Gale-force winds fan widespread wildfires across Australia and New Zealand

October 22, 2025

Strong winds fuel wildfires across Australia, New Zealand — People stand near a jetty in stormy weather in Melbourne

Spring’s Scorch: When the Wind Turned Hot

On a sun-bright morning that felt more like midsummer than October, a hot, dry wind ran through Sydney with a kind of impatient ferocity that made backpacks feel like ovens and sea breezes vanish like a trick. The city’s beaches—Bondi among them—were full of people in shorts and sun hats, but the usual relief from the ocean was absent. The wind didn’t cool; it seared.

“It’s not the breeze I expected,” said Tony Evans, a retiree visiting from England, wiping sweat from his brow as he stood on Bondi’s promenade. “It’s almost a blast of heat. You think the sea will save you, but today it didn’t.”

That blast came from a mass of hot air that had built across the outback and marched southeast, the Bureau of Meteorology reported, pushing daytime temperatures in Sydney’s central business district past 37°C, while suburbs farther inland—Penrith and Bankstown—neared 40°C. Those numbers are unusual for October, a month Australian cities normally use to shrug off winter and ease into spring.

Fires on the Edge: A Community Braced

The heat was accompanied by wind gusts strong enough to topple trees and raise the specter of bushfires. Authorities in New South Wales issued several total fire bans as gusts reached up to 100 km/h in exposed parts, and firefighting crews scrambled across multiple fronts.

At last count, 36 separate fires were active across the state, with nine still uncontained. Almost 2,000 properties reported outages as power lines strained against the wind. Firefighters worked in heat, smoke and dust, their silhouettes glimpsed on ridgelines like figures from an old story updated for a warming world.

“We are seeing conditions that rapidly escalate,” said a senior incident controller with the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. “A gust can turn a manageable burn into an emergency in minutes. Our crews are stretched, and communities need to heed advice now.”

The images were familiar to many Australians: ember clouds rolling like low fogs across paddocks, lines of plumes climbing the slopes, and volunteers racing along single-lane roads to lay hoses and clear vulnerable properties. For some, the heat was merely uncomfortable. For others it was life-altering.

“My neighbour lost power at midnight,” said Leila Matthews, who lives on a semi-rural fringe outside Sydney. “We gathered by the barbecue with torches and old blankets, worried about the lines and the kids’ asthma. You don’t expect this in spring.”

Across the Tasman: Red Alerts and a Different Kind of Fury

Across the Tasman Sea, New Zealand was battling its own weather extremes. MetService issued red-level wind warnings—the kind reserved for the most severe events—for central and southern regions, and the South Island’s east coast was braced for gusts that forecasters warned could reach 150 km/h. Around Wellington, winds of up to 140 km/h were forecast, alongside heavy rain.

Fire crews in Kaikoura on the South Island and in Hawke’s Bay on the North Island were fighting blazes stoked by the powerful winds. The fires destroyed several properties, including at least five homes, and prompted the government to declare a state of emergency in Canterbury to coordinate response efforts.

“We’ve had strong winds here before,” said a Kaikoura resident, pointing at a line of scorched mahoe and kanuka, “but this felt like a freight train. The sound of the wind was constant—like someone running a sheet of metal across the hills.”

The heartache was not limited to houses. Ingka, the parent company of IKEA, confirmed that some pine trees destined for furniture stock had burned, though it said the wider global supply chain would not be affected. For communities, the immediate cost—homes, livelihoods and a sense of safety—loomed largest.

Numbers, Patterns, and an Uneasy Context

One fire season statistic that haunts many Australians is the lengthening of the window of risk. While the traditional fire season runs from November to February, researchers and emergency services have repeatedly warned that seasons are starting earlier and finishing later in many areas. More heat, more drought, more wind—all the ingredients that compound risk.

A spokesperson from Australia’s climate service explained: “We are seeing more frequent and intense heat episodes in spring. These events are consistent with what scientists expect in a warming climate—more energy in the atmosphere, and more chance for rapid escalation from heat to fire.”

Globally, average surface temperatures have risen by roughly 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the latest assessments. That might sound modest, but when added to natural variability it means landscapes and communities are operating with a different baseline than they were a generation ago.

How to Think About It

So what does this day-by-day volatility mean for the person who shops, works and parents in these towns? For one: preparedness is becoming less optional and more civic duty. Local authorities urged residents to stay indoors during high-wind warnings, avoid travel, and prepare for possible power and communications outages.

Keep an emergency kit with water, medications and torch batteries.
Have a plan for pets and livestock; wind and fire can turn evacuation into a scramble.
Follow local warnings—those red flags from meteorological services are not theatrical; they’re a direct call to action.

