Sea bass, tuxedoes and a guest list heavy on Silicon Valley power brokers set the scene Thursday night as President Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at a White House state dinner, according to NPR, the Hill and the Washington Examiner. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Tesla and SpaceX's Elon Musk and Amazon's Jeff Bezos were among those in black tie, the Hill reported.

Trump said he and Xi had "never gotten along better," per BBC World's account of the evening, and the two leaders traded toasts to what the Washington Examiner described as the "long relationship between China and America." Xi, for his part, said the two countries must act as "responsible powers together," according to BBC World's reporting.

The warmth was real, by all accounts. The substance was thinner. BBC World reported that China wanted progress on trade, technology and Taiwan — and did not get as much as it had hoped for. Al Jazeera noted the two superpowers are seeking greater dialogue despite standing differences over Iran, Taiwan, AI and trade, none of which the dinner appears to have resolved.

That gap — a glittering evening layered over unfinished business — is the story here. State dinners are theater as much as diplomacy, and this one, by the outlets' own accounts, produced photographs and toasts more than breakthroughs. Whether goodwill at the table translates into movement on Taiwan or tariffs is a question for the negotiators still working the actual disagreements, not the caterers.

FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE — Ingrid Frost

— Compiled from reporting by BBC World, NPR News, the Washington Examiner and the Hill.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Pope Leo touched down in Paris on Friday, opening the first papal state visit to France in nearly two decades. The trip carries no shortage of freight.

The pope is expected to address the Catholic Church's standing in France after years of abuse scandals that have hollowed out trust in the institution. He arrives, too, as the country wrestles publicly with assisted dying — a debate the church has entered forcefully on one side.

But it is the AI speech that has diplomats and technologists watching closest. Leo is due to deliver a major address on artificial intelligence development at UNESCO, a venue chosen for its weight in global science and education policy. From Paris he travels to Metz, where he is expected to speak about Europe's future — a session some European leaders are expected to attend, according to reporting from the Guardian and Al Jazeera.

Neither outlet detailed the specific abuse cases the pope is expected to address, nor the exact contents of the AI remarks, which have not yet been delivered. Readers should treat descriptions of the speech's content as anticipatory until Leo actually speaks.

What is clear: a pope choosing to use a major European platform to weigh in on artificial intelligence signals how far the technology's reach has extended — into pulpits as much as parliaments. Whether the Vatican's voice moves the AI policy conversation in Brussels or Washington is a separate question, and an open one.

FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE — Ingrid Frost

— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian and Al Jazeera.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

It has been four years since the guns went quiet in Tigray, ending a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left much of northern Ethiopia in ruins. Now, according to NPR, fears are mounting that the region could be sliding back toward conflict.

The 2022 peace deal between the Ethiopian federal government and Tigrayan forces was hailed at the time as a rare diplomatic success in a war that had drawn in Eritrean troops and produced allegations of mass atrocities on multiple sides. But the agreement was always fragile, built on promises — disarmament, the return of displaced people, a political settlement over disputed territory — that have gone only partly fulfilled.

NPR's reporting does not detail a single triggering incident, but describes a broader climate of anxiety taking hold in the region as unresolved grievances fester. That vagueness is itself worth noting: this is a story about mood and momentum as much as any one event, and it deserves more granular follow-up as details emerge.

What is clear is the stakes. Tigray's 2020-2022 war was among the deadliest conflicts of the past decade, largely overlooked by the outside world even as it unfolded. A relapse would be catastrophic for a population still recovering, and a test of whether the international community learned anything from having looked away the first time.

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— Compiled from reporting by NPR News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Pakistan said Wednesday it carried out air strikes inside Afghanistan's southeastern Khost province, retaliation, Islamabad says, for drone attacks launched from Afghan territory. The governor's office in Khost said the strikes caused no casualties, according to Al Jazeera.

Details remain thin on both the scale of the strikes and the drone attacks that preceded them. Neither government has offered a full public accounting of targets hit or casualties on either side of the border, and Al Jazeera's report notes the claims of "no casualties" come from the Afghan governor's office rather than independent verification.

