World roundup: September 4 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Thailand, Brazil, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
September 4, 476: Odoacer and his army depose the very young western Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus (“Augustulus”) at Ravenna. This is the conventional date given for the final end of the Roman Empire in the west, though there were other claimants to the throne still kicking around. Modern historians tend to discount the notion that there was a specific end date for the western empire, with this date instead serving as one of many markers in a lengthy transition from the Roman world to one that was more recognizably medieval in makeup.
September 4, 1839: Four British boats open fire on a group of Chinese junks enforcing a blockade on the English community in Hong Kong, killing two in what’s known as the Battle of Kowloon. This minor engagement sparked the First Opium War, which ended with Britain in control of Hong Kong and China forced to agree to major trade concessions.
September 4, 1912: The Albanian Revolt of 1912 ends with Ottoman authorities agreeing to a list of rebel demands that gave the empire’s predominantly Albanian provinces a significant degree of autonomy. The Ottoman Empire was at war with Italy when the revolt broke out and simply lacked the capacity to deal with both struggles at once, so it more or less acceded to Albanian demands (the Ottomans lost the war with Italy anyway). The First Balkan War, which broke out on October 8, short circuited the autonomy plan but ended in mid-1913 with, among other things, the creation of a fully independent Albanian nation.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
A drone strike near Aleppo International Airport killed at least two people on Thursday. There’s no indication as to responsibility but tension between Turkish-backed militants and the Syrian Democratic Forces group remains high across northern Syria so this incident may be connected.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) now says it controls some 40 percent of Gaza City, which seems fairly robust for an operation that’s reportedly sparked heated arguments within the Israeli government over its slow pace. That territory doesn’t include the central city area, where most of northern Gaza’s remaining civilian population is concentrated and where Israeli forces may expect to meet stiffer resistance, so the most deliberate and intensive phase of the reconquest/leveling of the city is still to come. Palestinian officials in the territory reported that the IDF killed at least 30 people in Gaza City and 64 in total across Gaza on Thursday, including several strikes that targeted displacement shelters and tent encampments.
Hamas’s political leadership expressed openness on Wednesday to a new demand from Donald Trump for a settlement that would free all of the remaining Gaza captives. Trump claimed earlier in the day via social media that the carnage in Gaza “WILL END” if Hamas were to release those captives in one fell swoop rather than in a staged truce/ceasefire. Hamas leaders have repeatedly expressed interest in a deal that would completely end the current conflict while the Israeli government and US have insisted on the staged process. After Hamas agreed to the latest iteration of a staged ceasefire last month, Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly declared that he will only accept a full ceasefire and prisoner release. Israeli officials quickly rejected Hamas’s statement, calling it “more spin…that contains nothing new.” This is seemingly an open admission that there is now no ceasefire deal, regardless of how it’s structured, to which Netanyahu and company will agree.
According to a new investigation from +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian, Israeli authorities have identified just 25 percent of the 6000 or so Palestinians they’ve detained in Gaza since the October 7, 2023 attack as actual Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters. This is despite having labeled all of them as “unlawful combatants” in order to justify imprisoning them indefinitely without charge. Reporters determined these figures after reviewing “a classified database managed by Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate” alongside official prison statistics. This doesn’t discount the possibility that some of the other detainees belong to other militant factions, but those are all comparatively small and by the Israelis’ own figures they only account for “less than 2 percent” of these detainees.
According to Axios’s Barak Ravid, the idea of Israel annexing part of the West Bank has met with a mixed reception within the Trump administration. Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Marco Rubio is reportedly in favor, or at least “has signaled in private meetings that he doesn’t oppose” the idea and that “the Trump administration won’t stand in the way.” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, on the other hand, has argued that annexation would poison the US relationship with the Arab world and foreclose on the possibility of incorporating Saudi Arabia into the “Abraham Accords” anytime soon. As we noted yesterday the UAE has hinted that annexation could put its participation in the accords in jeopardy, though to be sure I will believe that when I see it. Also, the Trump administration blacklisted three Palestinian human rights organizations on Thursday, citing their involvement in the International Criminal Court’s investigation into Israel war crimes. It goes without saying that anyone who advocates for treating Palestinians as human beings is a potential threat to the United States and her allies.