Voices from the Ground—and a Wider Question

For locals, the weather is not an abstract trend. It is a texture in daily life: the timing of school sports, the smell of the air after a rain, the patience of power crews arriving to fix lines. “We always talk about the seasons,” said an older farmer outside Canterbury, “but the seasons are talking back now. They’re earlier. They’re louder.”

Emergency managers, scientists and residents all echoed a similar theme: events like these are not isolated curiosities. They are part of a pattern that stretches across continents—strong winds, abrupt temperature spikes, and the fires they fuel.

As you read this, ask yourself: How does your community prepare for weather that no longer behaves the way it used to? Are your local plans and infrastructure keeping pace with a climate that keeps rearranging the rules? These are not merely technical questions. They are civic and moral ones about how societies value safety, resilience and the lives of the most vulnerable.

For now, crews will continue to work the lines, residents will board up and check on neighbours, and the wind will do what wind does—move through landscapes and lives. But the memory of this spring day—hot, restless, and unexpected—will not quickly fade. It will be part of the conversation about how to live with a climate that has chosen to be more dramatic, and less forgiving.

Louvre Criticized for Insufficient Camera Coverage of External Walls

hanad

October 22, 2025

'Insufficient' camera coverage of outside walls - Louvre — Louvre Director Laurence des Cars said there was a plan to improve security

When the Louvre’s Heart Was Robbed in Daylight

There is a particular hush that settles over the Louvre at dawn — not the curated hush of galleries, but the city’s own: delivery vans rumbling past on Rue de Rivoli, a baker’s first baguettes steaming nearby, and the glass pyramid catching the early light like a shard of ice. It was in such light, under a Paris sky that had nothing to hide, that a brazen theft unfolded last weekend and left the museum, and a nation, stunned.

What was stolen was not just glitter and historical ornamentation. Eight pieces, including an emerald-and-diamond necklace gifted by Napoleon I to Empress Marie-Louise and a diadem once worn by Empress Eugénie — a crown-like treasure studded with nearly 2,000 diamonds — were taken in a theft now estimated to cost roughly €88 million.

The Heist, as the Story Is Emerging

Investigators pursuing an increasingly vivid trail say the raid was carried out with the kind of precision that suggests planning and muscle. “We are working on the theory that members of an organised crime group climbed a ladder mounted on a truck to reach a balcony on the Apollo Gallery,” said one senior investigator to reporters, describing a sequence that reads more like a film than reality.

Witnesses saw something else: a glittering object, perhaps a crown, dropped in the confusion as the thieves fled. “It fell and shone in the street,” said Claire Martin, a nearby café owner. “Customers pointed, some laughed nervously — we thought maybe it was a prop, like from a movie shoot. It was only later I realised it was real.”

What was taken

Napoleon I’s emerald-and-diamond necklace to Empress Marie-Louise
A diadem that belonged to Empress Eugénie, with nearly 2,000 diamonds
Six other pieces from the historic crown jewels collection

For a museum that welcomes roughly nine million visitors a year, the image of thieves scaling its walls by daylight was a jarring inversion of the ordinary — the ordinary being tourists clustered at the pyramid, camera phones raised, children pressed to viewing barriers, security measured and discreet.

Cameras, Gaps, and a Director’s Confession

In the days that followed, the Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, stood before France’s Senate culture committee and uttered a phrase rarely expected in such a place: “Our perimeter cameras are ageing.”

She elaborated with bluntness: coverage is “highly insufficient,” not extending to all facades. On the Apollo Gallery side — the very site of the break-in — the only camera aimed westward did not capture the balcony that became an entry point for the thieves. The image was of a security system built for an earlier era, not for the vector of today’s organised property crimes.

Des Cars also revealed that she had tendered her resignation after the raid — a symbolic act more than an administrative one — only to have the culture ministry refuse it. “You feel the weight of responsibility,” she told senators. “And yet you also feel the weight of the institution and the people who make it run.”

Planned upgrades — and disputed glass

She said there had been a plan in place: to extend video surveillance to every façade and to install fixed thermal cameras, a measure meant to catch movement in low light and across blind spots. The museum defended the glass display cases that protected the jewels — installed in 2019 — insisting they represented “a considerable improvement in terms of security.” Still, critics and commentators pointed out that improvements in one area do not substitute for blind spots in another.

Politics, Reopenings, and a Closed Gallery

President Emmanuel Macron ordered an acceleration of security measures after the theft, and the Louvre reopened its doors to visitors, a gallant signal that art and public life must go on. Yet the Apollo Gallery, the scene of the crime, remains closed — a wound in a building that is otherwise a living, breathing place.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez reassured the public: “More than 100 investigators have been mobilised. I have full confidence that we will find the perpetrators.” It is worth remembering that confidence and resolution are different things; investigations into art thefts can be long, labyrinthine affairs.

