World roundup: October 29 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Myanmar, Sudan, and elsewhere

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.

Atatürk’s 1933 speech marking Republic Day’s 10th anniversary (Republic of Turkey via Wikimedia Commons)

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.

INTERNATIONAL

In an interview with The Guardian ahead of the COP30 climate summit next month, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged that it is now “inevitable” that the planet will warm beyond the 1.5 degree Celsius guideline laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. He’s not breaking any real news here as it’s been apparent for a few years now that humanity had not reduced carbon emissions nearly enough to meet that target. Guterres is trying to heighten the urgency to make a major course correction at next month’s summit, though that seems futile given the Trump administration’s outright hostility to taking any climate action.

Without the US on board there’s little that the rest of the world can do to hit the level of emissions reductions necessary to mitigate severe climate outcomes. I’d be happy to be proven wrong here but I don’t think I will be, and it may be worth noting that major philanthropic figures (in this case Bill Gates) are starting to adopt a “don’t waste your beautiful minds worrying about climate change” narrative. That’s as close to throwing up a white flag as these folks are likely to get.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

State media is reporting that Kurdish fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces group killed two soldiers and wounded another in a missile strike near the Tishrin Dam in northern Syria on Wednesday. The SDF is denying that any attack took place and has blamed the casualties on landmines in the vicinity. The SDF and the Syrian government are still ironing out a tentative agreement to incorporate the former into the latter’s security apparatus and incidents like this could threaten that process.