It is “the most sought-after weapon in the world”, said CNN. But the US-made Patriot interceptor, capable of shooting down ballistic missiles, is “the focus of a global supply crunch”, caused by “liberal use in the Gulf”, often just to counter Iranian drone attacks. Ukraine, which is being “savaged” by Russia’s “near-nightly surge” of ballistic-missile attacks, has “pretty much run out”.

What makes Patriot so special?

Patriot (Phased Array Tracking Radar for Intercept on Target) is a mobile surface-to-air missile defence system, and “considered one of the most advanced” in “the US arsenal”, said The Independent. Nineteen other countries buy and operate the system, and its interceptors protect cities and military bases across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Combined with other defences, Patriot has this year intercepted more than 90% of Iran’s missiles and drones, according to the US Congressional Research Service. It is also “the only weapon capable of shooting down Russian ballistic missiles fired at Ukraine”, said the Financial Times.

Countering tactical ballistic missiles is “not a simple or cheap activity”, said The Guardian. To intercept them, a defensive system “needs to be remarkably sophisticated”, and building it involves “a huge amount of research and development”. Most Nato nations “have been happy for Washington to invest over decades to make the Patriot up to the job”.

The US “tightly guards the technical blueprints required to manufacture it”, said The Telegraph. So far, only Germany and Japan are licensed to make their own. Donald Trump has talked of letting Ukraine produce them but seems lately to have backtracked; Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “desperate for the technology”.

What is the stockpile situation?

Even before the US attack on Iran, Western allies “were nervous about depleting their own stocks by giving Patriot missiles to Ukraine”, said The Guardian. But the Iran war has now “created an acute global shortage”.

The US and its Gulf allies fired 943 rounds of Patriot batteries in the first 96 hours of the conflict, according to the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For context, US manufacturer Lockheed Martin only makes 620 interceptors a year.

Ukraine’s Patriot supplies been exhausted, said The Guardian. Ballistic-missile intercepts “have gone from more than 70% to none”; Russia now strikes “with impunity”. In one recent bombardment of Kyiv, Ukraine’s defences failed to intercept a single missile; 17 people were killed.

The situation is “so acute” that Kyiv has stopped disclosing the number of missiles Russia fires, to “avoid revealing how many it fails to intercept”, and “preserve public morale", said the Financial Times. Zelenskyy has “pleaded with” the US and European countries “to share more” of their stockpile with Ukraine. But such is the current depleted state of those stockpiles, they could take “months or years to be replenished”.

What does it mean for the world?

Almost all the countries that operate the Patriot system are “reliant on US production and supply chains, meaning any shortage in the US effectively becomes a global shortage”, said The Telegraph.

And such a shortage raises “urgent” questions about whether the US and its allies can “keep up in a new arms race with Russia, Iran, China and North Korea”. With those nations “ramping up production” of ballistic missiles, “the defence side is falling behind”.

The US, Germany and Japan can produce about 840 Patriot interceptors a year, said The Guardian. Russia produces about 750 Iskander ballistic missiles a year and “is looking to increase” that total. It can often take two to three interceptors – or more – to defeat an incoming missile. “And Iran has many more missiles in storage.”

Some analysts see America’s “ongoing strikes and conclude that stockpile concerns are overblown”, said the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “That is the wrong inference.” US-led forces can keep striking Iran because their stocks of bombs are “plentiful”. But “the strategic constraint” is the number of interceptors that “hold enemy launchers” at bay and “keep bases alive”. Bombs “let you keep fighting the war you are in”; interceptors decide if you can “afford to fight the next one”. The war in Iran is “creating a strategic illusion”: bombing continues but US readiness for a “larger, second-theatre conflict quietly bleeds out”.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Tuesday night announced a three-day pause on 50% tariffs he had threatened to impose on $20 billion of Canadian imports. “Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL!” he said on social media, about 90 minutes before the midnight deadline. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the two sides had made “substantial progress,” but there’s “important work still to be done.”

Who said what

Trump’s tariffs “would have risked escalation into a trade war between the North American neighbors,” The Wall Street Journal said. But the “political impact would likely have been bigger than the economic one,” The Associated Press said. Canada had “threatened to retaliate” with “levies of its own,” and Trump would be “taking a risk by imposing a hefty new tariff” on consumer goods ahead of midterm elections, with U.S. voters “already frustrated with the high cost of living.”

What next?

Trump has “previously announced deals with other countries, only to have them fall through,” The New York Times said. But the U.S. and Canada both have “reason to step back from the brink,” the AP said. Long-term government borrowing costs “hit their highest in decades” on Tuesday, Reuters said, as “Trump’s policies — from tariffs to war — upend the global order.”

France has taken a major step to crack down on telemarketers with the passage of a new law. It may make French people happy, but at least one country across the Mediterranean Sea is concerned about the move. Moroccans worry the new French law, which bans unsolicited cold calls, could have a negative impact on Morocco’s job market.

What is the new French law?

The law means that French companies are no longer “allowed to advertise goods and services through such calls unless consumers previously gave their consent or if the calls are about a preexisting contract,” said The New York Times. While many countries have attempted to enact no-contact lists for telemarketers, the law represents a new, much more proactive approach in France. Violators of the law will be subject to fines of up to $86,000.

Previously, French people who “wanted to avoid marketing calls had to register their number with a government-run service, but consumer groups said some call centers ignored the list,” said The Associated Press. Officials hope the law will fix what has been a persistent issue in France; at least 97% of French people “are annoyed by telemarketing calls,” according to a 2025 report from France’s National Assembly, while 72% say they are contacted by telemarketers “at least once a week.”

Why are Moroccans up in arms?

Despite the joy in France, the feeling in Morocco is different. Given the nations’ close proximity, Morocco “represents a major market for telemarketing companies” contacting French customers, said the Times. Moroccan officials “indicated that between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs could be at risk of disappearing” because of the new law, according to Moroccan newspaper Le Matin. France represents the majority of the Moroccan industry; Morocco’s call center business “makes 80% of its revenue from phoning French customers,” said Semafor.

Small- and medium-sized telemarketing ventures are particularly vulnerable because they “represent more than 60% of the call center network in Morocco,” said Le Matin. Despite the controversial nature of telemarketers, the centers they operate generated nearly “1.3 billion dirhams [$140 million] in investment in 2023 and generate between 10 and 12 billion dirhams [$1.1 billion and $1.2 billion] in added value annually.” Morocco’s “low labor costs, a large French-speaking workforce and relatively weak unions” make the country an “attractive outsourcing destination,” said the AP.

Some in France are also lambasting the effects of the new law. The leader of France’s direct-selling trade association, Frédéric Billon, has “criticized the reforms for adding what he said were administrative burdens for businesses,” said BBC News. Telemarketing companies will “have to obtain written consent from your customer, and you'll also have to keep proof of that consent,” Billon told BBC News. Despite some of the pushback, polls show most French people favor the law, leading Morocco to explore other avenues.

Moroccan officials are currently “rolling out a plan to ease the impact of the French law and support the sector,” said Moroccan news outlet Hespress. The plan starts by “encouraging companies to expand into new markets in Europe, including Germany, Spain and Italy, as well as in Africa and Latin America.” Officials are also urging companies to “shift from traditional telemarketing to higher-value services, including technical support, digital logistics, consulting and market research.”

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has fired the starting gun on the next presidential election, and it’s shaping up to be the country’s closest and most consequential political contest in decades.

The left-wing leader, commonly known as Lula, has launched his campaign for a historic fourth term, vowing not to let the “shameless” right wing return to power. His chief rival will be Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting a coup after losing office in 2022.

But the “two-man race” between Lula and Bolsonaro has “increasingly become a three-way fight” involving Donald Trump, said The Wall Street Journal. Lula has accused the US president of trying to interfere in the October election on behalf of Bolsonaro, while “tit-for-tat visa disputes and US tariffs” have plunged US-Brazilian relations to “their lowest point in years”.

Who are the main contenders?

Lula, whose first two terms spanned 2003 to 2011 and was elected again in 2023, is seeking re-election for the centre-left Workers’ Party. If the 80-year-old wins, Brazil would be the only left-wing major economy left in South America. Flávio Bolsonaro, a 45-year-old senator, “is running as the political heir to his father”, said The Wall Street Journal. There are several other conservative and right-wing candidates but all are currently polling in the single digits.

If no one wins more than 50% of the votes on 4 October, the two frontrunners will progress to a second-round runoff on 25 October. A BTG Pactual/Nexus ​poll reported this week by Reuters suggests that a runoff would see Lula receive 47%, with Bolsonaro on 44%.

What is the likely outcome?

Lula’s approval ratings are high: certainly at “levels at which incumbents can expect to win”, said The Economist. And Bolsonaro’s campaign “took a mighty blow in May”, when leaked recordings revealed he had asked for money from a “disgraced banker at the heart of Brazil’s largest-ever bank fraud”.

But “there could still be an upset”: Lula is “seen as weak” on corruption and crime – both top voter concerns. He also spent 19 months in prison for corruption himself before his conviction was overturned on a technicality in 2021. “Many voters have never forgiven him.”

It’s possible that disillusioned voters, “unenthusiastic” about either Lula or Bolsonaro, could boost the prospects of the currently low-polling Renan Santos, leader of the Missão party. A former entrepreneur, the “firebrand outsider”, who “models himself” on Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, criticises both Bolsonaro and Lula in “slick videos posted to millions of followers”.

What is Trump up to?

Trump has already interfered in several Latin American elections since he returned to the White House, said The Economist. And “right-wing lookalikes” have won the past seven. Experts say the Brazilian vote will “serve as a test case of how far Trump and an increasingly co-ordinated global right are willing to go to reshape Latin America’s political landscape”, said The Wall Street Journal.

The US president has recently “turned up the heat on Brazil”, said The Guardian. He has proscribed Brazil’s two biggest criminal groups as terrorist organisations, a move that some observers fear could be laying the groundwork for “a US military intervention”. Trump has also revoked the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to Washington, after Brasilia withheld approval of Trump’s own ambassadorial nominee, and denied entry to several US diplomats it accused of planning to meddle in the election.

“This reflects a dangerous convergence between Washington’s long-standing interventionist instincts in Latin America” and “the interests of Brazil’s far right”, said Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko Garcia on Al Jazeera.

What happened

Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy and son-in-law, reportedly met Sunday with Hamas political leader Khalil al-Hayya in Egypt as the White House and regional allies attempt to revive the Trump-backed proposal for peace in Gaza. Representatives from Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and Trump’s Board of Peace also attended the meeting.

Who said what

Trump said last month that Hamas had agreed to his Gaza road map, but the plan “​​appeared to hit a dead end” when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rejected it, The New York Times said. Hamas leaders on Sunday “reaffirmed their commitment to disarm and demilitarize” as Israel withdraws from Gaza, Axios said. Kushner “used the rare direct meeting to press Hamas for tangible steps,” warning that “Israel doesn’t trust the group to follow through.”

Hamas told mediators it was waiting for Israel to agree to the plan so they could “work out a timetable for implementation,” The Associated Press said. Instead, Israel “has resumed airstrikes in the past few days,” Reuters said.

What next?

Kushner and Board of Peace members Nickolay Mladenov and Tony Blair are set to meet with Netanyahu on Monday. The Israeli leader “faces a challenging election on Oct. 27” with a “coalition that includes ministers taking a harsh line on Gaza,” the AP said, and it’s “not clear whether he will take decisive steps on the ceasefire before then.”

What happened

President Donald Trump said on social media Sunday night he had instructed the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” America’s annual joint military exercises with South Korea, citing their cost, his own “very good relationship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Seoul’s disinclination to join the U.S. in the Iran war. The defensive drills, which began this week, are “totally inappropriate and hostile,” he said, as North Korea “has been unthreatening and respectful” while he is president.

Who said what

This is the “latest example” of Trump “appearing to turn against an ally in favor of a leader that previous administrations have cast as an adversary,” The Associated Press said. North Korea has been “pushing hard to enlarge its nuclear and missile arsenals since Kim’s high-stakes diplomacy with Trump collapsed in 2019.” Trump may intend this as “part of a larger effort to create a diplomatic opportunity” with Kim, Jenny Town at the Stimson Center think tank told Reuters, but the “haphazard nature of this move is unlikely to make much of an impression in Pyongyang.”

The Pentagon was “taken aback” by Trump’s “convoluted social media post,” The New York Times said, citing a senior U.S. military official. “We need South Korea as an ally more than ever to maintain deterrence on the Korean Peninsula and to reinforce our industrial base in critical sectors like shipbuilding and semiconductors,” Hudson Institute Asian security expert Patrick Cronin told The Wall Street Journal. “We should not punish Seoul for our lack of a strategy in the Middle East.”

What next?

The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises are scheduled to last until Aug. 27.

Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to scale back annual joint military exercises with South Korea after the country stayed out of the war with Iran.

Writing on Truth Social, the US president said the exercises “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his second term. He also noted that South Korea had recently declined to join the US in the “denuclearisation” of Iran.

What did the commentators say?

The US is losing the Iran conflict, so Trump has “taken the logical next step” of “punishing” a “loyal American friend”, said Tom Nichols on The Atlantic.

In fact, “scaling back the exercise” is an “insane” decision but in “Trump’s world, every loss, every defeat, is a personal insult”, and “when things go wrong, someone must be held responsible” and, of course, “that someone is never Donald Trump”.

So the world is “witnessing a public exhibition of narcissistic rage” because Trump “embarked on a war for personal glory”, but “what he got instead was ongoing humiliation”.

The Chinese, Russians and North Koreans will “draw the appropriate lessons from this deranged policy”, and notice that “when Trump fails, he hurts those he feels safe hurting”.

It is the “latest example” of Trump “appearing to turn against an ally in favour of a leader that previous administrations have cast as an adversary”, wrote Konstantin Toropin and Alanna Durkin Richer on The Associated Press. It’s a particularly “sharp turnaround” from how his administration has viewed South Korea recently.

The announcement could be “part of an effort to divert attention” from the war in Iran, which has “left energy costs high”. This has become a “sensitive economic issue” ahead of the US midterm elections, said The Korea Times.

It could “trigger a debate over whether the scaling down of joint exercises could affect the allies’ deterrence” against North Korea as the “recalcitrant regime has been doubling down on its nuclear and ballistic missile programs”.

The “sudden” announcement “risks renewing concerns” that “US forces are too stretched to support crucial Western allies or maintain deterrence against autocracies that threaten them”, said Brad Lendon on CNN. It’s also a “gift” to Kim Jong Un at a time when he has “ramped up his own nation’s threat to global stability and offered no concessions in return”.

What next?

Experts told the BBC that the “walking back” of these joint military exercises could “carry a high cost with relatively little benefit”.

They are “essential for military forces to be ready and capable of doing their jobs”, Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, told the broadcaster.

“Scaling them back” could “damage alliance coordination”, as well as “slow the process of South Korea taking on greater responsibility for its own defence, and weaken deterrence against possible conflicts in Asia”.

In a statement, South Korea’s presidential Blue House said it was reviewing Trump’s comments and added that it hoped a favourable relationship between Washington and Pyongyang could lead to meaningful talks.

The disappearance of 43 students in 2014 has come to symbolise Mexico’s “brutal cartel violence and government impunity”, said The Guardian.

