It has been a long week here at FX headquarters and I have a backlog of interesting pieces that I haven’t been able to work into the newsletter yet so with your indulgence I’m going to focus tonight’s roundup primarily on directing you to those.
TODAY IN HISTORY
November 7, 1811: At the Battle of Tippecanoe, a US force led by future President William Henry Harrison (then governor of the Indiana Territory) defeats a group of Shawnee and allied tribal fighters and is able to destroy their nearby base, known as “Prophetstown.” Though fairly indecisive in its outcome the battle is considered one of the key engagements in “Tecumseh’s War,” a conflict that bled into the War of 1812. Today it’s probably best known as part of the campaign slogan for the Harrison-John Tyler presidential ticket in 1840: “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” The “Tyler Too!” bit turned out to be far more relevant than I think anybody expected.
November 7, 1917: The Third Battle of Gaza ends with the Ottoman Yıldırım Army Group abandoning Gaza and Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force occupying the town. The first (in March) and second (in April) battles of Gaza had both ended in indecisive Ottoman victories, by which I mean the Ottomans held their positions but were unable to force the EEF back. Britain’s capture of Beersheba a week earlier was decisive and an extended British bombardment on November 6 proved to be the final straw for the Ottoman defenders. Capturing Gaza put the EEF well on its way to taking Jerusalem, which it would do around Christmas.
INTERNATIONAL
The United Nations World Meteorological Organization released a new report on Thursday confirming that 2025 will be one of the three hottest years recorded over the 176 years in which humanity has been keeping track of such things. The other two are, uh, 2023 and 2024. So we’re on a roll, I guess.
The WMO published this finding with the UN’s COP30 climate summit set to begin in Brazil on Monday. Several world leaders have either directly or obliquely criticized Donald Trump in the run up to the summit and he’s likely to dominate the event even though he’s not attending, inasmuch as Trump’s election more or less ended any US involvement in the effort to mitigate climate change and despite all the progress that the worlds other great emitter has made in adopting renewable energy if the US isn’t participating that’s enough to guarantee some pretty severe outcomes.
MIDDLE EAST
TURKEY
According to Reuters, the Turkish government is “preparing a law to let thousands of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters and civilians return home from hideouts in northern Iraq” as part of the PKK peace process. This would be the first tangible concession from Ankara to the PKK and is one of the biggest steps Turkish officials need to take in terms of getting to a final settlement. This law would not include a general amnesty, which has not been part of the negotiations, and high-ranking PKK commanders are likely to be exiled rather than repatriated.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Foreign Exchanges to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.