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What We’re Watching: Epstein files on the US House floor, Ukraine hits Russia where it hurts, RSF consolidated its grip on Darfur
U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) after signing the funding bill to end the U.S. government shutdown, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 12, 2025.
The US House set to vote to release Epstein files
The House of Representatives will vote next week to compel the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, after a trove of documents this week further linked President Donald Trump with the late sex offender. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have opposed the bill, but are braced for scores of their party to vote for the release – potentially over 100, according to Politico. Their defections signal that representatives fear being seen as implicated in a cover up could come back to bite them ahead of 2026 Midterm elections. Polling shows that 67% of Republicans agree that the administration should release all the documents. However, even if the bill does pass, it is unlikely to make it out of the GOP-controlled Senate, or get the White House signature it needs to become law.
For Ukraine, is offense the best form of defense?
Ukraine is on the verge of losing another town in the eastern part of the country, and at a great cost, raising questions over whether it should spend so much defending these areas. What’s more, Russia hit several residential towers in Kyiv last night. But Ukraine did have a response, using drones and cruise missiles to strike Russia’s Novorossiysk port, which sits on the Black Sea, and halt exports of 2% of the whole world’s oil supply. Fittingly, crude prices rose 2% as a result. With Ukraine struggling to hold onto towns out east, is a better option to halt Russia a continuation of strikes deep inside enemy territory?
World’s worst war is about to get even worse
Sudan’s horrific civil war is set for a fresh escalation as the paramilitary forces battling the army look to open a new front. The Rapid Support Forces, having consolidated power in the West and the South – where they are accused of recent mass killings and acts of genocide – are now eyeing an eastward push to the Kordofan region. Sudan’s civil war, now in its third year, has already displaced at least 13 million people, forcing some four million into neighboring countries. Estimates of the death toll run to 400,000. The US yesterday called for an arms embargo against the RSF, but the effect is unclear: a recent Washington-brokered ceasefire disintegrated within days.
Supporters of Jose Antonio Kast, presidential candidate of the far-right Republican Party, wave Chilean flags as they attend one of Kast's last closing campaign rallies, ahead of the November 16 presidential election, in Santiago, Chile, on November 11, 2025.
This Sunday, close to 16 million Chilean voters will head to the polls in a starkly polarized presidential election shaped by rising fears of crime and immigration.
The vote comes after a tumultuous few years in normally staid Chile, the world’s largest copper producer and the wealthiest large economy in Latin America.
Under the presidency of youthful left-winger Gabriel Boric, who was elected in 2021 following mass protests over inequality, Chilean voters rejected two separate rewrites of the constitution which were meant to address living costs, pensions, and employment.
One was too liberal, enshrining “cosmovisions” in the national charter. The other was too conservative, hewing too closely to the existing constitution written half a century ago under rightwing autocrat Augusto Pinochet.
Now, despite some successes in strengthening labor laws and winning a bruising fight over pension reforms, Boric is set to leave office deeply unpopular, with an approval rating in the 30s and an economy in the doldrums.
After so much upheaval, “the public appetite for sweeping changes has receded,” says Maria Luisa Puig, an expert at Eurasia Group.
Chileans’ main concerns now are, as in many Latin American countries, crime and migration. Nearly half of voters say crime is the number one issue for them, while 30% point to the border, according to Chilean pollster Activa. Only about 20% cite unemployment.
Although homicides have been falling since a 2022 peak, they are still double what they were ten years ago. Kidnappings remain near historic highs.
At the same time, immigration has soared, in particular from Venezuela – there are nearly 700,000 Venezuelan migrants in the country, almost tenfold the number from 2017. A rash of high profile killings and shootouts by Venezuelan gangs has fueled a backlash against immigrants more broadly.
Who’s running in the election?
Topping the polls, with about 27% support, is Jeanette Jara, a lifelong member of the Communist Party who served as Boric’s Labor Minister. She wants to increase the minimum wage, boost social spending, and modernize the police.