The case “rocked” the nation, and continues to “haunt” it. Now, the former governor of the state of Guerrero has been formally charged over his alleged involvement, after a judge ruled that Mexico’s attorney general had sufficient evidence to proceed.

Ángel Aguirre, who resigned as governor a month after the students vanished, is accused of “forced disappearance”, as well as the “obstruction of justice”: ordering the destruction of surveillance footage that “may have shed light on what happened”. He was ordered to remain in maximum-security detention pending trial. A lawyer for Aguirre denied any wrongdoing.

An elaborate cover-up

In September 2014, 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College “commandeered several buses” in the city of Iguala, Guerrero state, to get to a protest in Mexico City, said The Associated Press.

The local cartel is believed to have attacked the students “in collusion with security forces as well as local, state and federal authorities, including the millitary”. The students are presumed to have been killed, but only bone fragments of three of them have ever been identified.

Now, the federal prosecutor’s office has confirmed what international investigators “denounced years ago”: that camera footage, which recorded the moment security forces stopped a bus, was “hidden or destroyed to conceal evidence”.

It shows the students “lying face-down on the back of police pick-up trucks as they were spirited out of the city”, said the BBC. An initial investigation concluded that “corrupt municipal police” had “handed the students over” to the cartel, but that federal police and the military had been “uninvolved”. This provoked “widespread scepticism”; international experts called the findings “scientifically impossible”.

It was an “elaborate cover-up”, said The Guardian. Suspects were “tortured into giving false confessions”, and evidence from the crime scene was “manipulated”. A “years-long international investigation” later determined that both federal police and the military were involved, either by “participating directly”, or “failing to intervene as the students were taken away” and killed.

A state crime

The case, considered one ​of Mexico’s “worst human-rights atrocities”, has been “marred by missteps and interference”, said Reuters.

The Mexican government’s 2022 truth commission concluded that the cartel, Guerreros Unidos, and government authorities had been involved. Then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador described the case as a “state crime”. But almost all of those detained have since been released. Many claim López Obrador’s administration “blocked the investigation as it began to close in on the military”, said the BBC.

Last year, President Claudia Sheinbaum formed an investigative unit to re-examine the case, and the new attorney general, Ernestina Godoy, began a re-analysis. Godoy said new testimony had helped establish that Aguirre not only requested the footage, but had ordered its destruction. The concealment was “the result of a malicious operation, deliberately orchestrated from the highest levels of the State Executive Branch”, she told reporters last week.

“Key questions” still remain unanswered, said AP News. The motive is also “unclear”. Authorities believe the case is linked to “heroin trafficking in buses to the US”, organised by the cartel “in collusion with authorities”. But Aguirre’s indictment is the “biggest breakthrough” since the 2022 arrest of Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general in 2014, said The Guardian. Karam faces charges of forced disappearance, obstruction of justice and torture.

“We want no more deception,” said Meltión Ortega, spokesperson for the 43 students. The victims “deserve to have the actual perpetrators and the masterminds punished”.

Growth may be slowing, but Russia’s economy is essentially sound. That’s the message Vladimir Putin is keen to purvey; and by way of proof he cites Russia’s incredibly low unemployment rate: just 2.1%. He’s got it back to front, said Alexander Kolyandr in The Spectator.

Far from being a comfort, this figure should cause Putin huge alarm. It underscores the fact that his nation is undergoing its worst labour crisis in decades: it “has run out of workers”. The crisis has its roots in the low birth rates of the 1990s, but the war in Ukraine has “poured fuel on it”.

Woefully inefficient remedies

It certainly has, said the Luxembourg Times. Men are being sent to the front in vast numbers: the target number of contract soldiers to be signed up this year is 409,000. And the high pay they’re being offered as a lure is crippling the economy. In 2022, a contract soldier’s monthly salary was about four times the average Russian wage. It’s now closer to twice the average wage because the defence industry (employment in military production has risen by half a million since 2021), the railways and other big state sectors have all had to hike up wages in an effort to compete. As a result, companies in the civilian sector are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.

Yet the remedies the Kremlin has pursued to tackle the crisis have been woefully insufficient, said Samuel Bendett and Maria Snegovaya in Foreign Policy. Expanding forced prison labour, a familiar Soviet strategy, is no longer an option as so many convicts have already been sent to the front lines. (The jail population has shrunk from 465,000 in 2021 to 282,000.) So too with the plan to open jobs hitherto deemed too physically taxing or dangerous to women, as their number in Russia’s labour market is remarkably high already.

Economic ‘death zone’

Such measures fail to get to grips with the sheer scale of the problem, said Mathias Brüggmann in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 1.4 million Russian soldiers have been killed or badly wounded. The only solution to Russia’s chronic labour shortage is increased migration.

Yet since March 2024, when Tajik terrorists killed 149 people in an attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, the Kremlin has gone in the opposite direction, imposing harsh new rules on migrants, especially those from the former Soviet states in Central Asia – Russia’s largest immigrant group. Their number has fallen dramatically. Issuing 70,000 Chinese and 34,000 Indians work permits this year hasn’t been nearly enough to plug the gap.

In fact, Russia’s economy has now entered “the death zone”, said Alexandra Prokopenko in The Economist. The budget deficit is spiralling out of control; export revenues are falling. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk of fiscal crisis, of institutional collapse, “of damage so severe no post-war policy can repair it”.

What happened

The Navy is sending the aircraft carrier USS George Washington from the South China Sea to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln, U.S. officials said Thursday, amid growing concerns over deteriorating mental health and living conditions aboard the Lincoln after more than 260 days at sea. The ship, which hasn’t made a port call in more than 200 days, has been supporting U.S. military actions against Iran since January.

Separately, President Donald Trump signed a national security memorandum directing the Navy to “tear out a complex system for launching jet fighters from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults,” The Wall Street Journal said. This “would likely cost billions of dollars,” The Associated Press said, and “revert the Navy’s most advanced ships to a system that takes more sailors to operate and is more difficult to maintain.”

Who said what

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday said reports about deplorable conditions on the Lincoln have been “completely misrepresented.” But “concerns about the ship’s roughly 5,000 service members mounted” amid reports of “family members describing suicidal ideation and food shortages,” NOTUS said, and several attempts “to jump overboard.” At least one sailor did go overboard earlier this month, before being rescued, U.S. officials told CNN. “The Navy considered the incident a mental health episode.”

What next?

Trump’s directive to retrofit new aircraft carriers with steam catapults comes as the U.S. military is “trying to find funding from Congress for all its desired equipment,” the AP said, and “as the Navy is struggling to fill its ships with enough sailors.”

“It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game,” said Donald Trump at the weekend, as an impasse over diplomatic discussions and disruption in the Strait of Hormuz continue. By letting economic pressure mount, we are “low-keying it” with Iran, Trump told Axios, and “only semi-negotiating with them”.

In response, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said that whether “lights out or lights on, Iranians showed they are professional chess players”.

With no end to the war in sight, inflation on the rise, fuel rationing and continued threats of strikes, the vast majority of the Iranian population appear not to be players, but pawns.

‘Extensive’ damage

Speaking openly about politics in Iran still “carries obvious risks”, said Nawal Al-Maghafi in The Guardian. Within Iran there is “no single narrative of the war”, with some believing it has “strengthened national unity”, and others saying it has only “deepened repression”. Nonetheless, the country has been “transformed” by the war and, as the conflict carries on, “so does the struggle to shape the legacy it will leave behind”.

Iran is facing “extensive” damage from US attacks, estimated to be “running in the hundreds of billions of dollars”, said Maziar Motamedi in Al Jazeera. But this plays into “decades-old economic structural issues” and being continually “strained by years of Western sanctions and local mismanagement”. During both world wars, the US and Israel “systematically bombed” ports, bridges, roads and other civilian infrastructure, and the country has a long history of internet shutdowns and a “cash-strapped” government.

Now, inflation has risen to “nearly 90%” in the last month, with food inflation “hitting 134%”, compared to a year earlier. Following two wars in less than a year, conflict with the US is “showing no signs of abating”.

Many Iranians feel “abandoned” by the West, said Roxana Saberi and Fatemeh Jamalpour in The Times. They believe the US and others have “largely stood by during the recent executions and the January massacre”. The crackdown since January has left Iranians with “widespread trauma” that “spans generations and classes”. The “greatest source of trauma” is the “inaction” of the international community, said head of a survivor charity Azadeh Afsahi. “If these Western countries have democracy, how come they don’t care to see that the Iranian people are suffering?”

Opinion is ‘far from uniform’

There is still a “fervour” among those who support the regime, said Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4. In June, the “streets were full” of people for national celebrations, and children fired foam darts at “targets bearing the faces of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump was by far the most popular face to fire at.” Many are still eager to “express their love of country and their hatred of the enemy”. In many ways, ironically, it “reminds you of the most fired-up Maga supporters in America”.

Yet for others, the “greatest fear” is that “the war will end with the Islamic Republic still in power”, said Kelly J. Shannon on the Atlantic Council. However the conflict ends, the “remnants of the regime” will likely become “further entrenched and even more oppressive”. The massacres after protests in January, and an April order to “speed up executions of political prisoners”, support state television warnings that “any dissidents will be killed”. In the eyes of the Islamic Republic, the Iranian population is the “enemy, and it is willing to use any and all measures to keep them in line”.

Ultimately, “Iranian society is diverse, politically complex, and far from uniform,” said Mahmoud Rasouli on the European Consortium for Political Research. “Citizens hold differing views about domestic reform, foreign relations, economic priorities, and the country’s future.”

Yet this does not translate to political influence. Both Washington and Tehran invoke the interests of the Iranian people, but never do they allow such interests to “directly determine the direction of the conflict”. This creates a “paradox”: the Iranian people are “central” to the language used around the war, but “peripheral” in the “decision-making processes that shape their future”. They are neither “invisible spectators nor the main architects of the conflict”, but the “primary stakeholders in a confrontation largely shaped by others”.

A growing feud between the United States and Brazil has put both nations’ diplomatic corps on high alert, as South America’s largest economy finds itself on the receiving end of a Trumpian diplomatic spat. This month, Washington revoked the visa of Brazilian Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti after Brasilia refused visas for several Trump administration officials whom authorities claimed were planning to denounce the country’s leftist government.

Brazil has said it will not formally accept Trump’s Senate-approved ambassador pick, Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez, until after its October election. The country also complained that the United States had named Perez before completing certain diplomatic obligations.

‘Protocol can double as a weapon’

The visa cancellation is the “latest split” between “two governments that have spent the past year oscillating between confrontation and detente,” said The New York Times. But this episode is “very, very unique and severe,” said Brazilian political science professor Carlos Poggio to the outlet. Visa revocations are typically reserved for diplomatic foes, but “Brazil is not a U.S. adversary. It’s actually a major ally.”

“On the surface,” the diplomatic kerfuffle “may seem like tit-for-tat pettiness,” said Puck. “True practitioners of statecraft” understand that “protocol can double as a weapon.” Countries whose diplomatic corps “undergo some of the most rigorous training in the world” are “not naive about the message Washington is sending.”

Voiding Viotti’s visa “is not an isolated incident,” said the office of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a statement to NBC. Rather, it is part of a “deliberate escalation of hostile measures” fueled by “ideological motives that are incompatible with a bilateral partnership that has always been guided by mutual respect.”

Questioning Trump’s ‘confrontational approach’

Some in the Brazilian diplomatic corps have questioned why Trump is “rushing to have an ambassador in Brasilia only months before October’s election,” said The Associated Press — particularly given that the post has been “vacant since Trump returned to the White House” last year. The deepening rift comes as da Silva, a leftist, runs for a fourth term.

His opponent this time is Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, himself a “close Trump ally on the political right” who was convicted of “trying to overturn the results of the last election,” said The Washington Post. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one State Department official decried Washington’s “confrontational approach” to the outlet. “Each time Brasilia portrays itself as standing up to Trump,” said the official, the leftist government’s “standing in the polls only improves.”

“This isn’t just about Brazil,” said Orna Blum, a former senior State Department official who focused on Brazil, to Puck. “It’s part of a pattern.” The Trump administration has aligned itself with “far-right political movements from Germany’s AfD to Marine Le Pen in France, and now with Jair Bolsonaro and his son Flávio in Brazil.” Being seen as “picking sides in another democracy’s elections” under Trump has “cost America credibility with allies around the world.”

A wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is gathering pace across Africa, driven by political opportunism and rising anti-Western sentiment, and fuelled by US far-right groups.

Last week 71 men were arrested in Senegal and charged with “unnatural acts”, said the public prosecutor’s office, under a strict new law that has doubled the maximum prison sentence for same-sex relations to 10 years. It also criminalised the “promotion” of homosexuality, including any public representation or financial support.

Senegal has criminalised same-sex sexual activity since 1966, but hostility towards LGBTQ+ people has “intensified in recent years”, said Human Rights Watch. Since the new law came into force in March, more than 100 people have been charged, including “local celebrities”, said AfricaNews. Senegal is one of several African countries to have introduced or intensified its anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in recent years. Activists say LGBTQ+ people are being “scapegoated by politicians”.

What’s the background?

In 2023, Uganda hosted the first African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty. Many argue this forum has “influenced anti-LGBTQ+ laws” across Africa, said The Guardian. The annual gatherings have been endorsed by Family Watch International, a US-based Christian campaign group that “opposes abortion” and sex education.

Later that year, Uganda introduced “one of the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ laws”, said Africa News with Agence France-Presse. It included life imprisonment for same-sex sex, and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, which includes same-sex sex while HIV-positive, or with minors. Uganda “set the tone”, and other countries “followed suit”.

Since then, three neighbouring former French colonies – Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – have all tightened restrictions on same-sex relations, after being taken over by military juntas in a series of coups. In December 2024, Mali criminalised same-sex relations for the first time. Burkina Faso followed last September, introducing prison terms of up to five years. In February, Niger criminalised same-sex sexual activity for the first time, with same-sex marriage punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Today, 33 of Africa’s 54 countries criminalise LGBTQ+ people “in some form”, said Human Dignity Trust: more than any other region. In some countries, including Somalia and Mauritania, the punishment is death.

What’s the latest?

In Senegal, which borders Mali, MPs unsuccessfully sought to increase jail terms and penalties for “acts against nature” in 2022 and 2024. But in March this year, after a “wave of arrests over alleged same‑sex relationships”, parliament passed the new law by an “overwhelming majority”, said the BBC. Dismissing international criticism, the government said the legislation “reflected the views of Senegalese people”. But funding from US conservative movements may have helped “precipitate” the law, French-Senegalese expert Marame Kane told The Guardian.

In June, Ghana’s parliament voted to pass “one ‌of Africa’s most draconian anti-LGBTQ bills”, said openDemocracy. Same-sex relations were already criminalised, but this latest version of the bill (introduced in 2021) would impose prison terms for “promoting” same-sex relations. If signed into law, it would make identifying as LGBTQ+ “punishable by up to three years in prison”.

Days later, Ghana hosted this year’s family values conference, attended by “members of far-right and Christian groups in the Global North”. The conference produced a new African Charter on Family Sovereignty and Values, which encouraged governments to “withdraw from international treaties or funding agreements that promote ‘the LGBT agenda’, abortion and sex education”. Critics warned the charter could “entrench anti-LGBTQ laws across the continent”. Despite protests, lawmakers from 18 of the 20 countries represented voted to approve it.

