The Abbey Gate bombing in many ways marked the climax to the war in Afghanistan that began 25 years ago, shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. It’s a potent lesson still in how even seemingly just wars fought by the most powerful army in the world can go horribly wrong.

I made only two on-the-ground reporting tours in Afghanistan, but spent years following the work of military personnel, aid organizers, Afghan students, business leaders, and underground church-goers in what became one of the fastest growing Christian populations in the world.

So as the Taliban march on Kabul became a rout and gains of the 20-year war went down in a catastrophic U.S. withdrawal, I spent many sleepless nights that July and August reporting via Telegram and Signal, following evacuations sometimes in real-time alongside military veterans and others, tracking the movements of vulnerable Afghans and Americans trapped in the capital. I wrote about a dozen stories over those weeks as my days and nights blurred, and in the hours just before the bombing pulled an all-nighter to report on families deserving protection who were trapped outside the airport at Abbey Gate.

I watched onscreen via GPS the bright dots that were people with names I knew, moved first to safe houses then through Kabul streets to the airport gate, all led by U.S.-based guides who at the same time were communicating with U.S. military inside the airport. Among the dots, two pregnant women and children who already had spent sleepless nights at the gate before being turned away by U.S. soldiers (that story here). Getting turned back again that day would mean they lived and didn’t die. It would also mean months and months of hiding before making overland escapes. For many those escapes turned deadly as they were sought by the Taliban, now in control of the Afghan government.

No one in power planned for the numbers needing to escape nor the prevalence of Taliban fighters infiltrating what should have been a cordoned U.S. military zone. In frustration one U.S. official told me at the time—

“We’ve had empty planes on the tarmac and cannot get the people to them. At this point we are having to run operations against our own government to get people into the airport.”

Among many blunders marking the pullout, President Joe Biden in early July withdrew American forces from Bagram Airfield, the main U.S. and NATO operating base just north of Kabul. That decision alone crippled U.S. evacuation efforts and cost hundreds of Afghan and American lives.

But it was President Donald Trump in his first term who set the terms for the U.S. pullout. The February 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement committed the U.S. to removing all troops by 2021 and notably did not include the Afghan government as a party to negotiations, effectively handing control to the Taliban under the agreement’s terms.

President Donald Trump in an Aug. 26 proclamation honoring the service members killed said Biden “squandered” the hard-fought gains of the war by “putting politics over strategy.” He did not acknowledge the number of Afghans killed, nor the role his own diplomacy may have played. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth last year announced a new investigation focusing on information the Pentagon says was “overclassified.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on Wednesday that recently discovered “hidden documents” that “should have been disclosed” will become part of that probe, but gave no timetable on when it would be completed.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban government celebrated five years of current rule earlier this month with a military parade and flags in the streets, while its critics decried restrictions in all areas of daily life. Hundreds gathered outside the former U.S. embassy, while fresh flowers were thrown from military helicopters over a parade of athletes that featured only men. Women once again are banned from sports in Afghanistan. Russia is the only country to formally recognize the Taliban government since the 2021 takeover.

Other news:

On Friday, relief group Samaritan’s Purse said it is withdrawing from a $300 million award from the Trump administration to provide aid after natural disasters. The new funding was part of $2 billion in awards the State Department announced earlier this month for a consortium of Christian groups working in global relief and development. “Throughout my history leading Samaritan’s Purse, we have always relied on God, not government, for funding,” said CEO Franklin Graham in a statement to Christianity Today (full statement here).

In Nepal, rescue workers today bore through Himalayan tunnels to get to workers at hydroelectric plants missing since Wednesday’s flash floods. Authorities say 279 workers have been rescued but 933 are trapped. Overall, at least 2,400 people are reported missing since a catastrophic debris flow and flood swept down about 60 miles of steep mountainsides when portions of a glacier broke away in Lantan National park near Nepal’s border with China.

On Monday the United States removed Syria from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, opening the gate for economic and financial ties to the world. On Wednesday, President Ahmed al-Sharaa paid for a coffee with a Visa card at a restaurant in Damascus, demonstrating a restored international card payment system.

• Also in a week of turnabouts, Mazloum Abdi, the leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a longstanding U.S. ally and leading force controlling Syria’s northeast for a decade, announced dissolving the SDF and integration into the national army. He said the country had entered “a new phase defined by peace and the building of a new Syria.” Al-Sharaa appointed him as one of his advisers.

Across southern Lebanon as war got underway in March, residents in Christian villages were told they would not be targeted by Israel. Unaffiliated with Hezbollah, they would be spared, but that did not mean they would be unaffected. This month Israeli forces at checkpoints turned back reporters and Catholic organizations with humanitarian work in the buffer zone inside Lebanon now occupied, as Israel now controls access there.

Ukraine has more than 25 ad hoc Telegram channels that monitor the Ukrainian skies in real time. A sharp increase in Russian air attacks over the summer makes it hard for seasoned residents to scramble to safety, as this first-hand account makes clear.

From Africa, American missionary pilot Kevin Rideout was released from captivity on Aug. 14 with details still emerging. The SIM pilot, whose case had become a priority for the Trump administration, was kidnapped nine months ago from Niger, held in western Sahel by an Islamic State affiliate, and freed through Libya after a deal reportedly was brokered by Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar and his son Saddam. Reuters reports that ransom was paid, though U.S. policy prohibits paying ransom to terror group.

• Haftar is the 82-year-old de facto ruler of eastern Libya, and commander of the Libyan National Army. He took part in the military coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power in 1969, then was exiled to the United States and helped to lead opposition forces starting in 2011 that ousted Gaddafi. Haftar has received backing from Russia, from Trump, and he and his son went to U.S. court over war crimes charges.

In Algeria temperatures reached 116.6°F on Wednesday, a record for the Mediterranean port city of Annaba. Less noted than Europe, north Africa’s high temperatures have scorched coastal areas this summer and led to dozens of wildfires. Authorities said 64 of 174 fires were still burning as of Friday. Reporting in for GlobeTrot, Isaac Dellinger, who is traveling in Algeria, said—

“116 degrees while surrounded by water is pretty crazy to think about. The heat I felt can only be described as spicy, crackly to the skin.” Storm clouds form amid the smoke rising, he said. Lightning also is sparking wildfires, “but it’s so hot that the drops evaporate before reaching the ground.”

If you doubt the whole world mourned the death of Dolly Parton, just listen to the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace playing “9 to 5” following news of her death on Tuesday at age 80. Or the viral clips of her singing in an Irish pub in 1990. Rolling Stone has perhaps the definitive obit, and Russell Moore at Christianity Today a potent take on the way she belonged to all of America.

I’m following … efforts by the United States to dismantle the International Criminal Court, debates about Christian persecution in Nigeria, and reports the Trump administration may revoke up to 200,000 business and visitor nonimmigrant visas. Also upcoming: stories on the status of citizenship in the United States, and some healthy approaches around the world of vaccines.

Cairo is 1,500 miles from Tehran, and for months Egypt did not figure prominently in the Iran War. As the conflict crosses the six-month marker, though, few places and fewer people in the region can escape its impact. A video out of Tehran showing a frustrated ice cream vendor, who explodes in anger as 400 pounds of his merchandise melts due to power cuts, went viral across the region because so many can relate to his loss.

Technically, Egypt isn’t a combatant in the war. It hasn’t mobilized troops or taken military action. But a drone strike this month on an American tanker at the port of Damietta showed how quickly that may change. For many people, the question is no longer whether Egypt is a target but whether Damietta is only the first of future strikes in Egypt.

As the United States pledged on Thursday to keep the naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz “indefinitely,” it begins to feel that for those even at the fringes in the region, they also have a target on their backs.

For those of us living through it, this war can only be described as weird, a distant conflict turned into a domestic emergency as the shipping lanes of the Strait have become the battleground. Shortages and outages showed up the first night of war.

Cairo at the height of Ramadan is supposed to be at its loudest by 10 p.m. Muslims do not eat or drink from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan, so they often get together and feast into early morning hours. We knew the war had begun when the digital billboards at 10 p.m. went dark and the restaurants were told to close in February.

The ordinarily bright, crowded street between my friend’s apartment and my room a kilometer away fell empty and silent. Lights were cut in all public areas. Power rationing became a way of life within days of the war breaking out, right in the middle of the holiday, when most of Egypt comes alive at night under lights. The Egypt I had grown accustomed to while studying in Cairo changed almost immediately.

Power generation depends heavily on gas. Across the Middle East, gas is responsible for 71 percent of electricity output. As fighting intensified over Hormuz, supply tightened, and governments began rationing. Countries with no stake in the war lost their electricity anyway.

These shortages were not new. Millions across the Middle East grew accustomed to rationing fuel and electricity during past regional conflicts. But the weirdness of this war, with on-again, off-again air strikes, the blockade, and the economic instability, has made the outages longer and more frequent. While suppliers like the United States and Canada stepped up their output to offset global energy losses, we in the Middle East are the last to experience a resupply. The strike on a tanker at Damietta, sitting in the Mediterranean and not the Strait, was a potent signal that war in strange ways is at our doorstep.

With summer months it became notably more dangerous everywhere, as daily temperatures spike to 110 degrees Fahrenheit and above.

“People are without power again, and it’s hot right now,” a friend in Iraqi Kurdistan told me a few weeks ago. “We’re also tired of the unknown.”

Alongside Egypt and Iraq, Kuwait and Libya have significant power grid issues. A contact in Tripoli has repeatedly told me they are losing power in the late evenings and at night as the country struggles to meet demand.

The outages have profound impact on daily life. They mean downed servers, so businesses can’t operate. Transactions fail. University exams are cancelled. “You lose the will to study because you never know if the exam will actually happen,” said one student.

The cost is not just showing in infrastructure. In a war that has no single front, Iraq is feeling the heat. Rebel groups, U.S.-backed in the north, Iran-backed in the south, have been fighting one another in proxy skirmishes. In late July, the United States and Saudi Arabia carried out joint strikes across the country, killing at least 20 Iranian-backed fighters, according to U.S. Central Command.

At the same time, the war is putting Iraq in a severe cash crunch. Because oil accounts for most of its economy, and Iraq cannot export enough oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the government is running out of money to pay workers in its sprawling public sector.

“War has made Iraqis pay the price yet again,” said one Iraqi, “where Iraq has become less of an independent actor and more of a battlefield where regional and international powers pursue their own interests on our soil.”

The constant outsider activity in the country has destabilized not just its systems, but also people’s minds and trust in each other, she said.

Yemen is another country that desperately needs recovery from a recent history of war but instead facing more instability. Last week Iran-backed Houthis targeted several camps run by the Emergency Forces of Yemen’s internationally recognized government, killing at least 30 people.

Israelis do not currently face power rationing, though they have endured regular retaliatory missile strikes from Iran. In Palestinian areas like the West Bank, my friends tell me they have no gas for cooking stoves, limited water access, and almost no electricity. The human toll of this latest war for them, especially in Gaza, is staggering.

When the war began, my family and friends back home in America called asking if I was safe, if I needed to come home. I did not, but I worried instead about the countries, homes, and families of my newfound friends in Cairo, fellow students from around the region. And I realized something: All of us, at the end of the day, are connected to events by the family, friends, and places we know are affected. When something bad happens, it’s the connection that brings us together. My first thoughts are about the families of those I know here. If I worry about the price of gas, it’s because it affects people and places I care about. It’s the human, personal cost that counts most.

Elsewhere in the region:

The offensive launched by Israel against Iran-linked Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, only days after the Iran War began, has continued to level whole villages and towns, much of it happening after an initial Israel-Lebanon ceasefire on April 17. The campaign, part of an evolving occupation by Israel documented by the Financial Times, now includes about 6 percent of Lebanese territory, a zone containing mostly Shia and some Christian towns. It’s resulted in at least 4,000 Lebanese deaths, 30 Israel soldiers killed, and 1.2 million people displaced.

Israeli defense minister Israel Katz this week said “under no circumstances” will Israel withdraw troops from Lebanon, Syria, or Gaza. The Likud government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it must have buffer zones inside bordering countries to prevent retaliatory strikes from Iran or Iran-backed militants.

For those in Lebanon who cannot go home, it’s another way people across the Middle East are made to confront remote warfare.

“We have become prisoners of satellites, prisoners of maps, waiting,” said Fadia Bazzi, who owns a home she cannot return to in southern Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil, a town near the city of Tyre.

Said Johns Hopkins’ Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American political scientist: The account of “deliberate destruction of civil life in southern Lebanon is harrowing. In inflicting these humanitarian tragedies Israel is planting seeds of more conflicts to come.”

(video via Financial Times and Israel Defense Forces; Amit Segal/Telegram; LBCI Lebanon News showing IDF strikes and detonations on southern Lebanon)

Off the coast of Oman, two oil slicks have appeared in Iranian waters outside the Strait of Hormuz in what could spell an environmental disaster in the Persian Gulf.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has a deep dive on why U.S. military munitions are at an all-time low. Key takeaways: The war in Iran is an important driver; the Ukraine War, not so much.

More news:

About President Donald Trump’s dramatic plane switch in Turkey last month: Sitting presidents have duped the public on their whereabouts in a series of stunts for over a century. What’s extraordinary, given security around planes and airports today—

is that “the president had to be smuggled onto a different plane after a NATO summit in a NATO country,” said Holly Dagres, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “While the Trump administration touts the weakness of the Islamic Republic, its reach remains extensive enough to allegedly try and kill the most heavily protected leader in the world.”

In Colombia, rescuers raced on Friday to free four people from a collapsed hotel, a rare sign of hope nearly ‌four days after one of the strongest earthquakes to hit the Andean nation in decades left hundreds dead or missing. Monday’s 7.4 magnitude quake left major damage in Cali, the country’s third-largest city at about 2 million residents, and in Pereira and Manizales, hubs of Colombia’s coffee-growing region and home to about 500,000 people.