YEMEN
Northern Yemen’s Houthi movement apparently attacked another commercial ship in the Red Sea on Thursday. There’s no indication of casualties or serious damage. This is at least the second such attack since an IDF strike late last week decimated the civilian government the organization had previously established, suggesting that if anything that strike has caused the Houthis to escalate their Red Sea campaign.
IRAN
The Iranian Foreign Ministry announced a downgrade in Tehran’s relationship with Australia on Thursday, a bit more than a week after the Australian government expelled Iranian ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi over alleged Iranian involvement in a pair of antisemitic attacks last year. In essence it’s expelled Australia’s ambassador and appears to be maintaining consular services only at its Canberra embassy, with no higher level diplomatic activity.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
The death toll from Sunday’s earthquake in eastern Afghanistan has risen to more than 2200 people with over 3600 injured, and questions are emerging as to whether or not the Afghan government’s policy of ostracizing women from public contributed to those figures. Male first responders, legally prohibited from interacting with unaccompanied women, may have simply left many of them untreated or even trapped under rubble until other women were available to assist them. This might have been ok if Afghanistan had enough female medical and rescue personnel to accommodate the need, but those are in short supply because the Afghan government has barred most educational and employment paths for women and girls.
PAKISTAN
Pakistani Taliban (TTP) fighters reportedly gunned down two security personnel near the Afghan border in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province overnight. Pakistani border guards launched an operation in the province in response to reports of TTP members leaving graffiti messages in villages along the border in order to intimidate residents.
THAILAND
The Thai monarchy has rejected the ruling Pheu Thai party’s request to dissolve parliament and schedule a snap election, following last week’s dismissal of former Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra. That means the legislature will vote on a new PM on Friday, with Bhumjaithai Party leader Anutin Charnvirakul expected to emerge victorious.
Elsewhere, The Diplomat’s Tom Fawthrop reports on the extent to which mines in Myanmar are polluting rivers in Thailand:
Mekong tributaries flowing from Myanmar to northern Thailand, once clear and pristine, have morphed into an ominous, murky shade of orange-yellow. The cause: abnormally high levels of arsenic. Satellite imaging has identified rare earth mining sites in Myanmar’s Shan State as the prime cause of devastating impacts on three Mekong tributary rivers.
Aweera Pakkamart, director of Regional Environmental and Pollution Control Office 1 (Chiang Mai) reported that “the Kok River showed high arsenic levels, while the Sai and Ruak rivers, also Mekong tributaries, had even higher levels, which in turn elevated the levels in the Mekong River.”
He warned, “This is no longer a local issue – it’s a regional cross-border, environmental crisis. The pollutants could reach the South China Sea.”
TAIWAN
US Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Jedidiah Royal held an unpublicized meeting with “a senior Taiwanese national security official” in Alaska last week, according to multiple media outlets including Reuters. This was the do-over for what was supposed to have been a visit by Taiwanese Defense Minister Wellington Koo to Washington earlier this year. The Trump administration canceled that meeting to avoid roiling trade negotiations with China. Reconfiguring it as a meeting in Alaska between two lower level officials may draw a mild complaint from Beijing but probably not anything especially serious.
AFRICA
MALI
Mali’s ruling junta announced on Thursday that it has taken its grievance with the Algerian government to the United Nations International Court of Justice. The Algerian military shot down a Malian drone earlier this year after claiming that it had entered Algerian airspace. Malian officials dispute that claim and have characterized the downing as an act of “blatant aggression” intended to hamper a military campaign against Tuareg rebels in northern Mali.