The Wider Picture: Museums, Tourism and Organised Crime

This is not an isolated story about a single failure. It sits at the intersection of several global currents: the booming value of cultural property on illicit markets, the increasingly sophisticated logistics of organised crime, and the pressure on public institutions to remain open and accessible even while threats evolve.

The Louvre is the world’s most-visited museum. Last year it saw around nine million visitors. That scale — the ceaseless flow of people, deliveries and maintenance — makes comprehensive fortress-like security unrealistic without compromising the museum’s mission to welcome the world.

“Security is always a negotiation between openness and protection,” says Dr. Amara Singh, a security expert who has advised cultural institutions across Europe. “Museums must be public spaces. But when a crown worth tens of millions sits behind glass in a gallery that faces a public street, you must rethink perimeter strategy, not just vitrines.”

Why cultural theft matters beyond price

Cultural objects are repositories of identity and history.
The loss is not only economic; it’s symbolic, especially for items tied to national narratives like the French crown jewels.
Illicit sales of high-profile objects fuel wider criminal economies and can fund further illegal activity.

Think also of precedent. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston (1990), which still ranks among the largest art thefts in history, reminds us how artifacts can disappear into shadow economies and remain missing for decades. The very anonymity and mobility that once helped art circulate in the digital age also makes it easier for these objects to vanish.

Parisian Voices: Between Awe and Anger

Walk a few blocks from the Louvre and you hear different refrains. A young guide, Jules, who leads tours in three languages, said: “People come for the Mona Lisa and stay for the stories. This is a story the museum did not need. There’s sadness, yes, but also anger — we feel our history has been violated.”

An older concierge on the Rue de la Monnaie, Madame Fournier, expressed something quieter: “The city goes on. Children still play by the Seine. But there’s a bruise. When I pass that gallery, I see empty light.”

Questions That Remain

What does it mean to protect common patrimony? Who bears the cost when the treasures of a nation sit vulnerably in public view? Are museums required to become fortresses, or can technology, policy and community vigilance find a middle path?

As the investigation continues and security upgrades are rushed forward, these questions matter beyond Paris. They should concern anyone who believes that art — fragile, luminous, human — belongs not only to vaults but to people.

What to Watch For

Updates from French prosecutors about arrests or leads in the organised crime theory.
Public disclosures of the planned security upgrades, including any timelines for façade cameras and thermal imaging installation.
Discussions at UNESCO and cultural heritage bodies about best practices for protecting publicly displayed artifacts.

For now, the Apollo Gallery sits darkened, an almost theatrical silence where once crowns and diadems caught the light and the gaze of millions. The jewels themselves are not just commodities — they are touchstones to a complicated history. Their absence leaves a scar that is, in many ways, harder to document than a police report.

What would you do if you were in charge of security at one of the world’s great museums? Increase barriers and limit access, or innovate with technology and openness? The answer will shape how future generations encounter the fragile, shimmering objects we choose to preserve.

UN chief warns climate crisis is pushing Earth toward a dangerous tipping point

hanad

October 22, 2025

Global warming pushing planet to brink, UN chief warns — Antonio Guterres said: 'No country is safe from fires, floods, storms and heatwaves' (Stock image)

A planet on a knife-edge: inside the Geneva alarm bell

The conference room in Geneva smelled faintly of espresso and printer ink. Outside, the Alps wore the soft gold of an autumn afternoon; inside, delegates clustered around screens that looped images of flooded villages, scorched earth and smoke-torn skies.

Antonio Guterres rose to speak with a journalist’s bluntness and an elder statesman’s urgency. “Every one of the last ten years has been the hottest in history,” he told the packed hall. “Ocean heat is breaking records while decimating ecosystems. And no country is safe from fires, floods, storms and heatwaves.”

The words landed like a bell. They were not an abstract scolding but a report from the front lines: from subsistence farmers in the Sahel to fishers in the Pacific, from city planners juggling evacuation routes to insurers recalculating risk. The United Nations had convened this extraordinary meeting to mark 75 years of the World Meteorological Organization and to push a basic question into stark relief: how do we protect people now, not sometime in the distant future?

Warnings that mean the difference between life and loss

There is a deceptively simple answer that keeps resurfacing in these conversations: good warnings, given early enough. Guterres urged countries to build and fund comprehensive disaster warning systems. “They give farmers the power to protect their crops and livestock. Enable families to evacuate safely. And protect entire communities from devastation,” he said.

It is more than rhetoric. Studies and models show that being warned 24 hours before a hazardous event can reduce damage by up to 30%. Already, since a global push launched in 2022, more than 60% of countries have introduced multi-hazard early warning systems, an important uptick toward a 2027 target for universal coverage.