In Russia, officials released on Tuesday American Robert Gilman, whom family feared was “near death” from physical and psychological torture. The 32-year-old Marine veteran had been detained in Russia since 2022.

Here’s how a social media campaign snowballed after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants who swim to Ceuta cannot be returned to Morocco. At least 34 people died trying, and at least 60,000 have converged on the Spanish territory in the past week.

• According to the International Office for Migration, the number of migrant deaths more than doubled on the central Mediterranean route and tripled on the eastern Mediterranean route in the first four months of 2026, compared to the same period in 2025.

As Fox News puts it, Britain’s Reform UK Party leader Nigel Farage “gambled his seat on the voters of Clacton siding with him over Britain’s political establishment—and won.” While the anti-immigration figure may have beat a field of fringe candidates in a special election called after he quit the seat in July, a parliamentary investigation into potential wrongdoing he seemed to want to avoid now can proceed again.

Upper-level students in Denmark will be required to defend their written assignments orally under new government measures aimed at combating cheating with artificial intelligence. The Ministry of Education said that an oral defense will become mandatory for all written assignments completed at home.

We’re following:

The U.S. State Department last week announced $2 billion in humanitarian-aid funding for faith-based groups, with U.S.-based Christian organizations overseeing $1.4 billion. Much of the funding, to be distributed over 5 years, will be overseen by World Vision in a consortium that includes Samaritan’s Purse, Compassion International, and others. The new funding, reports Christianity Today, comes after drastic cuts to foreign aid, including healthcare programs and disaster assistance, but is part of an “evolving funding approach” that doesn’t necessarily replace programs that were cut overseas. The National Association of Evangelicals said in a statement it “applauds” the “lifesaving support through faith-based partners,” while critics question limiting the consortium to Christian organizations.

Persecution around the world is growing, according to the Pew Research Center and others, yet the priorities of the United States and Europe are shifting, resulting in reduced political and financial support for defending religious freedom. That’s the conclusion of a new report from Dallas Baptist University produced by a team of former State Department researchers and human rights lawyers. It recommends a “bigger tent” approach to religious freedom by reversing the divisions that have grown among competing rights groups. The Bush Center, too, has a good summation.

—with reporting contributed by Mindy Belz

It was a bold gesture of hospitality, I learned. Gabi had spent three years in prison for activities against the Assad regime, and Assad’s army had a security checkpoint in the city, just at the end of Gabi’s street. As our group walked to his home in the dark, we could see the lights of the gate. Gabi’s only caution was, “Don’t speak English in the street.”

There were still a few more hours before the power went down, so Gabi’s wife Samara made tea and we all settled in. The topics of politics and war soon gave way to American movies. My translator, Malik, said he loved The Godfather. Zoah, another friend in her twenties, exclaimed, “Anything directed by Christopher Nolan.”

Soon everyone was asking my favorite Nolan movies, and debating whether Inception or Dunkirk was the best. This went on until I could ask how they could see such films (VPNs) and why Nolan’s work was so important. “He’s creating an order from the chaos,” said Zoah, “but not afraid to describe the chaos as it really is.” As heads around the room nodded, I realized each of them had been living the chaos of war since their teens, grabbing normalcy where they could.

As if to make the point, Samara appeared and said, “Dinner is ready.” We ate from a spread of mezze, drank more tea, and finished with a coffee and whisky served only around Epiphany. And then the lights went out.

Christopher Nolan’s latest, The Odyssey, is again creating global buzz. Homer’s tale of Odysseus trying to find his way home in the midst of geopolitical upheaval looks poised to hit the $1 billion mark in box-office sales this weekend, just 3 weeks after its release. Most of the revenue is from international receipts, and that’s before it opened in China and Japan. This Nolan film seems to speak into the moment, capturing a stunning blur of humanity’s inhumanity, while uncovering the many ways a hero is made vulnerable. As Nolan’s Odysseus muses about himself near the end, “What if he knew that to burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire?”

The film has plenty of critics, including Nolan’s favored translator of Homer, Emily Wilson. But she concludes, along with others, its record-setting release “is an event to celebrate.” Wilson writes:

In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments.

Indian critic Ayan Paul Chowdhury, writing in The Hindu, says it could be “the oldest film [Nolan] has ever made,” a bit of reverse engineering after decades of making films about men trying to get home.

The New York Times’ Ezra Klein gives a compelling case for the film’s appeal in a time of chaos and tricksters, saying Nolan “has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into the film.”

The History Channel describes some of the archaeological discoveries linked to Homer’s work, where we learn one of the oldest examples of the “Odyssey” in writing is found on a potsherd from an ancient site in … modern-day Ukraine.

Postscript on Gabi: Last month Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa appointed Gabriel Moushe a member of the People’s Assembly, one of 70 named to the ruling body for their sacrifice and service to the country.

Other news:

Saudi Arabia is bracing for attacks from all sides by pro-Iran militias in Iraq working with Iran-backed Houthis from Yemen as the Iran War widens to threaten a key U.S. ally.

Turkey, ​Saudi Arabia ‌and Pakistan signed a ⁠joint ​defense agreement ​in Mecca on Friday, linking Sunni Muslim allies and a member of NATO in a pact stipulating an attack on one is an attack on all.

In Democratic Republic of the Congo, the number of women dying in childbirth has doubled since May at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak. The average recorded number of maternal deaths in Ituri province has risen from 3.1 deaths per week to 6.2 as expectant mothers avoid hospitals, and Ebola cases near 4,000 with more than 1,700 deaths. “The danger doesn’t lie only in the epidemic itself, but in the silent collapse of access to essential health care,” said Josué Mungwete, deputy medical director at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost a by-election this week in a seat it had held for three decades, a sign the youth-led Cockroach movement is shaking Narendra Modi’s government. Good background here on the roots of the protest movement in a country with the world’s largest youth population.

• In a marked difference from earlier generations who shunned politics and attention as a religious minority, Christian Gen Zers showed up at these demonstrations in large numbers.

A teenage gunman in Thailand has killed seven people, his grandparents along with staff and students at his school, before turning the gun on himself.

Across China and the Korean peninsula, a heat wave continues, as Typhoon Dolphin forced evacuations and closures across Okinawa in Japan before making expected landfall in northeast China.

In France’s Bordeaux region, World War II-era underground ammunition depots are turning up as they explode inside ongoing wildfires. More than 99,000 acres have burned across the region in 10 days.

Inside the Arctic Circle, temperatures are topping 90°F this week, as scientists say the region is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the world. Melting sea ice reflects less sunlight, meaning the ocean absorbs more heat, and more sea ice melts, a feedback loop. This week at Selagoncy meteorological station near the Arctic Circle border, the temperature hit 93°F.

In Myanmar, the U.S. State Department joined Asian nations in calling for the unconditional release of Myanmar's detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi met with a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday—the first sighting of the 81-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner since she’s been held in solitary confinement following a 2021 military coup.

I’m reading … Ungrounding by Eyal Weizman and also American Ground by William Langewiesche ahead of this 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks.

The concluding match of the most watched sport on the planet was something nobody saw coming. Avid fans expected a game between classic rivals, a dance of storied players, a fit climax to 104 matches played over six weeks in three rounds across the Americas. It was the last game, after all, for Lionel Messi, the Argentine footballer who turned 39 during the Cup, and who returned to play for his home team after forging a legendary career with Spain’s FC Barcelona.

Instead, what fans watched was a scrappy game more akin to a street football or a UFC fight. By halftime all predictions were all null and void. The match was to be a record-setting final for no good reasons. Argentina took zero shots on target for the entire match, a record that can only ever be matched, never broken. Its first shot of any kind came in the 115th minute in extra time, what one commentator called “a record of futility.”

Its other record? Argentine players scored 26 fouls, the most by a single team in World Cup history. Spain was not far behind with 21, bringing to a soaring 47 the total foul count.

Yet Spain’s national team showed a different side of football altogether, dominating the pitch in spite of the scrappy play. The team communicated well and achieved high stats in all categories, from 20 total shots to 763 completed passes with 89 percent accuracy. The winning goal in extra time came at minute 108, by 26-year-old Ferran Torres, ending the game and the tournament at 1-0.

Like many fans who watched the game, when the word FINAL flashed across the screen, I wasn’t elated. I felt like I was waking from a bad dream. World Cup followers had come to expect competitive sportsmanship, but in the end players on the pitch weren’t shaking hands, they were arguing and slamming each other to the ground. What unity the World Cup had brought across geography and weeks of summer was tainted as the final celebrations were mixed with angry words and tears.

It was a dramatic climbdown for Messi, who made history in the opening matches last month, scoring two goals against Austria to become the all-time leader in career World Cup goals. With the referee’s final whistle, Messi sat on the pitch, expressionless and scoreless, watching the two teams brawl. Afterward, though the teams made up, FIFA opened an investigation into the violent scene, with several Argentina players facing bans.

What made the World Cup historic was perhaps how it showcased the coming wave of a newer generation. Messi’s underwhelming performance likely marked his last appearance in professional soccer, along with legends like Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, and Luka Modrić.

Spain, with an average footballer age of 26.19 years, went into the World Cup as the sixth youngest of the 48 teams, but came out as the youngest to advance to the championship rounds. More striking, they played with a disciplined cohesion that stood in contrast to more mature teams like Argentina, a three-time World Cup champion. Spain conceded just one goal all tournament and stayed unbeaten, an incredible 38-game streak.

Leading the wave, too, if not the World Cup final stats, were unprecedented performances by teams from Africa, a sublime way to highlight the fastest-growing continent in the world with its youthful population (two-thirds of all Africans are under age 25). Egypt and Algeria both made history for the Arab world, too, making it into the knockout rounds for the first time. Egypt won their first knockout round against Australia, creating the biggest celebrations in Cairo in years. They went on to play Argentina, where they dominated the field, leading 2-0 until the 78th minute.

Then there were exciting performances by Cape Verde and Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the small African island of Cabo Verde off the coast of Senegal, Cape Verde was not expected to make it past the group stages in its first-ever World Cup appearance. Instead, it blew everyone’s minds by opening with a 0-0 draw against Spain. Then it played to draws with Uruguay and Saudi Arabia, which boosted all the teams in Cape Verde’s group to the knockout rounds, where it nearly beat Argentina, ending 2-3. Cape Verde players may not have made it past the top dogs, but they rocketed to the top of everyone’s minds as the ideal underdog.

DR Congo’s national team, making its first World Cup appearance in 52 years, advanced past the group stage for the first time before losing in a hard-fought match against England. The team came away on top in the best-dressed category. Its debut in Houston, where Congo based during matches, went viral with the work of Congolese designer Alvin Junior Mak and the squad’s leopard-embellished suits. Mak wanted to create a symbol of strength and resilience, he said, for Congolese people caught in war and now Ebola. “I wanted to change the vision people have about Africa,” he told the BBC.

The World Cup is not just about the matches and the stadiums. The quadrennial tournament with its global following captures a moment in time for the whole world. This time, across the United States: Towns like Lawrence, Kansas, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, showed their colors by hosting others. Spain’s team learned about Southern hospitality and staples like Buc-ee’s in Chattanooga, while Algeria’s team was welcomed to Lawrence and Midwest ease with an Algerian flag monument built in a local park, and Kansans who made dinners for the players. The other side of the televised and glamorized World Cup proved down-to-earth and very human.

By uniting people around a common experience, it draws us close to the rest of the world, and to something personal to so many. This, to me, is why the World Cup is ultimately truly human. With its audience of billions, it may be one of the closest things many have to a universal experience. In a time of change and upheaval, there can be unity in the midst of competition. And while the final match may have been tainted by some less-than-noble playing, it still represents the way that we are humans who make mistakes and can still create beautiful things together, just by getting up from the pitch and doing it all over again.

Other news:

UK resident Ed Hunt became the first recipient today of an experimental vaccine against the current Ebola virus, as official deaths in the outbreak across DR Congo and Uganda passed 1,000 this week.

In southwest France, tens of thousands of people are fleeing wildfires by car and boat as Spain declared a national emergency today and French authorities ordered a total evacuation of Cap Ferret peninsula, a summer tourist mecca.

Firefighters in Scotland for days this week battled a fire that broke out Sunday at Arthur’s Seat, the ancient volcano in Edinburgh—as a summer of heat waves continues to blaze across Europe and Canada.

Hundreds of thousands of nationals from Haiti are set to lose their legal status in the United States as soon as Monday. That comes after the Supreme Court last month let stand a Trump administration order to rescind their status, known as TPS, forcing potentially 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians out of a program that has allowed them to enter and work legally in the U.S. because of unsafe conditions in their countries.

• The move will open the door for federal immigration agents to round them up for deportation.

• By one Princeton researcher's estimate, 50,000 children born in the U.S. to Haitian parents could be separated from them.

• Two Republicans and two Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation that would protect Afghans under TPS by extending their status.

• According to new ICE data, 79 percent of immigrants in detention nationwide have no criminal record. The first data released in months, it highlights an increase in detentions and a shifted focus toward weakening legal immigration.

For the weekend … seems we should all go see The Odyssey.

Across Africa, 41 countries are without a top U.S. envoy, or nearly 80 percent of the continent. The administration recalled more than a dozen career ambassadors from Africa in December without replacing them, a move the American Foreign Service Association called “institutional sabotage.” While U.S. presidents typically name political appointees to high visibility posts like London or Tokyo, less enticing posts in Africa are often filled by career diplomats.

Across the board, the vacancies are part of overdue reforms for an out-of-touch U.S. State Department, say administration officials, a shakeup initiated by Trump along with foreign aid cuts the day he took office last year.

But former top officials speaking to the UK’s Financial Times say the absences are depriving the U.S. of needed expertise and making it harder to achieve foreign policy and national security objectives. The United States’ escalating war with Iran after an unworkable ceasefire agreement is the latest example. The failure-to-launch of Trump’s Board of Peace in Gaza is another.

