World roundup: October 8 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Ethiopia, Brazil, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 8, 451: The Council of Chalcedon opens, with the aim of settling the Christological debates embroiling Christianity. The council repudiated the 449 Second Council of Ephesus and adopted a dyophysite position on the nature of Christ, declaring that Jesus had two natures, one fully human and one fully divine, joined in a “hypostatic union.” This was a major theological debate at the time and it would continue to be an issue all the way up to the Arab conquests of the 7th century, which saw several communities that had rejected Chalcedon come under Islamic rule.

Russian painter Vasily Surikov’s 1876 Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (Wikimedia Commons)

October 8, 1856: Chinese authorities storm a British-flagged ship, the Arrow, in Canton harbor on suspicion of piracy. What probably didn’t seem like a big deal at the time wound up kicking off the Second Opium War, which ended with China ceding additional territories to Britain’s colony at Hong Kong and parts of Outer Manchuria to Russia.

October 8, 1912: Montenegro declares war against the Ottoman Empire, beginning the First Balkan War. The Ottomans, outmanned and outgunned by the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia, backed by Russia), lost decisively within a matter of months. The Treaty of London, signed on May 30, 1913, ratified Albania’s independence, with its borders to be determined by the “Great Powers” (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom). The treaty also forced the Ottomans to cede the rest of their Balkan territory to the League and give up the island of Crete, which promptly formalized its annexation to Greece. Bulgaria emerged as the new dominant Balkan state, which created an imbalance of power that ultimately led to the Second Balkan War.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

The US military is claiming that it killed a senior member of the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam in an airstrike somewhere in Syria last Thursday. It’s offered few details about the strike, like its location, but it did describe the target as a “senior al-Qaeda affiliated attack planner” and that seems to have raised some eyebrows. Ansar al-Islam has hitherto been a relatively minor organization in Syria that somewhat obliquely traces its origins back to a predominantly Kurdish group that operated in northern Iraq prior to the US invasion of that country. But a United Nations report earlier this year suggested that the group is in the process of absorbing whatever is left of Hurras al-Din, the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate that suffered from its split with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in 2017-2018 and has been a prime target of US strikes since then. That’s raised Ansar al-Islam’s profile but also now appears to be drawing American attention.