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Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Iran is supplying Russia with short-range ballistic missiles and Washington will punish those involved.

… Kim Jong-un says he’s redoubling efforts to ready North Korea’s nuclear force for combat with the U.S. and its allies.

… More than 140 Ukrainian drones targeted multiple Russian regions overnight, including Moscow, killing at least one person.

… Stimson Center China Director Yun Sun explains Myanmar’s strategic relevance to the great-power competition between the U.S. and China in an exclusive Threat Status Influencers video interview.

… Australia is proposing a legal minimum age for children to access social media, and Google just lost a final EU court appeal against a $2.6 billion antitrust fine.

… Nearly half of East Timor’s population attended a Mass with Pope Francis in the Southeast Asian nation on Tuesday.

… An extendable robot has been dispatched to retrieve melted fuel from Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear plant.

… And Israel’s defense chief says a temporary truce with Hamas is possible.

Exclusive video: The geopolitical significance of Myanmar’s civil war

National Security Editor Guy Taylor sits down with Stimson Center senior fellow and leading East Asian geopolitics scholar Yun Sun for a wide-ranging discussion about all facets of Myanmar's war.

There is “certainly an element of greater power competition in Myanmar,” the Stimson Center’s China director says in an exclusive interview for the latest edition of the “Threat Status Influencers” video series.

Ms. Sun discusses the strategic relevance of the violent civil war gripping the Southeast Asian nation, where a China-backed military junta and a patchwork of pro-democracy rebel groups are intersecting with Cold War-style dynamics between Washington and Beijing. Myanmar, which is home to key Chinese oil and gas pipelines leading to the Indian Ocean, occupies a “critical geopolitical location for China,” says Ms. Sun, who calls Myanmar “China’s corridor to South Asia.”

“When China thinks about a potential, let’s say, Taiwan contingency with the United States, one of the first things that will come to their mind is their ‘Sea Line of Communication,’” she says. “Their import of oil and gas from the Middle East and North Africa will have to travel through the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca, then enter the South China Sea and come back to the Chinese coast. … That [sea line] is extremely vulnerable for China from an energy security point of view. That’s where Myanmar comes into play.”

House report: Biden had no plan for evacuating Afghans who helped Americans

In this Aug. 22, 2021, file photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, Afghan passengers board a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III during the Afghanistan evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. (MSgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP, File)

A key finding of the GOP-led House Foreign Affairs Committee’s newly released report on the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal chaos is that more than 90% of Afghans who likely were eligible for a special visa to be evacuated were left behind when the United States completed its withdrawal.

Washington Times journalist Stephen Dinan offers a second-day look at the report released Monday. “As the Taliban fighters were closing in on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, American diplomats stared at a pile of passports they had collected from Afghan allies who had assisted the war effort and were seeking a special visa to get them out of harm’s way,” Mr. Dinan reports.

“The U.S. officials decided to burn the documents rather than let them fall into Taliban hands. That, however, meant Afghans who had devoted years to helping America suddenly could no longer prove who they were as they rushed for the Kabul airport to try to catch one of the U.S. evacuation flights out of the country.”

Europe shows the ways on the tricky politics of fertility

A room full of smaller cryo storage containers, each capable of holding approximately 150 egg samples immersed in liquid nitrogen, in one of the secured storage areas at the Aspire Houston Fertility Institute in vitro fertilization lab Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024, in Houston. Women over 35 and those facing serious diseases like cancer, lupus and sickle cell are among the most likely to turn to IVF to build the families they desperately want. But in Alabama, they are among those whose dreams are in limbo after three of the state's largest clinics paused IVF services. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)

Fertility rates have emerged as a front-row partisan issue in the U.S. presidential election, with the Trump and Harris campaigns clashing over abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization access — all related to demographics in one way or another.

While the demographics issue is only now gaining prominence in American politics, Special Foreign Correspondent Eric J. Lyman reports in a dispatch from Rome that the issue is a familiar one in many democracies across Europe, where falling birth rates, declining family sizes, and a dearth of younger workers to support the growing ranks of senior retirees are campaign issues with massive electoral consequences. European political leaders of the left, right and middle have struggled with ways to encourage voters to have more babies.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban hosts biannual demographic summits with pro-family events to boost the country’s fertility rate. This spring, French President Emmanuel Macron, in many ways Mr. Orban’s ideological nemesis in clashes over European Union policy, announced a comprehensive package to boost France’s demographic picture. Even with less than two children per woman, France has one of the highest fertility rates on the continent.

Opinion: Influencers and tourists serve as dictators’ communications teams

Tourists take photos near a tower at the International Grand Bazaar in Urumqi in western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as seen during a government-organized trip for foreign journalists on April 21, 2021. A prominent Uyghur scholar specializing in the study of her people's folklore and traditions has been sentenced to life in prison, according to a U.S.-based foundation that works on human rights cases in China. Rahile Dawut was convicted on charges of endangering state security in December 2018 in a secret trial, the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation said in a statement Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Claudia Bennett, a legal and program officer at the Human Rights Foundation, examines how authoritarian governments are exploiting “influencers and tourists” to whitewash abuses and spread disinformation on social media about areas of the world where those governments are guilty of gross human rights abuses.

“This is a tactic dictators love,” writes Ms. Bennett, who underscores how influencers and “social media journalists” have been given free trips to such areas as the Uyghur region of China, Afghanistan, Iran, Cuba and Syria and have then “whitewashed the human rights abuses and presented these areas as open to tourism.”

23 years after 9/11: The threat of terrorism is growing through open U.S. border

9/11 and terrorism through America's open border illustration by Linas Garsys / The Washington Times

Since last fall, Congress has been requesting information from the executive branch to better understand the severity of the threat posed by known and suspected terrorists crossing our open southwest border at or between the ports of entry, writes Rep. French Hill, Arkansas Republican and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

“On numerous recent occasions, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated in congressional testimony his concern about our open border and the increased threat of terrorism,” writes Mr. Hill. “He has suggested that the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States is at ‘a whole other level’ and that he sees ‘blinking lights everywhere.’”

“Despite Mr. Wray publicly citing his concerns and saying that the FBI’s ‘No. 1 priority’ is protecting the U.S. from terrorist attacks, you would think otherwise by the administration’s inaction to secure our borders,” the congressman writes. “The information requested by the Intelligence Committee went unanswered for over nine months.”

Events on our radar

Sept. 10 — Strategic Planning in Chaos: The Future of the U.S.-Israel Security Partnership, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Sept. 10 — How to Counter China’s Global South Strategy in the Indo-Pacific, Hudson Institute

Sept. 11 — Afghanistan under the Taliban: Power Dynamics, Regional Relations, and U.S. Policy, Brookings Institution

Sept. 12 — Ground Forces and Great Powers: A Conversation with U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, Stimson Center

Sept. 16 — What Remains of the Myanmar Economy After the Coup, Stimson Center

Sept. 20 — Confronting the Axis of Upheaval, Center for a New American Security

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If you’ve got questions, Guy Taylor and Ben Wolfgang are here to answer them.