World roundup: August 14 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, India, Russia, and elsewhere

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TODAY IN HISTORY

August 14, 1480: The Ottoman army executes 800 men in the just-conquered southern Italian city of Otranto, ostensibly because they refused to convert to Islam. The “Martyrs of Otranto,” as they’ve become known, are regarded as the patron saints of the modern town and the Catholic Church celebrates their feast day on August 14.

August 14, 1947: At midnight, the Indian Independence Act of 1947 goes into effect, ending the British Raj and creating the independent states of India and Pakistan. This territory included the future state of Bangladesh, though at this time it was part of Pakistan. This date is commemorated as Pakistani Independence Day while August 15 is commemorated as Independence Day in India. Initially both countries commemorated August 15, but the Pakistanis later shifted to August 14, ostensibly because British Viceroy Louis Mountbatten held Pakistan’s independence ceremony on that date so that he could attend a similar ceremony in India the following day.

INTERNATIONAL

I’m sure nobody could have predicted this, but the United Nations plastics summit that opened earlier this month appeared to be on the verge of imploding on Thursday, which was supposed to be its final day (it’s now been extended for at least one more day in hopes of salvaging a deal). With little substantive agreement on the text of a proposed international plastics treaty, organizers tried to draft a watered down compromise document that would satisfy everyone but instead wound up further alienating everyone. Around 100 of the 184 participants in the summit want the treaty to do something to address the toxic plastic manufacturing process and its constituent chemicals. The rest, led by major petroleum producing states, want to limit a treaty to managing plastic waste only. If a compromise treaty does emerge from this process the history of international environmental action strongly suggests it will favor the oil producers and thus will require little and offer nothing by way of enforcement.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

A UN commission investigating the massacre of hundreds of Alawites in northwestern Syria back in March has concluded somewhat anticlimactically that the incident “included acts that likely amount to war crimes.” The commission pointed to “members of the interim government forces and private individuals operating alongside or in proximity to them,” which partially contradicts an internal Syrian government investigation that downplayed the role of formal state security forces (and especially their commanders) in the massacre. The UN commission stopped short of accusing the government itself, saying that it “found no evidence of a governmental policy or plan” to carry out the massacres, but noted that the violence was so systematic that it “may be indicative of an organizational policy within certain factions or groups” that participated. Investigators also accused “pro-Assad” militants of wrongdoing in the attacks on state security forces that preceded the massacre.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) continues to lay the groundwork for its forthcoming invasion (re-invasion) of Gaza City and is now reportedly moving into its eastern outskirts, leveling homes along the way. Most of the destruction has so far been focused on the Shujaʿiyya and Zaytun districts and Israeli officials are still suggesting that it could be weeks before their forces seize the city itself, which may suggest that they’re planning to encircle it first and then allow some time for civilians to evacuate (or at least enough time that it looks like they’ve given civilians a chance to evacuate).

Elsewhere, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Thursday that he will give approval next week for the E1 settlement plan in the West Bank. This proposed settlement has been under consideration in one form or another since the mid-1990s as a way to link the Maale Adumim settlement to East Jerusalem. If completed it would cut East Jerusalem off completely from the West Bank and bisect the West Bank north-to-south with a string of Israeli settlements. It is viewed in Israeli political circles as a way to foreclose permanently on the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state. That’s not my assertion, by the way; in his announcement, Smotrich said that the settlement “buries the idea of a Palestinian state and continues the many steps we are taking on the ground as part of the de facto sovereignty plan that we began implementing with the establishment of the government.” Israel has built highways that allow Palestinians to bypass the area but that’s at least somewhat, if not entirely, beside the point.

In the wake of Israel’s targeted killing of several Al Jazeera journalists over the weekend, +972 Magazine and Local Call have uncovered the existence of an IDF unit tasked with justifying these sorts of atrocities to the outside world:

The Israeli military has operated a special unit called the “Legitimization Cell,” tasked with gathering intelligence from Gaza that can bolster Israel’s image in the international media, according to three intelligence sources who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call and confirmed the unit’s existence.

Established after October 7, the unit sought information on Hamas’ use of schools and hospitals for military purposes, and on failed rocket launches by armed Palestinian groups that harmed civilians in the enclave. It has also been assigned to identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel’s killing of reporters — the latest of whom was Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, killed in an Israeli airstrike this past week.

According to the sources, the Legitimization Cell’s motivation was not security, but public relations. Driven by anger that Gaza-based reporters were “smearing [Israel’s] name in front of the world,” its members were eager to find a journalist they could link to Hamas and mark as a target, one source said.

