Geopolitics

Kyiv’s military intelligence says a North Korean missile unit is taking up positions in western Russia, complete with launchers, missiles and the crews to fire them. The claim, if correct, marks the point where Pyongyang’s support for Moscow stops being a supply relationship and becomes a deployment. The information comes from Andrii Cherniak of Ukraine’s […]

At her farewell gathering with the Philippine media, outgoing French ambassador Marie Fontanel made an offer that was about energy and, by her own framing, about sovereignty. She said Paris stands ready to share its nuclear expertise with Manila, and she tied the offer to a broader ambition: deepening defense cooperation between the two countries. […]

Japan’s government approved on Wednesday the most significant tax change in nearly four decades: the consumption tax on food falls from 8 percent to 1 percent for two years starting in April 2027. It is the first reduction in a tax that has only ever gone up since it was introduced in 1989. On the […]

Over three days at the start of August, the public record on the Iran talks contradicted itself in plain sight. Tehran said it was not negotiating with Washington. President Trump said the two sides were talking, or about to talk, and that shipping through the strait could resume within a day. American officials then said […]

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. gave his fifth annual address to Congress on July 27 with the country’s most delicate foreign relationship hanging over it. The Associated Press read the speech as a veiled rebuke of Beijing. The Diplomat counted a single explicit reference to China, in a list of countries that kept fuel flowing to the […]

Before dawn on Saturday, Russia sent 27 ballistic missiles at Ukraine, most of them at Kyiv. Nine people died, more than 30 were wounded, and Ukraine’s defenses brought down exactly one of the incoming weapons. Zelenskyy said only one ballistic missile was intercepted because there are no interceptors for the Patriot systems. The Patriot, built […]

A video released by Ukrainian police shows a drone circling a van that doubles as a market stall, then detonating as the man dives behind it. Officers said the victim, in his 50s, suffered shock and shrapnel wounds. Officials later named him as Yurii, 52, and released a bedside interview filmed in the hospital. On […]

Amnesty International South Africa is demanding that the authorities rein in vigilante groups preying on migrants, shopkeepers and neighborhoods. The abuse, the group says, turns on nationality or on whether someone looks undocumented: illegal demands for identity papers, intimidation, forced eviction from homes and businesses, public shaming. The statement, released August 4, documents a graver […]

Israel has been at war, on several fronts, for most of the past three years, and its economy keeps performing like a country at peace. The shekel is among the strongest currencies in the world. Tel Aviv stocks have surged. Investment money keeps flowing in, and economists project the economy will outperform most of the […]

The trade numbers do not show a break. China’s rare earth magnet exports to Japan actually rose in the first two months of the year. Japanese companies still buy Chinese parts, Chinese consumers still buy Japanese goods, and the two economies remain tangled in ways that would take a decade to untie. And yet the […]