The exchange adds to a run of friction between Islamabad and the Taliban government in Kabul, whose relationship has curdled since the Taliban's return to power, with Pakistan repeatedly accusing Afghan-based militants of launching cross-border attacks and Kabul rejecting responsibility.

What happens next is the open question. Air strikes across that particular border have a way of not staying contained to a single night, and with drone technology now cheap enough for both state and non-state actors to field, the incentive for retaliation-by-air rather than costlier ground operations is only growing. Readers should expect this story to develop with more claims than confirmations for some time yet.

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— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The pollution did not stop at the fence. That is the blunt finding now facing Israeli water officials, who say an exceptional algae bloom has crippled much of the country's desalination capacity, leaving the country bracing for weeks of shortages.

Scientists tracing the bloom point to a grim source: the destruction of Gaza's wastewater treatment plants during the war. With five desalination plants shut down for days, the crisis has now boomeranged back on Israel itself.

"Pollution does not recognise political borders," the Zalul Environmental Association, an Israeli NGO focused on protecting the country's seas and shores, said in a statement. "The discharge of untreated sewage from the Gaza Strip into the sea is contributing to the worsening crisis affecting the Israeli desalination facilities. The wastewater contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed microalgae and cyanobacteria and may intensify their blooms."

The irony is heavy. Gaza itself remains in the grip of a far more severe and prolonged water and sanitation crisis, one that has left its own population without reliable access to clean water throughout the war. Now the consequences of that broken infrastructure are washing up on Israeli shores, forcing a reckoning that pollution, unlike people, needs no checkpoint to cross a border.

No timeline has been given for when Israel's desalination capacity might be restored, and the scale of Gaza's own infrastructure collapse suggests the underlying problem — a coastline absorbing sewage from a shattered water system — will not resolve itself quickly, whatever the ceasefire status.

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— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The room was in New York, not Tehran or Washington, and that mattered. US and Iranian officials sat down for mediated talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week, the first direct contact between the two governments since a ceasefire collapsed in June, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera.

The collapse in June came after President Trump threatened Iran with "annihilation," and the two sides have traded intermittent fire since. Now they're talking again, and Tehran has made its price plain: diplomatic progress, Iranian officials say, is tied to lifting shipping blockades and unfreezing Iranian assets held abroad, according to Al Jazeera's reporting from the talks.

The Strait of Hormuz sits at the center of it. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes through that channel, and any disruption ripples through gas pumps from Marion to Manila. Opening it back up is as much an economic demand as a diplomatic one.

Neither the BBC nor Al Jazeera reported a breakthrough or a signed agreement — only that talks happened, mediated, in a UN hallway rather than a formal summit. What was actually said behind closed doors, and by whom, has not been made public in the reporting available. That's worth naming plainly: this is a first step, not a peace.

Still, after months of silence and cross-border strikes, two governments that were shooting at each other in June sat in the same building and talked. In a year with more war than peace on the ledger, that alone counts as news.

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— Compiled from reporting by the BBC and Al Jazeera.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Lithuania's prime minister, Gintautas Paluckas, told the BBC's Newsnight that his country is ready to fight back if attacked by Russia, but confirmed the government has evacuation plans in place regardless. Lithuanians, he said, feel constantly threatened by Moscow - a sentence that reads as understatement to anyone watching a map of the region.

The comments came as European intelligence officials, gathering informally around this week's UN General Assembly session in New York, warned that Russia's tolerance for risk is rising. Sabotage attacks and other covert operations aimed at states supporting Ukraine have intensified, according to a Guardian briefing, part of what officials describe as a hybrid or shadow war, deliberately calibrated to stay just below the line that would trigger a military response from NATO.

The pattern is by design, not accident: strikes and disruptions bothersome enough to hurt, quiet enough to argue about. That ambiguity is precisely the point, and precisely the problem for NATO members trying to decide when a response is warranted.