The source described a recurring pattern in the unit’s work: whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue, the Legitimization Cell was told to find intelligence that could be declassified and employed publicly to counter the narrative.

ASIA

PAKISTAN

Pakistani Taliban (TTP) militants carried out at least 13 attacks on police in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province overnight and into Thursday, presumably to mark the country’s Independence Day. They killed at least six police officers. Provincial officials claimed that police inflicted casualties on the TTP but didn’t go into detail beyond that.

INDIA

According to AFP, the Indian and Chinese governments are discussing a resumption of cross-border trade, which they suspended after a deadly clash between their respective border guards back in 2020. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is scheduled to visit New Delhi on Monday, when restoring that trade is expected to be on the agenda. Trade across the largely foreboding India-China border has never been particularly robust but resuming it would be meaningful to local residents and fits in with a broader thawing of relations between the two most populous countries on Earth. To some extent an improvement in this relationship was probably inevitable—barring a war, bilateral tension couldn’t have gotten much worse than it did after that 2020 incident. But right now the improvement is being driven to a significant extent by Donald Trump and in particular by his recent hostility toward India:

U.S. President Donald Trump has almost single-handedly brought the India-U.S. partnership to its lowest point in two decades. On August 6, Trump signed an executive order imposing an additional 25 percent tariff on Indian goods in a bid to punish India for its continued purchase of Russian oil. The move came a few days after he reported his displeasure over India’s trade with Russia, claiming that he would substantially raise tariffs on India. This brings the total duty on India to 50 percent.

Adding insult to injury, Trump offended many in India with his remarks, saying, “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”

This trade spat has roiled the India-U.S. relationship, which is arguably at its lowest point thus far in the 21st century.

It’s not entirely clear why Trump is so angry with the Indian government, although there are some strong theories. For one, Indian officials have repeatedly rejected Trump’s assertion that he brokered the ceasefire that ended their brief conflict with Pakistan back in May, and Trump really doesn’t like to be contradicted. And if we take Trump at his word that he’s upset about continued Indian purchases of Russian oil, then maybe he’s taking out some frustration over his failure to mediate an end to the Ukraine war on India, which for whatever reason he views as an easier target than Russia. At any rate, it seems whatever is upsetting Trump has outweighed, in his mind, India’s value as a New Cold War ally against China.

AFRICA

SUDAN

According to Doctors Without Borders, cholera has killed at least 40 people in Sudan’s Darfur region in just the past week, amid what the NGO called “the worst cholera outbreak [Sudan] has seen in years.” Since August 2023, a few months after the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces militant group went to war with one another, nearly 100,000 cases of cholera have been reported in Sudan and nearly 2500 fatalities, and given the state of public health infrastructure in that country those figures probably understate the actual toll. Sudanese officials began a cholera vaccination program in Khartoum earlier this week but that won’t be of much help to the people in Darfur, who have been hard hit by both the war and the outbreak.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

A new UN report has documented a spike in sexual violence in the eastern DRC that can be attributed to the M23 conflict:

Healthcare providers in the war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) treated more than 17,000 victims of sexual violence over just five months last year, according to a United Nations report.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s annual report on conflict-related sexual violence, released on Thursday, said the cases were registered in the province of North Kivu between January and May last year, as fighting between Congolese forces and Rwanda-backed M23 rebels intensified.

“Many survivors sought care after violent sexual attacks, including penetration with objects, perpetrated by multiple perpetrators,” said the report, which charted crimes like rape, gang rape and sexual slavery.

By comparison, some 22,000 cases of sexual violence were reported in North Kivu in all of 2023, and that figure was roughly double the number reported in 2022. M23’s latest campaign began in March 2022.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday that he thinks his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday will be the first step toward a peace deal. Seeming to acknowledge concerns that he and Putin might negotiate such a deal without Ukrainian input, Trump explained that “the more important meeting will be the second meeting that we’re having” that will, apparently, involve Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and “maybe…some of the European leaders.” That’s assuming Friday’s meeting goes well, of course.

For his part, Putin seems to be telegraphing his approach to the summit, which does involve offering Trump a deal—maybe more than one—just not with respect to Ukraine. In “televised comments” Putin talked on Thursday about setting “long-term conditions for peace between our countries”—meaning Russia and the US—and specifically about discussing “agreements in the area of control over strategic offensive weapons.” It seems reasonable to speculate that he’s planning to offer Trump something he can claim as a win on the nuclear arms control front in order to secure concessions on Ukraine. I imagine he’ll also try to dazzle Trump with talk of all the economic activity the US and Russia could generate if they were getting along.