The vacancies in Africa include Chad and Sudan, where war has spawned the largest concentration of refugees in the world; and Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an Ebola outbreak is outpacing response while a U.S.-supervised peace accord stalls.

In South America, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was tapped to lead the transition and recovery in Venezuela after U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro. Rubio has yet to travel there. The country has no U.S. ambassador even as the United States is supporting a massive disaster recovery effort following June earthquakes.

In place of diplomats accountable to Congress, Trump is not so much reforming the State Department as replacing it with his own political cadre, relying on business friends and donors to mediate foreign policy.

“The president and his allies have built a network of groups financed by wealthy donors and businesses that is advancing his priorities with little public disclosure,” reports The Wall Street Journal in documenting (gift link) almost $1 billion in donations to Trump-linked groups since the 2024 election.

How does it play out overseas? Here’s one under-the-radar example:

In August 2025, the United States brokered a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, signed at the White House. It appeared to be the most significant step towards normalizing relations between the two countries following decades of fighting over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh (also called Artsakh or Karabakh). The now-defeated Armenian Christian enclave sits inside Muslim Azerbaijan, and at the heart a long ignored land bridge connecting the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea.

The arrangement, however, papers over decades of ethnic and religious conflict and territorial disputes. It says nothing about the rights of 120,000 Armenian Christians forced out of Karabakh, or dozens of Karabakh officials and civilians still held in Azerbaijani prisons. What it does proffer is a U.S.-backed economic project full of enticements enough to bring both countries to the table. The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP, stands to put the United States in the driver’s seat of a transit artery and trade corridor linking central Asia and Europe, with rail lines and pipelines to deliver energy resources East to West.

A $200 million U.S. enterprise fund managed through the State Department will facilitate grants and loans to underwrite TRIPP. It’s slated to launch new rail transportation along a 26-mile corridor connecting existing rail and seaport points, and to tap strategic minerals and an expanding energy and digital infrastructure, including data centers. Under Armenian law, the United States will sublease the land with a consortium of developers and management under a 99-year lease. According to Armenian press accounts, another $400 million in U.S. foreign aid could be designated for the project. Completion date: 2028, before President Trump leaves office.

It’s perhaps worth noting here that neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan have had a Senate-confirmed ambassador since the Biden era.

Last week the State Department named Konstantin Sokolov chairman of the TRIPP fund. A Russian-born private equity investor living in Chicago, Sokolov has given $11 million to MAGA, Inc., making him one of the biggest donors to Trump-linked groups. Sokolov is also one of 36 donors contributing over $350 million to the president’s ballroom project.

Sokolov has an investment portfolio focused overseas on telecommunications, energy, data infrastructure, and critical minerals. In Armenia he has picked up investments Russia was forced to sell off due to sanctions following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. As a result, he owns 20 percent of Viva Armenia, the country’s largest telecom. And just last week Russia’s state-owned VTB Bank sold to Sokolov its stake in Teghut copper and molybdenum mine, one of Armenia’s largest private entities.

Putting a business operator, not a career bureaucrat, in charge of an infrastructure campaign like TRIPP can be valuable. But that’s less the issue here than the priorities and guardrails around these arrangements. It’s whether Sokolov and Trump donors like him are shaping public policy around personal private interests. It’s about who holds them accountable for executing business deals under the guise of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy.

Other news:

War in Iran is now a wider war than the one the United States hoped to bring to a close with a June 17 MOU. The Iran-backed Houthis say they will impose a blockade on the Red Sea, choking Saudi Arabia’s oil and other supplies. At least two U.S. soldiers have been killed, one missing, and dozens wounded in an attack on a base in Jordan—all as Iran carries out retaliatory strikes in the midst of 9 days of U.S. bombing targets inside Iran.

Off the coast of Myanmar, at least 500 Rohingya refugees are believed dead after boats carrying them capsized in the Andaman Sea. A Muslim minority once residing in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, a million Rohingya have survived only by living in overcrowded camps in Bangladesh now subject to monsoon rains and funding shortages.

In China, authorities earlier this month unexpectedly released from 8 months in jail Ezra Jin Mingri, senior pastor of Zion Church. Jin was flown to Los Angeles, where he reunited with his wife and children. The release apparently came after President Trump raised the pastor’s case in a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. For the eight pastors and Zion Church staff who remain in prison, and their families, the days are filled with worry.

Countries bordering the Democratic Republic of the Congo have stepped up screening as health officials say the months’ long Ebola outbreak continues to outrun medical response. At least 930 people have died of the illness in DRC with 2,344 cases, but WHO officials warn the number could be up to four times higher.

The United Kingdom today has a new prime minister, its sixth in under a decade. Andy Burnham, until recently the mayor of Manchester, replaces Keir Starmer as Labour Party head in an increasingly fragmented British political scene.

With Spain’s 1-0 victory over Argentina in yesterday’s World Cup final, hat’s off to the writer/editor who thought it was a good idea to interview Lamine Yamal’s grandmother.

On the homefront, leave it to an experienced journalist like Jon Ward to give us the retrospective on Sen. Lindsey Graham we need. Graham died last week at 71.

And finally: “You cannot get away from your own humanity. I have learned that especially over time, to be a vulnerable human even in the midst of covering very vulnerable people.”

I said that in a rambling sort of interview I did for Zenger House last year, covering a 2025 story on Congo’s crisis of rape in the midst of war. I’d forgotten, but I’m grateful to see it posted this week because somehow it talked back to me in a timely way.

It’s a window on why I keep coming back to GlobeTrot (and maybe you should too) when the news of any week breaks your heart and scalds your brain. What can draw me, or any of us, to faraway places and difficult stories?—

One is that it is different. Your eyes are open just as mine were on this reporting trip, in so many ways that you cannot possibly know until you are actually there. It feels like such a privilege to be able to step into a life, step into someone’s kitchen, have them make you a meal, eat food you have never dreamed of tasting before. Those are all the things that are exciting about it. There are so many dimensions to that.

The other side of that is that it is the same. Over and over and over again, you see how our humanity binds us together. … I could relate as I watched these women walk who had just come out of surgery in this ward and watched them coming alongside one another and holding one another by the elbow … If you have had a baby, you start to feel that in your actual body … You begin to relate to these people as people and feel like this could be my neighbor, this could be my sister, this could be my daughter.

On Sunday Iran’s top leaders walked out in an unprecedented diplomatic rebuff an hour into discussions, which included Vice President JD Vance, after Trump on social media and in a televised interview threatened to “hit hard” Iran. Iran’s delegates said the president’s statements violated Article 1 of the agreement, which calls for the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations.”

On Wednesday the two sides clashed over UN inspections of Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites, with Trump announcing they would move forward while Tehran said inspections would be allowed only “within the framework of a final agreement.”

On Thursday Iran reasserted its control of the Strait of Hormuz, attacking a commercial vessel it said violated Iranian control just after President Trump declared the waterway open to unrestricted navigation. Iran also announced separate joint talks with Oman, which shares coastline along the strait, and with “littoral States in the region.”

Those moves came in response to a joint statement by the United States and six Gulf states rejecting Iran’s insistence that it could charge tolls on vessels transiting the strait.

“Safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz cannot be guaranteed under ambiguous arrangements, parallel routes or decision-making that does not take Iran's role as a coastal state into account,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi.

Far from vanquished, Iran with this week’s skirmishes shows how it’s seizing the upheaval brought by war and disagreement over the MOU, along with conflicting statements within the Trump administration. By gaining an upper hand in negotiations, it may engage U.S.-allied Gulf states, and further isolate Israel.

The MOU does effectively end the fighting that began Feb. 28 and offers a step-by-step plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz over 60 days. Vice President Vance outlined the negotiations in a June 18 briefing, with talks continuing in Switzerland even after Sunday’s walkout. Vance announced today an agreement to establish a coordination channel between Iran’s IRGC and U.S. Central Command to prevent the escalation of tensions, and operating out of Qatar.

But conflicting statements by President Trump, and guarantees for Iran’s restitution that are at once vast and vague, have confounded members of Congress and leave pundits even on the right calling the deal a “surrender.”

“There seems to be a vast chasm between what the parties have agreed to and said thus far,” said Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project. “We have given up much more than the Iranians have.”

Nelson’s assessment and comments here are a helpful summation.

The MOU says little about securing human assets, despite a vocal history of U.S. presidents championing the rights of political dissidents jailed by the Islamic regime. They are most likely to ally themselves with U.S. interests, plus to include religious minorities like Christians and Baháʼís.

The MOU is explicit only in its call for silence. Article 2 states, “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America undertake to respect each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other's internal affairs.”

President Donald Trump notably pledged in January that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” after Iran massacred an estimated 30,000 protesters. Yet the agreement leaves intact Tehran’s repression apparatus with no visible improvement in human rights and religious freedom.

The war that began less than a month later has brought months of internet blackout and prison lockdowns. Tehran officials repeatedly have denied access to prisons and named prisoners. There’s been no apparent attempt by U.S. or Israeli forces to gain access. In fact, Israeli airstrikes damaged Evin Prison on the outskirts of Tehran multiple times, the most notable political prison holding up to 15,000 inmates.

Families of jailed Iranian Christians say they have not heard from them since the start of the war. An estimated 250 Christians arrested on “national security” infractions for converting from Islam were imprisoned in 2025. Dozens were known to be in prison at the start of the war. One well-known political activist and Christian convert, Mohammad Nikbakht, has in recent weeks been threatened with execution.

Besides the silence from U.S. negotiators is the absence of advocacy from religious freedom organizations, including faith-based groups, or the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). In a report issued earlier this month, the Congressional Research Service highlights the Trump administration’s failure to fill key roles monitoring religious freedom and combatting antisemitism. Funds designated to support international religious freedom, it found, were ultimately terminated.

One religious freedom expert who held positions at the State Department and other U.S. agencies, said the White House “is hoping its religious base won’t notice the way it’s ignoring religious minorities in Iran who’ve been left to their fate.”

Other news:

Venezuela, hit by two earthquakes on Wednesday at 6:04 pm local time, saw its death toll tick above 900 today with at least 3,000 injured. The quakes, known as a doublet, came with an initial magnitude 7.2 on the Richter scale that rocked buildings in downtown Caracas, the capital. Five minutes later, another 7.5-magnitude aftershock triggered building collapses and havoc in the city and surrounding areas. The toll could climb, and also with the country’s political upheaval and longstanding sanctions: the US Geological Survey estimated on Wednesday that the number of casualties could range anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000.

Across Europe, an unprecedented heatwave continues, with record-setting highs. On Tuesday, Paris experienced its hottest day on record, with a high of 85.6°F (29.8°C). Europeans have dealt with rising temperatures in recent years, but many are not equipped for the heat with residential air conditioning. Spanish researchers already attribute to the heat more than 210 fatalities between Sunday and Wednesday.

• The heatwave comes as expert meteorologists predict that this year’s El Niño, the pattern of ocean currents off the Peruvian coast that affects global weather, could be the most extreme and deadly in history.

In Ukraine, the near-destruction of the Dormition Cathedral at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in a June 15 Russian assault on Kyiv should have shocked the world.

The landmark, founded in 1051, is one of Christianity’s oldest and most revered monasteries, with ancient caves where generations of monks are buried. But the Lavra has survived Nazi occupation, Soviet bombings, and previous attacks in this war. Metropolitan Eustratius, a spokesperson for the OCU and deputy head of its external church relations, told me just days after the attack, “The start of restoration work is happening right now,” and he provided video images showing the repair work underway.

Some Albertans believe their province, the 4th most populous in Canada, would be better off on its own. Residents in recent months show increased support for the province’s secession from Canada due to climate taxation and political underrepresentation as the province absorbs an increase in carbon taxes used to subsidize other, less independent provinces like the Northwest Territories. Alberta will hold an initial referendum in October.

As World Cup rounds continue in North America—

• Iran and Egypt face off this evening in Seattle, two storied teams with long pasts who have faced one another only once before. For Iran, this is its first World Cup match against an Arab country, and amid heightened Arab-Iranian tension in the Middle East. That didn’t stop local organizers from designating the game a Pride Match with drag performances and LGBTQ-themed watch parties across the city, even though homosexuality is illegal in both countries.

• Dutch fans took over Kansas City on Thursday in a decade-long tradition, the Oranje Fanwalk, as thousands turned out to watch the Netherlands beat Tunisia 3-1, advancing to the knockout round.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the federal government to remove protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria under a federal program that allows foreign citizens to stay in the United States when the U.S. government believes that it is not safe for them to return to their homes. In a vote of 6-3, the justices paused rulings by federal courts in Washington, D.C., and New York that had barred the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and Syria, saying the 1990 law creating the TPS program generally bars courts from reviewing the determinations by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

No GlobeTrot this upcoming 4th of July weekend, as I will be celebrating America’s 250th birthday by attending a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, a longstanding tradition to welcome new citizens in the shadow of the study where Thomas Jefferson penned the founding documents. May the long and winding experiment in democracy continue.

Engagement in this quadrennial event is running high for the 48 national teams competing in 104 games across North America, and for the first time on U.S. soil in 22 years. Last Friday’s 4-1 victory for the U.S. men’s team over Paraguay drew 18 million viewers, a record.

Soccer’s global appeal has always stemmed from its everyman reach. A piece of pitch and something resembling a spherical object will do. The countries boasting the highest percentages of soccer fans are among those with the deepest poverty rates, greatest political instability, and largest populations of young people. Some of the most successful players in the major leagues started their careers like any other kid. Pelé, one of Brazil’s most famous players, learned to play in the streets with socks, grapefruits, and tin cans instead of a soccer ball. Some of the best African players learned on dirt pitches using balls made of plastic shopping bags bound together with string. Their rise to fame is the stuff of legends for kids (like me) who grew up following them.

The same story can be found in the lives of more recent players we know by one name, like Neymar, Messi, and Salah. Even up-and-comers like Lamine Yamal, a rising, 18-year-old star playing as Spain’s left winger in the World Cup, or Gilberto Mora, Mexico’s 17-year-old attacking midfielder, are already household names. They aren’t simply accomplished new role models but accessible ones.

