Military forces from the United States, Australia, and the Philippines launched a barrage of high precision rockets and artillery as part of large scale war drills in the South China Sea that have antagonized Beijing. Military officials, diplomats and reporters watched the display of firepower from a hilltop above Laoag City on Wednesday. Washington and Beijing have been on a collision course over China’s increasingly assertive actions to defend its vast territorial claims in the South China Sea. In February last year, the Philippines approved a wider U.S. military presence in the archipelago. China opposed the move which puts US forces across the sea from Taiwan. The Philippines countered t has the right to defend its sovereignty and territorial interests.

Israeli forces have taken control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt in the Gaza Strip, pressing on with an offensive in the southern city as cease-fire negotiations with Hamas remain precarious. The incursion comes after the militant group on Monday said it accepted an Egyptian-Qatari mediated cease-fire proposal. Israel insisted the deal did not meet its core demands. The high-stakes diplomatic moves and military brinkmanship left a glimmer of hope alive — but only barely — for an accord that could bring at least a pause in the 7-month-old war that has devastated the Gaza Strip.

Iran and the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog are still negotiating over how to implement a deal struck last year to expand inspections of the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing atomic program. The acknowledgment on Tuesday by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s leader Rafael Mariano Grossi shows the challenges his inspectors face, years after the collapse of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers and the wider tensions gripping the Mideast over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Grossi has already warned that Tehran has enough uranium enriched to near-weapons-grade levels to make “several” nuclear bombs if it chose to do so. He has acknowledged the agency can’t guarantee that none of Iran’s centrifuges may have been peeled away for clandestine enrichment.

If it feels like TikTok has been around forever, that’s probably because it has, at least if you’re measuring via internet time. What’s now in question is whether it will be around much longer and, if so, in what form? The Chinese social video app merged in 2017 with the competing app Musical.ly, which also launched in China. That kicked off a remarkable seven years during which TikTok grew from a niche teen app into a global trendsetter, but also emerged as a potential national security threat, according to U.S. officials.