But the coverage is uneven. In the hall, delegates from island states talked about coastal sirens that fail during storms when electricity is down. A coastal mayor from Fiji—lean, with a sun-tanned face that had spent a lifetime on the water—leaned in during a lunchtime discussion and said, “A siren without a roof to run to is only a noise. We need shelters, boats, roads that don’t wash away.”

The World Meteorological Organization issued a sobering reminder: over the last fifty years, weather, water and climate-related hazards have killed more than two million people—and 90% of those deaths were in developing countries. The inequality burned through the numbers like salt on an open wound: those who contribute least to global warming are by far the most likely to die when the climate’s fury arrives.

Methane: the quick burn we keep forgetting

If early warnings are the first line of defense against immediate harm, methane is the short, sharp weapon in the climate fight that global leaders keep under-using. A UN observatory that stitches together data from more than 17 satellites reported that nearly 3,500 methane plumes were flagged across oil and gas operations—but only about 12% of those alerts resulted in any acknowledged action.

“We are talking about tightening the screws in some cases,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, which oversees the observatory’s Methane Alert and Response System. “We can’t ignore these rather easy wins.”

The point is technical but urgent: methane doesn’t stick around as long as carbon dioxide, but in the near term it is a far more powerful heater—roughly eighty times more effective at trapping heat over a 20-year window. That makes cutting methane a fast track to slowing near-term warming. More than 150 countries signed a 2021 pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% this decade—yet the commitments are not translating into rapid fixes on the ground.

Satellite technology, once the exclusive province of space agencies and defense contractors, is now being used to shine a spotlight on leaks. The International Methane Emissions Observatory’s system integrates dense satellite coverage to find plumes and send alerts to governments and companies. But the observatory found only 12% of alerts triggered a response—an improvement over last year’s 1%, yet still a fraction of what scientists say is necessary.

Giulia Ferrini, who heads the observatory, noted the potential in turning these alerts into quick wins: “We documented 25 instances where notification led to a large emissions event being fixed. Imagine scaling that up.”

Where the low-hanging fruit is—and why it’s still there

The oil and gas sector represents the largest, most straightforward opportunity to cut methane quickly: reducing venting, fixing leaks, stopping flaring where feasible. Investors have noticed. Earlier this month, representatives of asset managers holding more than €4.5 trillion urged the European Union not to weaken methane rules amid debates that hinted at rolling back standards to facilitate trade in liquefied natural gas.

Beyond fossil fuels, the observatory plans to broaden its gaze toward other major emitters—metallurgical coal used in steelmaking, agricultural sources, and waste. Each of these has a different fix timeline and cost profile, but the principle is the same: targeted detection plus swift repair yields outsized climate benefits.

Local voices, global implications

Back on the streets of Geneva, a delegate from Bangladesh—a delta nation shaped by tides—told me that an early warning system he helped install had cut losses from cyclones dramatically. “We used to lose whole harvests,” he said. “Now, if the alert goes out, families move animals to higher ground, children are moved to school shelters. It’s not perfect, but it saves lives.”

Across town, a climate scientist I met over coffee—white-haired, a little wearily hopeful—said, “We have the technology and the evidence. What we lack is the politics and the will to act at the speed the science demands.”

That lack of will is not just a moral failing; it’s a strategic mistake. Early warning systems and methane reductions are cost-effective. They protect livelihoods, stabilize markets, and reduce the human tragedy that reverberates in waves: displaced families, broken schools, and the slow erosion of trust in institutions that can’t keep people safe.

What now? A choice that will define this decade

The conference in Switzerland was not a moment for platitudes. It was a call to action executed in real time: to build shelters and sirens, to fund satellites and repair crews, to make the political choices that prevent avoidable suffering. The question for readers is both intimate and vast: what would you prioritize if you had to protect your community tomorrow?

Some answers are technical—fund local meteorological services, train emergency responders, mandate rapid-response teams for methane leaks. Some are structural—invest in resilient infrastructure, equitable insurance, and climate adaptation funds targeted at the most vulnerable. All of them require money, coordination, and a willingness to reorder priorities.

We face a simple arithmetic of survival: more warnings, earlier and clearer, mean fewer lives lost. Faster methane action means cooler air in decades that matter to this generation. The tools exist. The science is clear. The question now is whether societies, leaders and markets will move with the urgency the moment demands.

When you close your browser tonight, consider this: in a world where an alert can buy a family a day to flee a flash flood or a repair crew can stop a massive methane plume from turning into a warming catastrophe, inaction becomes a choice. What will you choose to support—voices for preparedness, or the slow erosion of safety?

Ukraine Reports Six Dead After Overnight Russian Missile Strikes

hanad

October 22, 2025

Ukraine says Russian overnight strikes kill six — Ukrainian officials said the attacks ran through most of the night

Night of Fire: Kyiv and a Nation Left in the Dark

They woke to sirens and ash. By dawn, much of Ukraine had been stitched with smoke, half the capital blacked out, and a grieving country counting bodies and broken lives.