We have not independently verified the specific intelligence assessments referenced by European officials; the warning comes from unnamed intelligence chiefs relayed through British reporting, and readers should weigh it as an informed warning rather than a confirmed operational picture.

For a country of under three million people on NATO's eastern edge, the calculation is not abstract. Paluckas's readiness to fight back is one thing. The existence of evacuation plans is another, and it tells you which outcome Vilnius is actually preparing for.

— Compiled from reporting by the BBC and The Guardian.

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The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps said Tuesday it would change the geography of the war if the United States escalates its conflict with the Islamic Republic - a blunt reply to fresh threats from President Donald Trump.

In an interview with Fox News aired Sunday, Trump said he was weighing three options for dealing with Tehran: wiping Iran out, letting them rot economically, or making a deal. He added that very big things are going to be happening in the not-so-distant future, though he offered no specifics.

The exchange landed just as world leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly, where Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has been holding his own diplomacy on the sidelines, meeting Pakistan's interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, in Tehran as Islamabad and Doha work to keep some channel open with Washington. It was Naqvi's sixth visit to Tehran, a sign of how much regional traffic is now built around managing this one relationship.

What we don't know matters as much as what we do. Trump did not detail what a strike, or a deal, would actually look like, and the Guard Corps statement was similarly light on specifics - a warning, not a battle plan. Readers should treat both as opening positions in a public argument, not settled facts about what happens next.

The stakes are plain enough without embellishment: an American president publicly floating the destruction of a nation of 90 million people, and that nation's most powerful military force promising to make any war bigger than intended. Whatever happens at the podium in New York this week, that exchange will be the subtext.

— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The leaders of France and Canada met Monday on Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, a French territory off Canada's Atlantic coast, and pledged closer cooperation on security, climate change and what they called the erosion of democratic values, according to the Guardian. It was the first visit to the territory by a French president since 2014, and the first ever by a Canadian prime minister.

The timing is pointed. The meeting came weeks after Donald Trump posted an image online showing Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, along with all of Canada and other North American countries, draped in the US flag — a gesture Ottawa has not forgotten. Canada, locked in a trade war with Washington, has been working to deepen ties with the European Union, and Monday's summit with Emmanuel Macron was part of that push, the Guardian reports.

Neither leader's exact words are quoted in the available reporting, so specifics of what was agreed — beyond a general pledge of closer relations — remain to be seen in follow-up coverage. What the visit signals plainly is a shift in posture: a G7 ally publicly courting Europe while its neighbor to the south applies economic pressure.

For a small French outpost of roughly 6,000 people best known for its fishing history, hosting two heads of government at once is itself the story. For Ottawa and Paris, the symbolism is the point — a visible answer to a map that put their territory under someone else's flag.

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— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Iran's military said Sunday that the United States is preparing to resume military strikes, and Tehran is threatening to retaliate if it does, according to Al Jazeera. The warning comes as President Trump weighs further military action against Iran, even as Qatar works behind the scenes to revive diplomatic talks.

The report from Al Jazeera is short on specifics — it does not detail what evidence Iran's military is citing for its claim that Washington is readying new strikes, nor does it lay out what form American action might take. That is worth flagging plainly: this is one side's assessment of the other's intentions, delivered through a military spokesperson, not a confirmed US plan.

What is clear is the shape of the standoff. Trump has kept the threat of force on the table. Tehran has answered with its own warning of retaliation. And Qatar — which has positioned itself repeatedly as a broker between Washington and Tehran — is trying to pull both sides back toward the negotiating table before the rhetoric hardens into action.

This is a region that has absorbed strikes and threatened strikes before, and each cycle carries its own risk of miscalculation. Readers should treat both Tehran's warning and any signal from Washington with the same caution: statements of intent are not the same as facts on the ground. The coming days, as Qatari mediators work the phones, will tell us more than any single warning does.

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— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Seven armed groups that have spent years fighting in Ethiopia's most populous regions announced this week they are forming an alliance, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera. The groups, drawn from areas that have seen some of the country's fiercest recent violence, say they will set aside old grievances and coordinate against the government in Addis Ababa.