Trailing her are two hard-right politicians. One is José Antonio Kast, an ultra-conservative Catholic father of nine who lost to Boric in 2021, who wants to seal the border, cut spending, and expand prisons. He polls at roughly 20%. The other, libertarian Johannes Kaiser, goes further, pledging to slash two-thirds of government ministries immediately, to crack down on migration, and to withdraw from global pacts on climate change and human rights. Like Kast, he openly admires Pinochet.
Jara’s lead is deceptive. The right wing vote is badly fragmented – a result of the conservative candidates’ inability to agree on a unified primary earlier this year.
With no one set to win more than 50% of the vote, the election will go to a December runoff featuring the top two finishers from this Sunday. Jara will be one of them, and Kast is likely to be the other, though Kaiser has seen a late bump in the polls.
Polls suggest Jara, facing a united right wing and conservative vote, would lose in any head-to-head matchup. With Chileans in a “throw-the-bums out” frame of mind, her ties to Boric are a liability.
In the end, Puig says, “this is a ‘change’ election.” And according to polls, Chileans are ready for it. For the first time in more than four years, a majority say they are “optimistic” about the future of the country.
More soon: the results should be in by Monday morning.
Hard Numbers: India’s Modi has excellent election day, US agrees to cut Swiss tariffs, 12-year manhunt for Assad ally ends, & More
India's Home Minister Amit Shah and India's Defence Minister Rajnath Singh present a garland to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters celebrate the Bihar state assembly election results, at the party headquarters in New Delhi, India, November 14, 2025.
200: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling coalition is headed for a landslide win in Bihar, securing over 200 of 243 seats in a key test of the leader’s popularity ahead of major state and national elections. The victory strengthens his fragile federal coalition and weakens the opposition
15%: The US and Switzerland reached a deal to bring tariffs down on the European country from 39% to 15%, lowering the price of pharmaceuticals, gold, watches, and chocolate that Americans import from the Swiss. The high rate was in part because of the high trade surplus that Switzerland had with the United States. The US also cut levies on certain products from four Latin American countries.
12: A 12-year manhunt for a Syrian official accused of war crimes has finally come to an end, after Austrian officials indicted him for torture. Brig. Gen. Khaled al-Halabi, who hid in plain sight in Paris and Vienna, was captured last December, but was only charged on Wednesday in connection with actions he took while helping to quell the Arab Spring from 2011 to 2013.
10: Canada is still taking Trump’s missives against them personally: October marked the 10th consecutive month of decline in the number of Canadians traveling to the United States. Air travel fell 24% compared to this month last year, and car travel by 30%. The slowdown is hurting some US businesses.
20,000: Germany’s government has created a new military service plan aimed at boosting the number of troops by 20,000 within the next year, taking the total enlisted above 200,000. Under the plan, all 18-year-old men will have to fill out a questionnaire on whether they are suitable to serve and, from 2027, undergo medical screening. Germany’s military past means it has been reluctant to remilitarize in the post-war period – until now.
South Sudan President Salva Kiir prepares to welcome Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni at the Juba International Airport, ahead of meetings aimed at averting a new civil war after South Sudan's First Vice President Riek Machar was placed under house arrest, in Juba, South Sudan April 3, 2025.
South Sudan’s president fires another VP
President Salva Kiir continued to take a wrecking ball to his country’s leadership structure this week, firing Benjamin Bol Mel, who was one of his vice presidents. He also sacked the central bank governor and the head of the revenue authority without giving reasons for the removals. The move comes after President Kiir in March put then-Vice President Rick Machar under house arrest, before charging him with murder in September – Kiir and Machar had entered a power-sharing agreement to end the civil war. Experts are concerned that Kiir’s moves will pull the sub-Saharan state back into civil war, only five years after it ended.
Iran’s water crisis threatens to empty Tehran
Iran may have to evacuate its capital Tehran – home to 10 million people – if it doesn’t rain by December, according to its President Masoud Pezeshkian. The water crisis is due to decades of mismanagement and inefficient agriculture practices, compounded by a lack of access to new technology because of international sanctions. It comes as Iranians are also enduring frequent electricity and gas shortages, heightening the risk that civil unrest could destabilize the regime.