Last night’s barrage — a mix of ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones — left six people dead, including two children, and knocked out electricity across broad swathes of the country, officials said. Debris from downed weapons rained over Kyiv, sparking fires in at least half of the city’s districts and turning familiar streets into scenes of chaos and rescue.

Where the city met the sky

In Dniprovskyi district, neighbors converged in their slippers and coats as smoke bled from a high-rise. Firefighters worked against a backdrop of emergency lights and the distant, ceaseless thud of anti-aircraft defenses. Ten people were pulled from the blaze; a child among five patients admitted to hospitals across the city.

“I smelled something like metal and burnt paper and then the windows shattered,” an elderly woman who lives two blocks from the damaged building told me, still holding her shawl tight. “We’ve had air raids before, but tonight it felt… larger. Closer.”

Fires flared in Desnianskyi, Darnytskyi and the Pecherskyi district — the latter home to the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a centuries-old monastery whose golden domes are a symbol of Ukrainian spiritual endurance. Smoke curled in the winter air, a dark ribbon over a place where people have prayed through worse storms.

The human toll

Ukraine’s emergency services reported two people killed in Kyiv itself. Four others, including two children, were killed in strikes on areas surrounding the capital. In the southeastern frontline region of Zaporizhzhia, rare but relentless overnight shelling wounded 13 people, according to regional governor Ivan Fedorov.

These are numbers that flatten faces into statistics — until you meet the families, the firefighters with soot-tracked cheeks, the children in hospital corridors. “People think numbers are easy to swallow,” said a volunteer medic who treated burn victims through the night. “But every number is a life: a mother, a son, a schoolteacher. That’s what keeps me going.”

Lights out: an energy system under siege

As the strikes unfolded, Ukraine’s energy ministry reported widespread emergency outages — in Kyiv and “most regions” of the country. Svitlana Hrynchuk, the energy minister, pledged on social media that emergency teams were responding, but offered few immediate details. In Poltava region, oil and gas installations in Myrhorod district were damaged, the regional governor said.

Power grids, substations, and energy plants have been recurrent targets since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Analysts say attacking infrastructure aims to degrade civilian resilience — to make winter colder, hospitals more vulnerable, and everyday life intolerable.

“Electricity is not just a convenience here — it’s a lifeline,” explained an energy engineer in central Ukraine who asked not to be named for security reasons. “When you cut heat and light, you cut water pumps, medical refrigeration, communications. It’s a multiplier.”

Recent rounds of attacks have left hundreds of thousands — and in past waves, millions — without power or running water at once. For families with small children, the elderly, or those on life-sustaining medical devices, the stakes become acute within hours.

Voices on the ground

In a kitchen warmed only by a gas stove and the hush of a single lamp, a young mother wrapped her child in a blanket and said: “We’ve had cold winters, but never this many broken nights. The kid asks why the lights are gone, and what do you tell a five-year-old?”

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, confirmed rescues and hospital admissions and appealed for calm and solidarity. “Our city is scarred today,” a municipal spokesperson told reporters, “but people are helping one another — emergency crews, volunteers, ordinary neighbors.”

From a war-weary frontline village near Zaporizhzhia, a teacher leaning on the fence of her burned-out school said, “We teach kids to read and to dream. Now we teach them to hide in basements. It’s not the kind of lesson any of us wanted to give.”

What officials are saying — and what it reveals

Kyiv’s leadership has repeatedly urged stronger, collective international action; one senior Ukrainian official lamented that global responses have yet to be sufficient to halt what he called “the killing.” Diplomacy and summits have become uneven instruments in the face of continued strikes — a fact underscored by reports that a planned summit between the U.S. president and the Russian leader was put on hold after Moscow rejected calls for an immediate ceasefire.

“We proposed a pause; instead, the killing continues,” said a government aide. “That tells you where we are and how urgent the call for collective deterrence has become.”

Beyond tonight: a pattern, a strategy

There is method in this destruction. Attacking energy infrastructure during autumn is not random — it is a strategic attempt to sap morale as temperatures fall. Winter has repeatedly been used as a pressure point in conflict, from the trenches of history to modern information warfare. The recent strikes appear to be a continuation of that grim logic.

Analysts warn that systematic damage to power networks can take months and significant resources to repair, especially when repeated attacks target the same systems. “You can rebuild a substation,” an international security analyst said, “but not the confidence of a population that must sleep with a bag packed and a torch under the pillow.”

Small acts of defiance

And yet, amid the blackout, small things spark hope. Volunteers gather hot meals in school cafeterias that double as shelters. Municipal utility crews, sometimes working from phone flashlights, mark out damaged lines and coordinate repairs. Artists and neighbors hang lamps and candles in windows, not just for light but as a communal signal that life refuses to be extinguished.

