World roundup: November 17 2025

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

TODAY IN HISTORY

November 17, 1869: The Suez Canal officially opens in a joint French-Egyptian ceremony. Although it quickly came under financial pressure due to the costs of construction and some technical flaws that required improvements, the canal made an immediate impact on international commerce, both for better and worse (it helped cause the Panic of 1873 because of its detrimental effect on British maritime trade). The Egyptian monarchy’s heavy debt obliged it to sell its shares in the canal to the British government, which provided an opening for Britain to establish control not only over the canal, but ultimately over all of Egypt.

November 17, 1885: The decisive engagement of the brief (two week) Serbo-Bulgarian War, the Battle of Slivnitsa, begins in western Bulgaria. It would end two days later with a decisive Bulgarian victory that allowed the Bulgarian army to enter Serbian territory. Alarmed by the merger of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, two polities created by the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the Serbian government used a border dispute as a pretext to declare war and invade, but their defeat at Slivnitsa turned the war on its head. Austria-Hungary subsequently threatened to intervene and thereby halted the Bulgarian invasion a few days after it began. But the war, short as it was, affirmed the Bulgarian-Rumelian merger and sparked a military reform effort in Serbia.

November 17, 1989: What became known as the “Velvet Revolution” begins with demonstrations against Czechoslovakia’s Communist government in Prague and Bratislava (the latter having actually begun the previous day). Riot police in Prague responded violently, prompting a larger public backlash particularly over the (fictitious, as it turns out) claim that they had killed a student protester named “Martin Šmíd.” By November 20 upwards of 500,000 people were in the streets of Prague and on November 28 the Communist Party announced the dissolution of the country’s government. The election of dissident Václav Havel as president in a unanimous parliamentary vote on December 29 is thought to mark the end point of the revolution.

Demonstrators in Prague on November 17, 1989 (LUBOMIR KOTEK/AFP via Getty Images)

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani visited Beijing on Monday in his first trip to China since assuming his post last December. He met with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, and the two agreed to collaborate on counterterrorism efforts, “thereby removing security obstacles to the stable development of China-Syria relations” as the Chinese Foreign Ministry put it. From the Chinese perspective this means containing the activity of Uyghur jihadists who are currently in Syria and potentially means Damascus handing those jihadists, or some of them at least, over to Beijing. The Syrian Foreign Ministry is denying an AFP report that Damascus is preparing some sort of handover along those lines, but assuming that the Syrian government would like to be involved economically with one of the two dominant economic powers on the planet it may not have much of a choice.