Geopolitics

The United States launched a new round of airstrikes against Iran on Sunday to “swiftly punish” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for killing two American service members in Jordan. CENTCOM said the strikes hit “surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage and maritime capabilities.” The language of righteous punishment made for a neat headline. […]

The European Union is telling two different stories about China, and it is not clear it can keep telling both at the same time. On June 29, the EU and China agreed on a new economic definition of their relationship: “stable and balanced key trading partners.” They launched a Trade and Investment Consultation Mechanism covering […]

Taiwan’s diplomatic footprint in the Pacific shrank further on July 16 when Papua New Guinea abruptly announced the closure of Taiwan’s Economic and Cultural Office in Port Moresby. “The physical presence of Chinese Taipei will no longer be recognized or required within the jurisdiction of Papua New Guinea,” Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko said in a […]

Russian authorities hit two anti-war voices on Friday with separate punishments, a fine that effectively ends one man’s political career and a pre-trial detention order for a blogger who dared to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal. The cases show that the Kremlin’s tolerance for dissent, already close to zero, keeps getting lower as the […]

The northeastern United States faced a double dose of dangerous weather on Saturday as flash flood warnings struck areas already choking under wildfire smoke drifting south from Canada. New York City and the surrounding Tri-State area spent the morning under unhealthy air quality alerts as smoke from more than 150 active wildfires in Ontario blanketed […]

Russians are pulling money out of banks and stuffing it under mattresses at a rate not seen since the pandemic, a sign that four years of war, tax hikes, and mobile internet shutdowns are fraying faith in the country’s financial system. Cash in circulation has increased by 1.56 trillion roubles ($20 billion) since the start […]

Ukrainian drone strikes on two Wildberries warehouses in Russia killed eight people and wounded 62 on Saturday, Kyiv’s latest attempt to take the war deep into Russian logistics territory. The attacks hit facilities in Tambov, about 475 kilometers southeast of Moscow, and Elektrostal in the Moscow region. In Tambov, seven night-shift workers died at the […]

A ceasefire is supposed to stop the killing. Since the US-brokered Gaza truce was signed in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 857 more Palestinians, including 229 children, according to the Palestinian health ministry and UNICEF. The numbers tell the story the diplomatic language tries to hide. In the first six months of the […]

Two U.S. service members were killed and one remains missing after Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks struck a base in Jordan on Friday, U.S. Central Command confirmed Saturday, bringing the total number of U.S. military personnel killed since the war began to 16. Four other service members were medically evacuated to hospitals in Jordan […]

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun departed Beirut for Washington on Saturday, headed for his first face-to-face meeting with President Trump at the White House on July 21, with talks expected to focus on Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the future of the fragile ceasefire. Aoun’s visit comes after Lebanon and Israel signed a US-brokered framework […]