Soccer as a way to escape life’s hardships was and remains a consolation for my generation. We grew up watching Messi and Ronaldo not just play the game but go back to the places where they began, meet the kids like us, and give back to their supporters in a way you don’t often see. That’s why across the Global South soccer jerseys as everyday attire dominate, why club soccer is so popular, and why you can go up to pretty much any young person anywhere and say, “Let’s play.”

This World Cup will mark the last for many icons of the 21st century: Cristiano Ronaldo at 41, Lionel Messi, who is turning 39 during the tournament, Neymar at 34, and Mohamed Salah, who turned 34 this week. These players and a few others are expected to step back from International Club Football at the conclusion of the World Cup next month.

This World Cup also marks new barriers for so accessible a sport. Dynamic ticket pricing is pricing out attendees by the thousands of dollars in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The United States is not the bastion of stability it was thought to be when chosen in 2018 to host this year’s events. The global ramifications of the Iran War and the prevalence of crackdowns over U.S. immigration cast the World Cup itself into question at several points.

Iran’s national team was forced to practice outside its country after the U.S.-Israeli-led war began in February. T

eam members received visas to travel to the United States only one week before the World Cup began. Due to threats and protests, the Iran team with FIFA decided to move its base camp from Tucson to Tijuana, Mexico, even though all of its matches will be held in the United States.

The U.S. rejected visa applications for more than a dozen Iranian support staff and soccer federation officials expected to accompany the team. Iranian federation president Mehdi Taj, one of those denied, is a former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Canada too revoked his travel documents.

The United States also denied entry last week to Somali national Omar Artan, the 2025 referee of the year in Africa. Artan was one of 52 referees selected by FIFA to officiate at the World Cup, but he was detained and questioned for more than 11 hours upon arrival in Miami, then sent back.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials cited “vetting concerns” for Artan’s denied entry, and a White House official said they stemmed from “terror ties,” but produced no evidence of those claims. The Trump administration has imposed severe travel restrictions on Somalia, and President Donald Trump in recent months called Somali immigrants to the United States “garbage” and said Somalia is a country where they “just run around killing each other.”

Somali government officials stood by Artan and FIFA announced it would pay his full salary for officiating at the World Cup.

Now with 24 games in the books and more to come, the fans can maybe return to watching soccer and taking inspiration from stories of kids rising from slums to stardom, and from seeing the cooperation and competition it represents at its best— and from putting the world back in World Cup. As one soccer podcaster put it:

The men’s World Cup is the closest thing we have to a universal human experience in the physical world. And this year, as we shuffle down the broad road of technological convenience toward who knows what, the World Cup should be particularly special to us because it remains a magnificent declaration of what we can do with our bodies and our intelligence, nothing artificial needed.

The United States faces Australia today (June 19) at 3 p.m. ET. Check your local news outlets for schedules and local watch parties; go to ESPN’s World Cup page for the overall schedule, standings, and scoreboard.

The ceremonial mass was conducted by Pope Leo XIV, who spoke in Spanish and Catalan, a consecration attended by the king and queen of Spain and other dignitaries, along with 9,000 guests inside the basilica and an estimated 120,000 onlookers in the streets outside.

Welcome to a summer edition of GlobeTrot and a reminder that for all that’s farcical, degrading, and hellish in the world, it’s also an incredible time to be alive. I’m glad for time away with family and friends, a long road trip to sweep out cobwebs and explore away from the headlines, and for coming back to news of the wide world.

One of the most ambitious architectural projects in modern history, Sagrada Familia’s modernist structure also stands as a culminating landmark for Catholics worldwide, whose numbers have kept pace with global population growth over the last century while numbers for Protestants and Orthodox adherents have declined. Pope Leo in his June 10 homily said:

This church is a single building made of many stones. A house that grows steadily over the years following a single plan. We are all the living stones of this edifice, which has Christ as its foundation and crowning glory, its beginning and end. Much more than a monument, the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia remains a work in progress today, reminding us that the Christian life is always a journey, because it is a project that God is carrying out.

A total of 18 sandcastle spires now rise from the basilica: 12 symbolizing the 12 apostles of Jesus Christ, four in homage to the Evangelists who recorded Christ’s life in the Gospels, one honoring the Virgin Mary, and the tallest and final Tower of Jesus Christ. Work on the interior of the basilica will continue through 2028.

The Washington Post has a video montage of the event and a photographic timeline on construction worth your time.

In a six-day trip that wraps up today, the first papal visit to Spain in 15 years, Pope Leo received a lengthy standing ovation from Spanish lawmakers following an address to Parliament in Madrid on Monday.

“The world is undergoing a profound spiritual and cultural crisis,” he said in a speech focused on migration, human rights, and the role of government. Drawing attention to paintings in the chamber depicting the reception of the Gospel and the Decalogue, he added—

Without confusing the political order with the religious one, these symbols invite us to recognize that modern freedom has also been shaped by a long education of conscience, deeply marked by the Christian tradition. In that inner school, people learned that law must serve the good, that justice sets limits on force, that power requires legitimacy, that the poor belong fully to the community, that the foreigner must be welcomed in accordance with his dignity, and that human life can never be treated as a commodity.

Other news:

Congo's Ebola outbreak has spread ​to three new health ‌zones, according to a government report published on Thursday that showed the ​number of confirmed ​cases had risen to 676, ⁠including 136 deaths.

• A cracked coffin carrying the body of a 44-year-old Congolese pastor in February could be leading evidence for investigators trying to locate ‘patient zero’ in the Ebola outbreak, as officials warn it could surpass the historic 2014-16 Ebola crisis in West Africa.

• American medical missionary and surgeon Dr. Peter Stafford with his family were released from Berlin’s Charité University Hospital in Germany on Saturday. Stafford was admitted to a special isolation ward May 20 with the Bundibugyo Ebola virus infection.

Nigeria’s President President Bola Tinubu vowed “no mercy” for gangs and terror groups attacking communities in the north. His national speech comes ahead of an onsite visit this month by UN Rapporteur on religion and belief Nazila Ghanea to investigate attacks on Christian and other communities. Ghanea will debrief government officials and issue a report on findings.

Russia’s decision to launch its invasion of Ukraine has become “a strategic failure” for Moscow, said Dan Negrea, the U.S. representative to the UN Economic and Social Council or ECOSOC. In straightforward comments to the UN Security Council on Monday, Negrea said:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic failure. Its oil refineries are on fire… Moscow cannot achieve its objectives on the battlefield. Escalation will not change that and will only increase the risk of making the catastrophe even worse. This war must end immediately. Enough is enough.

Details of a possible U.S. peace deal this weekend with Iran are sparse and conflicting, but both sides face an ominous global oil shortage. This week, U.S. government stockpiles are poised to hit their lowest levels since 1983.

Tuesday marked 100 days since Israel launched an offensive into Lebanon to counter Iran-linked Hezbollah in the war, killing an estimated 3,600 people and wounding 11,000 in its ongoing offensive. Attacks this week targeted Beirut’s southern suburbs and the ancient city of Tyre, where satellite imagery shows a destroyed waterfront, and Israel ordered residents of the Christian quarter to evacuate, many fearing they will not be able to return.

In the Philippines it’s Independence Day today, but in Mindanao rescuers continue to race the clock in pulling survivors from rubble of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake on Sunday. Humanitarian organization CARE says at least 47 people were killed, with tens of thousands displaced and many villages still accessible only by boat or helicopter.

In China, persecuted Christians view Western advocates with skepticism, says the U.S.-based daughter of jailed pastor Ezra Jin Mingri.

Upcoming:

NBA basketball is a global phenomenon, and with the New York Knicks one game away from their first championship in 53 years, watch parties for the NBA Finals stretch around the globe, including NBA House events in Tokyo, Mexico City, and other countries, plus elsewhere. At Bourke Street Imperial in Melbourne they’ll start the Spurs vs. Knicks Saturday matchup at 10:35 a.m and at Pro’s Cafe in Beirut it’s a 3:30 a.m. tip-off.

The G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, starts June 14 with French President Emmanuel Macron presiding and President Donald Trump saying he will attend.

World Refugee Day is June 20.

• Here’s a comparison of U.S. refugee admissions from the final 16 months of the Biden administration and the first 16 months of the Trump administration (via U.S. figures and Wrapsnet):

Notable:

Robert Louis Wilken, one of the foremost historians of early Christianity of his generation, and most recently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, died June 6 at 89. His book The First Thousand Years is foundational reading, and distinguished colleagues and friends reflect on his life and work here.

Karl Zinsmeister, a journalist who served as domestic policy advisor to President George W. Bush and created The Almanac of American Philanthropy died of lung cancer at age 67 on April 30. His wife Ann (link here) and my longtime colleague Marvin Olasky have reflections on his life and work.

I’m reading… about “the pressing duty to remain profoundly human” in Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical released last month, Magnifica Humanitas, and found this summation also helpful.

Mobutu Sese Seko, the despotic president who ruled for almost 30 years what’s now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), didn’t believe in road maintenance. He was too busy siphoning money to offshore accounts. Keeping vast stretches of Africa’s second-largest country (then Zaire) inaccessible also short-circuited rebel armies forming and moving against him.

With war that’s followed Mobutu’s downfall, much of Congo remains inaccessible by road. “It takes two months to drive across the country and you need a power saw, a shovel, and a 4 X 4 to do it,” longtime aid worker Steven Brewster says.

Infrastructure challenges, armed conflict, and a constrained health system all contributed to weeks of delays confirming the Ebola variant that’s now permeated eastern Congo’s Ituri Province.

As of May 21, the DRC and Uganda Ministries of Health report 575 suspected cases, 51 confirmed cases, and 148 suspected deaths. (UPDATE: The WHO on Friday announced raising its risk assessment in the Ebola outbreak to “very high,” with almost 750 suspected cases and 177 deaths.)

Among confirmed cases are two in Uganda, including 1 death, involving people who traveled from DRC. One confirmed case is American surgeon Peter Stafford, who was evacuated this week to Germany for care after he tested positive for Ebola on May 18, three days after the Africa CDC confirmed the new Ebola epidemic.

Stafford, 39, is one of three medical missionaries treating patients in the region with Philadelphia-based mission organization Serge. The other two physicians include his wife, Dr. Rebekah Stafford, and Dr. Patrick LaRochelle. They were evacuated this week also, along with the Staffords’ four children, and remain asymptomatic.

Stafford was “critically ill,” reported Serge, but is receiving treatment in Germany and yesterday spoke to Serge staff, saying:

“Before I was evacuated I was feeling really concerned I wasn’t going to make it. And now I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Doctors and aid workers I spoke to this week say the worst may be ahead for eastern Congo and the Nyankunde Hospital that Stafford and the others leave behind. The 150-bed hospital serves an immediate population of about 150,000 in an area of about 8 million people amidst a virus with a high mortality rate and horrific symptoms. The area also is currently occupied by M23 rebels backed by Rwanda. Stafford was the hospital’s only surgeon and his wife its only obstetrician.

As of today the hospital is reporting 25 suspected cases of Ebola, with no isolation rooms and dwindling supplies of masks and other protective equipment. There’s no specific treatment protocol or vaccine for this Ebola variant.

Like most hospitals in the eastern half of DRC, Nyankunde was founded by Protestant missionaries from Europe when Belgian Congo received independence in the 1960s. It’s today run by a French-led mission medical consortium that has included U.S.-based Samaritan’s Purse and Serge.

The hospital came under attack during the Second Congo War in 2002, an assault that killed 1,000 people, including patients and staff, and signaled a widening conflict that’s remained one of the worst in Africa (I covered it then here). The hospital lay abandoned for several years until the Centre Medical Evangelique stepped in to begin rebuilding. But with ongoing fighting, Nyankunde has not in the decades since returned to its full capacity.

• A good explainer of the crisis by Serge East Africa director Dr. Scott Myhre here.

• Ongoing updates along with prayer points from Serge here.

• U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) updates, along with travel advisories, here.

• The effect of drastic cuts to U.S. funding in DRC and the dismantling of USAID have direct impact on mitigating the spread, reported here.

• The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) said in a report on Monday that “as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent they are also becoming more damaging” and warned that pandemic risk is outpacing preparedness.

Epidemics involve multi-layered collaboration among nations and medical institutions, with coordination by the World Health Organization. The United States exited the WHO last year just after President Donald Trump took office. Despite Americans affected by the outbreak and related travel restrictions, no U.S. officials have been present for WHO consultations now taking place, according to one virologist I spoke to who has attended several such calls this week. The consultations typically involve dozens of experts and government officials via remote along with medical personnel on the ground. They are including American clinicians and researchers in private sector and public university roles.

Related news

U.S. cruise ship passengers quarantined in Omaha from a hantavirus outbreak are awaiting CDC guidance on how long before they can return home. Today marked the 12th day in isolation for the 18 passengers from the Dutch M/V Hondius cruise ship, with 10 confirmed cases and two fatalities directly connected to an outbreak onboard.

Australia’s diphtheria outbreak is now one of the worst in its history after spreading from the Northern Territory to Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia.

In Bangladesh, six children died from measles in 24 hours on Wednesday, as the death toll in a months’-long outbreak reached 481 children who have died from measles and measles-like symptoms since March 15. UNICEF said this week it warned the country’s interim government five or six times in writing that its vaccine shortage would lead to an outbreak.

Other news

Saudi Arabia will go ahead with the annual Hajj pilgrimage despite war in the region that’s included direct strikes on its territory. The a once-a-year event that brings Muslims to Mecca is expected to draw 1.5 million pilgrims.

Arriving in Iran today, Pakistan’s army chief will continue mediation efforts between the United States and Iran aimed at securing a permanent truce. The major sticking points remain, including Tehran’s insistence on maintaining its nuclear program and control over the Strait of Hormuz.