A robot waiter, serving drinks at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair, in Paris, on May 24, 2024.
- Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Imagine sitting down at a restaurant, speaking your order into your menu, and immediately watching a robot arrive with your food. Imagine the food being made quickly, precisely — and without a human involved, because the entire restaurant is fully roboticized.
Imagine those robots were made in China, powered by the next generation of AI.
This is all quite plausible. According to the International Federation of Robotics, global sales of professional service robots reached almost 200,000 units in 2024. More than one-fifth of those units were deployed in hospitality and service roles, including front-desk assistants and food-and-beverage delivery. One cafe in Beijing is now fully staffed with autonomous robots, which can talk to customers, take orders, and deliver drinks entirely on their own. The future of AI is physical, as Ian Bremmer recently noted.
China is the epicenter, now producing the majority of all worldwide robots, while the US falls increasingly behind. One recent study projected the size of China’s service-robot industry to reach $7.2 billion by 2031, accelerated by generous government subsidies and a focused industrial policy. From a Chinese perspective this makes sense, especially in light of their looming demographic bubble. By 2050, the country will have 150 million fewer people; China is leaning into robots instead.
Keenon is a market leader. It’s worth browsing their catalogue: Kleenbot, a simple roomba-like cleaner; Butlerbot, an R2D2-esque droid for hotels; Dinnerbot, a more complex automated waiter; and XMAN, a fully scifi humanoid robot with a base like a Segway. Keenon ships to over 600 global cities with no signs of slowing down.
Many societies are not ready.
Swapping a human greeter for a robot in a hotel lobby is far more visible than swapping a human assembler in a distant factory for algorithm-driven automation. The robot is public. It is physical. And it is branded — and if the brand is foreign, the communal understanding will be simple: “their machine replaced our person.”
Robotics firms of all nationalities know this risk, and marketing materials often emphasise robots’ “assistant” roles. Yet the scale and global spread of robotic deployments will be unspinnable. Countries will face difficult questions: Do they allow foreign-made service robots for their efficiency gains? Or do they regulate and protect domestic labor, potentially excluding or throttling foreign or global robot makers?
Governments will also be confronted with a national security challenge. If your country has millions of foreign robots, each with cameras, microphones, and motors, what happens if you have friction with their maker? At minimum your robots would likely be used as widespread spies. Beyond that, foreign robotics firms could disrupt your economy by remotely disabling the robots — the manufacturer could perhaps blame vague “glitches.” In the worst-case scenario, robots could rise up as guerilla fighters against their putative owners.
In the end, China’s surge in retail and service-robot exports may be as geopolitically significant as its earlier dominance in consumer electronics. The difference now is public-facing: a robot in a restaurant or lobby is more visible than a smartphone in your pocket. And if that robot is Chinese-made, the message takes on geopolitical overtones. The next time you are served by a machine, you might also be served a symbol — of automation, of global labour shifts, and of the next global convulsion.
Hard Numbers: Japan’s PM organizes 3 a.m. meeting, Exam day for South Korea’s students, US government shutdown ends, & More
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi answers a question at the Upper House's budget committee session at the National Diet in Tokyo, Japan, on November 12, 2025.
3: Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has taken her country’s difficult work culture to a new level, organizing a meeting last Friday at 3 o’clock – in the morning. Takaichi herself has a reputation as a workaholic, though it was still a surprise to see her leaving her residence just after 3 a.m. to convene a meeting that lasted three hours.
550,000: South Korea will come to a standstill today as 550,000 students, the most in seven years, will sit down to take the country’s infamously-long college entrance exam. For most students, the exam – which could determine their education and future job prospects – will last roughly eight hours. Blind students receive extra time, though, meaning they can spend up to 13 hours in the exam room. If you’re anything like us, that thought provokes cold chills.
43: The longest-ever US government shutdown is over after 43 days, after US President Donald Trump signed a continuing resolution last night that will fund the government until Jan. 30. Earlier on Wednesday evening, the House passed the bill, with six centrist Democrats crossing the aisle to vote for it – two Republicans voted against.
