World roundup: May 16 2025

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

TODAY IN HISTORY

May 16, 1916: The British government ratifies the Sykes-Picot Agreement, establishing it as the Allied blueprint for the post-war remains of the Ottoman Empire.

May 16, 1961: The South Korean military, under army general Park Chung-hee, overthrows the country’s civilian government in the appropriately named “May 16 Coup,” instituting a period of military rule in South Korea that lasted in one form or another until 1993. Park himself ruled the country until his assassination by the head of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service in 1979. The military government is credited, if you want to call it that, with rapidly industrializing the South Korean economy, at the cost of basic rights and liberties.

Park (center) and a group of South Korean soldiers mid-coup (Wikimedia Commons)

INTERNATIONAL

The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises found that “acute food insecurity and child malnutrition rose for a sixth consecutive year in 2024, affecting more than 295 million people across 53 countries and territories,” as Al Jazeera put it. Hunger levels rose more than 5 percent from 2023. There’s little reason to expect that 2025 won’t be still worse—the climate and conflict crises that fueled 2024’s rise haven’t abated and the global shortage of humanitarian funding has been supercharged thanks to the Trump-Musk administration.

International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan has reportedly taken a “leave of absence” from the organization amid an ongoing investigation into charges of sexual misconduct. The United Nations has been conducting that investigation since December and Khan—who maintains his innocence—is apparently intending to step back at least until the inquiry is concluded.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

According to Al-Monitor’s Rina Bassist, normalization talks between the Syrian and Israeli governments have picked up in intensity via two indirect channels—a “more formal” one being brokered by Azerbaijan and a “less formal” one brokered by the UAE. As he was announcing the easing of Syrian sanctions earlier this week, Donald Trump encouraged Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to normalize relations with Israel. These diplomatic channels were already open but the project may have taken on a new impetus as a result of Trump’s prodding. Obviously there’s a lot of ground to cover here, what with the Israeli military (IDF) presently occupying a good chunk of southern Syria and bombing targets across the country at will. But normalization here could also reduce tensions between the Israelis and the Syrian government’s main patron, Turkey.