• Iran’s 3-month internet blackout is “the most severe, by extent and duration, that we’ve tracked in the history of modern internet connectivity,” said a digital watchdog. “Even for Iran, it is an extreme measure.”

Syria’s southern province of Sweida has become a security threat for neighboring Jordan—and a major hub for drug trafficking—since Israel stepped in to supply and support the Druze-majority region’s militias. Leadership in the consolidated militias, called the National Guard, has devolved to former Assad regime officials and organized crime figures:

With Israeli support and de facto protection, the National Guard and a political council loyal to al-Hajari have consolidated control of Sweida, and since then, drug trafficking from the region toward Jordan has surged by more than 325%, according to data collated by Syria Weekly. In numerical terms, Jordan intercepted 21 drug trafficking attempts from the area between January and July 2025, with 128 additional interceptions taking place between July 2025 and April 2026.

In Iraq, regional officials have identified two sites used by Israeli forces as makeshift bases in the ongoing Iran War that date to joint U.S.-Israel attacks last June. At least one of the outposts, complete with landing strip, was known to the United States since June 2025, suggesting Washington withheld the information from its allies in Baghdad.

In India’s Manipur State, three Baptist pastors were killed and five leaders seriously injured when they were ambushed and shot by armed militants. Ethnic and religious tensions have flared in the region, the site of violent rampages starting three years ago that target Christians disproportionately.

The United States will deploy 5,000 troops to Poland, in a move that surprised both the Pentagon and Poland, and comes a month after Trump announced the removal of 5,000 troops from Germany.

Latvia's military on Thursday reported at least one drone flying in the country's airspace, with NATO aircraft activated to combat the apparent threat. The event forced residents of the small Baltic country to shelter indoors, and came one month after a drone believed from Russia hit an oil storage facility in eastern Latvia. Political fallout from the episode led to the collapse of an already fragile coalition government.

I could watch the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland all day.

On the homefront … retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling has a reflection on the deep contradictions of Memorial Day.

… and Globetrot will be on a summer schedule through June as I complete some family travel and other projects. Expect intermittent posts, with your comments and ideas (and book suggestions!) always welcome.

My neighbor Jake is always good for comparing notes on news of the day and for book recommendations. This week we caught up but he had little appetite to talk about the news. Like so many, he feels overwhelmed by the headlines and stays away. “It’s all tsarah, tsarah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for troubles.

Jake was a practicing psychologist and has run several companies, he reads deeply and travels widely, and I’ve always known him to possess abounding curiosity, so I asked him to tell me more. I understand Americans tuning out but civic illiteracy and isolation are so much at the heart of our national troubles, I said. He responded, “We should know about the world, but we don’t have to bear the weight of the world.”

Tsarah, I learned, usually means “distress,” “trouble,” or “affliction,” and in the Old Testament is used to refer to personal or national distress. Its root meaning is a narrow place, a constriction. In the Psalms, King David uses the word to describe being hemmed in by his enemies.

Disconnecting is one way to cope with the hopelessness of feeling trapped. As war and war crimes proliferate, institutions are broken down, and rules of law don’t apply, what appears wide-open chaos (or clearing the decks, depending on your view) in fact leads to narrowing options. You have only to look at your bank account since war with Iran double-boosted inflation to feel the pinch.

I advocate for disciplined and not obsessive news reading. For engagement with the world we touch, first and foremost, rather than taking on the whole weight, something no one can do but God. For me that does include far corners, as even this week notable events unfold in places I’ve covered in decades of reporting.

For others it can and should look different. I was encouraged to learn in a visit to Memphis last week about the work of the MidSouth Immigration Integration Network, a civic organization describing itself as pro-immigrant, pro-employer, and pro-MidSouth. It’s a partnership that spans churches, civic groups and nonprofits, and large-scale employers like FedEx, whose global corporate headquarters is in Memphis. All have differing views and interests but are coming together because they see ways their immigrant community is a needed contribution and not a public nuisance. “We can change systems by working on our values. It’s small scale but important because we are not simply conforming to national narratives imposed on us,” one partner said.

That’s just one way to perhaps dream small and also widen the frame in troubled times.

It’s easy to yell at the headlines and wish somebody would do something. But what if that Somebody is you? Nicholas Enrich learned about that as the head of global health at USAID when it was dismantled in the early days of the Trump administration last year. Enrich wrote a whistleblower memo from inside the humanitarian arm of the U.S. government revealing DOGE’s slash-and-burn disarray last March. He went on to testify before Congress, and to now publish a book about what he saw.

In a Lawfare interview that’s worth a listen, Enrich this week said the effects on the ground have been “catastrophic.” In the past year, “conservative estimates,” he said, show 750,000 people have died, including 500,000 children.

In the immediate aftermath, food distribution stopped in Sudan camps, where the world’s largest displacement crisis is underway. Pregnant women and children died when they walked days to reach clinics that had closed. Enrich also described Trump appointees barring his office from communicating with the WHO and CDC during an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last year.

What I’ve learned as I’m researching a related story for The Dispatch is this from one expert on global health:

Anything that disrupts those systems has downstream consequences. Even if you come back and say you didn’t really stop a program. You’ve actually disrupted it so much that you can’t pick it up. You’ve caused so many people to leave, people to get fired, purchasing to stop procurement, you’ve basically set it back 10 years. You’ve taken away some capabilities that are very hard to rebuild.

Yesterday the United States announced $1.8 billion in humanitarian aid funding to the UN, after reaching a “humanitarian reset” agreement in December. These are pooled funds that the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) will distribute across 21 in-crisis countries. The State Department says the spending comes after the Trump administration pushed for reforms that prioritize “greater transparency and accountability in a humanitarian sector.” The “new” funding also comes after the U.S. withdrew billions in foreign aid distributed via OCHA last year.

Other news:

President Trump concluded on Friday his three-day visit to China after a nearly three-hour closing meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The visit ended without formal deals with Beijing, but Trump told Fox News that Xi had agreed to stop sending military equipment to Iran, and the two leaders agreed the Strait of Hormuz needed to be reopened.

• Earlier Xi warned Trump that any mishandling of Taiwan could lead to “an extremely dangerous situation,” and that “the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations.” Trump did not comment on Taiwan, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised Trump would say more about Taiwan “in coming days.”

• Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One today that Xi was giving “very serious consideration” to releasing imprisoned Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri following the summit and calls for his release.

Here’s just one way the stalemated war in Iran could impact Taiwan and further derail a global economy.

In Lebanon, nearly 600 people have been killed during four weeks of fragile ceasefire with Israel, while more than 1 million people remain displaced.

In Israel, a May 12 report by a civil commission found almost all hostages who were abducted by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and later released had experienced or witnessed sexual violence. Based on more than 400 interviews and an independent investigation, the 300-page study details 13 types of sexual violence during the attack and against hostages, including rape, gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, executions linked to sexual violence, postmortem sexual abuse, and sexual assaults carried out in the presence of family members, among other acts.

“What we have witnessed is deep hatred to humiliate us and terrorize us as a people, as a nation, as women, as vulnerable people who found themselves in captivity and in a prolonged hell,” Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an international law expert and founding chair of the Civil Commission, told The Times of Israel.

Russia struck Ukraine with 56 missiles and over 1,500 drones in a record 30-hour attack that targeted mostly residential areas. It was the largest drone assault of the war, killing at least 24 people in Kyiv and leaving massive damage. Russian drones also reportedly targeted a UN aid convoy the same day near Kherson.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, health officials report 65 deaths from Ebola in the northeastern province of Ituri, and declared this week an outbreak of the deadly virus with hundreds more cases suspected.

As part of its pressure campaign against Cuba, the Trump administration says it will indict former Cuban dictator Raul Castro over the downing of planes flown by the humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue in a 30-year-old incident. In February 1996 Cuban jet fighters shot two unarmed Cessna twin-engine planes looking to rescue Cubans from water crossings over international airspace between Florida and Cuba, killing four Cuban-American pilots. Two escaped in a third plane. Despite military and civilian tracking of the planes, the Clinton administration went after the Brothers crew, threatening to pull their licenses for crossing into Cuban airspace.

• I actually covered the trial in Miami federal court in August 1996, and watched as it unfolded in the courtroom that U.S. civilian aviation and military authorities had opportunities to protect the pilots yet stood down while they were attacked.

  

In Nigeria, 12 former Chibok girls captured 14 years ago by Boko Haram militants became the first to graduate with bachelor’s degrees in Nigeria on May 9. In an international incident taken up by the Obama administration, 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from their boarding school in 2014 and most held for years before escape or rescue. Despite global pressure, 10 years later 82 were still in captivity. Several former schoolgirls have completed university education in the United States.

I’m reading … What Grows in Weary Lands by Tish Harrison Warren.

Since March 2022, just weeks into the war, President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered a moment of silence to honor those killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Four years later Ukrainians haven’t stopped observing one minute of silence nationwide. Every day.

Little of everyday life seems to change when Americans go to war. In Ukraine, war has transformed daily life, but not halted it. Children cram games and blankets in their backpacks in case they are forced into underground shelters to or from school. Every office and residential building has a designated shelter. During Fashion Week this spring, the latest collections from Ukrainian designers featured amputees and tributes to models and fashion industry figures killed or fighting on the front lines.

On the runways of both Kyiv and Paris this spring, designer Lilia Litkovska featured models wearing headlamps and lug boots, a nod to the persistent reality of nightly air raids, drone strikes, and cold with no electricity. Litkovska described how people flash the lights at one another during blackouts. She told Forbes, “you are talking without words, it’s like you are united. You are together. You are not alone.”

Such rituals are more than tokens of survival, they are signs of hope. They become ways of expressing a reality that life continues and will go on beyond a seemingly endless war. Litkovska dubbed her newest work this spring, “a collection about the light that refuses to die.”

More from the region:

Ukraine An estimated 100,000 Ukrainians have undergone amputations since the 2022 invasion, a casualty injury rate comparable to World War I. Yet war amputees are breaking the pain-trauma cycle, according to a new medical study from Northwestern University, with most regaining function and quality of life.

Sunday marked the 40th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in northern Ukraine. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi called for urgent international support to repair a confinement dome damaged in a Russian drone strike last year. The United States announced this week it would put $100 million toward the project.

• Nataliia Khodymchuk, 73 and a survivor of the Chernobyl accident, died just before the anniversary when a Russian drone slammed into the Kyiv apartment building where Soviet officials relocated her and her children after the disaster.

• Near another Ukrainian nuclear reactor at Zaporizhzhia, a deadly strike on a Baptist church in April was a targeted strike against church workers and an affiliated U.S.-based aid organization, according to religious freedom advocates and eyewitnesses. The April 16 attack using a precision-guided bomb killed one, a church minister, and wounded 8. It gutted the building of The House of the Gospel Church, which served as a distribution point for aid with Illinois-based Mission Eurasia.

• The Kyiv Post has a fact-check on U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s six-hour testimony before Congress this week, his first since the Iran War started.

Elsewhere:

Mali Al-Qaeda-linked militants launched coordinated attacks on Saturday across Mali, a West African country that’s one of the largest on the continent. They seized two major cities while simultaneously striking the heart of the capital, Bamako.

Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, and its Tuareg rebel allies this week continued operations to consolidate control over northern Mali, while JNIM tightened a blockade on Bamako aimed at toppling the Malian junta. The military government, which gained power during 2020 and 2021 coups, expelled French forces and aligns itself with Russia.

The conflict fuels ongoing displacement across northern Africa, and is raising global terrorism threat levels. Despite focus on Middle East jihadism, deaths in Africa’s Sahel region in recent years accounted for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths globally.

United Arab Emirates The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) will lose 13 percent of its production capacity starting today after the UAE announced Tuesday it will leave the cartel, which accounts for roughly 30 percent of worldwide oil production. Largely unconstrained by the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, the UAE will have more freedom to maneuver apart from other Gulf countries as war in Iran rattles oil alliances.

Iran Today marks 60 days since President Donald Trump notified Congress about his attack on Iran, but the deadline for his legal authority to make a case for continuing the war will pass without action from Congress. Despite growing unpopularity among voters over the conflict, GOP leaders are letting Friday’s deadline pass without action—and lawmakers left town yesterday. The deadline comes with the war at an impasse, as Washington and Tehran trading threats amid a fragile ceasefire.

Lebanon “The fate of southern Lebanon will be the same as that of Gaza,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said earlier this week. Before-and-after shots of Israel’s latest incursion show the extent of destruction: damage to water infrastructure, but also electricity networks and bridges, cutting off vital supplies and services for entire towns and villages.

Gaza Despite war and widespread destruction, half a million Palestinians cast their ballots for municipal and village councils across the West Bank and in the city of Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip. While 183 localities saw a mix of wins for the Palestinian Authority’s controlling Fatah party and independents, local control ultimately rests with Israel and its military control.

Myanmar The legal team of Aung San Suu Kyi plans to meet the detained former leader ‌this weekend after she was transferred to house arrest in the capital by the military-backed government, a representative said on Friday. The Nobel laureate, who is 80, has been detained since the military ousted her civilian government in a coup in 2021. The coup triggered a deadly civil war that has engulfed ​much of the impoverished Southeast Asian nation, and Suu Kyi’s whereabouts had been unclear.

United Kingdom The terror threat level for the UK was raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’ for the first time in four years following the stabbing of two Jewish men in London on Wednesday. An official said it’s not “solely as a result of that attack” but in response to an increase in “broader Islamist and extreme right-wing threats.”

• King Charles III brought a light wit and subtle jabs to a bitterly divided U.S. Capitol, speaking to a joint meeting of Congress about the Magna Carta and the importance of checks and balances. President Trump hosted the royal couple for a state dinner, and announced Thursday he would lift tariffs on Scottish whisky in their honor. And I don’t know but there was something heartening about the king visiting with park rangers in the Shenandoah Valley.