“We bake bread on a makeshift oven and share it,” a volunteer baker said quietly. “You’d be surprised how much a warm loaf and a cup of tea can stitch the soul back together.”

Questions to sit with

How does a society sustain itself when its most basic services are weaponized? What responsibility does the rest of the world bear when civilian infrastructure becomes a battlefield? And most urgently: as winter approaches, what must be done to protect hospitals, schools, and the elderly?

These are not rhetorical flourishes — they are policy dilemmas that require immediate, concrete answers. They demand coordination of humanitarian relief, international engineering assistance to harden energy systems, and a political will to push for safer avenues of negotiation.

Moving forward

Tonight and in the nights to come, Ukraine will measure loss and resilience in equal parts. The flames will be doused, power crews will repair what they can, children will be cradled through another fear-filled sleep. But the scars — on trees, on buildings, on people — will remain.

As the country grieves and rebuilds, the world watches. Will the international response be calibrated to prevent the next blackout, to protect the next monastery, the next school? Or will tonight’s ash become tomorrow’s memory, another line item in a ledger of suffering?

When the lights come back — whenever and however they do — Ukrainians will still be asking harder questions about safety, sovereignty, and solidarity. For now, they hold one another a little closer, cook a little more soup, and refuse, stubbornly, to hand over their nights to fear.

North Korea Launches Ballistic Missile, South Korea Military Confirms

hanad

October 22, 2025

North Korea fires ballistic missile - S Korea military — People sit in front of a television screen showing a news broadcast with of a North Korean missile test

Morning Smoke Over the Sea: A Quiet Launch, a Loud Reminder

It was the kind of morning that presses itself into memory: a pale sky over the East Sea, fishermen tending nets along a rocky coast, a city preparing for a string of high-profile visitors. Then, somewhere beyond the horizon, a plume of vapor stitched the air and a single, distant echo rolled across the water.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff would later describe the event in clinical terms—an “unidentified” ballistic missile flew east—but the human story is never that tidy. For residents of the coastal towns who watched the contrail vanish into the clouds, the launch felt like the brittle end of a frayed promise: a reminder that the Korean peninsula’s tensions, though sometimes dormant, are never far from the surface.

Timing and Theatre: Why This Launch Matters

The timing could not be more loaded. The firing came less than a week before APEC leaders were due to arrive in Gyeongju—a city already bracing for the diplomatic choreography of presidents, prime ministers, and a throng of international media. Among the expected attendees was former US President Donald Trump, who, according to public statements, has hoped for another meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

“This is not just about hardware,” said a defence analyst in Seoul who asked not to be named. “Every missile, every parade, is a message—internally to the regime, externally to capitals watching for weakness or opportunity.”

What We Were Told

South Korean officials confirmed the launch and said the projectile flew east into open waters. North Korean state media, meanwhile, has been increasingly theatrical in recent months—showcasing what it billed as its “most powerful” intercontinental ballistic missile at a military parade earlier this month, and touting the Hwasong-20’s boundless range. State outlets also reported a successful ninth test of a solid-fuel engine for long-range missiles, suggesting a full test-fire of a new ICBM could be imminent.

From Streets to Strategy: Voices on the Ground

In the fishing hamlet of Pohang, a woman named Min-jung, who sells dried squid on a street corner, paused her work and looked toward the sea. “We hear these things all the time now,” she said. “You get numb, but you don’t forget. You worry for your kids.”

A municipal official in Gyeongju, who was arranging security logistics for the summit, spoke in quieter tones: “We prepare for the spotlight, but security is always layered. A launch like this adds urgency to everything—evacuations, airspace management, communication channels.”

Across the line of control in Pyongyang’s state media, the message is different: strength, resolve, and sovereignty. “If we have these weapons, it is because we see them as the guarantor of our survival,” a defector-turned-activist in Seoul told me. “To the regime, this is not a bargaining chip; this is insurance.”

Hard Numbers and Harder Choices

Put plainly, the technical developments are important. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, depending on design, can exceed ranges of 10,000 to 13,000 kilometres—enough, in some configurations, to reach parts of the continental United States. Solid-fuel missiles, compared with liquid-fuel models, cut preparation time dramatically: liquid-fuel systems can require hours of fueling and safety checks that expose them to being detected or disrupted, while solid-fuel variants can be fired on far shorter notice and concealed more easily.

North Korea has been under successive rounds of United Nations sanctions for more than a decade; UN resolutions have sought to curtail the flow of materials and revenue that fund missile and nuclear programs. Yet sanctions have had mixed effects on curbing weapons development. According to public estimates from international monitors, North Korea has continued to iterate on missile technology through the 2010s and into the 2020s.