GHANA
Ghanaian officials say that an inter-communal territorial dispute in northern Ghana’s Savannah region turned violent last month and has left at least 31 people dead and almost 50,000 displaced since August 24. More than 13,000 of those displaced persons have fled the country entirely, crossing into neighboring Ivory Coast. At the root of the conflict, a “local chief” apparently sold a plot of land to private developers without consulting all of the relevant communities.
NIGERIA
The Nigerian military says it killed at least 28 jihadist fighters in two incidents in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state on Wednesday. According to this report it carried out an airstrike in the Sambisa forest area that killed at least 15 militants and its forces killed at least 13 Boko Haram fighters in fending off an attempted ambush on a military convoy. It’s unclear whether the airstrike targeted Boko Haram or its Islamic State West Africa Province offshoot/rival.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The Russian Foreign Ministry expelled an Estonian diplomatic staffer on Thursday. This was its retaliation for Estonia’s expulsion of a Russian diplomat last month for allegedly “undermining the constitutional order and legal system of Estonia.”
UKRAINE
Another meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing” on Thursday produced commitments from 26 countries to support postwar “security guarantees” for Ukraine, according to host and French President Emmanuel Macron. That number apparently does not include the US, but both Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed after the session that they’d spoken with Donald Trump and that US commitments to the cause will be “finalized” soon. We’ll see.
European leaders have been focusing most of their time and effort in recent weeks on crafting these “guarantees” because there’s really nothing else to be done with respect to the Russia-Ukraine peace process so long as the Russian government in particular refuses to participate. Whatever commitments The Gang is making are going to be purely hypothetical because any security guarantee that Ukraine gets will have to be part of a negotiation with Moscow. And as things stand right now there’s no indication that Russia will accept any guarantee at all, let alone the sort of robust guarantee that Zelensky seems to be expecting. The Russian Foreign Ministry reiterated after Thursday’s meeting that Moscow will not accept a foreign security force in postwar Ukraine, which is what Zelensky is seeking, “in any format.”
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
Foreign Affairs’ Hussein Kalout suggests that Donald Trump, by attempting to interfere in the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, is leading the US-Brazil relationship toward a breaking point:
Washington has undermined its credibility as a reliable partner to a friend with whom it has maintained more than two centuries of diplomatic and economic cooperation. Rather than furthering American (or Trump’s) interests, these measures have triggered a backlash in Brazil. Public opinion surveys indicate that a majority of Brazilians disapprove of Trump’s actions, which have helped erode support for Bolsonaro, weaken the ideological coherence of Brazil’s right-wing economic bloc, and alienate segments of the business elite. As a result, even conservative sectors once eager to play Washington’s tune are now more inclined to support the Brazilian government’s strategy of diversifying economic partnerships and reducing dependence on the United States.
The more the United States seeks to undermine Brazil’s sovereignty and destabilize its democratic institutions—including by implicitly advocating regime change—the more geopolitical space it creates for China to expand its already considerable influence in the country. Beijing has been steadily deepening its presence in Brazil through investments in critical areas such as energy, agriculture and food security, defense, advanced technology, automobile manufacturing, a joint satellite program, and strategic infrastructure such as ports. Most notably, China is building an ambitious transcontinental railway in Brazil to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. These developments not only erode Washington’s standing in Brazil but also recalibrate the broader regional balance of power.
For many policymakers in Brazil, this state of affairs is objectionable because it slows the emergence of their much-wanted multipolar world order. Instead of being able to balance relations with both the United States and its traditional rivals while also cultivating ties across the so-called global South, Brazil is being pushed toward a binary choice: align completely with Washington or with Beijing. Faced with growing threats from Washington, Brasília may ultimately conclude that its options are far starker than it expected.
ECUADOR
Marco Rubio visited Ecuador on Thursday, bringing with him $20 million in new US security assistance for President Daniel Noboa’s war on organized crime. The Trump administration further marked the occasion by designating two Ecuadorian gangs, Los Choneros and Los Lobos, as foreign terrorist organizations, further debasing that term in its effort to conflate counternarcotics and counterterrorism into one too-broad-to-be-useful category of military activity. Rubio also let it be known that the US would be happy to consider setting up a military base in Ecuador, an idea that Noboa has floated in the past.
