Geopolitics & international affairs
North Korea fired a ballistic missile over the sea on Wednesday morning, its second launch in less than a week, and the military exercise that Pyongyang is presumably answering has not even started. Seoul’s military tracked the launch from the Wonsan area on the North’s east coast at about 6 a.m., with the weapon arcing […]
Israel’s defense minister drove through the demolished villages of southern Lebanon on Wednesday and told the army to plan for a long occupation. Israel Katz, touring the strip of Lebanese territory his country has held since the spring, said the troops would stay, not for months but indefinitely, and that the same applied to Syria […]
A quarter-century-old tanker outside the world’s insurance system is emptying its cargo into the Arabian Sea, and the oil has reached Oman’s shore. The Caroline Bezengi, carrying about 800,000 barrels of Russian crude under international sanctions, ran aground off Oman on June 30. Satellite measurement puts its slick at more than 2,000 square kilometers (about […]
China’s national science foundation has quietly added the one field Beijing protects most carefully to its cooperation program with Iran: the extraction and processing of rare earths. The announcement, made this week, puts the strategically sensitive metals on the agenda of the annual joint workshops the Chinese and Iranian science foundations run together, alongside such […]
The EU, joined by 26 governments including France, Britain and Canada, published a joint statement on Wednesday condemning the executions of protesters in Iran in the strongest terms the signatories could find. The statement was released through Canada’s foreign ministry and announced by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot. The statement said the use of capital […]
From the deck of the missile cruiser Varyag, somewhere off the island of Sakhalin, Vladimir Putin delivered a warning that turns Europe’s sanctions strategy back on itself. If European states seize vessels carrying Russian cargo, he said on Wednesday, Moscow will respond in kind, and it will do so wherever it chooses. The Russian president, […]
A new survey of European public opinion has a finding that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Germans are now Europe’s most China-skeptical people. In a European Council on Foreign Relations poll of 15 countries, a combined 49 percent of Germans described China mainly as a rival, even an adversary, the highest share anywhere. […]
On Tuesday, an American naval helicopter put two Hellfire missiles into the ship’s engine room. The vessel, a cargo carrier under the Panamanian flag out in the Gulf of Oman, had ignored repeated warnings and kept making for an Iranian port. Central Command said the ship, the M/V Vela Nova, is no longer heading to […]
On Monday night three of the six reactors at Gravelines, France’s biggest nuclear site, went offline. A fourth dropped to half power, and a sixth was already out for maintenance. Only one unit of six kept running at full capacity. The cause was not a grid failure, a cyberattack, or a safety breach. It was […]
China announced on Tuesday that one of its frigates will hold a joint exercise with an Indonesian frigate in waters east of Taiwan in mid-August. On its face, the drill is small and technical: the Chinese guided-missile frigate Honghe and the Indonesian KRI John Lie will practice communication and replenishment at sea, the sort of […]