What’s driving the shift?

The “shift toward more restrictive laws” is being “encouraged by conservative figures” in the US and Europe, said Reuters. It has “gained new momentum since Donald Trump returned to the White House”. Some conference attendees said they “saw an opportunity to promote their agendas under Trump”.

Ugandan people are also “very highly homophobic”, Ugandan activist Agather Atuhaire told Africa News. Politicians “want something that is going to put them in their good books”.

LGBTQ+ people are “scapegoats”, one activist told Africa News, used to “deflect attention from thorny subjects” or rising discontent. They are also viewed as a “symbol of Western dominance in Africa”, said Ivorian anthropologist Stephane Ballet Djedje. The new anti-LGBTQ+ laws are linked to rising anti-Western sentiment across former colonies, particularly where military juntas have seized power. In Burkina Faso, the law was “framed as boosting its sovereignty in opposition to the West”, said The Guardian.

“Proponents of so-called African ‘family values’ have long portrayed the issue as a religious and moral concern,” said openDemocracy. But they are “increasingly recasting it as part of Africa’s fight against neo-colonialism”.

What does Enid Blyton’s Land of Spells have in common with the Bay of Pentos in “Game of Thrones”? asked The Guardian. Both were portrayed by the same “sunny archipelago in the Mediterranean”: Malta.

The EU’s smallest country, “no bigger in size than Sheffield”, has over the past decade become “one of the most popular places” for American and British filmmakers to work. It has hosted more than 30 film and TV productions in each of the past three years, including “Jurassic World Rebirth” and Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II”. The “microstate” just south of Sicily has stood in for Greece, southern France and even the Caribbean – in Guy Ritchie’s upcoming “Viva la Madness”.

Malta is “really punching above its weight”, said Adrian Wootton, the chief executive of the British Film Commission. It’s been “very aggressive, in a positive way”.

Small but mighty

Over the last century, the “small but mighty” republic has become “an appealing global destination for major film productions”, said Variety in 2024. After the Hollywood actors strike the previous year, requests to film came in “like crazy”, said co-founder of Valletta Pictures Joshua Cassar Gaspar. “The strikes didn’t affect us because the independent productions kept going, and many of us in Malta service TV shows, which were also unaffected.”

Providers were also less “Hollywood-dependent” than some European countries, such as the UK, said the news site. And productions benefited from a “hefty 40% tax rebate”. It’s probably “the most generous cash rebate in the world”, the producer of “Gladiator II” said on Deadline.

“Every euro that we invest in the rebate, the industry generates back four,” Malta’s film commissioner Johann Grech said in June. Today, film production is one of Malta’s “most effective” sources of investment, he said in MaltaToday. According to an independent report published this year, the industry contributed 0.28% of Malta’s gross value added between 2005 and 2017. That reached a record 2.16% in 2023. Since 2018, film production has contributed €1.2 billion to the GDP.

And “the economic effect is felt throughout the country”, driving infrastructure development, boosting hospitality and tourism, and attracting “numerous high-net-worth individuals” to the island. Film production is “one of Malta’s economic engines”.

A parallel universe?

As ever with “generous rebates”, there has been “some local pushback”, said Deadline. Malta’s infrastructure is “being tested to the limits as its cities, towns and villages regularly turn into film sets”, said The Guardian. Road closures and parking restrictions “have become a bugbear” for locals.

Critics say Malta’s rise as a filming location has “come at the cost of neglecting local cinematic talent”. The Malta Film Commission is “focused on courting international productions”, while domestic production is dependent on the arts council and its much smaller budget. Examples of Maltese films reaching international audiences are “few and far between”. With local crews in demand from international companies, Maltese directors “often find themselves being outbid by Hollywood”.

“There’s a bit of a parallel universe,” said Teodor Reljić, a Malta-based screenwriter. “People in servicing are thriving, but local filmmakers can’t pay a DOP [director of photography] because they are expecting ‘Jurassic World’ fees.”

“It is tempting to sit back and believe the local film industry to be ‘strong’ simply because many foreign productions shoot in Malta,” said producer Malcolm Scerri Ferrante in The Times of Malta. But volume alone “does not constitute a robust film industry, and certainly not an indigenous one”.

What happened

A Syrian court on Tuesday sentenced ousted President Bashar al-Assad to death, finding him guilty of murder, torture and crimes against humanity committed before and during Syria’s bloody 14-year civil war. Assad, his younger brother Maher and six of the seven other former officials handed death sentences by the Damascus court were tried in absentia. Assad’s cousin Atef Najib stood in a cage in the courtroom for the verdicts.

Who said what

Tuesday’s verdicts were the “first against Assad or any members of his inner circle since his family’s five decades in power came to an end 20 months ago,” The Associated Press said. They are “mostly symbolic” for Assad and his brother, who both fled to exile in Russia after their government’s “stunning collapse.” The sentences were nonetheless “met with celebrations” across the country, The New York Times said. Many Syrians have become “increasingly resentful and impatient at the lack of accountability” and the “pace of trials,” even as legal experts “cautioned that transitional justice takes time.”

What next?

The verdicts handed down by Syria’s “transitional authorities” should “set a strong legal precedent for others accused of crimes” under the previous regime, said Al Jazeera. Syria’s National Commission for Transitional Justice said Najib can appeal his verdict but the absent defendants forfeited that right.

What happened

President Donald Trump left a NATO summit in Turkey last month aboard an alternate military aircraft after publicly boarding Air Force One, then secretly exiting from the plane’s opposite side in an “airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight,” The Washington Post reported Monday, citing U.S. officials and “corroborating material.” The “elaborate deception” to “spirit” Trump out of the region was prompted by a credible “threat against him and Air Force One from Iran,” The New York Times said.

Who said what

The “furtive operation” was apparently “developed in a matter of hours,” the Times said. Reporters flying with Trump were not told of the deception, thereby “making them unwitting participants in the ruse and leaving them, along with some White House staff members, to serve as unknowing decoys.” The journalists and staffers were not “made aware of the extent of the threat on Air Force One,” the Post said.

When reporters asked Trump later why they had been advised to keep their window shades closed on the flight from Ankara to Britain, he said they were “probably on a dangerous flight,” but since he’s Iran’s top target, “if I go, you go.”

What next?

Asked about the reports, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said “many enemies of America” have “their sights on” Trump and “we use every tool at our disposal to address those threats.”

Ukrainian drones have hit 23 Wildberries warehouses across Russia in just three weeks, said Nataliya Vasilyeva in The New York Times. Known widely as “Russia’s Amazon”, the e-commerce giant has been targeted by Ukrainian long-range drones, with a fire breaking out overnight at a facility in Voronezh.

Ukraine claims that the company, founded in 2004 by now-multi-billionaire Tatyana Kim and has disputed links to the Kremlin, is aiding the Russian war effort. The retailer denies this.

Attacking the distribution network of one of Russia’s principal companies will increase financial pressure on consumers and retailers alike, but the longer-term threats to the Russian economy could pose a significant threat to the Kremlin.

What did the commentators say?

Wildberries, as a “linchpin of Russia’s consumer market”, is an “obvious target”, said Vasilyeva in The New York Times. It can access even the “most remote corners of the country”, making its reach in Russia “unmatched”. It is the most popular marketplace platform in the country, with 79 million people – more than half of the population – using it every month.

The strikes have “disproportionately affected” the “one million Russian sellers” who rely on the site for visibility and distribution. In a fractured country whose vast size poses significant business challenges, Wildberries’ 95,000 pick-up points “represent a sense of economic normalcy” for both retailers and consumers, “which the Kremlin has been eager to preserve” amid sanctions and economic pressure from the war.

Since the outbreak of the conflict, Wildberries has been championed as a “symbol of Russian ingenuity and resilience despite Western sanctions”, said The Wall Street Journal.

On the surface, it is a success story of economic growth, employing more than 15,000 people, having tripled its workforce last year alone. But with ties to “Kremlin-linked oligarch” Suleyman Kerimov, it is demonstrative of “Putin’s determination to restrict control over the engines of the economy to a cadre of businesspeople loyal to him”.

Ukraine’s reasons for striking Wildberries “appear to be two-fold”, said The Independent. Ukraine insists the platform is a “legitimate” target due to its involvement in “Russia's wartime logistics and economic infrastructure”. But the overwhelming motivation is a financial one. Alongside its smaller competitor Ozon and other rivals, Wildberries accounts for around 8.5% of Russia’s GDP and supports around four million jobs, “more than 5% of Russia’s workforce”. Signalled by the government purchasing a 5% stake in the company, Wildberries is considered “central to plans for economic growth”.

“Whatever the stated military rationale, the economic consequences extend far beyond the front line of war,” said finance expert Yerzhan Tokbolat on The Conversation. This latest tactic is making the “economic costs of the war harder for ordinary Russians to ignore”. The significance of the Wildberries strikes may not just be the destruction of warehouses, but rather found in the “millions of Russians whose incomes, shopping and sense of normality depend on them”.

The Kremlin’s protestation that Ukraine is attacking Russia’s civilian economy with their attacks on Wildberries “smacks of complete hypocrisy”, said Liam Nolan, Eastern Europe reporter at RTÉ. Russian forces have been destroying businesses and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine for the last four-and-a-half years, “despite the Kremlin’s insistence that it does not target civilian areas”.

Government drives to expand “long-range drone production and greater investment in deep-strike technology” have certainly pressed home the advantage. But Kyiv’s ultimate goal in targeting Wildberries – and Russia’s infrastructure more generally – is to “gain leverage in the negotiating process, whenever it restarts”.

What next?

Support for Putin will “not automatically weaken” because of these attacks, said Tokbolat on The Conversation. As of 28 July, the government announced it had been considering “loans, tax relief and subsidies” to maintain businesses, “but no decision had been made”. In fact, they could “reinforce patriotic sentiment” against Ukraine, and “generate solidarity with affected Russian businesses, rather than anger towards the Kremlin”.

“The greater political risk is cumulative.” The knock-on effects of fuel shortages and subsequent price increases, as well as a decline in small businesses, will make it harder to maintain the impression that “the war can continue without significantly changing everyday life in Russia”. But beyond outward support, Russia’s campaign depends on the “willingness of households and businesses to absorb the costs of war”. By placing a major economic engine, which affects everyday consumption, in its crosshairs, “Ukraine is testing that willingness”.

Colombia’s short-lived era of leftist leadership has ended, as far-right politician Abelardo de la Espriella takes office as the nation’s 36th president. Unlike his predecessor Gustavo Petro, who was the only left-wing president in modern Colombian history, de la Espriella wants to shift the South American country to the right. He is also dealing with a major natural disaster in his first days in office.

What did the commentators say?

The new president represents a “sharp” turn from former President Gustavo Petro, who “stopped awarding new oil and gas exploration contracts while pushing Colombia toward renewable energy” and encouraging a “global transition away from fossil fuels,” said The Associated Press. De la Espriella instead has pledged that “energy security would be a cornerstone of his administration,” as he makes plans to “revive the country’s oil and gas sector, restore state-owned energy company Ecopetrol and strengthen the electricity system.”

Alongside this energy agenda, de la Espriella will also be making changes stemming from his stance on social issues, including crime and drug trafficking. He has “promised to confront rebel groups in Colombia with greater military force while cutting government spending to reduce a budget deficit,” said NPR. In a symbolic move, de la Espriella was inaugurated not in the capital of Bogotá but in Cali, a city which has been “hit hard by drug violence and attacks from rebel groups.”

De la Espriella also “campaigned on promises to crush his country’s powerful drug traffickers with the help of the United States” and in collaboration with the right-wing Trump administration, said The New York Times. The White House has “made targeting traffickers in Latin America a priority,” although before de la Espriella’s election, President Donald Trump “made little headway with Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer and traditionally Washington’s closest ally in the region.”

Overall, Colombia’s new leader is “basically shifting the entire region, especially South America, toward the right,” the Washington Office on Latin America’s Gimena Sánchez said to PBS News. De la Espriella will be “feeling the pressure to make really big moves from the get-go because there’s so much expectation from the U.S. that he’s going to be hard on narcotraffickers.” It could “have a tremendous influence on the direction that Colombia takes.”

While all of these issues are simmering, the new president is simultaneously contending with the aftermath of a 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck western Colombia on Aug. 10. Officials in several major cities, including Cali and Pereira, “reported dozens of injuries, people trapped inside collapsed buildings and serious damages,” said NBC News. “The quake felt here was very severe,” taxi driver Luis Angel Sarrio told NBC.

What next?

The earthquake killed at least 100 people, with casualties expected to rise significantly in the coming days. In the first major check of his power, de la Espriella “declared a national disaster situation,” which gives his government “special powers to react to the emergency, including to reallocate budgets,” said BBC News. Alongside earthquake recovery, de la Espriella’s government is still focusing on anti-crime efforts. In another sign of a looming partnership, the United States notably pledged at least $1 billion in security assistance to Colombia soon after de la Espriella took office. The U.S. State Department said this money would help the new president achieve shared goals, including fighting organized crime and illegal immigration.

Taliban fighters entered Kabul on 15 August 2021 as the Afghan government collapsed and US troops scrambled to complete their withdrawal from the country. A year later, the group declared the date an annual national holiday.

In the five years since, the Taliban’s “increasingly draconian policies have made Afghanistan one of the world’s gravest human rights crises, particularly for women and girls”, said Human Rights Watch.

Among United Nations members states, only Russia has announced it formally recognises the Taliban regime, but “international condemnation is not enough”, said HRW.

What did the commentators say?

On “The Proud Day of August 15”, as the day has become known, Afghans are likely to see parades of the Taliban’s “suicide bomber squad on motorbikes and American equipment left by Nato forces”, said Christina Lamb in The Times.

Yet the country remains “on the brink of famine”. Around 4.7 million Afghans are facing “life-threatening malnutrition”, and almost 19 million are “in the grip of acute hunger or worse”, according to the World Food Programme. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world to ban girls and women from secondary school and university, while “morality police” patrol the streets seeking infringements of dress codes. The Taliban has even “banned women being seen at windows”, and recently “scrapped the minimum age for child marriage”.

Five years into its rule, the Taliban continues to expose the “wishful thinking of Western political and military leaders who insisted the movement had changed”, said the Lowy Institute think tank. The West has a “wilful blindness” towards the regime and is “quietly lowering the threshold of behaviour it is prepared to accept”.

“Tellingly”, the United Nations now refers to the “relevant authorities” in Kabul rather than the “de facto authorities”, in effect “narrowing the linguistic difference between the regime and a recognised government”. Warnings of the widespread repression under the regime are still “accurate”; what has changed is the “willingness of the world to act on them”.

Britain’s hesitation to evacuate eligible Afghans who worked with British officials in the country is “typical” of the UK’s “attitude to its obligations to Afghans generally”, said an editorial in The Independent. According to an internal government review conducted in February, 7,000 people have been found to be eligible for resettlement and “still likely to be at risk from Taliban retribution”, yet Britain has scrapped plans to evacuate them. Made worse by a “catastrophic data breach in 2022”, “obfuscation and delay”, Britain has been “dragging its feet in protecting those who served alongside our troops in Afghanistan”. It, like other countries, must “discharge its obligations to our Afghan allies, promptly and in full”, as a “matter of national honour”.

