one has been allowed near the mine since.

The RSF was itself a partner in running the mine, according to local miners, after they took control of West Kordofan state in December 2025. Gold is one of the main sources of revenue for both sides of Sudan’s war—the national military, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and the RSF—according to conflict economy experts. Over two million people work in the mining industry in Sudan.

Mining is essentially unregulated in Sudan, which makes it a particularly dangerous profession for people working in informal, unstable mineshafts.

MALI

The rebel Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) announced on Tuesday that its forces are withdrawing from the northern Malian town of Kidal, a bit over five months after taking it in a joint offensive with Jamaʿat Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin jihadists. The Malian military, with the support of Russian “Africa Corps” forces, has begun a new air and ground campaign to retake the town and the FLA is characterizing this move as “a temporary operational measure” in response.

KENYA

The Kenyan government has reported its first-ever case of Ebola, after a Kenyan national returned to the country from the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the weekend and then succumbed to the illness. He had apparently been ill for about a month before managing to catch a flight from Uganda into Nairobi. Kenyan authorities are tracking his known contacts and have quarantined those who have already been found. So far there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of spread.

EUROPE

UKRAINE

The Ukrainian military undertook one of its largest bombardments of the Moscow region since the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022 overnight, launching some 650 drones at the Russian capital. The attack disrupted air traffic around the city and killed at least two people while wounding nine more. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later warned in his nightly address that “there is updated intelligence indicating that Russia is ​preparing a massive attack.” The parameters of this potential attack remain to be seen.

The Black Sea portion of this conflict continued on Tuesday as somebody’s drones sank one merchant vessel and damaged another off the coast of Bulgaria. There’s no indication as to responsibility but the Ukrainian government disavowed any involvement. Bulgarian authorities rescued the crew of the damaged vessel but were still searching for survivors from the second vessel at time of writing. Additionally a Liberian-flagged tanker was reportedly attacked (presumably by the Ukrainians) and caught fire off of the Russian coast. Russian authorities were able to rescue its crew.

ICELAND

Having secured some degree of additional control over Greenland, the Trump administration is unsurprisingly, and unfortunately for the people living there, turning its attention to Iceland:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio brought President Trump’s Arctic ambitions to Iceland on Tuesday, looking to build on a deal that emerged from Trump’s push to take control of Greenland as the U.S. expands its military reach across the region.

In meetings with Icelandic officials, Rubio said the administration was open to expanding security cooperation, citing Iceland’s infrastructure, technology and surveillance capabilities.

“There’s interest in doing more together,” Rubio said, praising Iceland for allowing “the U.S. military to project power using your land, your air, your sea, giving us a critical outpost for monitoring clandestine behavior and deterring our adversaries.”

While last month’s deal fell short of Trump’s demands to control Greenland, a self-governing territory that is part of Denmark, it paved the way for a larger U.S. military presence. Such a buildup would further increase the strategic importance of neighboring Iceland, which has airfields, ports and surveillance infrastructure that provide a natural staging ground for operations in Greenland and across the North Atlantic.

Iceland being a full-fledged nation-state and not a territory of another country it would be even more awkward for the administration to threaten to annex it the way it did with Greenland — though that hasn’t stopped it from hinting in that general direction. As with Greenland, presumably it will settle for something less than annexation though what that will be is unclear.

Subscribe now

AMERICAS

UNITED STATES

Finally, Foreign Affairs’ Ali Vaez offers a pessimistic assessment of the Iran War and the chances of it ending anytime soon:

When will the war in Iran end? American officials claim that the answer is soon. “I think the war is going to end immediately after the [November] election,” declared U.S. President Donald Trump in September. “They can’t hold out any longer.” Iranian leaders agree that the war’s conclusion is near. Tehran has “brought the most heavily armed army in the history of the world to its knees,” proclaimed Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in August. Many outside analysts think that the conflict will drag on for longer and end with negotiations rather than with a clear winner. But generally, there is a sense that the fighting will soon be resolved, one way or another.

Such thinking is understandable. All wars eventually end, and after months of rising energy prices, the world is especially eager for this one to stop. Yet the unsettling reality is that the conflict is nowhere near over. The war’s two principal belligerents cannot achieve their desired goals, yet they both feel they are accomplishing enough to make continued fighting through a mix of military and economic tools worth it. The United States cannot topple the Iranian regime, get it to give up its missile program, force it to abandon its nuclear program, or make it stop supporting its regional partners. But Washington can keep degrading Iran’s military and constricting its economy. Iran cannot evict the world’s only superpower from the Middle East. Yet it can keep damaging U.S. regional bases, bombing the United States’ regional allies, and disrupting international commerce.

Critically, both states have the resources needed to fight indefinitely—and both believe they have no choice but to use them. They think that if their side lets up, the other will press on until it has either humiliated them or achieved its main objectives. They carry out periodic talks, but there is no mutual trust. In fact, they suspect that their enemy will simply use a cease-fire to regroup and resupply before attacking again. The Iranian government fears that relinquishing leverage, whether over Hormuz, its missile arsenal, or the nuclear program, would leave it exposed to pressure later. Washington, for its part, worries that sweeping sanctions relief would provide Tehran with the resources and time it needs to reconstitute its capabilities. Israel, meanwhile, fears that restraint today would only create a stronger Iran tomorrow. The steps required to escape the war look dangerous precisely because they require each side to temporarily make itself more vulnerable.

The war, then, will carry on as it has. There will not be a comprehensive resolution. There will be no lasting peace deal. But because the status quo is sustainable for each side, and because the parties lack the power to seize the upper hand, there will be no dramatic escalation, either. Tehran and Washington won’t be defeated. Yet no one will win.