Table of contents for October 17, 2025 in Newsweek

THE WORLD HAS BEEN FACING an unrelenting wave of growing uncertainties and challenges for an extended period of time. Conflicts, lawlessness, terrorist attacks, pandemics, climate disasters, and deepening injustice and inequality are placing immense pressure on the current international order. In response, Türkiye acts with a vision that, without compromising its foreign policy approach centered on the principles of justice, peace, and solidarity, navigates comprehensive, complex, and deeply painful crises while safeguarding both its own security and the shared future of humanity. Our long-standing call, grounded in the principle that “the world is bigger than five,” goes beyond a mere critique of the existing global order; it represents a vision for the common future of humanity. The United Nations, established in the aftermath of the Second World War to maintain…

Rescue workers retrieve a body from the wreckage of a collapsed residential building on October 1 after a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck Cebu province the night before, killing at least 72 people and injuring more than 360. In Bogo and nearby towns, 87 buildings and nearly 600 houses were damaged or destroyed, roads and bridges buckled and a seaport collapsed. The quake struck around 10 p.m. and was triggered by a shallow undersea fault line that Filipino seismologists said has not moved for at least 400 years, according to the Associated Press.…

HUNGARY’S TOP DIPLOMAT TOLD NEWSWEEK that peace in Ukraine and Europe’s security depend on a stable U.S.–Russia relationship, vowing that Budapest would not back down to pressure from EU and NATO allies on this issue and others. Speaking in September ahead of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where his counterparts from Washington and Moscow met, Hungarian Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Péter Szijjártó told Newsweek his country would “welcome such an event, because we in Central Europe have a very clear historical experience....And this experience says that in case the Americans and the Russians are able to maintain a civilized cooperation, then we in Central Europe enjoy a better security,” Szijjártó said. “If the Americans and the Russians fail to maintain a civilized relationship, then we are…

Every morning, millions of ameri-can children walk into schools that struggle with limited resources, while their grandparents receive government checks that haven’t missed a beat in decades. It’s not because the children are any less in need. However, the difference in how the government supports America’s aging population versus its youngest members is the result of politics and a lopsided system—one that guarantees checks for retirees but leaves funding for children up for regular debate. An analysis by the Urban Institute think tank found that, in 2023, the government spent over $37,000 per senior, compared with $7,300 per child under 19—a ratio of about five to one. That gap, which briefly narrowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, has since steadied, and recent policy proposals indicate it’s unlikely to shrink anytime soon.…

Pope Leo XIV blesses ice from a melting Greenland glacier at the “Raising Hope for Climate Justice” conference on October 1. The event, at the Mariapolis Center at Castel Gandolfo, marked the 10th Anniversary of “Encyclical Laudato Si’,” a papal letter by the late Pope Francis. It also aimed to use the perspective of faith, politics and civil society to foster a global response to the climate crisis.…

THE HEAD OF EUROPE’S OLDEST intergovernmental organization has warned that the West is caught in the throes of a series of crises that bears the real risk of undermining democracy, stability and rule of law, telling Newsweek that urgent measures were needed to rebuild trust in institutions designed to uphold these values. In an interview on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Council of Europe Secretary-General Alain Berset outlined a “sequence of crises” dating to at least the 2008 financial crash that has sowed the seeds of discord, contributing to an uptick in unrest, conflict and various forces seeking to upend the current order across the continent and beyond. “Financial crisis, debt crisis, the first stage of the war in Ukraine, just to take this example, that means war…