The US, in particular, “has a moral responsibility to not simply look away,” said Mursal Rahim, who fled Afghanistan in 2021, in The New York Times. Since leaving Kabul, the US has “increasingly disengaged from the country and its people”, closing the embassy, withdrawing diplomats and leaving “sharply reduced assistance” for Afghans coming to America. The situation in Afghanistan no longer “commands America’s attention as it once did”, but to continue in this vein risks accepting that the “systematic erasure of Afghan women is no longer its concern”.

What next?

It may be unpopular, but “Afghanistan’s future depends on greater international engagement” with whoever is in charge, said Tobias Ellwood, former chair of the Defence Select Committee, in The Telegraph. But importantly, “engagement does not mean recognition”. The goal is to ensure that Afghanistan, and its population of 40 million people, is “stable, secure and prosperous enough”, but that “will not be achieved by shouting from afar. It begins by re-engaging with those who govern Afghanistan today.”

“Far too little” is being done to protect girls from child marriages, and promote education, said former PM Gordon Brown in The Guardian. Other countries in the region have had some success. Pakistan’s Sindh province has criminalised marriage under 18 and introduced “penalties for those who facilitate it”. Bangladesh has also tightened its birth registration system to make it harder to conceal a girl’s age.

Changes to the UK government’s new immigration and asylum bill are positive recognitions of the problem. “But we must go further.” We must establish a fund in support of Afghan girls who are threatened with child marriage. It should offer them “bursaries to continue their education, if necessary outside their home country”. This may only be a “small gesture” after five years of Taliban rule, but “it is our moral duty to help them”.

Archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of vast earthworks in the Amazon rainforest, which they say are evidence of a “lost civilisation” that flourished nearly 2,000 years ago, said New Scientist.

Researchers believe the geometrically patterned structures, known as geoglyphs, were built by an advanced pre-colonial society, known as the Aquiry, between 600BC and AD850 – without metal tools or animals. But they are almost impossible to detect under the dense tree canopy of the deep rainforest.

The scientists used cutting-edge airborne laser scanning technology and found hundreds of previously unknown earthworks. They combined the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data with previous findings to estimate that there might be up to 30,000 structures across the Aquiry territory. The results “strongly suggest” that at its peak, the civilisation may have numbered 1.25 to 3 million, they wrote in a study published in Nature.

‘Astonishing’ scale and precision

Indigenous people have known about some of the earthworks for generations, “regarding some as sacred”, said The Times. Archaeologists first identified several in the western Brazilian state of Acre in 1977, when deforestation began to clear parts of the forest. In 2003, archaeo-anthropologist Martti Pärssinen, from the University of Helsinki, and his team flew overhead and observed ancient straight roadways connecting the sites, in a region that had long been regarded as “virtually untouched”.

“It was a common idea that the Amazonian forest was a virgin wilderness, occupied only by small groups of hunter-gatherers,” said Pärssinen, the study co-author. “These earthworks totally change our understanding of the supposedly pristine Amazon.”

Pärssinen theorised that the earthworks had been built by a complex, pre-Columbian civilisation. In 2021, he “officially introduced the name Aquiry”, said LiveScience, after the Indigenous name for the Acre River, which flows from Peru and Bolivia into Brazil.

In 2024, his team used aerial photographs and satellite imagery to count nearly 1,300 structures across southwestern Amazonia. But “the full scale remained lost beneath the trees”, said ScienceAlert. LiDAR technology “changed everything”.

The team flew over around 1,700 square miles, firing rapid laser pulses at the ground. Some pulses penetrate gaps in the forest canopy and bounce off the ground, reflecting back to the sensors. Computers can use that to create “a three-dimensional map of the ground under most vegetation”, said New Scientist.

The survey revealed 432 geoglyphs – “nearly 400 of which were completely new to science”. The largest covered an area of nearly 50 hectares. “The scale and precision of these constructions is simply astonishing,” said Pärssinen. An average-sized geoglyph would have required about 300 people to build and maintain it.

Pärssinen’s estimate of a population of up to 3 million people is bold, said Michael Heckenberger, from the University of Florida, but “plausible and extremely important, even mind-blowing”.

They lived ‘in harmony with the forest’

Over the past two decades, LiDAR has become “one of archaeology’s most exciting modern tools”, said National Geographic. It has been credited with driving an “archaeology revolution”. In the early 2010s, archaeologists were “astonished” when it revealed a lost Maya city.

But we still don’t know much about the Aquiry – they left “no written records, and their dwellings are long gone”, said ScienceAlert. We don’t know why they suddenly disappeared, between about AD850 and 1000. But the findings suggest that the view of the Amazon as a practically untouched wilderness should be “abandoned”, said Pärssinen.

The presence of thousands of geoglyphs is “leading archaeologists to rethink assumptions about pre-colonial civilisations and urban development”, said LiveScience.

While Romans were “laying roads and building temples”, the Aquiry were “carving vast circles, squares and monumental enclosures” on the other side of the world, said The Times. Their territory extended across “an area slightly smaller than Britain”. And the geoglyphs suggest “sophisticated planning and organised labour”.

Pärssinen said the civilisation is “likely to have resembled ancient Greece”: dispersed communities with shared beliefs and traditions, rather than a single centralised empire. The “great enclosures” appear to have been “ceremonial and political centres” where communities met to “make decisions, feast and perform rituals”.

The Aquiry also cultivated maize, squash and manioc, grew Brazil nut trees and peach palms, and cleared forests for the huge earthworks and extensive roads, “without destroying the Amazon”.

“They lived in harmony in that way with the forest,” said Pärssinen. “They made clearings, but not too big to change the ecological systems. Despite their huge numbers, they never converted the rainforest into savannah.”

Well, is it on or is it off? No one’s quite sure, said Al Jazeera (Doha). Two weeks ago, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a multibillion-dollar deal allowing US companies to build and operate nuclear power plants on Saudi soil over the next 30 years.

But a day later, President Trump added a new condition, via social media: Saudi Arabia must fall in line with the UAE and other Arab nations that have signed the Abraham Accords, and recognise the state of Israel.

‘Reckless’ agreement

And that may prove a deal breaker, said David Frum in The Atlantic. Riyadh had been working towards this landmark pact for almost two decades. Thanks to the savvy of its de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), who ensured the private equity firm of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would get its share of the billion-dollar nuclear licensing deals at stake, he almost got it over the line.

But now it must surely be in doubt, said Mohamad Elmasry on Middle East Eye. Riyadh has vowed it won’t normalise relations until Israel guarantees Palestinian statehood. And MbS has reportedly told US officials that hostility towards Israel is so great among Saudis in the wake of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, that to sign a normalisation treaty would probably get him assassinated.

It’s obvious why the Saudis still badly want this nuclear deal, said Joseph Cirincione on MS Now (New York). It’s not, as they claim, to diversify their energy profile: that makes no sense for a nation sitting on an ocean of oil and blessed with the ideal wind and solar conditions for generating renewable energy – a far cheaper option.

No, the real reason is to gain atomic weapons to protect itself against its main foe: Iran. MbS has made no secret of his desire to build a bomb, and the deal would be a concrete step in that direction. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, it appears to permit nuclear enrichment on Saudi soil, thus enabling Riyadh to follow the likes of India, Israel and Pakistan in covertly enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels.

‘Guiding hand’

Who knows what’ll happen if this “reckless” deal goes ahead, said Mitchell Plitnick on Mondoweiss (New York). The “gold standard” nuclear-power pact that the US signed with the United Arab Emirates in 2009 required the UAE to forego the ability to enrich uranium, and obliged it to submit to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections: this Saudi deal has no such restrictions.

Which is why it would inevitably trigger a Middle East arms race, said Azriel Bermant in Foreign Policy. If the deal proceeds, Iran would openly seek its own nuclear deterrent, something it has so far officially forsworn. “It beggars belief that the US went to war against Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon yet now acts in a way that is an open invitation for Tehran to weaponise.” And in a way that would also pour “proliferation kerosene” on Turkey and Egypt’s “smouldering nuclear ambitions”, said Matthew Kroenig and Henry Sokolski in The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s deal invites disaster.

Actually, the US is doing the right thing, said the Washington Examiner. The hard truth is that the “era of non-proliferation is coming to an end”: Pakistan and North Korea are both testing nuclear weapons. Given that sobering reality, better the US offer “a guiding hand” to the Saudis and oversee their nuclear agenda than let China or Russia fill the void.

Good or bad, the deal matters a lot to the US president, said Sharon Squassoni in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Chicago), so rumours of its death “are premature”. After all, it’s not some “spur-of-the-moment fantasy” cooked up by Trump. The same deal was also being considered under Joe Biden, and then too enrichment was a quid pro quo for recognising Israel.

The Saudis won’t do so, of course, given recent history, but they won’t have to. Although Congress can disapprove the deal once it’s submitted, the present Congress – due to adjourn on 18 December – is much less likely to do so than any freshly elected one. So the Saudis can “call Trump’s bluff by simply sitting back” and waiting for him to succumb to the pressure of the December deadline.

“The fact that a drone armed with explosives is here on the grounds of an airport represents a new threat scenario,” said Germany’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt in Leipzig. “We’re talking about a professional hybrid threat situation.”

Dobrindt looked “ashen-faced” as he addressed the media, said Newsweek. Flights were halted after the discovery of a quadcopter armed with explosives in a restricted area near Ukrainian Antonov freight planes. Nato has acknowledged it is aware of the incident.

Security experts and officials are asking a question that was “once unthinkable”: is Germany “de facto at war, or at least engaged in a hybrid war – and with whom?”

Germany becoming ‘primary target’

Leipzig/Halle airport is a Nato and German military logistics hub, and since 2022 has been used by Ukraine to transport military equipment. It is also the base for Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines in Europe, a cargo carrier, and as the drone was found close to a Ukrainian cargo plane, this has “directed suspicion towards Russia”, said The Guardian.

Drone sightings at German airports rose “significantly” in the first half of 2026, said Der Spiegel. According to German Air Navigation Services, 166 drones were spotted at 15 international airports, compared to 101 in the same period last year.

The threat of drone attacks is “becoming increasingly concrete”, said Süddeutsche Zeitung. But bringing them down is notoriously difficult. Drones can be stopped by “jammers, nets, or even by being shot down”, but this is a “delicate task” when they are near residential areas.

Leipzig airport was already equipped with a drone defence system, but a “custom-made” model was seemingly able to bypass it. Germany is becoming the “primary target” in “Russia’s shadow war”, which has the “aim of dissuading it from supporting Ukraine in the short term and weakening it in the long term”.

Germany has “gradually expanded its defensive measures in recent months”, said Euronews. Since October 2025, “under certain conditions”, the federal police have been allowed to shoot down drones. And Dobrindt has called for drones to be “detected, intercepted and, if necessary, shot down more consistently in future”. But the process is complicated, with frequency scanners, cameras and radar systems all required.

Russia trying to ‘sow fear’

“As well as the means and the motive, Moscow does have form” with this kind of attack, said the BBC. Though there is no hard evidence to suggest who is behind it, there is “renewed talk” of hybrid war across Europe. “If Russia was behind this”, its aim was likely to “sow fear”.

The incident raises concerns about foreign interference in upcoming German regional elections, where “far-right politicians have campaigned on fears of escalations with Moscow”, said Politico. Former communist and East German states Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania will hold elections in September. “Pro-Russian sentiment remains strong” and the far-right party AfD “could take power for the first time at the state level”.

Saudi Arabia last week announced it had joined American forces in conducting air strikes on Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of Iran-backed militias accused of attacks on both U.S. and Saudi assets in the region. The Saudi attack came in response ⁠to recent drone attacks targeting oil facilities “launched from Iraqi territory and carried out by Iran-aligned terrorist militias,” said the kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in a statement on X.

The latest assault is a “highly dangerous escalation,” said the PMF, per Al Jazeera. Iran’s Foreign Ministry had also condemned the “aggressive attacks” as a violation of Iraq’s “national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The kingdom ‘does not seek escalation’

After spending months “trying not to get dragged into a regional conflict,” Saudi Arabia “appears hemmed in, facing enemies in three directions” between Iran and its proxies in Iraq and Yemen, said CNN. Saudi Arabia’s strategy of “opening the kingdom up to foreign investment” and making it the “regional economic powerhouse” is “now on life support.” At the same time, embroiling itself in a “broader conflict” would be a “risky and potentially costly option” for Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia’s strikes, done “in coordination with U.S. Central Command,” mark the country’s “first announced foray” into the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, said USA Today. But previous reports from Reuters citing “unnamed Western and Iranian officials” indicated that Saudi Arabia had “launched covert strikes on the Islamic Republic” earlier this year already. These most recent attacks stem from the kingdom’s “legitimate right to defend itself and its capabilities,” said the Saudi Defense Ministry in a statement. Riyadh also reserves the “right to respond at the appropriate time and place.”

While Saudi Arabia “does not seek escalation,” the ministry said, it will “respond to any aggression it faces.” Over the weekend, however, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke with President Donald Trump and “expressed concern over his plans for massive new strikes” against Iran, said Axios. Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman expressed similar sentiments at a recent meeting with Vice President J.D. Vance, emphasizing “deescalation with Iran” shortly after the joint U.S.-Saudi strikes, said the outlet.

The PMF in particular has “always been a contentious” issue between Iraq, the U.S., and “other neighboring countries” like Iran, said Al Jazeera. The Iraqi group exists as “part of the country’s security force,” reports “directly to the commander-in-chief who is also the prime minister,” and has “at times struck the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and bases across Iraq at will” while refusing government orders.

‘Unpalatable choice’

Unlike previous clandestine entanglements, Riyadh’s “overt involvement” in regional fighting “marks a new turning point in the conflict,” said The Guardian. “There is a feeling” among Saudi leadership that the Iranians are “doing what they are doing because they feel that the Gulf Arab states won’t move up the escalatory ladder,” said H.A. Hellyer, the Royal United Services Institute’s senior associate fellow in Middle East studies, to the outlet. Riyadh wants to “make it clear that assessment is wrong and that if Tehran thinks the Gulf states are easy prey, they are wrong.”

Should Saudi Arabia come under direct Iranian attack, “it could face an unpalatable choice,” said CNN. Either it must “respond directly in a way that would draw it more deeply into war” or risk emboldening a Tehran “regime that many see as more hardline than before the war.”

While the Trump administration has become known for its policy of anti-globalization, recent reports that the White House plans to shutter five overseas embassies and consulates have some worried about the implications. Several of the planned closures will occur in nations with close diplomatic ties to the United States, including Canada and Japan. The rare moves, which often happen only during times of conflict, could create new foreign affairs headaches, even as Republicans laud the plans.

What did the commentators say?

The U.S. State Department has reportedly informed Congress that it is planning to close the embassy on the Caribbean island of Grenada; the consulates in Nagoya, Japan, and Medan, Indonesia; the diplomatic post in Winnipeg, Canada; and the embassy in Douala, Cameroon. The closures are “expected to save the government roughly $4.4 million per year,” but the affected buildings also “employ very few people compared with others,” said The Associated Press.

The buildings in Grenada and Nagoya “have only one American staffer and five local employees each,” said the AP, and the Medan consulate has only 47 local employees; the Douala embassy has only 14 and the Winnipeg post has just two. The closure effort is “part of a broader push by the Republican president to transform the U.S. bureaucracy so that it is fully aligned with his ‘America First’ agenda,” said Reuters. People seem split on the closures. Supporters have “portrayed cost-cutting measures as necessary to right-size ​an organization many conservatives see as bloated and overly bureaucratic.”