• In London a pair of African distance runners broke through what was until Sunday one of the most unthinkable records in sports, shattering the long-unapproachable two-hour barrier in the 26.2-mile (42.2-kilometer) marathon.

Sabastian Sawe of Kenya won the London Marathon in 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, bettering the previous men’s world record by an astonishing 65 seconds. He beat Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who was running his first marathon and finished in 1:59.41.

• Ethiopa’s Tigst Assefa crossed the women’s finish line in 2:15:41, taking nine seconds off her world record set in the same event last year. Assefa and Sawe talked to The Athletic about what it took to get there.

On the homefront … I’m reading Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around by Justin E. Giboney, and practicing hope. This may look to you like a 100-year-old basement, and it is (mine). But there’s new life breaking through, the firstfruits of a harvest to come.

In South Korea residents are taking shorter showers and getting paid to drive less. In Nigeria the taxi drivers are watching profits disappear with fuel prices spiking 65 percent. Rice farmers in India and maize growers in Africa are missing crucial planting windows due to shortages of fertilizer and other supplies. In Kenya’s flower industry, losses are running $1.4 million a week.

The shortages and setbacks are beginning to pile up as the Iran War nears a third month with one of the world’s leading shipping corridors largely closed. The cascade of global repercussions differs according to geography and economic status, but the effects come with much of the world still recovering from familiar pandemic-era supply-chain breakdowns.

For Europe and North America, jet fuel shortages are prompting major airlines to cut flights just as the summer travel season gets underway. Lufthansa this week cut 20,000 flights stretching into October, an indicator that tie-ups now starting to bite won’t easily go away even if the war ends tomorrow and the Strait of Hormuz fully reopens.

The Middle East is the largest exporter of jet fuel, a kerosene-grade fuel that’s more refined than other oil products. European carriers have begun cutting flights to key U.S. cities to conserve fuel.

Asian nations—which receive more than 80 percent of the oil and liquefied natural gas delivered through the Strait of Hormuz—have scrambled to replace energy imports, but now face challenges in getting exports produced and delivered.

Japan reached a new oil import agreement with Mexico this week. South Korea, lacking deep strategic reserves, launched a national fuel conservation campaign. Daily notices emphasize curtailing activities in public (in yellow below), at work (pink), and at home (blue). Government workers are now riding bikes, and government announcements on Earth Day on Wednesday featured taking short showers.

African countries are especially exposed because many depend heavily on imported refined fuel, food, and fertilizer. Kenya’s flower industry has been hit by all three, plus lower demand for cut bouquets abroad as prices rise. But the disruptions are particularly life-threatening for countries facing internal conflict, like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia.

“We no longer ask what we will eat. We ask who will eat,” said a resident of North Darfur in Sudan, where famine conditions are worsening with fuel shortage-driven aid disruptions.

• Transportation of critical medicine and others supplies to some of the most remote parts of the world happens via mission aviation groups, and all face months-long delays due to shortages and fuel price increases.

• Here’s a deeper dive into the complexities of the fertilizer shortage.

• For India, “In my 35 years in this business, I have not seen such panic,” said Prakash Limbuyya Swami, a fertilizer retailer in Karnataka. The kharif season that begins in May with sowing rice and cotton depends on fertilizer imports.

Talks to end the war may resume this weekend. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Islamabad late Friday. U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner also heading on Saturday to Pakistan, but without clear plans of the two sides meeting. Here’s an inside look at how Iranian infighting is playing out in negotiations and in the Strait of Hormuz.

Figures such as Araghchi operate inside a system where diplomacy is not separate from military strategy but embedded in it. The same structure that manages escalation also calibrates de-escalation.

In southern Lebanon, the IDF announced it had replaced the statue of Jesus Christ destroyed by an Israeli soldier in the Christian village of Debel. While the photo of the soldier was real, the IDF photo of its replacement was not. The new statue, resembling the one destroyed, came via Italian troops serving with the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, and was placed with locals and Catholic clergy in attendance.

The IDF did remove two soldiers connected to the incident from combat duty and placed them in military detention for 30 days. Debel is one of few Christian villages in southern Lebanon where residents have remained through Israel’s military campaign against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia.

American journalist Shelly Kittleson writes about her kidnapping ordeal in Iraq last month at the hands of Iranian-backed Khatib Hezbollah militants.

Something people living in the Middle East are happy about: Record rainfall all over, with Saudi Arabia showing 160 percent its normal precipitation. But in the current climate, one theory catching on around social media is that drought has ended because Iran destroyed key U.S. and Israeli sites long believed to be manipulating the weather, creating droughts.

In other news:

Pope Leo XIV concluded an 11-day trip in to four African countries on Thursday, giving a wide-ranging press conference on the flight back to Rome. He reiterated concern over the war in Iran, a position that sparked a social media attack from President Donald Trump at the outset of his trip: “As a pastor, I cannot be in favor of war.”

• Good background on the conflict between an American pope and U.S. president in last week’s news roundup from my friend Jon Ward.

• Walter Russell Mead sets their confrontation in the frame of changing North-South religious postures, pointing out:

The Trump administration’s Protestant supporters are closely aligned with the Pentecostal and evangelical movements that shredded Catholicism’s near-monopoly of Latin American religion.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech on Sunday that his country’s economic dependence on the United States has become “a weakness that must be corrected.” As relations between the neighbors remain tense amid diplomatic disputes and tariffs, Carney said his government is pursuing economic diversification through new investments and trade designed to reduce reliance on U.S. markets.

Britain is launching an mRNA vaccine trial for bird flu, a virus scientists fear could trigger the next pandemic.

In Uganda medical personnel testify to a spike in many disease-related deaths with disruptions brought by the elimination last year of USAID. Some warn the breakdown in delivery of care, even with some of the funding now restored, could lead to heightened risk of an influenza-type pandemic.

As one expert explained to me this week:

You can say, ‘well, I didn’t stop it,’ but you’ve actually disrupted it so much that you can’t pick it up. You can say that funding was restored. But the people are gone and the systems are gone. The equipment is gone. Some things have been redistributed and are not a system anymore. It is a complicated, unfortunate process. You’ve basically set it back 10 to 20 years.

In Mexico the shooting on Monday that killed at least one tourist has rattled officials just weeks before the World Cup begins.

In Panama a man long sought in connection with the deadliest terrorist attack in Panama’s history arrived in the country Monday after being extradited from Venezuela, marking a breakthrough in a case that had remained unresolved for more than three decades. The 1994 bombing of a Panamanian jet killed all 21 people on board, most of them members of a local Jewish community as well as at least 3 U.S. citizens.

Since the war in Ukraine began four years ago, Russian courts have sentenced five people to imprisonment and fined three on criminal charges for opposing Russia's invasion of Ukraine on religious grounds. In the latest, a district court in Moscow last month sentenced journalist Kseniya Luchenko for a Telegram post in which she condemned a Russian missile strike on a Kyiv children's hospital and contrasted the attack to Putin government and Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate's promotion of “traditional values.” She faces an 8-year jail term should she return or be extradited to Russia.

In the United States, New York’s city hall, in an announcement coinciding with Israel’s Independence Day, said the city will not replace a formal definition of antisemitism that Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrapped his first day in office. Critics, including Mamdani, argue it conflates political criticism of Israel with discrimination. The issue is significant because discrimination against Jews is often not clear-cut, yet Jews are targeted in hate crimes more than all other groups combined in the city, according to NYPD. The city will continue investments in Israeli bonds, with international controversy around both policies heightened for a city with the largest Jewish population center outside Israel.

Here’s a look at the drought map for the United States. I live in one of the red zones, and for my county it’s the second time in under 2 years to be part of a federal disaster area, and the opposite of 2024 when we were deluged by a hurricane.

Good news is rain is in the forecast. Today my neighbor reminded me of the last line in The Count of Monte Cristo: “All human wisdom is contained in these two words—Wait and Hope.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared that the Strait of Hormuz is “completely open” today, following a ceasefire late on Thursday between Israel and Lebanon. Halting attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon was a key demand of Iran to continue negotiations with the United States. More than a million people have been displaced—one-fifth of Lebanon’s population—and at least 2,000 killed since Israel launched this wave of strikes March 2.

Iran’s decision highlights the regime’s ongoing control over the Strait of Hormuz, with its 21-mile wide chokepoint that on any day normally transits one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. The U.S. military, which began de-mining operations in the strait earlier this week, faced daunting risks around any move to open the sea lanes by force.

In Lebanon, the Litani River will be a demarcation critical to any lasting settlement between Israel and Lebanon. Israel over the past month forced evacuations of 600,000 residents living south of the river and appears intent on establishing a widening buffer zone inside Lebanon. The Litani River since 1974 has been a marker between the two warring countries, with south Lebanon patrolled by UN peacekeepers, a mandate due to expire late this year.

The Israeli offensive, meant to eliminate Hezbollah outposts along its border, at the same time flouts international law as it has displaced civilians and emptied ancient Christian towns and villages south of the river.

Last month a Lebanese Maronite Catholic priest was killed in southern Lebanon when an Israeli artillery tank fired on a house. The attack took place in Qlayaa in the Marjayoun district of southern Lebanon, an area still largely inhabited by Christians—

An Israeli Merkava tank hit a house in Qlayaa twice. The first strike wounded the owner and his wife. Father al-Rahi and other neighbors rushed to the scene to help when the tank fired a second time. Father al-Rahi was wounded from the strike and later died from his injuries. Several other Lebanese civilians were also injured in the attack.

Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, has continued its attacks from north of the Litani, firing 40 rockets into northern Israel on April 15 alone, wounding one man.

Israel in recent weeks has bombed all bridges crossing the Litani, including the last standing bridge just hours before the ceasefire took effect on Thursday. That further challenges residents who now may return home. It also has extended its zone of control north along the river and around the Golan Heights. The Israeli government on Wednesday approved a $334 million, five-year plan for the development of the first city in the Golan Heights, to be completed at Katzrin by 2030.

President Donald Trump said he had invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun to the White House for peace talks, a historic endeavor for two border states technically at war for more than six decades. Leaving Hezbollah on the sidelines, however, risks any lasting settlement.

Trump said today that a U.S. blockade of ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz to Iranian ports will continue until “our transaction with Iran is 100% complete.” With a U.S.-Iran ceasefire set to end next week, continuing talks with Pakistan mediating could begin this weekend.

Other news:

Russia conducted one of its largest series of drone and missile strikes throughout the day on Wednesday and overnight into Thursday (April 16), using over 700 attack drones, killing at least 17 and injuring at least 100 civilians. Yet, the Russian winter-spring campaign has hit a wall, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), because Ukraine still holds a decisive drone advantage. By establishing a “digital iron ceiling,” Ukrainian drones are stalling Russian armor and infantry needed to take actual territory.

Russian forces are suffering from a staggering casualty rate while achieving only marginal, “meter-by-meter” gains, a pace slower than almost any major offensive in the last century.

• Mississippi farmer Ronald Mask has helped to shelter 150 Ukrainian families from war, and the community of care around them shows how churches and others can do the same. Now, the community is involved in legal advocacy, as the Trump administration moved to end the sponsorship program and legal status in the U.S. for thousands taking refuge from the war in Ukraine.

In Hungary the political earthquake that ended 16 years in office for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, with the party opposing Orbán winning two-thirds of the seats in Parliament in April 12 returns, was unimaginable apart from the Tisza Islands. The small civic clubs, formed largely in rural areas that were the political base for Orbán, functioned independently and by reminding Hungarians that once they weren’t so polarized.

The victory of renegade politician Péter Magyar could hold lessons for both parties in the U.S. looking for a post-Trump leader.

A student in eastern Turkey opened fire on two classrooms at a middle school on Wednesday, killing nine people and wounding 13 others. Two days before, a former student wounded at least 16, mostly students, before shooting himself at a high school in Turkey’s eastern Sanliurfa province. Until this week, school shootings were rare in Turkey.

Cuba’s leaders are taking seriously reports the Pentagon is quietly laying plans for a military invasion—with President Trump hinting the Caribbean may be his “next conquest.” Last week the grandson of Cuban leader Raúl Castro dispatched a wealthy Havana entrepreneur to personally deliver a letter to the White House proposing economic and investment agreements to head off a war. The businessman was stopped by U.S. border officials in Miami, who took the letter and returned him to Havana.

China is waging an information war on Taiwan, aimed at convincing Taiwanese that China’s ​military power is so overwhelming it’s futile to try to defend itself military.

Homefront … I’m amazed to be included among a roster of great journalists receiving the 2026 Zenger Prize for my reporting on the war in Democratic Republic of Congo. … And, among many highlights of a trip to Memphis last week was an evening with Bill Bangham and his wife Dianne. Bill is an international photographer extraordinaire who took a chance on allowing a cub reporter (me) to accompany him to areas around the Chernobyl nuclear site decades ago. He is mentoring me still.

—from the American Geographical Society’s Around the World Program Iran, a booklet published in 1958 for K-12 classrooms

You need only look to Ukraine, a small, emerging country that at first glance looked no match for a former superpower like Russia, to see the unexpected staying power of the underdog, especially when defending its homeland.

As the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran enters a second month, the situation on the ground in the Middle East defies the triumphant rhetoric from Washington. It also defies cataloging here, as I have started and been halted by events several times this week. Forgive me, but we live in remarkable, challenging times.

As the possibility of a ground war looms, Iran this week launched dozens of ballistic missiles and drones into neighboring Gulf countries, even as it took hits from U.S./Israeli forces, who together have carried out more than 16,000 strikes inside Iran since the war commenced on Feb. 28.

On Thursday Iran attacked a U.S. Steel Corporation facility in Abu Dhabi, with damages. It also struck with significant damage two of the largest aluminum smelters in the Middle East, major suppliers of U.S. aluminum. The IRGC said it will target named U.S. tech firms in the region for their role in U.S. killings of Iranian officials, and on Thursday it shot down a U.S. F-15 fighter jet, the first of the war.