Details of the alliance's command structure, size and specific aims remain thin in the reporting available. Al Jazeera describes the pact as forged among "former adversaries" who say they will "settle differences" as concern mounts over a wider war. The BBC confirms the seven-group lineup and notes the alliance spans regions that account for the bulk of Ethiopia's population.

What is not yet clear — and what regional watchers will be pressing to find out — is whether this is a durable military pact or a looser political statement. Ethiopia has been here before: alliances of convenience among armed factions have formed and frayed quickly in the past, and ethnic and regional rivalries that fueled earlier rounds of fighting have not vanished simply because leaders shook hands.

For ordinary Ethiopians, the practical stakes are displacement, disrupted markets and the fear that a patchwork of local conflicts hardens into something bigger and harder to end. Neither Al Jazeera nor the BBC reporting available here details government reaction. That gap matters — and it's one to watch as the story develops.

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— Compiled from reporting by the BBC and Al Jazeera.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Saudi Arabia said Saturday that Yemen's Houthi rebels tried to hit Riyadh with a ballistic missile — the first time the Saudi capital has been targeted since the Iran-backed group escalated fighting on a new front connected to the broader Iran war.

The attempted strike prompted the U.S. State Department to issue a caution notice to Americans in the Middle East late Saturday, warning that "the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation." President Trump cut short a weekend trip to Camp David, returning to the White House Saturday evening, though the White House has not tied the two events together publicly.

Details on the missile's fate — intercepted, as Saudi officials indicated, or otherwise — rest on the Saudi government's account; there is no independent confirmation yet of the interception or of any damage. The Houthis have not issued a statement addressed to Western outlets confirming the attack in the terms Riyadh describes.

Still, the target matters. The Houthis have fired at shipping lanes and at Israel repeatedly since the Gaza war widened the region's conflicts, but Riyadh itself had largely stayed out of range — or out of the group's stated intentions — until now. If confirmed as a deliberate strike on the Saudi capital, it marks a real widening of a war that Washington has spent two years trying to keep from becoming everyone's war.

— Compiled from reporting by NPR, the Washington Examiner and The Hill.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

About 3.8 million voters in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania went to the polls Sunday, in an election being read well beyond those two states' borders as a verdict on Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The vote comes two weeks after the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland scored its highest-ever result in a regional election in Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD, which has also drawn scrutiny for its friendly posture toward the Kremlin, is expected to drain further support from Merz's Christian Democratic Union.

Merz's own political future is described by German press as hanging in the balance. He leads a coalition government still finding its footing, and a second strong AfD showing in as many contests would harden the sense that Germany's political center is losing ground, state by state, to a movement most mainstream parties have refused to govern with.

The results will matter beyond Berlin. Germany is the EU's largest economy and a linchpin of European support for Ukraine; a chancellor visibly weakened at home has less room to maneuver abroad. For now, the story is the trend line — two elections, two gains for the AfD — more than any single night's tally.

— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian and Al Jazeera.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Moscow's mayor put a number on it Sunday: more than 1,600 drones intercepted, 450 of them aimed at the capital itself, on the final day of Russia's parliamentary election.

Russian authorities say at least two people were killed and a major oil refinery in the Moscow region was damaged in what they called an unprecedented attack. Flights were suspended at two of the capital's airports as the barrage unfolded.

Moscow has accused Ukraine of timing the strikes to interfere with the vote. Ukraine has not publicly confirmed responsibility, and there is no independent verification of the casualty figures beyond what Russian officials have reported — worth remembering, given the Kremlin's history of shaping the story around its own elections.

What isn't in dispute is the scale. Sixteen hundred drones intercepted in a single push, whatever the true origin of each one, marks one of the largest aerial engagements over Russian territory since the war began. An oil refinery going up mid-election is the kind of image no government wants on voting day — which may be exactly the point if Kyiv is behind it.

The vote itself was never in doubt; Russia's parliamentary elections are not competitive in any meaningful sense. But the drones over Moscow are a reminder that the war keeps finding its way back to the capital, no matter how the ballots are counted.

— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian, Al Jazeera and the BBC.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Divers off Indonesia have recovered three bodies from a capsized ferry, authorities said, as the search for roughly 126 still-missing passengers and crew stretched on under worsening conditions.

Bad weather has forced rescue teams to delay operations aimed at righting the overturned vessel, a step officials say is necessary before a full search of the hull can proceed. The ferry went down with an unspecified number of people aboard; the exact total of passengers and crew, and the circumstances of the capsizing, have not been detailed in available reporting.

Indonesia's waters are crossed daily by inter-island ferries, often overloaded and operating in a monsoon-prone archipelago where sudden storms are common. This desk does not yet have confirmed details on the vessel's capacity, ownership, or whether it was operating within safety limits — questions that typically follow disasters of this kind and that Indonesian maritime authorities will need to answer in the coming days.

What is confirmed: divers are working the wreck, three bodies have been recovered, and well over a hundred people remain missing as the operation continues. Families of those aboard are waiting on a coastline where the sea has not yet given up its answers.

We will update this report as authorities release further details on casualties, the cause of the capsizing, and the vessel's manifest.

— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

For the first time, Russians went to the polls this week in Ukrainian regions Moscow claims as its own — territory seized and illegally annexed since the invasion began more than four and a half years ago. The Kremlin calls it democracy. Kyiv and most of the world call it occupation dressed up in a ballot box.

Analysts note the vote serves a purpose beyond the results, which are not in doubt: it lets Moscow perform legitimacy, both for its own public and for the territories it wants the world to accept as permanently Russian. Election observers independent of the Kremlin were not present in the annexed areas.

The vote came the same week President Trump signed a sweeping Russia sanctions bill into law — legislation named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime advocate for Ukraine aid. The law authorizes tariffs of up to 100% on countries still buying Russian oil and gas, aiming to choke off the revenue funding Moscow's war.

Whether sanctions change Kremlin calculus is an open question this desk won't pretend to answer. What is documented: European governments are increasingly worried the war won't stay contained to Ukraine. Denmark has accused a Russian warship of firing emergency flares at a Danish military helicopter over the Baltic Sea, one of several incidents European officials describe as escalating Russian "hybrid threats" against NATO members not directly party to the war.

Taken together — a Kremlin election in occupied land, a new US sanctions law, and warships firing flares at NATO aircraft — the picture is of a conflict that has stopped behaving like a contained war and started looking like a continental standoff. Details on the Baltic flare incident come from Danish government accusations reported by the Washington Examiner; Moscow has not confirmed the episode.

— Compiled from reporting by NPR News, Al Jazeera, BBC World, The Hill and the Washington Examiner.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

For months President Trump talked about taking Greenland — by force, if it came to that. On Friday he settled for something narrower: a security agreement with Denmark that expands the US military footprint on the island without handing Washington the sovereignty Trump once demanded.

Trump told reporters the deal gives the United States "permanent control" over security matters in Greenland, a claim that goes beyond what Denmark, a NATO ally, has said publicly. Danish officials have described the arrangement as a bolstering of the existing American presence, not a transfer of authority.

The agreement caps a tense stretch in US-Danish relations. Trump spent much of the year musing openly about annexing Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory, citing its strategic location and mineral wealth. Copenhagen rejected those overtures while working to keep Washington inside the NATO tent.

What emerges instead is a security pact — American troops, radar and infrastructure expanding on Danish soil, under Danish sovereignty. It lets Trump claim a win for his base without the diplomatic rupture a forced annexation would have caused with a treaty ally. It lets Denmark keep the island while absorbing a larger American military presence it did not originally seek.

Neither side has published the full text of the arrangement, and key details — troop numbers, basing rights, duration — remain undisclosed. Readers should treat Trump's characterization of "permanent control" as the president's framing, not a verified legal fact, until Copenhagen or the Pentagon confirms the terms.