ICBM range estimates: often cited as 10,000–13,000 km for potential North Korean designs.
Launch readiness: solid-fuel missiles can reduce launch prep time from many hours to minutes.
Sanctions: North Korea has faced dozens of UN measures since 2006, yet program advances have persisted.

Diplomacy on a Knife Edge

There is a paradox at the heart of North Korea’s posture: on one hand, relentless development of deterrent capabilities; on the other, intermittent openness to talks. Kim Jong Un and former US President Donald Trump met three times in high-profile summits, the glamour of which masked the hard limits of negotiation. The Hanoi summit of 2019 collapsed over disagreements about sanctions relief and the scope of denuclearization—an impasse that persists.

“Kim’s rhetoric this year has been oddly accommodating in one breath and immovable in another,” said a former diplomat who served in Northeast Asia. “He has said he’s open to meetings, but he also insists he will not give up his arsenal.”

Indeed, North Korea’s state media conveyed a recent message from Kim about “fond memories” of his meetings with Trump and signalled a willingness to engage—provided the United States abandons what Pyongyang calls a “delusional obsession” with denuclearisation and instead accepts coexistence as a premise for talks.

Beyond the Peninsula: Global Ripples

This is not merely a regional matter. The actors watching closely include not only Washington and Seoul, but Beijing and Moscow—both of which were portrayed in state parades and coverage as spectators to Pyongyang’s outreach. Each has its own calculus: China worries about instability on its border and the precedent of a denuclearised Korean Peninsula; Russia views the Korean dynamic through a lens of great-power rivalry; the United States sees extended deterrence and alliance credibility at stake.

The launch underlines a broader trend: an erosion of the cooling-off period that followed the diplomatic spritzes of 2018. It raises questions about whether arms control in Northeast Asia can be resurrected or whether incremental advances will continue to be met with incremental security responses—and the potential spiral that brings.

What Comes Next?

For now, the practical measures are familiar: monitoring, diplomatic notes, discussions in back rooms and on phone lines between foreign ministries. For ordinary people on both sides of the border, the calculus is more immediate. A teacher in Busan told me she now spends time in school drills explaining to students what different sirens mean. “You want to give them facts without fear,” she said. “But fear sits in the corners.”

As we watch this small plume of smoke settle into the record of an uneasy morning, it’s worth asking: what would lasting security look like here? Can deterrence and dialogue coexist without one swallowing the other? And perhaps more importantly, how do ordinary lives—markets, schools, seaside cafes—navigate the gap between headlines and daily routines?

There are no easy answers. The launch is a piece of a larger mosaic—a mix of military capability, domestic politics, and international posturing. It is a reminder that in a world of flashpoints, much of the true work is patient, slow, and often invisible: diplomacy, confidence-building, humanitarian ties, and the mundane acts of governance that keep lives steady through turbulent times.

For now, the sky over the East Sea has cleared. The summit in Gyeongju approaches. Leaders will speak in ornate halls, but the conversation that began with a single, solitary plume will continue well after the cameras pack up. What will they do with that conversation? That question now belongs to policymakers—but it belongs to the rest of us, too. How much risk are we willing to live with? And what, truly, is the price of peace?

Trump says he won’t accept a ‘pointless’ summit with Putin

hanad

October 22, 2025

Trump says he does not want 'wasted' meeting with Putin — US President Donald Trump's announcement came just days after he said he would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest

The Summit That Fizzled: Diplomacy in the Time of Uncertainty

There are meetings that change the course of history, and there are meetings that never happen but still ripple through the world. Last week’s blistering arc — a presidential phone call, a sudden announcement that a summit would be held in Budapest, and then a quick reversal — felt like both.

“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting,” President Donald Trump told reporters from the Oval Office, a phrase that read at once like caution and a diplomatic shrug. Days earlier he had telephoned Russia’s Vladimir Putin and, speaking in an unusually optimistic tone, declared that a face‑to‑face in Hungary would follow within weeks. Then, almost as quickly, the White House put the plan on ice.

For anyone watching closely, the sequence was less about geography than about the fault lines in global diplomacy — the fragility of ceasefire talk, the weight of battlefield realities in Eastern Europe, and the human cost that stubbornly refuses to be sidelined by statecraft.

From a Call to a Cold Shoulder

The pivot happened fast. A White House aide said the leaders of the two countries now had “no plans” to meet in the immediate future. U.S. Secretary of State and Russia’s foreign minister also canceled a planned preparatory conversation. “Things are changing on the war front,” the president added, promising further announcements in “the next two days.”

But what really made diplomats and capitals sit up was not the choreography of talks, it was what unfolded at the smaller, quieter table inside the White House: a closed‑door meeting between President Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky that one Ukrainian official described bluntly as “tense.”

