Status Two informal straw polls have been held in the Security Council on the succession to António Guterres, whose second five-year term expires on 31 December. Neither produced a candidate with nine encourage votes, the threshold that would signal a Council majority. The declared field has doubled since March, from four candidates to eight. The lead changed hands between the first poll and the second. The successor takes office on 1 January 2027.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who spent more than two decades in the U.S. Senate and emerged as one of Washington’s most influential voices on defense and foreign policy, died Saturday night after what his office described as a brief and sudden illness. He was 71. A medical examiner’s preliminary findings pointed to an aortic dissection as the cause of death, according to officials familiar with the case. Graham had recently returned from a trip to Ukraine.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered what may be the clearest articulation yet of the Trump administration’s transactional NATO doctrine — and its implicit breaking point. Speaking publicly, Rubio reframed the alliance’s foundational logic: the United States didn’t join NATO merely to serve as Europe’s security guarantor. It joined, in part, because a permanent military footprint on European soil advances American strategic interests — forward deterrence, power projection, logistical depth. The bases in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere are not charity.

The recent confirmation of Zeina Jallad to a six-year term as a United Nations human rights expert marks a troubling moment for the integrity of international institutional oversight. During the 61st session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Jallad was appointed as the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, a role intended to provide objective analysis on the humanitarian effects of international sanctions. However, the process by which she attained this mandate, and the controversial history she brings to it, suggests a significant breakdown in the vetting standards expected of the world’s primary human rights body.

The joint statement by the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy, and Britain is precisely the kind of performative multilateralism that has made European foreign policy increasingly irrelevant to the realities of the Middle East. Let’s be precise about what the bill actually does: it expands the possibility of capital punishment for terrorists in specific, extreme circumstances. It does not mandate it. It does not apply to ordinary criminals. It targets perpetrators of mass atrocities — the architects and executors of violence on a scale that, one would think, Europe above all should understand.

A Russian tanker is currently en route to Cuba carrying oil the island desperately needs. The timing is not incidental. It lands as Donald Trump softens his posture toward Moscow for what is, by now, an uncountable number of times — each retreat dressed up as diplomacy, each concession framed as dealmaking. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence and too durable to be strategy. Trump does not appease Putin because he is outmaneuvered.