The deal lands as Washington also weighs pulling back a third of its troops from Europe, a Pentagon proposal that would reshape the continent's defense posture. Greenland, it turns out, is where America is adding forces even as it debates subtracting them elsewhere.

— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera and NPR News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

South Korea's president drew a clean line on Friday: no troops, no ships, no assets sent anywhere near Donald Trump's war on Iran.

"There won't be deployment that would involve or enter war. I can tell you that very clearly," Lee Jae Myung told reporters, according to The Guardian, closing off weeks of speculation that Seoul might send forces to the Strait of Hormuz under pressure from Washington. "We won't deploy military assets in any form to that end," he said.

The refusal is a notable act of independence from a treaty ally that has, for decades, largely followed the American lead on regional security questions. Trump has pushed allies to contribute to the effort in the Gulf; Lee's answer amounts to a polite but unambiguous no.

It is not, however, a break with Washington altogether. Al Jazeera reports that Lee said South Korea remains willing to help facilitate talks between the United States and North Korea — offering itself as a diplomatic channel even while declining to be a military one. The distinction is deliberate: Seoul wants to be useful to Washington without being drawn into a Middle East war it did not choose and has no stake in fighting.

The episode is a small but telling data point in the wider picture of the war's regional fallout. Just this week, a UN fact-finding mission concluded that Iranian forces committed crimes against humanity during protest crackdowns, and separate UN-backed human rights experts said US strikes on Minab may amount to war crimes — a reminder that the legal and moral ledger of this conflict is still being written on multiple fronts, not just the battlefield. South Korea, for its part, has decided it wants no entry in that ledger at all.

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— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian and Al Jazeera.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Polls opened Friday across Russia's eleven time zones for a State Duma election whose result is not seriously in doubt. Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, which has controlled parliament for 23 years, is expected to extend that grip through a three-day vote that runs to Sunday, when results are due.

What competition exists is nominal. A handful of opposition parties are on the ballot, but according to The Guardian, they reliably vote with the Kremlin on matters that count. A liberal, anti-war party was barred from running at all — a decision that, more than any campaign poster, tells you how this election was shaped before a single vote was cast.

The vote comes against the backdrop of a war in Ukraine now well into its fourth year, a conflict that has hardened Putin's control over Russian political life rather than loosened it. There is no meaningful public debate on the ballot about ending the war, because there is no party positioned to make that argument.

Separately, research detailed by The Guardian describes how tens of millions of Russians have in the past 18 months been pushed onto a state-promoted messaging and payments app called Max, pitched as a patriotic alternative to Telegram and WhatsApp. Researchers say the platform functions as a backdoor onto users' devices — a surveillance tool riding alongside the political machinery that keeps this weekend's election a formality rather than a contest.

What happens Sunday when the polls close is not really the story. The story is what doesn't happen: no opposition breakthrough, no surprise, no real choice on the ballot. That, more than the final tally, is the measure of where Russian politics stands four years into the war.

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— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

For more than a decade, the disappearance of American journalist Austin Tice in Syria has sat unresolved — a case without a body, a confession, or a clear chain of custody. A new BBC investigation adds a significant piece: a source has told the broadcaster that Tice's 2012 abduction was planned for weeks and personally approved by Bashar al-Assad, Syria's leader at the time, before Assad's government fell.

This is, as reported, a single-source account relayed by the BBC, and it should be read that way: a serious claim from a serious outlet, not a closed case. The BBC has not published corroborating documentation in the summary available here, and Assad — now removed from power — has not been reported offering a response.

Tice, a former U.S. Marine turned freelance journalist, vanished at a checkpoint near Damascus in August 2012 while covering Syria's civil war. He has not been definitively confirmed alive or dead since. His disappearance has remained a live diplomatic irritant between Washington and Damascus through multiple U.S. administrations, and a source of anguish for his family, who have spent years pressing for answers.

If the BBC's reporting holds up, it would be the clearest attribution yet of direct responsibility to the top of the former Assad government for one of the highest-profile unsolved cases involving an American journalist abroad. What it does not do — yet — is answer the question that matters most to Tice's family: where he is now.

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— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."