But Democrats “argue that cuts to the U.S. diplomatic footprint — coupled with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, ‌which ⁠provided billions of dollars worth of aid globally — risks undermining American leadership,” said Reuters. While “on paper, the move is about efficiency,” in practice it “goes far beyond the fate of five buildings,” said Newsweek. The consular slashing “suggests the Trump administration sees America’s overseas presence as a dollar figure to be managed on a balance sheet, not as a strategic asset to be maintained.”

Some of the buildings planning for closure are far less consequential than full embassies; the diplomatic post in Winnipeg does “not provide full consular services, only emergency assistance to Americans in distress,” said the National Post. But the closures also mark a “rare reduction of America’s diplomatic footprint outside a specific geopolitical crisis,” said Newsweek, even though the shutterings themselves are “modest in isolation.”

What next?

The State Department hasn’t specifically confirmed or denied the closures but said its officials were “​focused on ensuring that the ⁠nation’s diplomatic footprint was efficient and effective,” the agency told Reuters in a statement. The department also said it was “committed to following congressional notification procedures.” No exact timeline for the shutterings has been announced.

The decision follows a recent pattern of closures. Earlier this year the Trump administration announced it would “permanently close the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, which was the closest diplomatic mission to Afghanistan,” said the AP. At the same time, the U.S. is also “investing millions of dollars into reopening the U.S. embassies in Caracas, Venezuela; Damascus, Syria; and Tripoli, Libya,” to “restore America’s formal diplomatic presence following the ouster of long-ruling autocrats in those countries.”

What happened

The Trump administration has refunded about $100 billion of the roughly $166 billion collected through President Donald Trump’s 2025 “liberation day” tariffs, according to a court-ordered progress report filed Tuesday with the U.S. Court of International Trade. The Supreme Court ruled in February that those import taxes had been collected illegally using an authority the president did not have, and a judge subsequently ordered their return to the importers.

Who said what

Trump has “placed heavy-handed tariffs at the center of his economic and foreign policy agendas,” CNBC said, and he has “vented his rage over the court rulings.” The “speed at which the money has been refunded has surprised trade lawyers and analysts” alike, the Financial Times said. White House officials had “warned that the refunds would depend on further litigation.”

What next?

Trump’s administration has “recently taken a series of steps to effectively re-create” his initial sweeping tariffs “using other legal authorities,” said CNBC. On Monday, 25 states sued the administration over the new tariffs, “calling them a pretext for replacing” the axed “liberation day” levies, The Associated Press said.

The Ukraine war has entered a “dangerous new phase”, said Sky News’ Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett.

Overnight, 17 Ukrainians were killed in Russian strikes on Kyiv, and just days ago seven people were killed by a Ukrainian drone attack on a crowded Russian Black Sea beach.

“More and more civilians are being killed on both sides” as Russia and Ukraine seem to expand their scope beyond military targets. As the conflict intensifies on multiple fronts, neither side shows signs of withdrawing.

What did the commentators say?

Four years into the war, it seems Ukraine is evolving its approach against Russia, said world affairs editor Sam Kiley in The Independent. Kyiv’s recent drone attack on a Russian Black Sea beach, where seven civilians died, including three children, marked a “shift in the war”. Ukraine may not have a policy of attacking civilian targets, but as it “steps up its war inside the Russian Federation, there have been, and will be, more civilian deaths”. Despite a reshuffle of top commanders, and being “outgunned, outmanned and outsized by the invaders”, Ukraine remains on the front foot. As it presses home the advantage, and “strikes deeper at Moscow, these tragedies will multiply”.

Following successful campaigns against Russian oil refineries, Ukraine’s increasing attacks on Wildberries – Russia’s equivalent of Amazon – are also changing the mood within Russia, said world affairs editor Catherine Philp in The Times. “Far from merely inconveniencing shoppers”, this is an “audacious attempt to bring down Russia’s economy”. The company accounts for around 50% of online retail in Russia, and “barely two days have passed without another warehouse in flames” since mid-July. This campaign shows that the conflict has broken beyond the front lines, and is now regularly “bringing the war into the lives of ordinary Russians”.

Even as these strikes intensify, Vladimir Putin has shown “no sign of backing down”, said Russian expert Professor Stephen Crowley in The Nation. The core response from European leaders has been to engage in the “greatest military build-up since the 1930s”. But all this does is perpetuate a “spiral of action and reaction on both sides” that invites further escalation. Instead, they should “open lines of communication” and bring about “difficult but necessary” negotiations to end the war through temporary lifting of sanctions or thawing diplomatic relations. Some would argue this would be giving “Putin a way out of his war of choice”, but once it is over, he would be forced to “face the Russian people and attempt to justify his historic debacle”.

As Trump focuses on the war in Iran, a “propitious moment to be the peacemaker in the Russia-Ukraine war could be slipping away”, said Thomas E. Graham, former White House Russia expert, in The New York Times. The conflict has entered a “dangerous escalatory spiral”, and both Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have been clear in their wishes for the US to re-engage in negotiations. “Only Washington has the combination of access, leverage and political weight to lead a comprehensive diplomatic effort.”

Given Russia’s animosity towards Europe, the US should send envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Kyiv and Moscow to “lay the groundwork for an intense period of shuttle diplomacy to bridge the yawning gaps between the two sides”. But time is of the essence. They must act imminently, “before escalation closes the diplomatic opening that exhaustion has begun to create”.

What next?

Europe must “seize the moment and demonstrate that they are capable of acting decisively on the international stage”, said Lesia Ogryzko in Atlantic Council. Ukraine’s recent progress provides a “rare window of opportunity to increase the pressure on Putin”. However, this window is “likely to prove temporary”.

The continent should prioritise Ukraine’s manpower constraints, as well as “improving military recruitment, retention and mobilisation”. European leaders should also grant Ukraine access to critical technologies including advanced electronics, cloud-computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence tools, and communications systems. The goal for many years has been “strategic autonomy and Europe’s emergence as a serious security actor”. “The coming months may provide the clearest test yet of whether those ambitions are realistic.”

The Trump administration has found a novel way to limit the U.S. death toll in the Iran war, said Jack Crosbie in Rolling Stone: Claim that “some deaths don’t count.” Last month, the names of four service members killed by Iranian strikes in mid-July suddenly vanished from the Pentagon’s official list of war dead, lowering the total from 18 to 14. U.S. officials gave differing explanations for the change, from benign “temporary data disruptions” to the claim that the troops killed in Jordan and Iraq didn’t actually die in the war with Iran since “Operation Epic Fury” technically stopped when President Trump struck a temporary ceasefire with Tehran in April. Never mind that neither side ever ceased firing. After Senate Democrats and veterans groups protested the disappearance, the names of the four service members reappeared on the Pentagon website—but under a different category for “Overseas Operations,” which includes only those killed and injured since July 7, when fighting fully reignited.

This is only the latest attempt by the administration to obscure the human cost of its unpopular war, said Edith Olmsted in The New Republic. In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed an Iranian drone strike on a tactical operations center in Kuwait as a “squirter,” and the Pentagon said just five troops were seriously wounded. In fact, dozens of soldiers suffered injuries “including burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma.” And when the Pentagon restored the four dead soldiers to its online database, it also quietly upped the number of wounded personnel by more than 140— pushing total U.S. casualties in the war above 600. Trump last month tried to put a positive spin on the casualty count, said Joe Lancaster in Reason, favorably comparing in an online post the conflict’s “4 months, 18 dead” with the thousands of Americans killed in multiyear wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. That may be true, but “American soldiers are still dead as a direct result of the conflict he helped instigate.”

This is predictable behavior from Trump, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. He “has frequently treated the military as a political prop” and, according to his first-term chief of staff John Kelly, called U.S. troops who died in wars “suckers” and “losers.” Trump and Hegseth seemed to think that the American public are suckers as well, and thought their accounting tricks would prevent Iran war deaths from becoming a political liability. But that plan backfired and has succeeded only in drawing attention to the 18 dead Americans. “The administration sought to hide the war with Iran; instead, it showed the painful and growing costs.”

What happened

The Iran war expanded further across the Middle East last week, as Saudi Arabia joined the U.S. in striking Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthi militant group hit Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, and a U.S.-owned natural gas storage tanker at an Egyptian port was set ablaze in a drone attack. In Riyadh’s first acknowledged involvement in the conflict, Saudi and American fighter jets attacked the Iraq-based Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella group of Iraqi militants, in retaliation for more than 30 drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities, which the U.S. accused Iran of directing. The U.S.-Saudi operation, which killed at least 20 fighters, came hours after Iran launched a surprise ballistic missile attack at American military sites in Jordan, shattering a days-long pause in fighting. The missiles were all intercepted, but the assault marked a shift in strategy for Iran, showing it was willing to go on the offensive and not simply respond to U.S. strikes. After the drone strike at Egypt’s Mediterranean port of Damietta, President Trump vowed to retaliate against Tehran, saying, “It’s our turn to hit them.”

In the southern Red Sea, the Houthis claimed at least four attacks on Saudi-linked tankers since announcing a maritime blockade of Saudi ports last month. Iran fired on three tankers it said were using an “illegal” route through the Strait of Hormuz—Saudi Arabia’s other major shipping route—and reportedly rejected a proposal from Oman to divide control of the strait and solicit voluntary fees.

What the columnists said

Iran’s escalating attacks “illustrate a fundamental shift” in the war, said Jared Malsin and Suha Ma’ayeh in The Wall Street Journal. The hard-line Revolutionary Guard “exerts more power than ever in Tehran,” and “has grown more assertive and more comfortable with a state of war that could continue for months.” It suits them better than a peace in which they’d have to confront public anger over Iran’s “struggling economy.” Their “zero sum” stance makes any agreement to end the war even more remote, and “heightens the risk of more-frequent rounds of escalation.”

Trump has been told that “a return to major combat operations would be a hugely risky endeavor,” said Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan in The New York Times. At a meeting with Cabinet members and top advisers last month, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Dan Caine warned such an offensive would “dangerously deplete” the military’s stockpile of air defense munitions. Trump and aides “are also uneasy” about a widening war alienating Gulf allies vulnerable to Iranian attack, and a “growing energy crisis.” Sources say “few if any in Trump’s inner circle” believed “escalation was wise.”

That interceptor shortage could put “American troops at more risk,” said Ben Finley in the Associated Press. Our stockpile of Patriot interceptors has fallen from 2,330 before the war to as low as 759, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And our stash of 452 THAAD interceptors has dropped by nearly 40%. To conserve inventories, the U.S. could “take more risks,” such as firing two rather than the standard three interceptors at incoming missiles. That might prove fatal for soldiers on the ground: Last month, three U.S. soldiers were killed in Jordan after an Iranian missile slipped through air defenses.

Meanwhile, growing hostilities between Iran and Ukraine show the war’s potential to “go global,” said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Ukraine recently sank an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea it said was ferrying military cargo to Russia, drawing threats of retaliation from Tehran. Iran has supplied Russia with drones that have “killed a great many Ukrainians”; Ukraine says Russia in turn has given Iran intelligence to target American military assets. That “Ukrainians are clashing directly with Iran” is an ominous step toward a wider conflagration.

Trump is in a bind, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. Through months of negotiation, Iran has offered “a steady, ironclad” position, insisting on an end to sanctions, no nuclear concessions, and control of the Strait of Hormuz. Our flailing president has toggled between “two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want.” While he vacillates in the vain search for an exit strategy, the damage mounts. “Petroleum reserves, missile stockpiles, global trust in the U.S.-led world order—these are finite resources that are all being spent down at alarming rates.”

The next major fight between Israel and Palestine might be fought not on the ground, but rather below it. Israel is currently attempting to seize the land around archaeological sites throughout the West Bank, the largest of which has an ancient history going back three millennia. But Palestinian officials believe Israel is claiming these areas illegally, and they are revving up for a political battle.

Why is Israel going after these sites?

Israel is “undertaking a major drive to develop and expand archaeological sites in the occupied West Bank” because officials believe it is “incumbent upon Jewish citizens to connect to their history and heritage,” said The Forward. There are several locations that Israel is working on developing, with two being the most prominent: Sebastia, a small village near the West Bank city of Nablus, and Jericho, another West Bank city that is home to the ancient Hasmonean Palaces.

Sebastia is “one of the most layered archaeological sites in the Middle East” and is now a “flashpoint in a fight between Israeli and Palestinian authorities over land, heritage and narrative,” said CNN. The town’s history “goes back at least 3,000 years” to when it was the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. The archaeological site “lies in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli civil and security control according to the Oslo Accords,” while the town itself is in “Area B, under mixed Palestinian-Israeli jurisdiction.”

In Jericho, Israeli officials want to control the Hasmonean Palaces site because they claim it is under “deliberate and systematic destruction by the Palestinian Authority,” which Israel says has “targeted it and other sites in a bid to erase evidence of Jewish ties to the land,” Israel Ganz, the head of the West Bank’s Yesha Council, told The Forward. To try and control these sites, as well as others, Israel’s parliament has proposed a bill to create a new Israeli body in the West Bank, which would “have the power to conduct excavations, declare sites, expropriate lands and more,” said Haaretz.

What has the Palestinian response been?

The Israeli bill, as well as Israel’s overall push near the sites, has “drawn criticism from Palestinians and Israeli rights groups who say it is tantamount to annexation of occupied land and would expand Jewish settlements,” said Reuters. Israel’s actions are “intended to expand control in these areas, deep inside Palestinian territories,” Hani Al-Hayek, the Palestinian Authority’s tourism minister, said to the outlet.

Palestinian officials are taking action to stop Israel’s movement in the region. At their urging, UNESCO recently designated Sebastia a full “World Heritage site, hoping it will prevent Israel extending ​its control at the ancient village,” said Reuters. Some Israelis seem to agree that their government is being overzealous. The digs are “another way of weaponizing. That is, you attach more importance to a certain kind of heritage and less importance to other kinds of heritage,” Rafi Greenberg, an archaeology professor in Israel, told CBS News.

The Israeli government, however, remains steadfast. “The area is Israeli territory. It belongs to the Jewish people,” Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu told CNN. No matter the end result, this archaeological debate will be a “test case to a battle not just over the past but about the present and the future of the territory and the people who live near its historic stones.”

“To Do. Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) $5-10 bil,” read a note written by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a cabinet meeting on Friday. By Monday, he had confirmed on X that the US had participated in “coordinated foreign exchange actions” with the Japanese government to counter “disorderly yen movements”.

In recent weeks, the yen sank to a 40-year low against the dollar, the latest milestone in Japan’s economic decline. However, having traded at ¥163 to the dollar on Thursday, the yen has strengthened to ¥155 to the dollar since the intervention.

Donald Trump claimed the joint move would be “good for the world economy”. But some analysts believe the intervention will best serve America’s interests.

Why is the yen so weak?

Japan, the world’s fourth biggest economy, has “long struggled with a weak yen”, said CNN. After suffering recession and “chronic deflation” in the 1990s, Japan has kept interest rates much lower than other developed economies. In April, the Bank of Japan increased its rate to 1% – the highest since 1995 – while the US rate usually lies between 3.5% and 3.75%. While such low rates hope to stimulate consumer spending, they also are much less attractive to international investors.

