World roundup: October 16 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Lesotho, Argentina, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
October 16, 690: Chinese Empress Dowager Wu Zeitan removes her son, Tang Dynasty Emperor Ruizong, from the throne and assumes power in her own right as Empress Regnant under the name Wu Zhao. The first and only woman to rule the Chinese Empire openly, Wu’s reign—regarded as an interregnum within the Tang period—saw a significant expansion of imperial territory and Wu made several lasting reforms to the Chinese state, including opening up the imperial civil service examination to members of the lower classes. She was ousted in a coup in 705 after falling gravely ill and the Tang Dynasty regained control.
October 16, 1934: The Chinese Red Army begins the “Long March,” a series of maneuvers that would, over the next year and over some 9000 kilometers, see Mao Zedong’s forces evade the Kuomintang army of Chiang Kai-shek. Though the Red Army lost a substantial portion of its forces, the Long March preserved the Chinese Communist Party and enabled Mao’s rise to undisputed leadership within it, in addition to being a massive symbolic success.
October 16, 1964: The Chinese government successfully tests its first nuclear warhead in an operation known as “Project 596” in the Xinjiang region’s Tarim Basin. The test was the result of nearly a decade of work begun in the wake of Chinese clashes with the US in Korea and the Taiwan Strait and made the People’s Republic the world’s fifth nuclear weapons state. It was something of a surprise to US analysts, who knew China was pursuing a nuke but discounted its chances of success after the Soviet Union stopped supporting the project in 1959.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
A bombing that targeted a government bus in eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzor province killed at least four people and wounded nine others on Thursday. The bus was apparently carrying workers at an oilfield in that province. The four known fatalities were all security personnel at that facility but there are reports of oil workers and other civilians among the casualties. There’s been no claim of responsibility as yet but this seems likely to have been an Islamic State attack.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least three people in Gaza on Thursday, reinforcing the sense that this “ceasefire” is really more of a reduction in the pace of killing rather than a full cessation. Israeli forces have killed 23 people since it went into effect on Friday. The Trump administration says that it is moving forward with the ceasefire process, which means primarily that it’s working on instituting some sort of Palestinian administration to govern the territory on a day-to-day basis and on creating the hypothetical international “security force” that’s supposed to supplant both the IDF and Hamas. Those are issues that still need to be negotiated by the parties but have to be settled in fairly short order or this entire facade is going to start crumbling and a return to pre-ceasefire levels of killing could be in store.
The two main threats to upend the ceasefire continue to be 1) Israeli complaints about the speed with which Hamas is returning the bodies of dead captives and 2) violence between Hamas and other armed factions in Gaza. As to the latter, Donald Trump proclaimed via social media on Thursday that “if Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them.” This is the same Donald Trump who earlier this week explained to reporters that Hamas has short-term “approval” to conduct security operations in the territory, and while I guess it’s possible that he didn’t mean they had approval to “kill people” one assumes he’s not that naive. One also assumes he’s not serious when he suggests that US forces could be deployed to Gaza to try to achieve something the IDF couldn’t get done (assuming it was really trying) in two years.
To the former, while Israeli officials have backed off of their threat to reduce the number of humanitarian aid trucks entering the territory they are now dragging their feet with respect to the planned reopening of the Rafah checkpoint between Gaza and Egypt. Hamas officials have insisted that the nine bodies (of 28) they’ve repatriated represent all they can do without international assistance and heavy machinery. Israeli officials insist that’s not true, though to my knowledge they haven’t explained how they know this or what Hamas would be hoping to gain by artificially slowing down the repatriation process. Reopening Rafah is important both for aid delivery and because it could facilitate medical evacuations. Preparations for its reopening seem to be continuing but there’s no date set as to when it will resume operations.
YEMEN
Yemen’s Houthi movement announced on Thursday that its military chief of staff, Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Ghamari, has died of wounds suffered in an IDF airstrike back in August. He is the senior-most Houthi figure killed by the Israeli military over multiple attacks on northern Yemen.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
Wednesday ceasefire along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has survived the first 24 of its planned 48 hours, but according to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif the “ball” is in the Afghan government’s “court” as far as negotiating a longer-term arrangement. I have not seen any comment from Kabul. Casualty figures after two rounds of fighting, one on the weekend and the other overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, remain unknown though the number of people killed is believed to be in the “dozens” and local officials in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province are claiming that at least 40 civilians were killed there alone.
PAKISTAN
Within Pakistan, meanwhile, Drop Site reports on the government’s efforts to suppress a new protest movement spawned in part by events in Gaza:
As Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was nominating President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize—for the second time—during the Gaza “Peace Summit” in Egypt, a large anti-Israel demonstration organized in Pakistan by a religious extremist group normally aligned with the country’s powerful security services was met with a violent crackdown that left scores dead.
Partly in response to growing rumors that Pakistan was on the brink of normalizing ties with Israel, the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), one of the country’s largest religious extremist parties, held a march towards the U.S. embassy in Islamabad against normalization with Israel and in support of Gaza.
“We heard that Pakistan was going to normalize ties with Israel, like UAE has, that is why Saad Rizvi”—the leader of TLP—“decided to march on Islamabad now,” one TLP activist told Drop Site on condition of anonymity. Party leaders believed the march had the blessing of the military-backed government, yet it ended in a massacre.
Their reporting suggests that the Pakistani security establishment set TLP up to engage in these protests to establish a precedent for violent crackdowns. The party is a very good foil for such a scheme because its religious extremism makes it less likely that other Pakistani civil society factions will come to its defense.
INDIA
The Indian government is suggesting that Donald Trump may have hallucinated the conversation he claimed to have had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, in which Modi is supposed to have promised to phase out purchases of Russian oil. On Thursday New Delhi insisted that there was “no telephonic conversation between PM Modi and US President Trump yesterday.” So somebody would appear to be lying here, unless the sitting president of the United States really believes that he had a phone call that he didn’t actually have. Hopefully it’s just somebody lying.
INDONESIA
The Indonesian military is claiming that its forces seized a village in the country’s Central Papua province from separatist rebels on Wednesday, killing 14 militants in the process. It characterized the village as a “hotbed” of insurgency, according to the AP. However, the rebel West Papua Liberation Army is telling a much different story, insisting that the village was not an insurgent hub and that only three of the 14 killed could be classified as rebels whereas nine were “innocent residents.”
AFRICA
LIBYA
The US military’s Africa Command announced earlier this week that part of its Flintlock 2026 counterterrorism exercise will take place in the Libyan city of Sirte and will involve military units aligned with both the western-based and eastern-based Libyan governments. The aim, apparently, is to try to unify the country’s military forces and maybe through that to unify its fragmented politics. The Trump administration has made some effort to cultivate ties with both governments, primarily out of a desire to develop/exploit Libya’s oil resources. This military project goes beyond the Flintlock exercise but that will be the first opportunity for eastern and western units to train with one another.
LESOTHO
The AP reports on the devastating effect that the Trump administration’s aid cuts have had on HIV treatment in Lesotho:
This Lesotho was unimaginable months ago, residents, health workers and experts say. The small landlocked nation in southern Africa long had the world’s second-highest rate of HIV infections. But over years, with nearly $1 billion in aid from the United States, Lesotho patched together a health network efficient enough to slow the spread of the epidemic, one of the deadliest in modern history.
Then On Jan. 20, the first day of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, he signed an executive order freezing foreign aid. Within weeks, Trump had slashed overseas assistance and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. Confusion followed in nearly all the 130 countries with USAID-supported programs. Nine months later in Lesotho, there’s still little clarity.
With the single stroke of a distant president’s pen, much of a system credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives was dismantled.
The administration has restarted some of Lesotho’s programs, at least on a temporary basis, but as the piece notes restarting public health initiatives on paper and actually restarting them are two different things. And in the meantime people have lost months of life-saving treatment.
MADAGASCAR
Madagascar junta leader Michael Randrianirina will be sworn in as the country’s new president on Friday, according to a statement issued late Wednesday. His predecessor, Andry Rajoelina, is refusing to give up his claim on the office for whatever that’s worth, which is probably not much seeing as how he’s fled the country and been impeached by the Malagasy National Assembly. Randrianirina’s inauguration isn’t going to do much to quell international criticism, led by the African Union and its decision to suspend Madagascar following the coup earlier this week.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin relationship is back on again, apparently, after the two had a phone call on Thursday in which Trump says they made “great progress.” It’s unclear what exactly progressed during the call, but Trump now says he will meet with Putin in person in Budapest in two weeks, give or take, after a preliminary session between US and Russian officials sometime next week.
