It was the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, and socialism has made something of a comeback, not just through China's rise, but through the advance of "democratic socialists" (in Europe they would be social democrats) within America's Democratic Party. The west also saw a sudden return of climate activism via Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, who found themselves in an unlikely alliance with whoever sent drones to attack Saudi Arabia's oil facilities, against the existing world energy system.
Middle East tension has been going up in step fashion, once every month or two: tankers mined, tankers seized, now a drone attack on Abqaiq, long known as a point of vulnerability. I see this as Iran demonstrating its ability, in the event of being attacked, to counterattack by stopping the flow of oil. And suddenly the region is in flux again: Trump fires hawk Bolton as his security advisor, Iraq's Muqtada encourages anti-corruption demonstrations, Israel remains in political limbo, and now Turkey will replace America in Syria, in another defeat for Kurdish independence.
India remained a crossroads of the ancient and the modern, Harappan nationalism and celebrity #MeToo. Its space agency, headed by a son of farmers, lost its lunar lander, but the orbiter continued its mission. A study of ancient Indian DNA was said by the secular intelligentsia to show the truth of Aryan Invasion, but somehow ended up being hailed by Hindu nationalists as proof that all Indians came from India. Some big political names passed away: Swaraj, Jaitley, Jethmalani. Next door, Pakistan was perturbed by the new status of Indian Kashmir, and Imran Khan went to Beijing to confer with Xi, before Xi was to meet in India with Modi, who was recently with Trump in Texas and Putin in Siberia. Nepal's communists opened a pipeline with India, even as they also worked with their Chinese comrades.
Indonesia proposed to locate a new capital in Borneo. Morally conservative changes to the criminal code brought out student demonstrators. And on the 20th anniversary of Timorese independence, West Papua entered a time of troubles.
