Washington is preparing for a new round of talks in the Indo-Pacific. The South China Morning Post reported on October 22 that Philippine ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez anticipated possible meetings of the informal “Squad” security grouping ahead of regional summits...

It usually began with the engineers walking the length of a street, threading charges through house after house along a whole block. Then the countdown, and then the block went down together, a single rolling wall of dust where a neighborhood had stood, and over the...