Tigray Burns Again, North Korea Tests Hypersonic, and a Media Merger Clears Its Last Hurdle

The Tigray conflict has resumed, with the Tigray People's Liberation Front declaring a 'defensive war,' seizing Mekelle's airport, and clashing with Ethiopian federal forces — a collapse of the 2022 Pretoria peace agreement that was supposed to have ended one of the deadliest conflicts of the early 2020s. Ethiopian Airlines, which is state-linked, suspended all flights to Tigray, a judgment about security conditions that carries its own significance. The humanitarian stakes are severe: an estimated 600,000 people died during the previous phase of the war from combat, famine, and disease, and the aid infrastructure rebuilt during the truce period is now at risk again. The spread of fighting into the Afar region, which borders Eritrea and controls critical transportation corridors, risks drawing in Eritrea, which fought alongside Ethiopian federal forces in the last conflict.

Pakistan struck ten sites inside Afghanistan this week, with Islamabad citing the interception of cross-border drones from Afghan territory. The Taliban government in Kabul said four civilians were killed. The strikes are part of a pattern months in the making — Pakistan conducting operations inside Afghan territory under counterterrorism justification, with Kabul protesting but lacking the military capacity to respond in kind. The added complexity this week is that Pakistan is simultaneously activated under the new Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan defense pact, meaning its military command is managing multiple operational fronts at once.

North Korea's hypersonic missile test arrived with Kim Jong-un's warning of an 'incurable headache' for enemies — theatrical language paired with a genuine capability. Hypersonic missiles maneuver during flight at speeds above Mach 5, making interception far more difficult than against traditional ballistic missiles that follow predictable arcs. The timing, as the Trump administration's attention is concentrated on the Middle East and the Xi state dinner, follows a pattern of Pyongyang calibrating its provocations for maximum attention during moments of American diplomatic distraction.

The $110 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. merger cleared its last legal hurdle this week after twelve state attorneys general had sued to block it on antitrust grounds. The settlement that cleared the deal involved specific behavioral conditions rather than a simple payment — a reminder of how antitrust enforcement actually operates. Under the Sherman Act of 1890, holding a large market share is not itself illegal; the law targets either agreements to restrain competition or the willful acquisition of monopoly power through exclusionary conduct. The state AGs' concern was that combining the two studios' content libraries, streaming platforms, theatrical distribution networks, and back catalogs would create a concentration that harms competitive access — conditions in the settlement presumably require content licensing or distribution commitments designed to preserve that access.

Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 15 years in New York this week, with the judge ordering the term to run consecutive to a pending California sentence and explicitly calling Weinstein 'the literal face of the Me Too movement.' The New York conviction was initially overturned on appeal before being retried. The consecutive structure means that whatever California imposes will add to, rather than overlap with, the New York term. Weinstein is in his mid-seventies; the practical effect of consecutive sentencing at that age is, in most scenarios, a life sentence.