For the first time in modern American history, a midterm election has been decided by a war of choice and by the price voters paid for that war at the pump. The Democrats are taking both chambers of Congress, but the most dangerous sixty days are yet to come.
Drones over airports, GPS jamming, damaged undersea cables and Russian warships escorting the "shadow fleet". With Sweden and Finland joining, the Baltic has become an allied sea, but also a space in which a single wrong move could trigger a war no one wants.
Six months after an offensive that killed the defence minister, Mali's junta still holds Bamako, and the army has returned to Kidal with Russian help. But the capital lives on escorted convoys, and the Sahel has become the world's deadliest terrorism hotspot.
Eight months after the war began, Iran no longer has the navy or the radars it once had, yet it still keeps the Strait of Hormuz practically closed. Not because it controls it, but because no one else can guarantee that it is safe.
The CEC has certified the results of an election that brought few surprises on the domestic scene. A much bigger change took place outside the ballot boxes: Schmidt has gone, there is no successor, and Washington and Brussels no longer see BiH the same way.
Ahead of talks in Abu Dhabi, Moscow is acting from a position of “full strategic initiative”. Data on front-line movement, losses and weapons production paint a different picture: a war in which Russia finds it ever harder to seize territory, and ever easier to hit civilians.
For the first time in several years, the Taiwanese president’s October speech did not trigger a major military exercise around the island. Behind the apparent lull lies a different strategy: snap drills, cyber pressure ahead of elections, criminal proxies and pressure on the Philippines.
Satellite imagery from Yale University shows a city where life has practically stopped, hospitals with pits and a 75-kilometer berm around the city. The drone war is spreading to Khartoum and the power grid, while foreign backers of both sides go unpunished.