Global events such as the Iran war have also impacted Japan’s import-heavy economy. The country is “resource-poor”, said The Japan Times, with around “95% of its oil imports” coming from the Middle East before the recent conflict began. While a weak yen is beneficial for Japan’s exporters and the tourism industry, energy and fuel inflation have hit the country’s population hard.

Other issues such as a “decades-long slide in its working-age population”, substantial government debt and low productivity have also hampered economic growth, said the BBC.

What’s in it for Trump?

The president called the move a “signal of friendship” between the two nations. The US is “always there for Japan”, a country that has been “very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor”.

But the US also stands to benefit. The Japanese government has been buying up yen, thereby “raising the value of their currency”, said The Guardian. But to pay for this, Japan has been selling off US government bonds, which are kept by many countries as a “store of national wealth”. If, however, these bonds are sold quickly and in large quantities, it can lead to a rise in the interest rate the US pays on its debt, thus making it more expensive for the US to borrow money.

Another factor behind the intervention could be that Trump sees Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi as an “ideological ally”. In October, the US bought “billions of Argentinian pesos to help prop up the country’s finances” just weeks before midterm elections for President Javier Milei, another ally of Trump’s. Takaichi’s defence agenda – she is planning to double spending to 2% of GDP over the next five years – has been “broadly welcomed” by the Trump administration.

Is this a sign of things to come?

Both US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama have announced they would not hesitate to participate in further joint interventions.

In April, the Bank of Japan took action to boost the yen, said CNN, but it proved to be only a “temporary success”. Analysts are “less optimistic” that this latest intervention could “fundamentally alter the broader course of the yen’s weakening”.

Within Japan, there is concern that Takaichi’s spending plans will put further pressure on the currency. A two-year cut in sales tax on food and soft drinks from 8% to 1% is an attempt to ease cost-of-living pressures, and the PM has promised to invest hundreds of billions as part of a pro-growth agenda that led to her election. However, the policies could instead “strain public finances and rattle markets”, said the Financial Times.

South Korea’s culture of heavy drinking has long been seen as a male-dominated phenomenon, fuelled by corporate workplace and business drinking traditions.

But over the past decade, rates of high-risk drinking for men (defined as seven or more shots of traditional soju rice wine, or five cans of beer, in a single sitting, at least twice a week) have fallen significantly among all age groups. For women, the trajectory has been the reverse.

High-risk drinking for women (five or more shots of soju, or three cans of beer, in one sitting, at least twice a week) rose significantly among those over 30 between 2016 and 2025. That’s according to a new analysis by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), based on last year’s annual Community Health Survey data and reported by Seoul Economic Daily.

Among women in their 20s, high-risk drinking declined by only 18.5%, compared with a sharp 41.6% drop among men in their 20s. But rates rose by 19.1% among women in their 30s, 41% in their 40s and 13.2% in their 50s. The findings highlight “a growing divergence in the country’s drinking habits”, said The Korea Times.

‘Cultural change’

At company dinners, heavy drinking has become far less common, said Aju Press, a South Korean news agency. But “drinking has quietly moved into the home”.

For many women, alcohol has become “more varied, more accessible and more seamlessly woven into everyday life”. One “popular explanation” is that more women have entered the workforce and become “more exposed to Korea’s long-standing drinking culture”, with the “double burden” of juggling childcare and household responsibilities.

But it is “difficult to attribute the increase solely to stress”, said sociology professor Kim Yoon-tae; there’s a broader cultural shift afoot. “As women’s economic and social participation has expanded, there may be more occasions when they drink at workplaces or social gatherings,” he said, such as networking events. Drinking “remains a strong part of social culture”.

The rising number of single-person households has also “normalised honsul” – drinking alone, said Aju Press. Convenience stores have become “major retailers” of alcohol, and the growing popularity of wine and cocktails like highballs has “broadened alcohol’s appeal beyond the traditional soju-centred drinking culture”.

The hit South Korean TV comedy series “Work Later, Drink Now”, which follows three women in their 30s “whose friendships revolve around sharing drinks after work”, captures “the cultural change”. Boozing has become “a familiar part of women’s everyday routines rather than a predominantly male social ritual”.

Men ‘still outpace women’

Despite the cultural shift, men still "outpaced women on every indicator”, said The Korea Times, drinking substantially more. Half of men in their 30s, 40s and 50s engaged in binge drinking, and more than one in five men in their 40s and 50s qualified as high-risk drinkers.

“This analysis confirmed that Korea’s overall drinking behaviour is improving, but men in their 30s, 40s and 50s still show high rates of monthly binge drinking and high-risk drinking,” said KDCA commissioner Lim Seung-kwan. These behaviours “raise the risk of disease, injury and alcohol dependence”.

South Korea’s high-risk drinking rate may have “come down somewhat over the past decade”, but it’s still “near the top by international standards”, said Seoul Economic Daily. Its monthly binge drinking rate ranks fifth-highest among 27 developed countries, according to the OECD.

Why is it so significant?

It “must be the only artistic masterpiece that is also a crucial source for a major historical event”, wrote the medieval historian Patrick Wormald. The Bayeux Tapestry’s survival, largely intact, is miraculous in itself. A strip cartoon-style rendering of the Norman Conquest, from 1064 to the Battle of Hastings, it is rich, evocative and astonishingly vivid. The tapestry is “not merely a record of conquest, but an incomparable mirror of medieval life”, says the French scholar Lucien Musset. Colourful, graphically violent and occasionally ribald, it is rich in background detail, allowing us to look back nearly a millennium and see the world of the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman foes: their arms and armour, their ships, their cooking, their horses and dogs, their hairstyles (the English have flowing locks and long moustaches, while the Normans are cropped and clean-shaven).

How was it made?

It is not actually a tapestry, but an embroidery: a linen cloth 50cm high and 68 metres long, showing 58 scenes embroidered with woollen yarn of 10 colours, and captioned with brief Latin titles. When it first surfaced in history, in 1476, it was hung to decorate the nave of Bayeux Cathedral in Normandy every year at an annual feast. According to local tradition, it was made by William the Conqueror’s wife Matilda and her ladies-in-waiting, but most scholars now think it was, in fact, commissioned in the 1070s by William’s half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (and later Earl of Kent), who features four times (more than anyone except the main protagonists) and is seen rallying the troops at Hastings.

So is it a work of propaganda?

In outline, it tells the Norman version of the conquest, similar to that in the two main Norman chronicles of the period – framing it as a crusade against a perjurer. Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, crosses over to northern France in 1064, is captured by Count Guy I of Ponthieu and is rescued by William. Harold then swears an oath over holy relics, before returning to England and assuming the English crown upon the death of Edward the Confessor (his sister’s husband, who died without a direct heir). William’s case was that Harold had made, and broken, a sacred oath to support his claim to the English throne (this is how he gained the papacy’s backing for his invasion). The tapestry shows Halley’s comet – a bad omen – appearing above the newly crowned Harold. However, the tapestry is thought to have been made in England, probably in Odo’s earldom of Kent, which was famous for its needlework: some designs match those in manuscripts in Canterbury. This could explain its sympathetic portrayal of the English.

How is it pro-English?

The Norman invaders are shown seizing the locals’ food, and burning a house while an English woman, holding her son’s hand, implores them to stop. Harold is portrayed without rancour, and with dignity, even heroism; he saves two Norman soldiers from a river while in France. The action starts with him, and he appears more times than William: one academic has even called it “the tragedy of Harold”.

So it's subversive?

Arguably. Looking at the scene of Harold’s oath, it could be interpreted as showing that it was extorted from him – as one early 12th-century English source argued. It could even be said to endorse Harold’s claim to the English throne. After his coronation, Harold is described as “Harold Rex”, whereas the Domesday Book is careful only to call him Earl Harold. The Conqueror, by contrast, is never called “Rex” (only “Dux”) in the tapestry, though this may be because the final section, presumably showing his coronation, was torn off and lost. The tapestry is, at the very least, enigmatic and ambivalent – it can be seen both as “a Norman brag and a Saxon lament”, says art critic Jonathan Jones.

What about the background detail?

Along the top and bottom run decorative borders featuring scenes from fables, and of farming and hunting, along with a few naked human figures (there are at least five human penises). In one unexplained scene, “a certain cleric” is shown touching the face of a woman named as Ælfgyva. A priapic naked man squats below. And when the story reaches the Battle of Hastings, carnage from the battlefield spreads out onto the margin: decapitated bodies, severed limbs, looters stealing armour from the dead.

Has it always been in Bayeux?

Almost always. Antiquarians started taking an interest in the tapestry in the 1700s, and in the early 1800s it went to Paris, where Napoleon displayed it to whip up enthusiasm for an invasion of England. The final caption – et fuga verterunt Angli (“and the English turned in flight”) – was added shortly before 1814, presumably for propaganda reasons. The Gestapo also took it to Paris during the Second World War: Heinrich Himmler then ordered it to be taken to “a place of safety” in 1944, but Paris was liberated before his order was executed. It then returned to Bayeux.

Why was the loan agreed?

For two main reasons: because its home, Bayeux Museum, is closed until October 2027; and because President Macron was determined to make it happen. Macron first proposed the loan in 2018; he joked that it has taken longer to sort out than Brexit. The Bayeux Museum’s curator initially called it “unthinkable”; the risk of damage in transit led 78,500 people to sign a petition blocking the loan. But Macron insisted – knowing, said Peter Ricketts, who coordinated at the UK end, that the exhibition “would be a sensation”. The Norman Conquest is, after all, just a detail in French history but central to Britain’s national story.

What happened

Thousands of people on Thursday crossed from Morocco into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, marking the largest border influx the enclave has experienced since 2021. Streams of people climbed over border fences or swam onto the shores, overwhelming security forces at border controls. At least 41 people died during the crossings, according to The Associated Press.

Who said what

The autonomous Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa have “long been a point of tension between Morocco and Spain,” The New York Times said. The two areas “constitute the European Union’s sole land border with Africa.”

The government in Madrid “finally reacted to what is effectively an invasion of European territory by mobilizing army units,” said The Times of London. One migrant traveling with his family told the paper, “I did not want us to miss the opportunity. Salaries are very low in Morocco — it’s dead; Morocco is dead.”

What next?

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is due to visit Ceuta on Friday as authorities focus on restoring order. Italy has called for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s free-travel zone.

What happened

President Donald Trump claimed Thursday on Truth Social that Hamas had agreed to “COMPLETE DISARMAMENT” in Gaza and that “Israeli forces will withdraw” from the war-torn region. Details on the deal remain limited, but Trump said it was brokered by the international Board of Peace, which he established earlier this year to oversee the Gaza peace plan.

Who said what

The breakthrough is a “critical step” toward Gaza being “governed by a new Palestinian government” and Israel having “the security it deserves,” Trump said. He added that the International Stabilization Force would collaborate with “a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe.”

But “we didn’t say disarmament,” Hamas negotiator Ghazi Hamad told The Wall Street Journal. Instead the group simply “agreed to place its weapons in a storage facility.” Israel has yet to make a public statement on the reports. Trump would be “very, very” disappointed if Israel rebuffed the plan, a senior Trump adviser told reporters.

Hamas has “long regarded giving up all its weapons as tantamount to surrender,” The New York Times said, so “disarmament would be a monumental undertaking.”

What next?

Board of Peace officials expected details of the deal would have to be “refined” over the coming weeks and months, Bloomberg said, and the timeline for Israeli withdrawal has yet to be finalized.

Europe is braced for more explosive debate over immigration and open borders after an estimated 49,000 migrants crossed into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco in 24 hours via land and sea.

Italy’s most senior politicians have called for Spain to be kicked out of Europe’s Schengen zone, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on X that she was “prepared to take action – including extraordinary measures – to defend our borders and ensure citizens’ safety”. Spain’s Interior Ministry blamed human trafficking networks for encouraging the latest crossings, saying criminal organisations had exploited a recent Supreme Court ruling to lure more migrants, particularly young people, into attempting the journey.

Spain’s Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that migrants intercepted at sea while attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla cannot be summarily returned under the enclaves’ special border-rejection regime. “It has been a slow trickle since the Supreme Court’s ruling, but today has been an explosion,” a Guardia Civil spokesperson said on Reuters.

What did the commentators say?

The tiny Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla sit on the northern shores of Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. Together they form the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. “It’s not yet clear what prompted this surge in illegal crossings from Morocco, or how hard the authorities there tried to prevent it,” said the BBC. But at one point, a Spanish official said the border was in total collapse.

Just a week ago, Jessika Roswall, a centre-right European commissioner, “painted an idyllic image of the Schengen area, praising the ‘seamless journeys’ made possible by ‘decades of European cooperation’”, said Eddy Wax on Euractiv. But “that Brussels fantasy has now been smashed apart”. Italy has “always been quick to clamour for EU solidarity when faced with inflows of migrants at its own borders” but Meloni “has particular form” for exploiting the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s woes while “boosting his far-right adversaries”.

She “challenged him at the last EU leaders’ summit over his move to regularise hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants” and last night, Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, “alleged the policy itself was a pull factor”. That drew “a stern rebuke” from Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, said Joe Stanley-Smith on Politico but the policy “has proven hugely contentious, both domestically and at a European level”.

“A young person leaving, sometimes with their parents’ consent, is a guarantee that they will send money back to their family,” sociologist Ali Zoubeidi said in Le Monde. “The Spanish government’s announcement [in April] of the regularisation of 500,000 undocumented migrants may also have encouraged young people to try to reach Ceuta.”

The situation “may also have been exacerbated by an event that suggests Rabat could have deliberately loosened controls at Ceuta’s border”, said Le Monde. Sánchez’s recent visit to Morocco’s regional rival Algeria, reportedly upset those in Rabat. For Abdullah Abaakil, deputy secretary of the Moroccan Unified Socialist Party, there is no doubt it played a role: “The Moroccan authorities clearly let them through,” he said. “There is a suspicious trend of using migration and the despair of young people to embarrass the Spanish government and to send a message when they are dissatisfied.”

What next?

Spain and Morocco have agreed to return all migrants to Morocco and Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the two countries would intensify joint efforts to combat irregular migration, describing cooperation with Morocco as “exemplary”.

Though Italy has called for closing the open-border Schengen agreement with Spain, the countries “do not share a land border, so Italy would likely need to get other European countries on board to be able to enforce this”, said the BBC.

But the crisis has intensified calls for further action on immigration from the bloc. Manfred Weber, president of the European Parliament’s largest political grouping – the centre-right European People’s Party – called for tougher action. “This proves one thing: the Migration Pact and return regulation must be enforced today, not tomorrow,” he said on X.

What happened

Joint U.S. and Saudi Arabian airstrikes on Iran-backed militia positions in Iraq on Wednesday have intensified fears that the Middle East conflict is entering a more dangerous phase. At least 20 fighters from Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces were killed in the attacks, while Iran responded by firing missiles at U.S. military bases in Jordan. “We are going to be hitting them very hard because it’s our turn,” President Donald Trump said before the U.S. military launched what it called a “heavy wave of strikes” in Iran.

Who said what

The “scope of the war” in the Middle East has now “widened,” The New York Times said. Iran-linked groups across the region have “opened new fronts and reopened old ones, drawing in forces in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan”.