In Israel, one of the most significant Iranian missile barrages of the war forced Passover celebrants into underground shelters. Ongoing strikes and the Israeli offensive into Lebanon are curtailing Easter celebrations. Predominantly Christian areas of south Lebanon are under attack as Israel engages Hezbollah ranks, and Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem and the West Bank face new restrictions and settler violence. Jerusalem clergy reached a temporary settlement with Israeli authorities allowing Easter celebrations at historic sites and churches after Israel blocked access on Palm Sunday.

In the past four weeks, President Donald Trump told Americans in a 19-minute speech on Wednesday, “our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. Victories like few people have ever seen before.”

He said Iran’s ability to launch missiles had been dramatically curtailed, and weapons, factories, and rocket launchers “are being blown to pieces. Very few of them left.”

Trump tied his rationale for the war to campaign pledges going back to 2015 to stop Iran’s nuclear development. “Terrorists who have nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat,” he said. Calling the U.S. military “unstoppable,” he said, “We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders.”

Trump vowed to continue attacks on Iran and pledged over the next two to three weeks, “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” Underscoring the regime’s defiant spirit, Iran’s state news agency posted a map soon after that it said shows the extent of Iran’s empire during the Stone Age:

U.S./Israeli forces widened targets this week, striking key infrastructure, residential areas, and bridges. On Thursday they struck the Mobarakeh Steel Complex, the largest steel producer in the Middle East, hitting the core of Iran’s industrial base. Both Iran and the White House appeared to be deepening plans for a ground war.

For all its losses, Iran’s regime controls the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen threaten Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea passage that controls shipping to the Suez Canal. Iran has destroyed strategic U.S. weapons, while retaining underground missile sites and off-site ballistic missiles it for years has stationed in the region outside Iran.

Who’s winning? is seemingly obvious. Yet experts contend that while the United States has achieved air superiority in parts of Iran, it has not achieved it where it counts. For all the U.S. and Israeli expenditure of munitions, military dollars, and military lives, and the war’s upending of global trade and economic security, what the Trump administration has demonstrated to this point is something everyone everywhere already knew: If the United States wants to decapitate a government and devastate a country, it has the military capability to do so.

The questions always are, at what cost? And what comes next?

Read more

For Israel, fighting Iran plus opening an invasion of Lebanon to counter Hezbollah this month all have come on top of a 2 1/2-year war against Hamas in Gaza. Festering violence within its own borders now could be the undoing of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), a historically disciplined military that’s ranked 15th most powerful in the world, and renowned for preparedness against larger adversaries.

At a closed-door cabinet meeting on Wednesday, IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir said the IDF could soon implode without reinforcements.

“I am raising 10 red flags before the IDF collapses into itself,” he said.

Stepped-up conflicts, a severe shortage of recruits, and a longstanding tradition that exempts ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from conscription have exhausted the IDF ranks. For U.S. forces facing a potential ground war with Iran, Israel’s manpower shortage presents a new layer of risk as the Iran war enters a second month.

Across party lines too, current and former officials in Israel are calling for action to stop attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians living in the West Bank. Many have gone unnoticed outside the area under cover of war in Gaza and now Iran, and unpoliced. This week Gen. Zamir visited the West Bank, as an Israeli human rights monitor reported 257 incidents of violence against Palestinians there since the start of the Iran war.

Israel armed settlers in the West Bank following Oct. 7 attacks that triggered the war in Gaza. Recent violence includes killings, assaults, and property seizures extreme enough to draw condemnation from opposition members of the Knesset, other politicians, rabbis, former security heads, and educators, and the broad cross-section of the diplomatic corps. In one firsthand account, the head of a nearby Modern Orthodox yeshiva, Rabbi Yehuda Gilad, described “a pogrom” in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Humsa, where rioters with zip ties and clubs beat villagers and stole an entire herd of 300 animals.

Netanyahu authorized an expansion of Jewish settlements after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that began with massacres of Israelis in their kibbutzim homes. In under three years, 69 settlements have been approved in areas inhabited by Palestinians. The new communities have displaced approximately 36,000 Palestinians, including entire villages historically present in the region.

War in the Middle East

One of Europe’s great optimists is not hiding a bleak assessment: The Iran war, said Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, risks triggering a “self-inflicted global recession” that could have more severe consequences for the economy than the coronavirus pandemic. Read the interview.

Among rising fuel prices and fresh shortages, the global helium supply is one you don’t know til it’s gone. One-third of the world’s helium comes from Qatar and has been cut off by attacks and the Strait of Hormuz shutdown. Helium is essential to MRI scans, chip manufacturing, and AI, plus party balloons.

The Iran war heads into a second month with competing claims. President Donald Trump says Iran is “begging” to make a deal to end the war, while Iranian leaders deny talks with Washington. Trump has extended a deadline before striking Iran’s energy infrastructure, while Iran overnight targeted with missile and drone strikes Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. More Iran War coverage in an upcoming post for paid subscribers.

Russia is expanding its military cooperation with Iran to facilitate Iranian strikes on U.S. and Israeli forces in the Middle East, and is close to completing a phased shipment of unspecified drones, medicine, and food to Iran.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is reaching agreements with Gulf states to share missile technology in a bid to win additional support for its war with Russia. “The pressure on Russia is insufficient,” President Volodymyr Zelensky told Le Monde, “Not only from the U.S., but also from Europe.”

The U.S. State Department announced on Thursday it will provide $25 million in new assistance to support the identification, return, and rehabilitation of Ukrainian children and youth who have been forcibly transferred to Russia or otherwise held away from their families and communities.

From the region:

In Syria’s Suweida governorate, more than 1,700 people were killed and nearly 200,000 displaced during a week of violence in ‌southern Syria in July 2025, a UN investigation said on Friday. The report cites multiple actors including Syrian government forces, tribal fighters, ​and Druze armed groups committing acts that may amount to war crimes.

“Suweida is still under siege. You can’t get to it,” Nadine Maenza told me this week. Maenza is co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable and a longtime adviser on Syria. She said at least 600 people are missing, many likely dead, in Suweida’s majority Druze villages, with a military blockade making access for assessment a challenge. About 34 villages remain occupied by Syrian security forces or Bedouin tribes there and closed to residents.

In Malta, people gathered earlier this month to discuss religious freedom across the Middle East with war in Iran just two days old. About 20 delegates couldn’t make the conference after airlines canceled flights but the summit provided a measure of hope as Christians, Muslims, and Jews came together. A panel on Syria raised concerns about crimes against Kurds, while Egyptian panelists talked about work with youth. Iran loomed large as facilitators explored possible scenarios for regime change with an emphasis on religious freedom. They also came together to counter the rise in anti-semitism worldwide, reports Christianity Today, with the war in Iran also spiking attacks on Jews.

Elsewhere—

Global

A new study from BMJ, one of the world’s oldest medical journals, concludes that actions by the United States constitute grounds for declaring a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) under international law. PHEIC is defined as an “extraordinary event” that creates a “public health risk to other states through the international spread of disease.” Sudden and drastic cuts to global health funding, alterations to childhood vaccination schedules, and pull back from pandemic preparedness are creating the risk of multiple, international infectious disease outbreaks.

Asia

China’s new ethnic unity law, adopted by the National People’s Congress March 12 to take effect July 1, codifies Xi Jinping's shift from ethnic autonomy to aggressive assimilation of China's 56 recognized groups into a unified "Chinese nation" identity. According to a report from the Council on Foreign Relations:

The new law’s core concept is captured in the term zhulao (铸牢) – to “forge” or “cast” metal—and its instruction that “forging the communal consciousness of the Chinese nation” is core to the Party’s ethnic policies … [It] reflects a hardening of Beijing’s political line under Xi Jinping … aimed at “melting” subnational and ethnic identities into a shared collective one.

The law reinforces Sinicization, requiring Christians, Muslims, Falun Gong adherents, and Tibetan Buddhists to align doctrines and governance with CCP ideology, including CCP propaganda in worship spaces and loyalty oaths. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom highlighted those abuses in its 2026 report issued earlier this month. The report also shows how the expansion of AI‑enabled surveillance and big‑data tools is being used by authorities to flag “abnormal” religious activity—online worship, encrypted chats, and religious content sharing.

For Zion Church pastor Ezra Jin Mingri and other leaders arrested last fall (I covered China’s surveillance of the house church network here), their cases are stalled as their team of lawyers face official harassment, revoking their licenses and forcing some to close their law practice.

Americas

In South America, malaria remains “stubbornly persistent,” and a study published yesterday in Science shows how whole genome sequences from across the continent are evolving to evade insecticides.

With a coming election in Colombia, leftist leader Gustavo Petro’s approval rating rose to its highest level since 2024, potentially boosting the chances of his ally Iván Cepeda in the May presidential election.

For the United States, populations of about 40 percent of counties nationwide shrank in the first half of 2025. The reductions largely are tied to the shutdown in immigration.

“International migration has long helped keep the U.S. population expanding as Americans grow older and new generations have fewer children,” while, “about two-thirds of U.S. counties saw more deaths than births last year.”

Deeper dive here on how immigration can reverse U.S. population declines.

********

Bear, the Australian Koolie who saved more than 100 koalas from the Black Summer bushfires that raged across Australia's eastern seaboard from in 2019-20, this week retired at age 11 after a decade of service.

Rose Marie Miller, the co-founder of international missions organization Serge, an author, teacher, and indefatigable counselor to many, died Thursday at age 101.

Weekend watch … anyone else watching Tehran? I’ve not but have been inundated with the recommendation.

The holiday comes with extended family picnics, hikes into the mountains, and mountaintop bonfires that sometimes include fire jumping. Everywhere everyone exchanges fragrant bouquets like this one I received during one reporting trip over Nowruz. And oh the food. Traditional dishes may feature sprouted wheat, lentils, garlic, and spring herbs served with young lamb.

This year many simply will long for a new day, as celebrations are subdued under the shadow of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Some schools in the region have been closed. Residents across the region are experiencing frequent power outages (sometimes with below-freezing temperatures) and internet blackouts. Iranians in particular are seldom leaving their homes, and runaway prices were a damper on holiday spending before the war began.

Yet in Syria, Nowruz on Saturday will be celebrated officially for the first time in its history with concerts and festivities at traditionally Arab landmarks like Umayyad Square in Damascus. Marking Nowruz was banned under the Baath Party rule of ousted President Bashar al-Assad. Despite fighting only a month ago between the Syrian army and Kurdish forces that have controlled the country’s northeast, current President Ahmed al-Sharaa declared it a national holiday.

At the same time, Muslims today are marking with feasting the end of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, and also coming in the Christian season of Lent. Writer Heather Surls has a reflection on the confluence in the midst of war.

From the region:

In Iraq, three weeks of war is devastating the local economy:

The faint braaaap from the sky sounded like a deck of cards riffled against a steel file. The following explosion tumbled, west to east, across the night. Our group — me and some half-dozen Kurdish businessmen gathered at a neighborhood mosque — paused our chat and looked up.

“Boom,” said Salih Albarzinja, an Erbil businessman who owns one of the largest travel agencies in the region. His tone was casual and he sounded unfazed by the aerial explosion of the drone that was likely targeting the U.S. airbase next to Erbil’s international airport. But every drone launched by Iranian-backed militias targeting U.S. facilities might as well be a bullet to his bank account. His business has come to a standstill thanks to the war next door in Iran.

“Now our profit is zero,” he says glumly. “I’ve lost a lot of money.”

In Lebanon more than 1 million people have been displaced by Israel’s latest attacks targeting Hezbollah operations, and now face overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, and harsh weather in informal shelter settings.

• The tiny nation of nearly 6 million, roughly the size of Connecticut, already has sheltered about a million Syrians and Iraqis from previous wars, many of them coming under attack alongside forcibly evacuated Lebanese in the Bekaa Valley’s string of encampments.

• Remarks by Prime Minister Netanyahu asserting “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan” hold some insight into his view on the U.S.-Israeli military campaign. Newsweek did some unpacking of the controversy that ensued. Netanyahu, like Trump, is consistent in overlooking civilian casualties and international law (ex: attacking hospitals and using chemical sprays) in service to projecting strength.

• Israel says it has killed nearly 600 Hezbollah members and two senior commanders since intensifying strikes in Lebanon. Among those killed: the brother of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, who is accused of carrying out last week's attack at a Michigan synagogue.

• Amid reports Iran’s regime may have activated sleeper cells to launch terror attacks in the United States, analysts say the Michigan attack may have been one, though it is unknown whether the assailant had official orders from the Tehran.

• Israel is missing its chance in Lebanon (and Gaza), writes Hussein Ibish:

  It has steadfastly refused to accept the fact that only the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization offer a practical alternative to Hamas. The equivalent in Lebanon is Israel’s failure to understand that the Lebanese state is the only viable alternative to Hezbollah’s domination. For Israel’s military campaigns to become political successes requires the adoption of policies that strengthen the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority. These would serve to counter Hezbollah and Hamas, respectively.

For Lebanon, basketball reigns, and March Madness in better days would bring watch parties and pickup rivalries in Beirut neighborhoods. Instead, fans will focus on Arkansas’ Lebanese guard Karim Rtail, who joins a diverse international roster of players from 58 countries for this year’s NCAA tournament.

In Iran, an inside look from an inspector who worked at the South Pars gas field struck by Israel this week: “When you strike South Pars, you are not striking a military installation. You are striking the economic foundation of two nations — and the heating supply of 85 million Iranians.”

• Qatar condemned the attack, directly connected to its own North Field, calling it “dangerous and irresponsible.”

• Counterstrikes by Iran on energy infrastructure, include a Wednesday strike on the North Field, plus continued near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz are perhaps modifying U.S. strategy. U.S. leaders are focusing on reopening the Gulf oil bottleneck (and sending additional Marines to do so) as one possible endgame in the war. Trump today called NATO leaders “COWARDS” for not joining the effort.

