Latest news for 4 December 2025

UKRAINE

More talks.

US and Ukrainian officials will continue their Russia peace talks in Florida today (Thursday). Meanwhile, the UN General Assembly has demanded Russia return all ~19,000 Ukrainian children it’s taken since the start of the war. ~57 countries including China abstained, while 12 (like Russia, Iran, North Korea) opposed. (BBC)

UNITED STATES

Closed.

DC has now halted green card, citizenship, and asylum application processing for 19 mostly African and Middle Eastern countries. President Trump had pledged to “permanently pause migration from all third world countries” after an Afghan citizen shot two national guard members last week; the same country list already faced travel curbs after June’s antisemitic fire-bombing in Colorado. (NPR)

LEBANON

Direct talks.

Lebanon and Israel, who’ve technically been at war since 1948, just held their first direct civilian talks in decades, amid hopes of expanding their ongoing (if wobbly) ceasefire into broader engagement. (MEE)

Comment: The biggest question mark right now is whether they can align enough to disarm Hezbollah without destabilising the region again.

BRAZIL

TikTok’s expanding.

China-owned TikTok has announced it’ll invest $37B to build a data centre in Brazil, its first infrastructure project in Latin America. (SCMP)

Comment: Brazil is TikTok’s third-biggest market, but the warming Brazil-China ties will no doubt have helped in the giant’s decision-making process.

SOUTH KOREA

Negotiated exit.

President Lee Jae Myung is reportedly considering reviewing South Korea’s joint US drills as a way to ease tensions with North Korea. (Bloomberg $)

Comment: These are classic pre-negotiation negotiations: the North’s Kim says he won’t even talk to Trump or Lee unless they drop their denuclearisation demands, so Lee is seemingly offering to tone down the drills instead. Either way, it’s still arguably giving something (whether demands or drills) for nothing (talks that’d just legitimise Kim anyway). You could also see it all as a softening of Lee’s more hawkish announcement that he’ll now build nuclear-powered submarines in the US.

ITALY

Gold fever.

The European Central Bank has warned Italy against plans to declare that the Italian central bank’s gold reserves (the world’s third largest) belong to the Italian people. The worry is the move could infringe central bank autonomy, breach relevant EU treaties, and enable Rome to go on a populist spending spree. (Reuters)

Comment: This specific case aside, it seems inevitable that any politicisation of the US Fed will inspire others abroad: if they get a piggy-bank, why not us?

MALAYSIA

Search again.

The search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will resume this month under a new ‘no find, no fee’ deal with a US-UK marine robotics company. The flight mysteriously disappeared in 2014, along with 239 crew and passengers. (Guardian)

Comment: This resumption seems less about any new evidence, and more about a new funding model that flips the ROI back in favour of hopefully finding the jet’s black box, and thereby solving one of modern aviation’s greatest mysteries.