World roundup: December 10 2025

Stories from Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Peru, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

December 10, 1877: A Russian army defeats an Ottoman garrison and captures the town of Plevna, in modern Bulgaria. Despite the defeat, the months-long Ottoman defense at Plevna frustrated and ultimately may have prevented a Russian advance on Constantinople while creating time for other European powers (i.e., Britain and France) to react and warn Russia off of any attempt at wiping the Ottoman Empire out. As a result, although the Ottomans lost the 1877-1878 Russo-Ottoman War, a loss that could have been fatal to the empire wound up only costing it some Balkan territory.

Russian painter Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky’s 1880 The artillery battle at Plevna. The battery of siege guns on the Grand Duke Mount. (Wikimedia Commons)

December 10, 1898: The Treaty of Paris ends the Spanish-American War. Under its terms, Spain agreed to give up its claims on Cuba (which became a US protectorate) and turned Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico over to the United States. It is often considered the end of the Spanish empire, though Spain still held some colonies so that’s not really accurate, and the first emergence of the United States as a major world power.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Drop Site’s David Schutz recounts his experience earlier this year with Israeli settlers in the West Bank:

On July 20, around ten masked men raided the Palestinian hamlet of Ibsiq in the northern Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank. They arrived in a two car convoy, dressed in Israeli military-issue fatigues, and carried assault rifles fitted with green laser pointers.

While their vehicles blocked the road, they stormed into a cluster of homes. At gunpoint, they forced a Palestinian family to their knees and warned them they had 48 hours to evacuate Area C and go to Area B—referring to technical designations of control in the West Bank under the Oslo Accords. Area C is under full Israeli control and Area B is technically under Palestinian civil administration but shares security control with Israel. The masked men said they would “return and burn the community down,” if the family did not evacuate to Area B.

I had been staying with an elderly Palestinian couple for five days in Ibsiq to document settler violence amid rising threats against the community. As the men approached, I asked one of them who he was. They looked like soldiers, but the vehicles in which they arrived had yellow civilian license plates. These masked assailants were members of the hagmar—settler reservist militias formally attached to the Israeli army and tasked with “security” in West Bank settlements.

The men dragged me behind a fence where four of them beat me until I required hospitalization. They stole the phone of an International Solidarity Mission activist who tried to record the attack.

My host, Abu Safi, who was 84, had little choice but to leave his home after that raid by the hagmar. The family packed up their belongings accumulated over decades in the house and moved to a nearby location in Area B. Abu Safi died of a heart attack soon afterwards.

Israeli occupation forces continue to arrest Palestinians across the West Bank en masse. One Palestinian man who was arrested back in June reportedly died on Tuesday in a Jerusalem hospital of unknown causes. His family had last seen him in late November and said they saw no signs of illness that would explain his death.

In other items: