World roundup: October 23 2025
Stories from North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
October 23, 42 BCE: A Roman army jointly led by Triumvirs Marc Antony and Octavian defeats Brutus’s Republican army in the second phase of the Battle of Philippi. Brutus committed suicide after the battle. As his co-commander, Cassius, had already killed himself following the first phase of the battle on October 3, this left the Republican army leaderless and it unsurprisingly fell apart. Although there were other Republican leaders still in the field, like Sextus Pompey in Sicily, the defeat at Philippi marked the end of serious Republican resistance. The way was clear for the “Second Triumvirate” of Antony, Octavian, and the almost forgotten Marcus Lepidus to seize uncontested control of the Roman Republic.
October 23, 1798: An Ottoman-Albanian army under Ali Pasha of Ioannina defeats a French Revolutionary army in what became known as the Battle of Nicopolis since it was fought near the ruins of that city. The battle was fought over territory France had inherited the previous year when Napoleon and the Habsburgs had collaborated on the dissolution of the Republic of Venice. Ali wanted some of that territory, and when the Ottomans declared war against France in July he had the excuse he needed to go get it. Ali’s victory here allowed his forces to enter the nearby town of Preveza, one of those territories he wanted, at which point they fired the town and massacred many of its inhabitants. Ali contested control of Preveza with the Ottoman authorities until they took it decisively in 1820. The town is part of Greece today.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Syrian officials and the Firqatul Ghuraba jihadist faction negotiated a ceasefire on Thursday, one day after government security forces surrounded the group’s camp in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province. The deal allows the security forces to enter the camp and to open a criminal investigation into the group’s leader, a French-Senegalese man who goes by the name Omar Omsen. He’s not only wanted on a French warrant, he’s also apparently been accused of kidnapping a girl in Syria.
LEBANON
Israeli military (IDF) strikes killed at least four people in Lebanon on Thursday including an “elderly woman” according to Lebanon’s National News Agency. Thursday’s attacks were extensive, covering northeastern, eastern, and southern Lebanon.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
+972 Magazine’s “Ahmed Ahmed” (a pseudonym) describes what he found when he returned to Gaza City under the ceasefire:
When I arrived in Gaza City, I barely recognized it. The streets were filled with twisted metal, shattered glass, and debris from houses and towers flattened by Israel’s methodical bombing of high-rise buildings and use of explosive-laden robots. Many roads were completely blocked; I had to get off my bicycle and carry it part of the way.
It had only been a few days since I was displaced, but in that time every corner of the city had turned into a map of memories where physical structures once stood: my school, the cafés where I met friends, the restaurants I ate in with my family, the shops where I used to buy clothes.
Upon finally reaching my neighborhood, I was overwhelmed with relief to see my building still standing. I pulled the key from my bag and climbed the stairs with a smile, only to find the door blown open, the windows shattered, and plaster falling off the walls. All our furniture was gone. Yet I still felt lucky — I had a roof over my head, unlike thousands of others who had lost everything, now forced to live in tents.
Without realizing what I was doing, I lay down on the rubble-covered floor and cried. I was home.
Elsewhere:
US Vice President JD Vance left Israel on Thursday as Secretary of State Marco Rubio was arriving. It would appear that the Trump administration has decided that it needs to keep at least one senior administration official in Israel at all times to babysit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lest he terminate the ceasefire. Both Vance and Rubio have commented negatively on this week’s Knesset vote to advance a bill that would legally annex the West Bank, with the former telling reporters that “if it was a political stunt it was a very stupid political stunt and I personally take some insult to it” and the latter warning that annexation could “threaten” Donald Trump’s ceasefire framework. Speaking of which, Trump told reporters on Thursday that “Israel’s not going to do anything with the West Bank.” He’s previously suggested that annexation could cost Israel all of its US support. Even Netanyahu denounced the vote as “a deliberate political provocation by the opposition to sow discord” while Vance was in the country. This is incoherent, because it was extremist parties that are in Netanyahu’s coalition that supported the bill.
To be perfectly clear, Israel has already annexed the West Bank. Doing so formally would be more provocative than the de facto annexation it’s already long since achieved, but the practical reality is that the West Bank is Israeli territory and nobody—not the US, not Europe, not the governments of the Arab world—lifted a finger to stop what’s been happening out in the open for at least the past three years and really since 1967. The United Nations International Court of Justice explained this pretty clearly last year.
The Israeli government is still starving Palestinians in Gaza, just less acutely than it was prior to the ceasefire. In addition to simply restricting the amount of food entering the territory it also seems to be privileging commercial food trucks over aid trucks. Commercial items entering Gaza tend to be less nutritious and are sold rather than provided free, so people who can’t afford their inflated prices are still struggling to find food.
The Turkish government seems intent on carving out some sort of role for itself in the international security/peacekeeping force that the Trump framework envisions stepping in to replace Hamas forces in Gaza. This sets up a potentially awkward situation inasmuch as Netanyahu has rejected any Turkish participation in that project but the Trump administration seems open to the idea.
According to Reuters, the Trump administration is considering a new aid distribution system that would see the establishment of “12-16 humanitarian hubs” along the “yellow line” marking the IDF’s occupation zone in the territory. These facilities would also potentially serve Hamas fighters and other militants who want to surrender their arms in exchange for “amnesty,” whatever that means in this context, and could be expanded to function as bases for the aforementioned international security force. This sounds uncomfortably similar to the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” scheme, even if the GHF itself is unlikely to survive the ceasefire.
In a TIME magazine interview recorded earlier this month and released on Thursday, Trump claims that he’s considering whether or not to insist that the Israeli government free Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti. Hamas has sought Barghouti’s release and there was briefly speculation that he might be included in the ceasefire but the Israeli government quashed it pretty quickly. Barghouti is generally regarded as the one figure who could unite the various Palestinian factions and as a result the Israelis will never release him voluntarily and it seems unlikely that Trump will press them on it.
This is not really related to the above, but Barghouti’s family is claiming that prison guards beat him into unconsciousness last month. They learned of the beating from someone who was released by the Israelis under the ceasefire.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
Unspecified gunmen killed six people, including the leader of a local pro-government militia, in a shooting incident in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Wednesday. There’s been no claim of responsibility but the militia leader was reportedly embroiled in a dispute with elements of the Pakistani Taliban, who’d been shaking him down for protection money that he wasn’t paying.
MYANMAR
The BBC offers an explanation for a string of recent gains by Myanmar’s military junta, including its capture of the town of Hsipaw in northern Shan state over the weekend. The junta is eager to retake as much territory as it can from rebels ahead of the election it’s planning to stage in December, because that means it can conduct voting (or whatever will pass for voting) in a larger portion of the country. It’s benefiting from increased support from China, which has reportedly been supplying the junta with drones, and from its total control of Myanmar’s airspace. The rebels, despite the successes of the joint “Operation 1027” that began in October 2023, remain to factionalized and poorly armed to mount sustained campaigns against the military, particularly absent effective air defense capabilities.
CHINA
The Chinese Commerce Ministry announced on Thursday that US and Chinese negotiating teams are planning to meet in Malaysia between October 27 and 29 in an attempt to make some headway in trade negotiations. They’ll be trying to lay some groundwork ahead of the planned Donald Trump-Xi Jinping summit that’s supposed to take place on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual forum that opens in South Korea on October 31. Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had agreed in principle to a new round of talks during a phone conversation the two had over the weekend. Trade tensions flared up a bit earlier this month though they appear to have subsided again.
NORTH KOREA
When the North Korean military launched multiple missiles on Wednesday it was noteworthy in that it had been months since Pyongyang’s previous weapons demonstration. It has been a down year for such incidents, with the North Koreans only carrying out 12 or so as compared to annual totals in the 20s to 30s of late. The Wall Street Journal suggests that this downturn reflects a shift in focus from quantity to quality:
Now, Kim has chosen more ways to convey North Korea’s military strength. While Kim’s primary show of force used to be missile launches during President Trump’s first term, the North Korean leader now opts for frequent military factory visits, orders mass production of munitions and declares his country’s nuclear status.
Kim’s advancing capabilities give him more leverage in potential negotiations with Washington over Pyongyang’s nuclear program, especially with Russian technical help, which means there is less of a need to continuously fire missiles to pressure the U.S., said Hong Min, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a state-funded think tank in Seoul.