5: Trump became the fifth leader to announce that he won’t travel to South Africa next week for the G20 summit, joining Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, and Argentine President Javier Milei. US Vice President JD Vance will go in Trump’s stead.
10: France today mourns the 10th anniversary of the Bataclan attacks, when Islamic State-linked militants killed 132 people in a series of coordinated attacks in and around Paris. The country remains wary of threats from jihadist militants – the interior minister said authorities have foiled six terrorist plots this year.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI, Rama Duwaji, MIRA NAIR, MAMOOD MAMDANI during an election night event at The Brooklyn Paramount Theater in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025.
Last Tuesday, a self-identified democratic socialist who ran on making New York affordable for the 99% won the city’s mayoral race in a landslide, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. And the reactions have been predictably hysterical.
Some critics are claiming that Mamdani will impose Sharia law and turn New York into Venezuela. Business leaders and billionaires are warning about a mass exodus. The Washington Post editorial board sees "class warfare" on the horizon. And President Trump, never one to waste an opportunity for confrontation, is threatening to cut federal funding to the city.
Everyone needs to take a breath. Yes, a 34-year-old Muslim who's never managed anything bigger than a state assembly office with five staffers just won the most powerful mayoral job in America on a platform of free buses, rent freezes, universal childcare, and soaking the rich. But most of that isn’t going to happen. Why? Because the mayor of New York City, for all the pomp and circumstance of the office, has remarkably little unilateral power to do... well, almost anything.
Let’s start with the most basic and binding constraint on Mamdani: money. The city is legally required to run a balanced expense budget each year, meaning that every dollar the mayor wants to spend on new programs has to come from somewhere else – either budget cuts elsewhere or new revenue.
Mamdani has proposed increasing the top corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5% and levying an additional 2% tax on incomes over $1 million to fund his ambitious agenda. But – and this is key – the mayor of New York can’t raise income or business taxes on his own. The power of the purse belongs exclusively to the state legislature in Albany and requires Governor Kathy Hochul's signature.
And Hochul – a centrist Democrat who was Andrew Cuomo's lieutenant governor – has already ruled out tax hikes. "I'm not raising taxes at a time where affordability is the big issue," she stated flatly. Not surprising given that New York already has a combined top marginal income tax rate of 51.776 percent – the highest in the nation. Mamdani could raise property taxes with City Council approval, but that wouldn't solve his problem – property taxes don't discriminate by income, hit middle-class homeowners and co-op owners who've already seen taxes skyrocket, get passed through to renters, and wouldn't raise nearly enough to fund his agenda anyway.
What does this mean for free buses? Mamdani made this a centerpiece of his campaign, but it’d cost the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $630 million annually in lost fares, and the mayor doesn't control the MTA – the governor does. To make buses free, he would need to get either the City Council to approve funding replacement or the state to pony up the money.
What about universal childcare? The mayor could operationally run such a program, but funding it would cost $5 billion annually – requiring either massive budget cuts elsewhere or tax increases he can't authorize and Albany and Hochul won’t. A $30 minimum wage by 2030? Can't do it without the state legislature. Building 200,000 affordable housing units? That would require borrowing $70 billion, $30 billion more than the city's debt limit – and Albany’s approval is needed for that, too. Are you starting to see a pattern?
Even the rent freeze – probably Mamdani’s most viable promise – would face challenges. Yes, the mayor appoints the Rent Guidelines Board, and there’s precedent for political appointees freezing rents. But the RGB is supposed to follow economic indicators or risk lawsuits, and it doesn't always do what the mayor wants. Crucially, even if Mamdani gets his freeze, it’d only cover about one million rent-stabilized apartments – not market-rate units, condos, co-ops, or the thousands of newer "affordable" units governed by federal and state regulations.
What can Mamdani do? He can make buses faster through dedicated bus lanes and Department of Transportation enforcement. He can open city-run grocery stores through the Economic Development Corporation, which already operates retail food operations, for relatively little money. He can reorganize the NYPD to create an Office of Community Safety, even if a full department would need City Council approval. And he can use new charter amendments passed in November—which reduce City Council and community board veto power over housing—to accelerate private development, even if he can't fund the government-built affordable housing he promised. Not nothing, but not exactly a socialist revolution.
