World roundup: October 15 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 15, 1529: The Ottoman siege of Vienna ends in failure. A substantially wetter than usual Balkan spring made the Ottoman march on Vienna extremely difficult and forced Sultan Suleyman I to leave his largest and therefore most effective artillery pieces behind. The army he finally brought to Vienna was simply not capable of breaching the city’s walls and taking it. Suleyman tried again to attack Vienna in 1532 but turned around midway after receiving word of a very large Habsburg army mustering to defend the city. The Ottomans wouldn’t make another attempt on Vienna until 1683, which again failed and marked the start of an imperial retreat out of central Europe.

October 15, 1979: A group of Salvadoran military officers ousts President Carlos Humberto Romero in a coup. Romero was himself the leader of the military government that had ruled El Salvador since 1931, but the Sandinista overthrow of Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza in July raised fears within the Salvadoran military and the US government that Romero’s government might fall to left-wing rebels. Some of the coup plotters were themselves politically on the left, but the US worked with other elements of the junta to steer things in a right-wing direction. The junta’s violent suppression of public demands for reform sparked the 12+ year long Salvadoran Civil War, which pitted the military (with US support) against the leftist FMLN coalition and left hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans dead.

INTERNATIONAL

The United Nations World Meteorological Organization’s latest climate report concludes that there is more carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere now than there has been in some 800,000 years, contributing heavily to the rise in extreme weather. This is after the largest annual jump in atmospheric carbon on record, from 2023 to 2024. The study found that atmospheric carbon amounts are still increasing despite relatively flat levels of fossil fuel emissions, suggesting that we’ve passed a “tipping point” wherein natural processes (forest fires, for example) are contributing as much carbon as direct human activity.

While we’re on the subject of “tipping points,” a study published earlier this week suggests that the planet has hit another one—the inevitable death of most of its coral reefs. A mass bleaching event that began in 2023 and has affected some 80 percent of the planet’s coral reefs shows no sign of abating, and while reefs can recover if water temperatures decrease there’s no reason to believe that they will do that anytime soon.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa visited Moscow on Wednesday to, in his words, “restore and redefine” his country’s relationship with Russia. I haven’t seen any indication as to how those talks went but both sides seem interested in exploring commercial and development ties and the Russian government would of course like to hang on to its two Syrian military bases. Sharaa was expected to request the extradition of former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad but that seems like a long shot.