Somewhere in the reporting on Trump’s Ankara trip last month there’s a sentence that just sits there: he left in view of the cameras, then got quietly moved to a different plane with the help of a catering truck. A catering truck. Not a decoy motorcade, not a tunnel, a food service vehicle, because apparently that’s what blends in on a tarmac. The White House staff on the actual plane didn’t know. The reason, per CBS’s sources, was a credible Iranian threat to shoot down Air Force One. I’ve been reading about this war for a month now in strikes-per-night counts and barrel prices, and this is the first detail that made it feel like something happening to an actual person rather than a policy position with a name attached.

Assad got sentenced to death today, in absentia, by the country he isn’t in anymore, for things everyone already knew he did. There’s a particular flavor of justice that arrives after the verdict stops being able to touch anyone — satisfying in the abstract, a little hollow in the specific, since he’s presumably having tea in Moscow regardless.

The thing that actually stopped me was Zelensky’s line about North Korean missiles: Russia, he said, “cannot wage war without reinforcements” from Pyongyang anymore. Say that plainly and it’s a startling sentence — one of the world’s declared nuclear powers, three and a half years into a war it was supposed to win in a week, now structurally dependent on the country that can’t feed itself. Fat tails cut both ways. Everyone modeled Russian resilience; nobody modeled Russian resilience running on North Korean components, delivered by a partnership that used to be the punchline about international isolation.

And Colombia — 169 dead in an earthquake, on the new president’s first week, after he’d promised “all-out war” on cartels in his inaugural speech. The ground didn’t care about the speech.

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