At the beginning of September 2023, Pope Francis embarked on a four-day trip to Mongolia. The visit marked the 43rd foreign journey he has made since beginning his pontificate (Business-gazeta.ru, September 10). The Holy Father used the occasion to outline his views on the proper... MORE

On September 9, at the G20 summit in New Delhi, United States President Joe Biden signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with India and a number of Middle Eastern countries and European Union member states. The agreement aims to create a new trade corridor linking... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absence at the G20 summit in New Delhi on September 9 and 10 was not all that surprising and seemed hardly registered by any of the two dozen world leaders who attended. Putin also missed the previous summit in Bali, Indonesia,... MORE

Supreme leader Xi Jinping’s failure to attend the G20 summit in New Delhi this weekend (September 9-10) — thus nullifying the possibility of a meeting with top Western leaders including American counterpart President Joe Biden — is symptomatic of the isolation that China is facing... MORE

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has come to recognize the important role of social media in modern conflict and peacetime operations. As such, PLA researchers have begun using the term “social media warfare” (社交媒体战) to describe the extension of non-kinetic military activities onto social media... MORE

Beijing has recently introduced a blitzkrieg of regulatory measures targeting industries ranging from video games and financial technology to food delivery and education (Tuzhixi, July 27, 2021). The introduction of these regulatory measures has had profound implications on China’s economic trajectory. China’s tech giants have... MORE

Chinese President Xi Jinping is working in earnest to develop for China what his government calls “rule by law” (法治). It is sometimes translated into English as “rule of law,” though this is misleading, as Chinese law cannot restrict arbitrary exercise of power at the... MORE

On August 29, a new version of Russian commercial aircraft, the SJ-100 (formerly known as the SSJ-100), completed its first flight. The main difference between the new SJ-100 and the old SSJ-100 is that extensive import substitution efforts were carried out to source the necessary... MORE

It has been nearly ten years since Indonesia’s elite counter-terrorism force, Densus 88, began hunting down the country’s most influential Islamic State (IS) loyalist, Santoso, in Sulawesi in 2015. The force eventually killed him in 2016 (jakartapost.com, December 1, 2015). Since Santoso’s death and IS’s... MORE

Russia’s Caspian Flotilla has been dominant in the inland sea for so long that many have ignored the fact that, over the past several years, it has ceased to be the only national navy that matters. Outside powers, due to the expansion of their navies,... MORE