UKRAINE

During his video conference with Zelensky and other European leaders on Wednesday Trump apparently made a pledge of US support for a European military force that could be stationed in Ukraine to provide security guarantees in the event of a peace deal. Several European governments have expressed a willingness to put together such a force but without US logistical support and at least the threat of US air support the effort would be fairly toothless. It’s unclear exactly what Trump said—all the reporting is based on what other people who were in the meeting are claiming that he said—so who knows if he’s actually prepared to support the effort. Putin has flatly rejected any sort of European force in Ukraine after the war.

Zelensky and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz preparing to join Wednesday’s video conference (JOHN MACDOUGALL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Al Jazeera’s Mansur Mirovalev reports on the increasing use of violence by Ukrainian conscription units:

Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify all of the details of [alleged victim] Artem’s story, but some of his allegations corroborate with other cases of conscription-related coercion and corruption in Ukraine amid a dire shortage of front-line troops in the fight against Russia.

Between January and June, the Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman’s office received more than 2,000 complaints about the use of force by conscription patrols that consist of military and police officers.

In one case, patrol officers hit a bicyclist in the central Rivne region with their car in January after he refused to pull over. They beat and tear-gassed him to deliver him to the conscription office and “illegally mobilise”, investigators said. Ultimately, the patrolling officers volunteered to go to the front line to avoid assault charges, they said.

On August 1, police in the central city of Vinnytsia used tear gas to disperse a crowd that tried to storm a conscription office and release some 100 men that they claimed had been detained illegally.

Meanwhile, a privileged few abuse their position to dodge the draft.

AMERICAS

MEXICO

The US Treasury Department on Thursday blacklisted two cartels—Cárteles Unidos and Los Viagras—that primarily operate out of Mexico’s Michoacán state, as well as seven related individuals, all on alleged terrorism charges. Cárteles Unidos was among the eight cartels—six of them Mexican—that the Trump administration designated as terrorist organizations earlier this year.

HAITI

In a story that’s sure to put smiles on the faces of FX readers, mercenary extraordinaire Erik Prince told Reuters on Thursday that he’s going to continue profiting from the suffering of Haitians. His company, Vectus Global, has apparently signed a ten year contract with the Haitian government, such as it is, to support its efforts to regain control of the country from criminal insurgents and then, if/when that’s done, to collect customs duties on goods shipped into Haiti from the Dominican Republic. Prince told the outlet that “he expected to wrestle control of major roads and territories from the gangs in about a year,” which is interesting inasmuch as Vectus Global has been working in Haiti since March and, if anything, the gang problem has gotten worse. But according to Reuters the firm intends to bring in “several hundred fighters from the United States, Europe and El Salvador” to “intensify” its operations in the near future.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Jacobin’s Alberto Medina warns that the Trump administration is undertaking a “hostile takeover” of Puerto Rico’s finances:

On Monday, August 4, President Donald Trump dismissed five of the seven members of the Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), the entity that, for all intents and purposes, governs Puerto Rico. The move likely signals the start of a Trumpian takeover of the island that will only intensify austerity, poverty, and the multifaceted crises afflicting the oldest colony in the world.

No one should shed a tear for members of the board — or La Junta, as Puerto Ricans not-so-lovingly call it. The FOMB was created by federal law (PROMESA, signed by President Barack Obama in 2016) to address Puerto Rico’s financial crisis and oversee its debt restructuring process. It was given near-unlimited power by Congress to set Puerto Rico’s budget, veto local laws, and overrule the elected governor.

For the past decade, the board has used that authority to implement a draconian austerity regime in Puerto Rico. It has slashed pensions, cut funding for public education, and pushed for privatization of the island’s electrical grid to companies that charge Puerto Ricans more money for a poorer service.

While Puerto Ricans feel the pain, bondholders swim in profits. The board’s members, and its army of lawyers and consultants, are handsomely paid as well. Executive director Robert Mujica Jr, who was Andrew Cuomo’s former budget chief in New York, makes $625,000 a year — more than the president of the United States. As of 2022, McKinsey had raked in $120 million for consulting on the island’s debt restructuring. By now, that figure is surely higher.

The Trump administration has cited the board’s profligacy and excess as cause for the five members’ dismissal, but that’s a cheap misdirection. First, because while the FOMB was created by Congress and its members are appointed by the president, all salaries and fees are paid for by Puerto Rico’s government. Few reasonable people will believe that the Trump administration is particularly concerned about the well-being of Puerto Ricans. Second, because the five members of the board dismissed by Trump were all appointed by Democrats. The two remaining members of the FOMB, John Nixon and Andrew Biggs, are Republicans.