The good news is that Mamdani’s tenure doesn’t need to be revolutionary to be successful. Fiorello La Guardia had it right when he said, “There is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.” There isn't a socialist way either. What most New Yorkers will care about when they go back to the polls in four years is whether their mayor kept the subways running, the trash collected, the schools functioning, and the streets safe. That’s what the job is largely about, and why the mayor’s real power isn't passing laws or raising taxes but appointing hundreds of commissioners and department heads and managing the 300,000-person workforce that runs city services. Here's where a truly radical mayor could do real damage: hiring incompetent ideologues and cronies to run the NYPD, the Department of Education, sanitation, emergency management, and so on.
Given Mamdani’s lack of an administrative track record, the jury is still out on whether he will govern as an ideologue or a pragmatist. But the early signs are encouraging. His transition team is heavy on people with actual records of accomplishment. He’s talking to experienced hands like Maria Torres-Springer, who's served multiple mayors and knows how to get things done at City Hall. He’s expressed a desire to keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, a widely respected technocrat whom business leaders and moderates trust. And in his victory speech on Tuesday night, Mamdani quoted his defeated opponent’s dad Mario Cuomo about campaigning in poetry but governing in prose, signaling that he understands the job ahead will take more than just slogans.
The real risk isn't that Mamdani will turn New York into a socialist hellhole, but that he won't be able to accomplish much of anything at all. This isn't some low-tax, low-spending jurisdiction where a progressive can open the spigots and transform society. New York already has some of the highest taxes and spending in the country. But the problems that actually make the city so unaffordable – entrenched public unions with ironclad contracts, overregulation, a bloated bureaucracy – have no easy fixes and are mostly beyond any mayor's control.
We've been here before. When progressive Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty in 2013 on a very similar “soak the rich” campaign, the same people predicted an apocalypse. Crime would explode, the tax base would flee to Florida, and the city would enter a death spiral. De Blasio made many mistakes during his eight years at Grace Mansion, but none of that (save for crime going up during the pandemic, not just here but everywhere) came to pass. New York remained New York: dirty, noisy, expensive, still the greatest city in the world.
I don’t know if Mamdani will be a good mayor. But people who've been predicting the death of New York for forty years still haven't learned that betting against the city is a sucker's game. We’ve survived far worse than an inexperienced progressive mayor with big ideas and limited power. And if you look past all the pearl-clutching, Mamdani’s victory reveals something far more interesting about where American politics is headed.
Mamdani ran a left-wing populist campaign focused almost entirely on one thing: affordability. He didn't win on identity politics or progressive social policy or democracy or Trump's corruption. He won by speaking to New Yorkers’ economic anxiety while mostly avoiding the more polarizing cultural issues that alienate moderate voters and tear the Democratic Party apart.
And here's the thing: economic anxiety resonates far beyond New York. Yes, the city's electorate is younger, wealthier, more educated, and less white than the rest of the country. These people are particularly concerned that they and their children won't have the opportunities their parents had – whether because of inflation, housing costs, student debt, AI displacement, or disillusionment with capitalism. But voters everywhere are angry at a system that feels rigged for the rich and powerful, less meritocratic capitalism than kleptocracy. That grievance is not exclusive to liberal urbanites.
Just as Trump won by convincing Americans that democracy was broken and he alone could fix it, expect to see a wave of left-wing economic populism that mirrors right-wing Trumpism but comes from a completely different place. Neither the current Democratic establishment nor Trump himself – who's abandoned "drain the swamp" for pay-to-play corruption – is positioned to capitalize on this energy.
It won't be Mamdani either. His Israel-Palestine and identity-politics positions don't play nationally like they do in deep-blue New York (frankly, neither do his demographics). But his economic playbook will. The candidates who can speak most credibly to economic anxiety and promise to disrupt a captured system – without the culture-war baggage – will have an edge in 2026 and 2028.