Russia’s official press has confirmed that Alexei Navalny, the country’s best-known dissident and a caustic critic of President Vladimir Putin, died Friday while serving a sentence at a Siberian penal colony.

Mr. Navalny, who drew global attention by campaigning against corruption and organizing major anti-Kremlin protests, had been behind bars since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. 

Moscow brushed off the allegations at the time, but  U.S. sources said the case fits a pattern of targeted killings and assassination attempts against figures who challenge President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule.

Some of the more than $113 billion in U.S. weapons and equipment shipped to Ukraine couldn’t be used in combat operations because of improper maintenance and poor conditions at U.S. Army warehouses in Europe, the Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office says. 

Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn reports that investigators found manifests on military cargo aircraft were incomplete and led to a “lack of visibility” of equipment arriving at transfer points inside Europe. Also, the Pentagon didn’t properly track $1 billion worth of sophisticated weapons and other equipment that requires special monitoring, such as Javelin and Stinger missiles.

Thailand is the latest Southeast Asian nation to find itself in the spotlight of U.S.-China great power competition. Washington Times Special Correspondent Richard S. Ehrlich digs into the situation with a dispatch from Thailand. 

He writes that the Thai government’s search for international capital finds Bangkok actively wooing Beijing to help build a long-sought east-west highway and railway land bridge linking the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand — a potentially major shortcut for oil and other cargo that currently must sail farther south via Singapore and the Malacca Strait. 

The project’s price tag is an estimated $28 billion. Bangkok has also reached out to U.S., European and Asian countries looking for investors. Thailand, eager not to get caught in a tug of war between Washington, a longtime ally, and China, the rising regional power and the country’s single largest trading partner, insists the project is based on economics, not power politics.

The Biden administration has confirmed that Russia is developing a space-based military “capability” that poses a national security threat, but the White House still insists there’s no immediate danger to the U.S. 

“We are not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack human beings or cause physical destruction here on Earth,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday, a day after GOP House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner touched off fevered speculation about Russia’s attempts to build a space-based anti-satellite (ASAT) nuclear weapon.

A new Atlantic Council analysis says conventional ASATs have “existed almost as long as satellites” and can “destroy or incapacitate” them, including through “non-kinetic attacks, such as by electromagnetic jamming, lasers, and cyberattacks.” But threat of nuclear attacks on satellites is more sobering, given that a “nuclear detonation in space would add significant radiation to orbits used by a number of U.S. military satellites, causing them to degrade in the weeks and months following the detonation unless they are specifically hardened against radiation.”

The Department of Homeland Security says two migrants accused of taking part in the mob attack on police officers in New York City are part of a violent Venezuelan gang that’s quickly spreading in the U.S. The two were both arrested this week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which says they’re part of the Tren de Aragua gang blamed for a wave of thefts and robberies in New York.

When Argentine international soccer star Lionel Messi stayed on the bench during a recent game that his team, Inter Miami, played in Hong Kong, the Chinese government’s extensive propaganda machine leapt into action, portraying the incident as a symbol of an alleged vast international conspiracy.  

Hudson Institute China Center Director Miles Yu writes that the situation exposed the “paranoid worldview” of the Chinese Communist Party, arguing Beijing’s reaction “cannot be disentangled from the Chinese leaders’ profound loathing of the recent political developments in Argentina.” He asserts the South American nation’s “shift from a long-standing alignment with left-wing political forces toward the free-market stance championed by the newly elected president, Javier Milei, has been a source of contention for the Chinese government.”