“This is a war in search of a rationale,” Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-Calif.) told CNN. “We’re losing lives and we’re not going to be any closer to real peace in the Middle East.”

What next?

It is now impossible to know how Tehran will respond because it views this conflict as an existential struggle, H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute, told CNN. The region has entered “uncharted territory.”

What happened

Search teams have rescued eight people from the ruins of a shopping center after a powerful earthquake struck the southern Japanese island of Kyushu on Tuesday. Recovery operations continued overnight at the Aeon Mall in Kumamoto Prefecture after part of the building collapsed and an explosion followed the initial quake.

The earthquake was initially measured at a magnitude 7.1 before being revised to a 6.8. It was followed by more than 60 aftershocks and together, they sparked fires, damaged roads and cut power to thousands of homes. At least 18 people are known to have died, and the death toll is expected to rise.

Who said what

“Although more than 20 hours have passed since the earthquake, there are those still in need of help,” Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said during a press conference. “This is truly a race against time.”

The earthquake has “rattled a region still marked by one of the country’s deadliest recent disasters,” CNN said. In 2016, a series of massive earthquakes killed 275 people, injured thousands more and caused widespread devastation, with more than 200,000 homes damaged.

What next?

Emergency workers continue to look for people who are trapped or missing, as engineers assess the damaged infrastructure. The Japan Meteorological Agency has warned of landslides and further aftershocks over the coming week because the quake is still “triggering seismic activity in the area,” said The Guardian.

US Senator Lindsey Graham “relished his role as an informal envoy” between Donald Trump and foreign leaders, said The Economist. So it’s fitting that the Republican’s funeral today “will provide one final round of diplomacy”.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Benjamin Netanyahu will both attend the service for Graham, a “defence hawk” who “forcibly lobbied Washington” to back Ukraine against Russia, and Israel against Iran, said Reuters. Tonight, the Senate prepares to vote on a bipartisan package imposing sanctions on both countries that Graham “spent his final days trying to push across the line”.

Both leaders are also scheduled to meet the US president “with the goal of winning the ear of Donald Trump” at a time when US policy towards both wars is “in a state of flux”, said Robert Tait in The Guardian.

What did the commentators say?

Netanyahu will probably pressure Trump to further “escalate” the war in Iran, while Zelenksyy will “look to shore up American support” after the loss of Graham, “one of Ukraine’s staunchest backers”, said The Economist.

The two wars, taking place 1,550 miles apart, have “converged in recent days”, said Chris Hamill-Stewart on Al Jazeera. On Saturday, Ukraine attacked an Iranian tanker said to be carrying military technology and drones from Iran to Russia. Kyiv’s actions “will please” America, former US ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia, William Courtney, told the news site. But Zelenskyy is “unlikely to want to be too closely associated with the ‘unpopular’ US war on Iran”.

There are signs of “a dramatic change” in the US posture on Ukraine, said The Guardian’s Tait. Washington seems “more supportive” of Kyiv than at any other time in Trump’s second presidency. Last week, right-wing influencer Laura Loomer gave the latest “signal of a sea change” when she met Zelenskyy in Kyiv, before “recanting her previous support for Russia”. Trump and Zelenskyy’s “cordial” meeting at the Nato summit in Ankara was also “starkly” different to “last year’s bitter confrontation in the White House”.

By contrast, Trump’s relationship with the Israeli prime minister has grown “visibly strained” since they last met in February, said Tal Shalev on CNN. “Close cooperation and effusive praise” at the start of the Iran war has “given way to Trump’s expletive-laden outbursts”. Trump has said he lashed out at Netanyahu, calling him “crazy”, for continuing to bombard Hezbollah in Lebanon and endangering peace talks with Iran. He has been “resistant” to this meeting, having “little interest in resuming a full fight” against Iran before the US midterms in November, according to one Israeli source.

What next?

Ukraine and the US are moving closer towards a deal on joint drone production, which “could help the US catch up with Ukraine in this crucial military technology”, said Al Jazeera. And Trump and Zelenskyy agreed this month to allow Ukraine to jointly produce Patriot air defence interceptors, “a crucial component for the country’s defence against Russian aerial attacks”.

For Netanyahu, there’s the sticking point of Lebanon: he told his security cabinet on Sunday that the Trump administration “wants to pull Israeli forces back from positions in Lebanon, as well as in Gaza and Syria”. But, as Israel has already refused to withdraw its forces completely before Hezbollah disarms, Netanyahu “intends to oppose the idea”, said CNN’s Shalev. The Israeli PM is under political pressure ahead of elections in October: in recent polls, “he falls far short of the majority he needs to secure another term”. He knows Trump’s support “could be critical”. The stakes “are as high as ever”.

How many sailors are in the Gulf?

About 6,000 seafarers are stuck onboard several hundred tankers and cargo ships, many of which have been stranded in the Gulf since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran erupted in late February. “It’s as if we are trapped in a pond,” Shafiqul Islam, captain of a ship carrying some 37,000 tons of fertilizer bound for South Africa, told the BBC last month. “There’s only one way out.” That’s via the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas—as well as shipments of crucial commodities including fertilizer, aluminum, and helium—once flowed from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, and Iran to global markets. Before the war, more than 100 ships a day transited the strait, which is 21 miles wide at its tightest point. After hostilities began, Iran declared the waterway closed and launched missiles and drones at vessels trying to sail through, grinding traffic to a halt. At one point, up to 20,000 mariners and 2,000 ships were stuck in the Gulf, with only a few vessels squeezing through the strait each day.

How were they able to get out?

India, China, Pakistan, and other countries negotiated with Tehran for safe passage for their flagged vessels, and some tanker operators paid Iran up to $2 million for transit rights for individual ships. The logjam in the Gulf eased in June after Washington and Tehran struck a preliminary peace deal, after which about 30 ships a day were able to move through the strait. But that number dropped back to single digits earlier this month after the war restarted. For the sailors stuck in this war zone—many of whom hail from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Ukraine—the fear of death or injury is a constant. “Everyone is just exhausted,” said captain Hassan Khan, “both physically and mentally.” While standing on ships often loaded with highly explosive substances, the crews have watched missiles and drones streak overhead, and more than a dozen mariners have been killed in Iranian and U.S. strikes. Raman Kapoor, a tanker captain who had 10 days left on his tour when war erupted, watched helplessly in March as a nearby tanker exploded in flames after being hit by an unmanned craft. One crew member died. “Everyone was so scared,” Kapoor said. “We are just seafarers. We are not trained for any war.”

What are days like onboard?

Long, monotonous, and hot. While the crews work to ensure their ships remain seaworthy, and movies and ping-pong serve as distractions, staving off boredom and depression is a struggle. “We do our best to keep [up] morale,” Abhijit Chopra, the captain of a tanker that’s been stuck for more than 120 days, told Bloomberg. “But there is definitely a sense of strain and uncertainty.” To entertain themselves and add some diversity to onboard meals, some crews are catching and cooking fish; they report that dried ribbonfish is surprisingly delicious. Calls home are a boon, but infrequent, because satellite phone time is limited and expensive. To protect sailors’ mental health, captains encourage crews to do everything together and to never leave anyone alone—even when they dine or relax. Sailors report that access to knives and other sharp objects is more tightly controlled than normal, to prevent people from harming themselves or others. Meanwhile, food, water, and medicine on many vessels is running low.

Is anything being done about that?

Boats from nearby ports are delivering supplies, but prices keep going up. One Korean sailor told the BBC that it feels like suppliers “are trying to take advantage of the situation to make excessive profits.” The engineer of one ship said the cost of 180 tons of water has spiked in recent months from about $2,000 to $11,000. Price gouging isn’t the only way people are taking advantage of the stranded vessels. Scammers claiming to belong to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have also tricked shipping firms into sending hefty payments to their cryptocurrency wallets in exchange for safe passage.

Have there been any evacuation attempts?

A short-lived one. While a ceasefire was in effect in late June, the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization began ushering ships through the strait’s southern and northern corridors—avoiding the central lanes where Iran had laid mines. Some 130 ships and 3,000 sailors made it out, but the U.S.-backed initiative was scrapped within days after Iran attacked a tanker that was not taking part in the evacuation off Oman’s coast. Some sailors have taken matters into their own hands. Stuck at an Iranian port, Santosh Kumar borrowed nearly $7,000 to pay an agent to drive him to neighboring Armenia, where he boarded a flight to Dubai and then on to his native India. “My family just wanted me home alive,” he said. But such escapes have become increasingly difficult: Some Gulf Arab states have restricted short-term shore passes for sailors over security concerns. Many merchant sailors are now wondering if the profession has become too dangerous, because the Iran war is only the latest crisis to ensnare the shipping industry.

What were the other crises?

Mariners were stranded at sea during the pandemic, and drone attacks on vessels in the Black Sea have become routine since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen—who attacked more than 100 vessels during the HamasIsrael war—this week declared an embargo of Saudi Arabian shipping in the Red Sea, putting more commercial vessels in the line of fire. Merchant sailors seem increasingly wary of going to sea: Companies have struggled to secure replacement crews to relieve sailors in the Gulf whose contracts have expired, despite offering monthly salaries of up to $30,000. The war, said IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez, has shown that “people take seafarers for granted, they don’t value them.”

What happened

Lawmakers in Washington recently demanded that the Trump administration outline its strategy in Iran, as a war that President Trump had vowed would end quickly approached its sixth month and spread further beyond the Persian Gulf. In the first U.S. casualties since March, three American soldiers were killed in a missile attack on a military base in Jordan earlier this month. The next day, a fourth soldier died in Iraq during the controlled detonation of a downed Iranian drone, bringing total U.S. deaths to 18. In response, the U.S. intensified its assault on Iran, hitting bridges and rail lines as well as missile and drone launch sites and air defense facilities. Iran stepped up its attacks on U.S. regional allies, striking a water desalination plant in Kuwait and a U.S. air base and an Amazon data center in Bahrain; the Revolutionary Guard also fired on a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, forcing the crew to evacuate. President Trump vowed the U.S. would “destroy one bridge or power plant” each time Iran targets a ship in the waterway, through which 20% of the world’s oil once flowed.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was pressed on U.S. strategy during a contentious appearance before the Senate appropriations committee. Hegseth, who put the war’s current price tag at $37.5 billion, urged Congress to approve $67 billion in emergency defense funding and warned that the Pentagon would face “critical shortfalls” without the money. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Democrats would not bankroll “this war and whatever other misadventures Trump wants to get us into”; Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) called for “hard answers” about plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Hegseth insisted the U.S. had the upper hand, but Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said Hegseth and the administration had “failed” U.S. troops, adding, “You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war.

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia vowed to block Saudi Arabian ships from exiting the Red Sea and deployed drones and missiles near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, leading energy analysts to warn that oil prices— which spiked $20 this month to $95 a barrel—could go even higher. Attempts by mediators to secure a 10-day ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz made no apparent progress. Until Iran is “ready to meet in a meaningful way,” said Trump, “we have no interest."

What the columnists said

The Iran war “has entered a bleak new phase,” said Megan Messerly and Alex Gangitano in Politico. Trump allies fear the president is running out of ways to extricate America from an unpopular conflict ahead of the midterms. With average gas prices hitting $4 a gallon for the first time since June, Republicans say the war could sink them “in an election that is expected to hinge on costof-living issues.” Even among Trump’s MAGA base, 37% said in a new Politico poll that the U.S. should hold course in Iran only if it doesn’t raise costs.

Trump’s war will only “get harder and harder to defend,” said Zeeshan Aleem in MS.now. Nearly 100 troops have been injured over the past few weeks as Iran ramped up attacks on U.S. bases, and the war’s “human toll is likely to increase.” The Pentagon has been slow to release information on casualties, likely because it knows “the war will become even more widely despised as more people die.” The public will swallow casualties in a campaign they support, but won’t tolerate troops dying “for no obvious reason at all.”

Iran, it turns out, “may be stronger than we thought,” said Joshua Keating in Vox. Contrary to previous assurances by the Trump administration, Iran retains “significant missile and drone capabilities,” with 70% of its prewar missile stockpile intact, according to a recent intelligence report. Meanwhile, there are “growing questions about whether U.S. air defense capabilities are depleting.”

A Houthi blockade of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait could widen the war and “further disrupt global oil supplies and international trade,” said Fatma Khaled and Ahmed Al-Haj in The Associated Press. Sitting at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, the strait serves as a conduit for about 12% of global trade and has become even more vital for Saudi oil exports following the shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis say they’ll stop only ships connected to Saudi Arabia, but even the threat of attack could drive up insurance premiums and deter other ships from using the route.

The conflict now “stands on a knife’s edge,” said Erika Solomon in The New York Times. We’re at a critical moment where both sides must find a way to dial back the hostilities or “risk provoking a war that cascades beyond what they may be able to contain.” With Iran’s economy in tatters and Trump under mounting domestic pressure, “the costs of accelerating the conflict are high for both sides.” But the same factors that make escalation dangerous are “pushing them to riskier attacks,” as they seek to gain leverage.

“Trump has only terrible choices,” said Brynn Tannehill in The Atlantic. With hard-line leaders and “a captive population” accustomed to “economic pain,” Iran is unlikely to bend. Facing that reality, Trump can “stay the course,” with scant odds of success. He can declare victory and walk away. He can ratchet up the pain by targeting civilian infrastructure, which would draw Iranian retaliation against Arab states and make the U.S. a pariah. Or he can launch a ground invasion, and pay a steep price in blood. It boils down to “an unpalatable choice between accepting Iranian hegemony over the strait—or initiating cycles of escalation that cannot end well.”

What happened

Ongoing massive wildfires in southwestern France and central Spain have forced nearly 400,000 people to evacuate. The French blazes have scorched an “area four times the size of Paris,” The Associated Press said, and are spreading toward the wine region city of Bordeaux. Near Madrid, the “biggest wildfire in Spain’s recent history” has burned around 200 square miles of countryside, Reuters said. Firefighters are racing to contain the fires as another European heatwave looms.

Who said what

“We don’t know how the blaze will spread, the fire front is constantly shifting,” a spokesperson for the National Firefighters Federation of France told Agence France-Presse. “It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario.” The fires have caused “incalculable” damage to Spain’s cultural heritage, the country’s King Felipe VI told reporters. Western Europe is experiencing an “extreme summer” of intense heatwaves and dry weather, “setting the stage” for wildfire conditions, The New York Times said.

What next?

Temperatures are forecasted to again “reach abnormally hot levels” across the Spain and France fire zones this week, CNN said. “Difficult hours lie ahead,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told reporters ahead of a crisis meeting with his Cabinet on Monday.

What happened

The United States has “pressed pause” on airstrikes against Iran after President Donald Trump’s advisers told him their military was “running out of targets” and “expressed worries” about dwindling munitions, Reuters reported Sunday. Sources also told Axios that Adm. Brad Cooper, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, and other advisers “recommended stopping the bombing campaign” because it had “reached the limit of its effectiveness.” There have been no U.S. strikes in the region since last week, and Iran has halted its retaliatory attacks. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

Who said what

The president is giving “some space” for diplomatic talks to take place while still keeping “all options on the table,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The U.S. has “far more munitions than anyone in the world,” Trump insisted in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.

