Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Some headlines:
Latin America
The Angry Tide of the Latin American Far Right
Trump Warns of Expanded Military Operations Against Venezuela
Europe
UK slams Putin 'sabre rattling' after he says Russia ready for Europe war and digs in on Ukraine peace talks
Ukraine talks 'productive' but more work needed, Rubio says - BBC News
Middle East
Iran
Iran’s Escalating Air Pollution Crisis
(they use mazut)
Gaza
Israel launches airstrike in southern Gaza after earlier attack by militants wounded 5 soldiers
Over 350 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since ceasefire, authorities say. Is this high?
Asia
HK housing complex fire a warning for Taiwan, since they can observe the repression of protesters afterwards.
Wang Yi and Lavrov jointly emphasized safeguarding the outcomes of World War II. Putin also signed a visa-free order for Chinese citizens.
India/Pakistan
Bangladesh sentences UK Labour MP Tulip Siddiq in absentia to two years in jail for corruption
25% increase in terror incidents in 2025 in Pakistan, think tank report says
India rejected Pakistan's claim that New Delhi denied overflight clearance to Pakistani aircraft carrying humanitarian assistance to Sri Lanka
Africa
UN warns Sudan's Kordofan faces mass atrocities as fighting spreads
200,000 children to die this year because of foreign aid cuts
Tanzanian activist blocked from Instagram after mobilising election protests
Tanzania: US Reviews Ties With Tanzania Over Repression, Post-Election Violence
EU split on Tanzania aid after violent crackdown
Trump hosts signing of peace deal between leaders of DR Congo and Rwanda
E.U Parliament Halts $174 Million Aid to Tanzania
Artificial Intelligence
DeepSeek-v3.2 Release
Gemini 3 Pro
Amazon agents as a service
OpenAI becomes for-profit, gives Microsoft 27% stake. Microsoft will retain rights to OpenAI’s confidential research methods until either an independent expert panel verifies that AGI has been reached or through 2030, whichever comes first, and will keep some post‑AGI commercial rights.
OpenAI's GPT-5.2 'code red' response to Google is coming next week
TPUv7: Google Takes a Swing at the King
Google has moved from internal TPU usage to aggressively commercializing TPUv7 “Ironwood” systems: it is selling complete racks to customers and renting capacity via GCP, with Anthropic as the marquee customer. Google is prioritizing external adoption by ramping TPU software support: efforts include a native PyTorch TPU backend.
Anthropic's Claude 'Soul Document' extracted from Opus 4.5 weights
More tech
China has its own autarkik and probably superior version of Android now. The US is afraid of it.
I also gained the ability to parse reddit, from which:
Serbia’s Krušik arms plant sees second explosion in 3 months https://old.reddit.com/r/serbia/comments/1pe6sc3/druga_eksplozija_u_kru%C5%A1iku_u_3_meseca/
US travel ban from selected countries https://old.reddit.com/r/USCIS/comments/1pd6ix5/uscis_pause_and_review_megathread/
GPS spoofing in Eastern Europe. I don't understand what the significance of this is. https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1pdqpdm/comment/ns7kc2h/
Asia floods https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/02/global-heating-and-other-human-activity-are-making-asias-floods-more-lethal
4.3M Chrome users infected in malware campaign https://www.koi.ai/blog/4-million-browsers-infected-inside-shadypanda-7-year-malware-campaign
Marine algal stuff https://old.reddit.com/r/Adelaide/comments/1pc2nl3/marine_harmful_algal_symposium_5th_december_2025/
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