• David Ignatius, again, with a helpful summation on what unwinding the conflict could look like.

Elsewhere—

Europe

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, facing his closest election next month after a 16-year grip on power, is nevertheless having a showdown with EU leaders over the latest loan package for Ukraine. The United States will send Vice President JD Vance to Hungary ahead of the April election, in which Trump has endorsed Orbán.

Ukraine’s forces have pushed back Russian troops, liberating in the past month more than 400 square kilometers in the Dnipro region, an area held by Russia through much of the war.

Russia is routinely jamming mobile internet as part of “security measures.” Over the past week, disruptions in Moscow mean it has become impossible to call a taxi or pay with a card, while ATMs and payment terminals have stopped working. Businesses are losing millions of dollars, and residents are in a state of palpable shock.

The Last Pioneer

When the Internet Disappears

Russia is experiencing a genuine surge of political turbulence. Over the past week, Moscow has been gripped by disruptions caused by the near-total absence of mobile internet. It has become impossible to call a taxi or pay with a card; ATMs and payment terminals have stopped working. Businesses are losing millions of dollars, and residents are in a stat…

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5 months ago · 19 likes · Mikhail Zygar

Central Asia

Afghanistan says Pakistan is to blame for a strike on a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul that killed at least 400 people, the deadliest attack since cross-border fighting began weeks ago.

In a refugee camp in Qatar, Afghan evacuees who had helped the U.S. continue to face uncertainty, reports BBC News.

Afghan Mohammad Nazeer Paktyawal, who worked for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, was pronounced dead 24 hours after he was detained by ICE agents in Texas. Paktyawal was parolled legally into the United States during the 2021 withdrawal, and the father of six is the 12th person to die in ICE custody this year.

Africa

South Africa is deploying members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to fight crime in a high-stakes move that recalls policing during the apartheid era. The decision may be part of an effort to narrow a deepening rift with the United States, and as the Trump administration ramps up controversial refugee processing for up to 4,500 applications per month of mostly white Afrikaaners.

Guinea opposition leaders are calling for “direct resistance” against President Mamady Doumbouya after his administration ordered the dissolution of 40 political parties, a move critics say is the latest step toward a one-party state. The West African nation was a constitutional democratic republic until a September 2021 military coup brought Doumbouya to power.

Americas

El Salvador lawmakers approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday backed by President Nayib Bukele to permit life sentences in a country that has imprisoned more than 1% of its population in its war against gangs. The move came as watchdog groups highlight Bukele prison abuses and accuse the government of disappearing some nationals deported from the United States to its infamous CECOT prison.

Cuba came back partially from a nationwide power collapse on Monday, as the island endures a U.S. blockade and threats of takeover by President Trump. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said any attempt to take over the island would be met with “impregnable resistance.”

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On Tuesday the national debt for the United States topped $39 trillion, less than five months after it reached $38 trillion, and a doubling of the national debt in the 10 years since President Trump vowed to eliminate the debt in eight years. Yale Budget Lab Executive Director Martha Gimbel on Wednesday explained to lawmakers why the U.S. is approaching a debt crisis, and it’s worth a watch:

“We are currently the boyfriend at the beginning of the Hallmark movie in the big city, where the girlfriend is still going out with him even though she knows that it’s wrong,” she said. “At some point, she’s going to go home to the small town, and find the nice firefighter, and realize that there’s another option.”

Dana Milbank has a report today on a cluster gathering of Faith250, an interfaith movement launched by my friend Rabbi Michael Holzman and governed by a ‘covenant for conversation’:

When I attended a cluster meeting in Fairfax, Virginia, this month for a study of the Declaration of Independence, there were Catholics, Latter-day Saints, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Conservative Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Baha’is. I saw skullcaps and headdresses, men and women, Black, White and Brown. Muslims broke their Ramadan fast with an iftar — which honored the host synagogue’s kosher requirements. A Muslim leader wished Christians a blessed Lenten season. And when it was over, we all stood and sang “America the Beautiful.”

Grieving the loss of two American greats: Civil rights activist, pastor, author, and racial reconciliation advocate John Perkins, and foreign correspondent John F. Burns, the dean of all reporters covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

I’m reading Love Is Strong As Death: A Biography of Franz Rosenzweig by Paul Mendes-Flohr … and with friends (everyone should have two friends like mine to read books with), Theo of Golden by Allen Levi.

Is it the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? The new regime in Iran doesn’t seem to agree with President Donald’s assertions this week that the war will end "soon" because “there’s practically nothing left to target.”

Overnight Hezbollah and Iran fired at least 150 rockets into Israel, sending hundreds of thousands of Israelis to shelters starting Wednesday evening.

• In reply, Israeli Defense Forces say they hit dozens of sites inside Iran tied mostly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, part of a new stage of the war aimed at “deepening the blow.”

• Besides maintaining its home defense, Israel’s front against Lebanon is expanding, forcing Lebanese living south of the Litani River to evacuate and residents of Upper Galilee into shelters.

• In Iraq, battles between pro-Iranian militias and opposition groups also are growing. Late on Thursday a Kurdish military base came under attack by the pro-Iran PMF, with 6 French soldiers reported wounded. Iraqi Kurdistan took hits from 40 missile and drone strikes in under 48 hours starting Wednesday, and about 270 since the war began in late February.

• The International Office of Migration (IOM) is tracking “notable precautionary mobility,” or voluntary displacement, in Iraq, a country already hosting nearly 1.5 million displaced people from Syria and Iraq. This has forced airports, schools, and businesses to close and foreign workers to evacuate. I’ve talked to several families who have relocated to rural areas away from drone and missile strikes. All threaten the hard-won gains for stability in Iraq I’ve written about recently here and here.

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— “A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert

*****

In under one week’s time the Iran War that began last Saturday with surgical strikes inside Iran has expanded to encompass strike zones from the edges of Europe to the tip of the Indian subcontinent. More than 50,000 U.S. military personnel are participating in the joint U.S. and Israeli operation, according to one CENTCOM-briefed estimate, while the Pentagon has not publicly released a figure.

For summaries read this week’s posts for paid subscribers here and here.

Iranian Golshan Fathi went to donate blood at 7 a.m. this morning. “Hospitals are open, and every hospital has a number of injured people. Gas stations are working. There's mineral water, it's just gotten more expensive,” she posted on X. “We're under so much pressure from worry and war that my throat choked up.” Read her whole post here.

Americans at home have yet to feel the pinch of a new war in the Middle East, but likely will. Today Qatar’s energy minister said he expects all Gulf energy producers to shut down exports within weeks if the Iran conflict continues and drives oil to $150 a barrel.

Meanwhile, the conflict has left tens of thousands stranded as nearly 25,000 flights were cancelled. And in one potential sign of internal disarray, the State Department is battling accusations from diplomats and travelers who say the Trump administration endangered U.S. citizens in the Middle East by beginning a war against Iran without adequate plans for helping Americans leave the region.

• Here’s the latest security alert for Americans in Lebanon, where an estimated 100,000 people have fled Israeli assaults, with more than 120 killed since yesterday.

• In Israel travelers faced persistent Iranian missile and drone strikes without a way of escape. It’s the Jewish holiday of Purim this week, Ramadan for Muslims, and the Christian season of Lent. Thousands of holiday tourists and observant groups were blocked from air travel, and Israel’s Ministry of Tourism is rationing slots for shuttle bus service to exit the country via a Red Sea border crossing at Taba to Egypt.

“Targeted killing in the War on Terror was a gateway drug to what we have now,” a former top national security official told The Washington Post’s David Ignatius. Read his latest on the dangerous rise of decapitation warfare.

In other news:

Kristi Noem yesterday became the first cabinet secretary to be fired by President Trump in his second term. Her departure from the Department of Homeland Security follows a tumultuous tenure with two high-profile killings of U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis. The Wall Street Journal has an inside look (plus past investigative pieces) on her wreckless, self-aggrandizing management of the department and events leading to her departure.

• In a 66-page ruling, federal district judge John R. Tunheim last week forbid the federal government from arresting and detaining Minnesota refugees who have no grounds for removal and are awaiting green cards. The Justice Department has yet to appeal the ruling, which applies only to Minnesota. It is a striking read, and Christianity Today has key excerpts from the decision, which addresses head-on the Department of Homeland Security’s ill use of the law. In part:

  “The Court will not allow federal authorities to use a new and erroneous statutory interpretation to terrorize refugees who immigrated to this country under the promise that they would be welcomed and allowed to live in peace, far from the persecution they fled.”

Along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, a week-long “open war” declared by Pakistan continues with heavy shelling and explosions, displacing nearly 66,000 Afghans. Pakistan has hosted thousands of Afghans unable to find safe haven in other countries after the U.S. exit in 2021, but Pakistani airstrikes on alleged militant sites in Afghanistan last month prompted Taliban retaliatory operations. On March 1 blasts and explosions extended to the Afghan capital, Kabul.

China is escalating its use of military drones against Taiwan, reports the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, with recent airspace violations and a sophisticated transponder-spoofing operation. Analysts describe both as rehearsals for a potential conflict scenario. A Reuters investigation found China conducting 23 single drone flights over the South China Sea in recent months while transmitting false transponder signals that made it appear to be other aircraft.

Former rapper and Kathmandu mayor Balendra Shah, 35, is leading in key vote-counting areas of Nepal after the country’s first general elections since deadly Gen Z protests last year.

Nigeria is the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian, begins a new report by the House Appropriations and Foreign Affairs committees at the request of the White House. It calls for a bilaterial agreement between the U.S. and Nigeria to monitor and protect vulnerable communities coming under attack and to demobilize and remove Fulani herdsmen militias overtaking Christian holdings. In one attack last month, militants took 160 Christians hostage and force-marched them 20 miles.

In Democratic Republic of Congo, more than 200 people were killed on Tuesday in a mine collapse at the Rubaya mining sites in North Kivu, an area under control of Rwanda-backed M23 rebels. The coltan shaft collapsed in heavy rain, and the death toll includes 70 children, presumably mine workers.

Mexico along Jalisco’s tequila trail, the Los Angeles Times has an inside look at the cartel terror that engulfed the area following a Mexican military operation that killed cartel boss Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, last month.

Chile became the first country in the Americas to eliminate leprosy, or Hansen disease. Chile is only the second country in the world, behind Jordan, to have reached the milestone, according to the World Health Organization. The United States has about 225 new cases a year, a number that’s been rising in recent years.

Last year for the United States, something not seen since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. U.S. net negative migration in 2025 led to an estimated loss of some 150,000 people, and with immigration crackdowns the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution.

• At the same time, the U.S. saw a 6 percent drop in foreign visitors, or 11 million fewer tourists, representing $12.5 billion in lost economic activity.

Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds received his posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor on Monday for “acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty” as a prisoner of war in World War II Germany. A Methodist high school graduate from eastern Tennessee, Edmonds was among 20,000 Americans captured in the Battle of the Bulge. When Nazi commanders sought to separate out from his unit Jewish POWs, Edmonds ordered his unit to stand together, famously telling the incredulous SS officer, “We are all Jews here.” Edmonds also served in the Korean war, and died in 1985 without telling anyone, even his family, what had happened in the Stelag.

Homefront: I’ll be traveling over the coming week, first to Florida for spring training baseball and then to Washington, D.C., to meet with the Center for Christianity in Public Life’s 2026 class of fellows, an inspiring program I’m glad to be part of for such a time as this.

As the U.S.-Israel war on Iran entered a sixth day, the widening conflict held some firsts.

American forces destroyed the Iranian guided-missile frigate IRIS Dena in international waters off the coast of Sri Lanka, the first torpedo sinking by a U.S. submarine since World War II, according to Pentagon officials. Sri Lankan authorities carried out search and rescue, recovering 84 bodies from the sinking and posting guards at a hospital where 32 rescued sailors are recovering.

The Indian Ocean explosion in South Asia, about a thousand miles from Tehran, underscores the war’s dramatic expansion in just days’ time. It pushes the boundaries of the conflict, stretching from the edges of Europe to the tip of the Indian subcontinent.

U.S. Central Command says it has struck 2,000 sites in Iran since Saturday, and the Islamic republic responded with strategic strikes on U.S. and Israeli installations across the region. At the same time Israel launched a renewed offensive into Lebanon, hitting targets in Beirut tied to Iran ally Hezbollah that include densely populated neighborhoods. Israel on Wednesday told people living south of the Litani River, a region spanning hundreds of square miles in Lebanon, to move north ahead of an expansion of strikes and the entry of ground forces.

Widening war is forcing European countries into the fray that once hoped to stay on the sidelines of this conflict. The UK ordered RAF fighter jets to Cyprus after its base came under attack and an Iranian general threatened “intense” strikes on the divided island nation. NATO also activated its missile defense system when Iran fired a ballistic missile on Turkey, a member state that shares a 300-mile border with Iran. In the Caucasus, Azerbaijan came under Iranian drone attacks too.

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The attacks—what analysts say for the U.S. is the largest concentration of U.S. air power since World War II—coincided with a meeting of Iran’s senior political and military leaders and a window where intelligence officers knew where to find Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Israeli forces targeted Iran’s leaders while U.S. forces focused on key military targets and supply lines, with bombing extending beyond the capital to include sites in central and western Iran: 24 of 31 provinces were hit by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes, according to the Iranian Red Crescent. An Iranian diplomat said hundreds of civilians were killed and wounded in the strikes, with at least 115 reported killed at a girls’ school.

State media confirmed hours later that Ayatollah Khamenei was dead. Other top officials are also believed killed, including Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Iran state television said President Masoud Pezeshkian, the country’s political leader and head of government, survived. Iran formed a council to govern until a new supreme leader is chosen.

Khamenei, who was 86, ruled the Islamic republic for decades longer than its founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He institutionalized its ideological aims, creating a ruthless prison system, instilling rivalry with the West that included a defiant nuclear program, and creating the formidable IRGC as chief enforcer. Read Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour’s obituary here.

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