Pressure on the Edge: Donbas and the Price of Peace

To many in Kyiv, the encounter felt like a private negotiation about public fate. According to Ukrainian sources, the U.S. president urged President Zelensky to accept a deal that would have frozen fighting along the current lines — and to give up control of large swathes of the industrial Donbas region as part of any peace arrangement.

“He asked if we would consider stepping back from territory we still hold,” said a senior Ukrainian official who requested anonymity. “There was pressure. Understandable from a negotiator’s vantage, devastating from ours.”

Ukraine has consistently refused to cede the Donbas — the twin provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk that have been the center of fighting and tension since 2014. To Kyiv, those lands are not bargaining chips but the fabric of the nation: towns with Soviet‑era factories, rivers that run through working‑class neighborhoods,: family cemeteries and Orthodox churches.

Weapons, Warnings, and an Empty Hand

In return for talks, President Zelensky reportedly sought long‑range Tomahawk missiles — weaponry that Ukrainian commanders say is necessary to blunt Russian advances and protect cities from long‑range strikes. The request was denied.

“We came asking for the means to defend ourselves,” an aide to the Ukrainian delegation said. “We left with an outline for a ceasefire that would lock in the front lines — lines that do not reflect the lives of people who have been forced from their homes, who have lost fathers, mothers, children.”

Voices from the Ground: Cities and Kitchens

If this is a story about policy, it is more urgently a story about people. In Kharkiv, a city scorched repeatedly by shelling, neighbors pick through the rubble of a baker’s stall and compare lists of what was lost. An aid worker who has been driving food into northeastern villages for two years shook her head.

“They talk about lines on a map,” she said, “but I know an old woman who walked two miles to retrieve her dog from a basement and found her house burned to a frame. Will a line bring her a new roof?”

In a smaller town near Donetsk, a schoolteacher described the surreal calculus families now perform every morning. “We teach the children to duck and count,” she said. “Duck if you hear the drone, count if it’s far enough. This is what peace looks like to us: fewer explosions, more breakfasts.”

European Leaders Push Back

Across the continent, the nascent idea of trading territory for an immediate halt to fighting met resistance. A broad swath of European capitals — from Paris to London — publicly rebuked the suggestion that Ukraine should give up land as the price of silence.

“We support a ceasefire, and we support negotiations that start from the current line of contact,” a joint statement from a coalition of European leaders read. “But unilateral excisions of sovereign territory cannot be the precondition for peace.”

Numbers That Don’t Lie

It helps to put this human drama against the cold arithmetic of war. Russia launched a full‑scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Since then, fighting has devastated cities, damaged vital infrastructure, and upended millions of lives.

Territory: Russia currently occupies roughly one‑fifth of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory, a complex mosaic of front lines, annexations, and controlled areas.
Displacement: As of mid‑2024, UN agencies estimated more than 8 million Ukrainian refugees had left the country, with several million more displaced within Ukraine.
Casualties: Estimates vary, but by mid‑2024 the war had claimed tens of thousands of lives among military personnel and civilians alike.

Those figures are not abstractions; they are the reasons diplomats hesitate and populations fear being asked to accept borders redrawn by force.

What This Moment Reveals

Diplomacy is rarely linear. It is an improvisation performed on the stage of power, where domestic politics, realpolitik, and human suffering intersect. The aborted Budapest summit is a symptom: leaders are searching for ways to stop killing without legitimizing conquest. Some want to freeze fighting; others insist any agreement must restore sovereignty and justice.

“The risk is that a frozen conflict becomes permanent,” said an international relations scholar in Brussels. “We’ve seen this elsewhere — frozen lines that last decades, where new generations grow up with walls and suspicion rather than memories of community.”

And there is the geopolitical undercurrent: NATO, an expanding coalition of European states, and the EU have all rallied around Kyiv in form and in rhetoric. Yet the transatlantic alliance also whispers of fatigue, of electoral cycles that bend policy, and of a world where powerful actors test the limits of rules that undergird the post–Cold War order.

Where We Go From Here

There will be more phone calls, more briefings, and more statements. A series of European summits is expected to discuss aid and strategy; leaders will posture, constrain, and console. And on the ground, people will continue to weigh the simple, stubborn truths of their lives: will the baker reopen his shop, will the children play in the square again, will a pensioner reclaim the roof over her head?

What do you think a durable peace looks like for Ukraine? Is it a frozen front line that saves lives today but hardens grievances for tomorrow? Or is it a longer path toward restitution, reconstruction, and a diplomacy that puts justice at its center?

As the leaders in Washington and Moscow circling the idea of Budapest, the real work will be done by diplomats who can marry immediacy with principle, by humanitarian workers who bind up the living, and by ordinary people whose daily courage keeps a country’s heart beating. Those are the meetings that matter most — even if they never make the headlines.

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