Recent polling shows the MAGA base is “losing patience” with the conflict, Politico said. Trump seems “trapped” by a “war he cannot find his way out of,” said The New York Times. “There is more skepticism than optimism” that the pause in fighting will continue, a senior Iranian source told Reuters.

What next?

Oil prices tumbled Monday morning as the pause held, but “analysts cautioned against pricing in further falls,” the Financial Times said. Fed officials will meet this week to discuss a possible interest rate hike as prices remain high.

“No remnants of Nazi influence remain” at Salzburger Vorstadt 15, the building in the Austrian town of Braunau where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, said The New York Times. The former guesthouse has now been remodelled into a police station, in an estimated £15 million renovation that concludes a “years-long effort” to prevent the site from becoming “an attraction for Nazi sympathisers”.

‘Neutralise’ history

The Austrian government acquired Salzburger Vorstadt 15 from its previous private ownership in 2016. It then remained empty while a commission decided the future of the building, forcing the town to decide whether to “confront or erase this past”, said Katja Hoyer in The Telegraph.

Ultimately, it decided it wanted to “neutralise” history by choosing a new purpose for the building to ensure it would “neither be demolished nor become a memorial”.

As a police station, the building will be seen as a place of “democracy, the rule of law, security, freedom and human dignity”, said Gerhard Karner, the Austrian interior minister. “Our police is the opposite of the darkest times of our history,” he said at the opening ceremony. However, he added, “memory will not disappear”.

While there will be no information plaque at the site, a memorial stone remains at the front of the building. The stone, taken from Austria’s largest Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, bears the inscription: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. The millions of dead remind us.”

‘Concerns on several levels’

Over the years, Braunau residents have become “fed up” with “extremists and drunken revellers” who “posed for pictures” outside the building with the “straight-armed Hitler salute” or laid “roses and wreaths” to mark the dictator’s birthday, said The Guardian.

But choosing what to do with the site was no easy task. Turning it into a museum of Nazi atrocities could “continue to draw right-wing extremists” but demolishing the building would “obfuscate an important chapter of local history”.

It was felt that a police station would “discourage Hitler admirers” from visiting the site, commission member Oliver Rathkolb told Deutsche Welle.

However, in a 2023 poll only 6% of respondents were in support of the police station idea, possibly due to concerns over the role of the Gestapo secret police as “one of the regime’s principal instruments of terror”. Salzburger Vorstadt 15 should have become “a place dedicated to peace, freedom, democracy and tolerance”, said local resident Eveline Doll. Turning it into a police station “raises concerns on several levels”.

But Florian Kotanko, chair of the Contemporary History Society of Braunau, rejected such comparisons. “We live in a democratic state governed by the rule of law” and, so long as officers are “held accountable”, there is “no reason for fundamental distrust of the police”, he said.

Since the US and Israel first attacked Iran on 28 February, President Trump “has claimed more than 30 times that Operation Epic Fury has been successful, is over, or almost is”, said Robin Wright in The New Yorker. None of these predictions have been borne out; “some have bordered on delusional”.

Tehran on the attack

The latest ceasefire, agreed in June, has “functionally collapsed”. In the past fortnight, the US has launched nightly air strikes, renewed the blockade of Iranian ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz, and reimposed sanctions. Iran has attacked US and other targets in Jordan, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. Three US service personnel were killed last week by a strike on an airbase in Jordan; nearly 100 more have been injured in the latest attacks.

Trump has tried three strategies so far: regime change, a longer campaign of relentless bombardment, and diplomacy. None have worked. In Washington, “there is a growing sense of despair” about the direction of the war.

Iran’s leaders feared that the Memorandum of Understanding agreed in June was just a temporary retreat, said Vali Nasr in the FT – to relieve pressure on the world economy and allow US forces to rearm. There was, in fact, “plenty of evidence to support their suspicions”. More US military assets began to arrive in the area, and the deal’s provisions – on coordinating the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz with Iran, on the need for a ceasefire in Lebanon – were ignored. Tehran’s aim now, in going on the attack, is to show that the US cannot dictate events, and that Iran can withstand whatever military and economic pain is inflicted on it.

Deep trouble

Some strategists think the new US plan could work, said Mark Urban in The Sunday Times. Its forces are battering Iran’s coast – military installations, bridges, airports, port facilities – to neutralise the Iranian military’s hold on the strait. At the same time, choking off oil exports will plunge the country into deep economic crisis – albeit in months, not weeks.

In the meantime, the collateral damage to the region is escalating, said Ahmed Al Omran in the FT. Kuwait, which is bearing the brunt of Iran’s current attacks, has endured 1,400 missile and drone strikes. Its airport and its oil infrastructure have been attacked, along with the energy grid and the desalination plants that supply 90% of Kuwait’s water. Oil exports have dropped to 20% of pre-war levels.

The US is in deep trouble, and there’s no easy way out, said Will Walldorf in Foreign Policy – short of accepting Iran’s authority over the Strait of Hormuz and its right to enrich uranium. “But that’s the unfortunate consequence of losing a war that should never have [been] started in the first place.”

What happened

The US-Saudi nuclear cooperation agreement signed this week was thrown into uncertainty on Thursday after President Donald Trump said the deal would depend on Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic ties with Israel. In a post on Truth Social, Trump warned that the agreement allowing Riyadh to pursue civilian nuclear power using U.S. technology was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” the initiative that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states during his first term. The condition was not specified when the deal was announced.

Who said what

Trump’s White House “had faced down considerable political opposition to push forward with the Saudi deal,” said The Washington Post. By highlighting caveats to the agreement, Trump is “responding to two of the bigger criticisms: that it could open the door to nuclear enrichment and that Washington gave up leverage to push a peace deal with Israel,” said Axios.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the new condition as a “historic leap for peace.” Saudi officials have previously resisted linking nuclear cooperation to recognition of Israel.

What next?

“It is unclear,” said CNN, what “impact Trump’s social media missive will have on the signed agreement,” which is expected to be submitted to Congress for review.

Iranian strikes on CIA facilities have led US intelligence officials to believe that unprecedented intelligence cooperation is taking place between Russia and Tehran, with China cooperating closely with Moscow too.

The US is investigating how Iran was able to accurately target covert CIA facilities in Saudi Arabia and other allied countries in March. Reuters cited former CIA officials who said that relatively few countries possess both the intelligence capabilities and strategic motivation to provide Tehran with such highly sensitive data.

If confirmed, “the successful targeting of covert CIA facilities would represent one of the most significant intelligence security breaches affecting US overseas operations in recent decades”, said Military Watch Magazine.

What did the commentators say?

It appears likely that Iran had help from Russia as the attacks “were far more advanced than what they’ve done before”, Nicole Grajewski, from the Center for International Research at Sciences Po university in Paris, told Al Jazeera. Russia “has also allegedly helped Tehran improve the accuracy” of its attack drones by supplying a Russian-designed anti-jamming navigation system, said Al Jazeera.

A secret document seen by The Economist and estimated by the newspaper to have been from the first six weeks of the war showed Russia also offered to provide Iran with “unjammable drones and training on how to use them against American troops in the Gulf”. Christo Grozev, an expert on Russia’s intelligence services, said the proposal was consistent with other evidence that Russia is looking for ways of increasing support for Iran.

For Russia, the benefits of a continued conflict in the Middle East are obvious. More countries are looking to buy Russian oil while the Strait of Hormuz continues to be unstable, said RadioFreeEurope. The Philippines, for example, “has sought to increase Russian crude access and expanded discussions over long-term energy cooperation”. Where Moscow could benefit economically, “China may see diplomatic gains amid the same situation”.

Moscow and Beijing “have coordinated closely throughout the crisis”, said Jasim Al-Azzawi on Middle East Monitor, jointly convening UN sessions and “declining to abandon Tehran diplomatically even as they withheld direct military support”. There is “a seductive myth that China and Iran are allies bound by blood and ideology, that Beijing would ride to Tehran’s rescue the way Nato would for a member under Article 5”. But “nothing could be further from the truth. What binds Beijing and Tehran is colder, more durable, and in some ways more dangerous than sentiment: mutual utility.”

The Iran war has been good for Beijing because it has “accelerated three of China’s long-held goals: a Middle East less dependent on America, a world more dependent on critical Chinese technology and a reputation for Beijing as a serious and steady world power”, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post. Accordingly, China “provides technological and military support to Iran”, said Nadia Helmy on Modern Diplomacy. Chinese companies are “supplying vital components and technologies used in Iran’s missile and defence programmes, making Tehran a regional power that is difficult to deter without significant cost”.

What next?

The US is “surging forces, medics and weaponry to the Middle East to give President Trump more muscular military options as he considers expanding the conflict”, said The Wall Street Journal.

But any escalation will be complicated by the continued support of China and Russia for Iran and the changing of the geopolitical pecking order that this war is beginning to cause. “The Iran conflict has shown that governments increasingly judge the major powers by whether they can help manage energy costs, shipping risk and inflation,” Ilango Karuppannan, a veteran Malaysian diplomat, told RadioFreeEurope.

“This creates a risk for Washington. The US may remain militarily important while becoming less economically relevant.”

What happened

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis on Thursday morning said they had attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, enforcing a threatened blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb waterway that Saudi Arabia has been using to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. The attack “threatened to open a new front in a war that has roiled the global economy” as the U.S. and Iran “vie for control of vital shipping lanes,” The Associated Press said. Both sides have also “increasingly threatened civilian infrastructure.”

The U.S. conducted a 12th night of airstrikes against Iran, which fired at U.S. allies in the region. Along with striking U.S. military bases, Iran has also hit several CIA sites, prompting U.S. intelligence to “investigate whether Russia assisted by providing targeting information or ​advanced drone technology,” Reuters said.

Who said what

President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened on social media to “destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT” in Iran every time Tehran “shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz.” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran will respond in kind with an “eye for an eye” defense against the U.S. and its enablers. “Current and former military officials caution it isn’t lawful to strike an adversary’s infrastructure for political purposes,” The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

Trump is considering “both a ceasefire and a significant military escalation” in Iran, Axios said. The Pentagon is “surging forces, medics and weaponry to the Middle East,” suggesting “Trump is considering escalating the conflict,” the Journal said.

In politics, first impressions can mean a great deal and Donald Trump has heaped praise on Andy Burnham for his plans to fast-track oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, the president said “the People of Aberdeen” are “dancing in the streets” because Burnham said “he will be opening up, all the way, the invaluable North Sea Oil!” As ever with Trump, this was playing fast and loose with the truth, as Burnham is yet to commit to any new drilling in the North Sea.

But after Trump gave Burnham an initial thumbs-up, “talk in DC turned to Ed Miliband’s role as the most contentious figure”, said The Times’ Katy Balls. Miliband has been an outspoken critic of Trump in the past, which is “likely to put him on the back foot with an increasingly hostile US administration”, said Bloomberg.

What did the commentators say?

There’s an “opening” for a new prime minister who is “liberal, centre-left, internationalist” and who “recognises the world has changed”, said Steve Bloomfield on The New Statesman.

Burnham must “find a way to deal” with the “fracturing” of the special relationship, and having “seen how others have fared”, with Trump, he “should find it easier”.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani calls Trump a “fascist” but still works with him on “areas where they agree”, while Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese “took the risk of standing up to Trump” and “subsequently won elections they were predicted to lose”. So “standing up to Trump is not only morally right”, it’s “electorally effective”.

Economic, intelligence and defence ties “run deep”, so many believe it’s “better to stay on the right side of Trump – however tempting it might sometimes be to give him a (metaphorical) kick”, but you don’t want to be a “total toady”, said Anushka Asthana on Channel 4 News.

On energy, Burnham “seems prepared to move the rhetoric” with the suggestion he will green-light two oil and gas drilling projects in the North Sea. He’s promised “help on the Strait of Hormuz” but what if Trump breaches international humanitarian law? Diplomats and advisers know “full well” that the unpredictable president could “change his mind, at any moment”.

Keir Starmer’s relationship with Trump “turned from warm to cold”, said Andrew Buncombe on The i Paper. Burnham will “run into the same problems” on “issues that have created friction”, including Britain’s decision to cede control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, its refusal to get involved in the war against Iran, and “how far to proceed with drilling for oil in the North Sea”.

The PM “only has a limited way to try and influence how Washington acts” and he should remember that his first call with Trump was “just that – the first talk”. If the “rest are positive”, then Burnham “will turn out to be a very lucky man”.

What next?

Starmer was a former prosecutor seen as a “cool-headed technocrat, unruffled by the insults as long as he was making his case”, said Steve Hendrix in The Washington Post. But Burnham has “honed a warmer, plain-spoken touch” which “could be an asset” with a president who “responds to personal chemistry in ways he doesn’t respond to formal diplomacy”.

The new PM has “made clear that his instincts, and his mandate, are relentlessly domestic”, so the new No. 10 will “have its eyes fixed inward”, not “across the Atlantic”. Trump and the rest of the “foreign policy inbox” is “expected to be substantially subcontracted” to the foreign secretary.

What happened

President Donald Trump has approved a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that could open the door to uranium enrichment inside the kingdom, The Wall Street Journal first reported Tuesday night. The 30-year agreement is “designed to give American companies a central role” in developing Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear infrastructure, the Journal said. But it’s “certain to prove controversial” among U.S. allies and lawmakers opposed to the “spread of nuclear technology in the volatile Middle East.”

Who said what

The nuclear cooperation agreement “has been under discussion for years,” The New York Times said. Trump dropped a Biden administration stipulation that the Saudis first normalize relations with Israel, and to “get the deal done with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” he “had to agree to terms that may limit international inspectors” from visiting sites “they think could be a pathway to diverting fuel to weapons projects.” Bin Salman has vowed to build nuclear weapons if Iran does.

The White House argues that the U.S. role “would ensure enrichment remains peaceful,” the Journal said. But if the Saudis can enrich uranium, so “goes the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Egypt,” Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center told the Journal. “The idea that this will have a happy ending is delusional.”

What next?

U.S. and Saudi officials are expected to sign the accord on Wednesday.

What happened

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday dismissed the country’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, and replaced him with Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi. The switch “comes amid ongoing mass protests” that erupted across Ukraine after Zelenskyy’s ouster last week of “popular reformist” Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had clashed with Syrskyi, The Kyiv Independent said.

Demonstrators said Zelenskyy should have sacked Syrskyi instead when he picked sides in the dispute. Drapatyi, the widely respected commander of day-to-day combat operations, had publicly backed Fedorov.

Who said what

Fedorov had “emphasized the strategic importance of new military technology, particularly drones,” CNN said, and his “six-month tenure as defense minister coincided with Ukraine’s recent success on the battlefield” and in damaging Russia. Syrskyi, by contrast, was widely seen as a “Soviet-school commander reluctant to implement radical changes in the army,” the BBC said.

As the protests swelled, “it became clear” that for many Ukrainians, Fedorov “embodied a tech-driven path to victory that might spare lives,” while “Syrskyi had come to represent the darkest, most punishing realities” of the war, The New York Times said. The clash of visions fueled “concerns that the national unity that had helped the country survive nearly five years of war was in danger of fracturing.”

What next?

After meeting with Fedorov on Tuesday, Zelenskyy “offered him what he called a respected position in the government,” The Associated Press said. It “wasn’t clear if Fedorov accepted,” but he congratulated Drapatyi, calling his promotion a “new hope in the fight of free people for freedom and justice.”