UKRAINE
In the meantime, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is heading to the White House on Friday, mostly it would seem to talk about Ukraine’s desire to obtain Tomahawk cruise missiles. It’s unclear how the Trump-Putin call will affect Trump’s thinking on this issue. On the one hand if he sees a new (probably futile, but who knows?) opening for diplomacy he might be reluctant to risk it by acceding to Zelensky’s request. On the other hand he might feel that it’s the threat of Ukrainian Tomahawks that has made Putin more amenable to diplomacy. Zelensky is hoping for a definitive answer on Friday but I imagine Trump will give him some sort of noncommittal response or maybe a pledge to supply the missiles if his meeting with Putin goes nowhere.
FRANCE
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s decision to jettison President Emmanuel Macron’s signature pension cut paid off on Thursday when his new cabinet survived two parliamentary no-confidence motions thanks to the support of the Socialist Party. Lecornu’s main task now becomes passing a budget, which promises to be a substantially heavier lift given Macron’s insistence on austerity.
AMERICAS
ARGENTINA
The Trump administration is trying to double the size of its Argentine bailout, as President Javier Milei’s wildly successful implementation of a radical libertarian agenda apparently needs $40 billion in handouts to survive rather than the original $20 billion that Washington pledged. The additional funds will come from private lenders and sovereign wealth funds rather than out of the US Treasury.
However, Donald Trump said earlier this week that the US might not help at all if Milei “doesn’t win” Argentina’s midterm election later this month, which is suddenly in a bit of doubt. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza coalition was leading opinion polls earlier this year, but that was before the Argentine economy needed to be hosed down with $40 billion in foreign cash. More recently, the opposition Union for the Homeland coalition won last month’s Buenos Aires provincial election relatively handily, and it’s unclear whether that outcome was more a reflection of the province’s politics or a decline in Milei’s appeal. In fact that election result is one of the reasons why Milei suddenly needs a financial lifeline, as it triggered a significant decline in the peso’s value that required an injection of foreign currency to stem.
VENEZUELA
The US military blew up a sixth (at least) boat in the Caribbean on Thursday, and in an interesting twist Reuters is reporting that there were survivors. It’s unclear what happened to them and it’s possible they’re now in US custody. There’s no word as to the number of casualties in this strike. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that Venezuelan fishermen are now afraid to pursue their trade lest they wind up the target of a drone strike, which means that the US is terrorizing and immiserating (well, further immiserating) the Venezuelan people at the same time it pretends to be seeking regime change on their behalf.
UNITED STATES
The head of the US military’s Southern Command, Alvin Holsey, abruptly announced his retirement (effective in December) on Thursday after just a year on what is supposed to be a three year job. I can’t say for sure that he’s leaving because he’s uncomfortable murdering random boaters on the orders of his cable news host boss and his cable news host boss’s reality tv star boss, but I also can’t say for sure that he’s not leaving for that reason. In fact Reuters suggests that it’s part of the reason for his departure, the other being that he’s a Black admiral and Pete Hegseth instinctively regards any Black flag officer as a DEI hire. The indication is that Hegseth might have been planning to fire him anyway.
Finally, the US military’s new restrictions on Pentagon reporters came into effect on Wednesday and most of the building’s journalists headed for the exits:
Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon on Wednesday rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, pushing journalists who cover the American military further from the seat of its power. The nation’s leadership called the new rules “common sense” to help regulate a “very disruptive” press.
News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.
Many of the reporters waited to leave together at a 4 p.m. deadline set by the Defense Department to get out of the building. As the hour approached, boxes of documents lined a Pentagon corridor and reporters carried chairs, a copying machine, books and old photos to the parking lot from suddenly abandoned workspaces. Shortly after 4, about 40 to 50 journalists left together after handing in badges.
One of Hegseth’s rules bars reporters in the building from “soliciting information” from military personnel, a practice that is also known in some circles as “journalism.”