VENEZUELA
Speaking of the conflation of drugs and terrorism, a “former senior federal law enforcement official” spoke to The New York Times about the Trump administration’s decision to bomb an allegedly Venezuelan speedboat that was allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean earlier this week. They apparently have some doubts about the administration’s narrative:
The former official, who has years of direct experience in fighting drug cartels, raised several other questions about the attack on the fast boat.
First, the former official said, Tren de Aragua was not known for handling large shipments of cocaine or fentanyl. Instead it was known to focus on smuggling what is known as pink cocaine — a psychedelic substance that is generally made by combining ketamine and MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, a stimulant that can cause hallucinations.
The former official also said it was unusual to have 11 people manning a vessel that could easily be crewed by two or three, especially since traffickers are always trying to maximize the amount of cargo space devoted to carrying drugs, not human beings.
In the former official’s opinion, it was more likely that the vessel was carrying migrants on a human smuggling run. It would be impossible to know for sure, however, given that any evidence of drug smuggling was destroyed in the attack.
One might argue that this uncertainty is a good reason not to allow any US president to assume the authority to blow up boats (or any other type of vehicle, for that matter) on what seems to have been very close to a whim. But that’s exactly what we’ve done in creating a system under which simply uttering the magic word “terrorist” grants presidents apparently absolute authority to do whatever the fuck they want. We’ll come back to this in a moment.
UNITED STATES
In US news:
Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Friday changing the name of the Department of Defense to the “Department of War.” He doesn’t actually have the authority to do this but presumably Congress will go along with it. This is pretty silly and will likely cost a great deal of money that could be put to better use on almost anything else, but it does offer the advantage of speaking plainly about what it is that the Pentagon does so maybe it will wind up serving some positive function somehow.
Wednesday brought more bad legal news for the Trump administration as a federal district judge ruled that it cannot simply refuse to spend money that has already been appropriated by Congress—specifically referring to some $4 billion in would-be foreign aid that the administration has unilaterally suspended. The administration now has until September 30 to release the funds unless Congress acts to rescind them. Presumably it will appeal the ruling.
On the subject of foreign aid, the administration said on Thursday that it is expanding the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief program a bit by helping to get two million people in low-income countries on the drug lenacapvir by 2028. Lenacapvir is a twice-a-year injection that apparently shows great promise as an HIV prevention treatment. Its manufacturer, Gilead Sciences, is reportedly working to roll out cheap generic versions of the drug and this PEPFAR initiative, undertaken in collaboration with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, is intended to bridge the proverbial gap until those generics are available.
Finally, questions are swirling around the US military strike on that alleged drug boat earlier this week (see above), and particularly around its legality. Reuters, for example, asks plainly “Was the deadly US attack on the Venezuelan vessel legal?” As is the case with most question headlines the answer is “no.” The Conversation’s Mary Ellen O'Connell explains:
The U.S. government is justifying its lethal destruction of a boat suspected of transporting illegal drugs in the Caribbean as an attack on “narco-terrorists.”
But as an expert on international law, I know that line of argument goes nowhere. Even if, as the U.S. claims, the 11 people killed in the Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. Naval strike were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, it would make no difference under the laws that govern the use of force by state actors.
Nor does the fact that protests from other nations in the region are unlikely, due in large part to Washington’s diplomatic and economic power – and President Donald Trump’s willingness to wield it.
Protest is not what proves the law. Unlawful killing is unlawful regardless of who does it, why, or the reaction to it. And in regard to the U.S. strike on the alleged Venezuelan drug boat, the deaths were unlawful.
Domestic U.S. legal issues aside – and concerns have been raised on those grounds, too – the killings in the Caribbean violated the human right to life, an ancient principle codified today in leading human rights treaties.