World roundup: September 25 2024

Stories from Lebanon, China, Ukraine, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

September 25, 1396: An Ottoman army under Sultan Bayezid I defeats a “Crusader” force at Nicopolis (modern Nikopol, in Bulgaria). The outcome was so overwhelming that it broke the nascent Crusade in one fell swoop and left the way open for the Ottomans to march on Vidin and put an end to the Second Bulgarian Empire.

The Battle of Nicopolis, by 15th century French miniaturist Jean Colombe (Wikimedia Commons)

September 25, 1513: Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer and the governor of Veragua (a territory including the Caribbean coasts of modern Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama), leads a small detachment of men across Panama to what they knew as the “South Sea,” thereby becoming the first European in the New World to lay eyes on the Pacific Ocean. Balboa spent several years exploring his “South Sea” but eventually ran afoul of the governor of Panama, Pedrarias Dávila, and was executed in 1519.

September 25, 1962: A military coup against the Mutawakkilite ruler of northern Yemen, Muhammad al-Badr, sparks the 1962-1970 North Yemen Civil War. The conflict quickly expands from a domestic insurrection to an outlet for the “Arab Cold War,” pitting republican Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who supported the insurrectionists, against an old guard of Arab monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, which supported the Mutawakkilites (despite their sectarian differences with the Yemeni Shiʿa). In the end the republicans emerged victorious, but Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Six Day War left Nasser greatly weakened so the “Arab Cold War” began to fizzle out.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Gaza’s Health Ministry claimed via Telegram on Wednesday that it had refused a shipment of 88 Palestinian bodies from the Israeli government, because Israeli officials had failed to provide any information regarding their identities, the circumstances of their deaths, or even where the bodies had been found. Gazan officials called the attempted shipment an “inhumane and criminal move” that violated “the minimum rights of these people and their families.” In Gaza, meanwhile, the Israeli military (IDF) reportedly increased the intensity of its bombing campaign across the territory, killing at least 53 people over a 24 hour period.