“The qualitative aspect of testing has become more important than the sheer number of launches,” Hong said.
North Korean media is reporting that Wednesday’s launch involved two “hypersonic” missiles. If that’s true—and the definition of “hypersonic” often gets fudged in these sorts of claims so take it with a grain of salt—it would continue a string of apparent advances in North Korean military technology that may be at least partly related to the country’s intensifying military ties with Russia.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Rapid Support Forces militants pummeled Khartoum with drone strikes for the third straight day on Thursday. These strikes have interfered with plans to reopen Khartoum’s international airport, which was supposed to happen on Wednesday. Sudan’s Badr Airlines did land a plane at the facility on Wednesday but it’s unclear to me whether it was an actual commercial flight or an empty test run, and either way it’s unclear whether or when any additional flights might be scheduled as long as the city and the airport remain under threat of RSF attack.
NIGERIA
The Nigerian military is claiming to have killed over 50 Boko Haram fighters on Thursday in raids launched in retaliation for several drone strikes targeting army bases in the northeastern states of Yobe and Borno. There’s no word as to military casualties.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
With the Trump administration pulling the proverbial trigger on new sanctions targeting Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil on Wednesday, the European Union appears to be set to move forward with a new round of sanctions of its own similarly targeting Russian energy concerns. This latest sanctions package includes the EU’s first designations targeting Russia’s liquefied natural gas exports, which member states have agreed to phase out over the next 14 or so months (eliminating imports entirely by January 2027). The EU is also blacklisting 117 tankers allegedly linked to Russia’s “shadow fleet,” which facilitates Russian exports in violation of Western sanctions and price caps. The EU is still deliberating a proposal to use frozen Russian assets to secure a loan for Ukraine.
The decision to blacklist Rosneft and Lukoil caused global oil (and Western oil company stock) prices to spike a bit on Thursday so clearly markets are taking notice. But Vladimir Putin is not, at least not publicly. While acknowledging that the sanctions could “put pressure on Russia,” he discounted their potential impact and insisted that “no self-respecting country and no self-respecting people ever decides anything under pressure.”
UKRAINE
In a bit of positive news, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced on Thursday that off-site power has been restored to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest nuclear facility in Europe. The facility lost connection to the Ukrainian power grid on September 23 and had been running on generators for a month, which is stretching safety limits to say the least. Zaporizhzhia’s reactors are offline so it needs outside power to maintain its safety and cooling systems. One damaged power line into the plant has been repaired and the IAEA says it’s working with Russian and Ukrainian officials about restoring another line.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
Donald Trump told reporters on Thursday that he’s taking his boat bombing campaign on to land, which is presumably his pretext for the US military to begin conducting airstrikes on Venezuela. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the US military flew two B-1 bombers close to Venezuelan airspace on Thursday in what seems to have been a dry run for what’s coming. B-1s can in theory be used to carry out surveillance operations but there are definitely more cost effective ways of doing that, so at the very least their use would have been meant to intimidate the Venezuelan government. Last week the US military flew Marine F-35s and Air Force B-52s in the same area in another show of force.
COLOMBIA
The US military blew up another boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Wednesday according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, its second in as many days. This strike killed three people, after Tuesday’s incident left two dead. The Pentagon has not been terribly forthcoming regarding the details of these strikes, but the Colombian government has condemned them and it sounds like they’ve been taking place near that country’s coast. Colombian Deputy Foreign Minister Mauricio Jaramillo called the strikes “disproportionate and outside international law.”
UNITED STATES
The recent revival of the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database has has revealed that extreme weather events accounted for a cool $101 billion in damages in the United States in the first half of 2025, a new record. This database used to be maintained by the US governments’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but it was shut down by the Trump administration because, as everyone knows, if you don’t talk about climate change then it doesn’t exist. Its former manager, climatologist Adam Smith, has resuscitated it as a nonprofit operation.
Finally, ProPublica charts the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s development into Donald Trump’s unchecked “national police force”:
Current and former national security officials share [Santa Ana, CA Mayor Valerie Amezcua]’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails, encouraged agents to wear masks, threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way, and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.
And although they are reluctant to predict the future, the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.
One former senior DHS official who was involved in oversight said that what is happening on American streets today “gives me goosebumps.”