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Evo Morales announces candidacy for 2025 Bolivia presidential elections - Reuters   

Bolivia's President Luis Arce and former President Evo Morales attend an ancestral ceremony to ring in the Aymara New Year, in Tiwanaku, Bolivia June 21, 2022. REUTERS/Manuel Claure/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights

Sept 24 (Reuters) - Former Bolivia President Evo Morales will stand in the South American country's elections in 2025, he said on Sunday in a message on social media platform X, adding that he has been "obliged" by attacks against him.

The announcement confirms a rift between Morales, one of Latin America's most prominent leftists, and Bolivia's sitting President Luis Arce, his former economy minister turned rival within the ruling MAS party.

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WGA writers, studios reach tentative deal to end strike - Fortune   

Striking Hollywood screenwriters reached a tentative new labor agreement with studios including Walt Disney Co. and Netflix Inc., settling one of two walkouts that have shut down film and TV production.

The Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,500 Hollywood scribes, said Sunday it reached the deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, the studios’ bargaining group. The agreement, if approved by the guild members, will end a strike that began on May 2.

The provisional three-year deal remains subject to the completion of contract language and recommendations from the union’s council and board, which could come as soon as Tuesday. Members would vote after that. The strike continues through that process.

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Rome fell. Will the modern-day West follow suit? - The Economist   

Why Empires Fall. By John Rapley and Peter Heather. Yale University Press; 200 pages; $27. Allen Lane; £20

DECLINISM is in fashion again. As relations between America and China worsen, studying the ends of earlier ages of hegemony becomes more popular. Books predicting the unstoppable rise of autocratic strongmen and the death of democracy proliferate. There is much talk of the “Thucydides trap”: the inevitability of a clash between a rising power and an established one, as Athens challenged Sparta in the fifth century bc.

This provocative short book adapts this approach with a novel twist. It draws a comparison between the West in 1999, the zenith of its confidence, and Rome exactly 1,600 years earlier, in 399—just decades before the empire’s collapse.

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How the Pentagon assesses Ukraine’s progress - The Economist   

AFTER THREE months of achingly slow progress, Ukraine’s counter-offensive is gaining some momentum. Near the southern village of Robotyne, Ukrainian troops have pierced the first of Russia’s three defensive lines. They are now attacking the second. “Had we had this conversation two weeks ago, I would have been slightly more pessimistic,” says Trent Maul, the director of analysis for America’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). “Their breakthrough on that second defensive belt…is actually pretty considerable.” Can Ukraine breach it, and the third line beyond, before shells become scarce and winter beckons?

Mr Maul, whose DIA office on the Potomac river periodically shakes as Marine One, the presidential helicopter, shuttles to and fro from its heliport next door, is charged with answering such questions. The job of his agency, which is less well known than the CIA, is to take the military measure of America’s foes. That often requires quantitative judgments: the range of an Iranian missile or the size of China’s fleet. An annual DIA report, “Soviet Military Power”, was read avidly during the cold war. But intangibles are just as important. Mr Maul singles out the will to fight—and candidly acknowledges that his agency got it wrong in Iraq in 2014 and Afghanistan in 2021, where American-built armies crumbled almost overnight.

“We thought the Afghans would fight until the end of the calendar year and try to have a heroic defence of Kabul,” says Mr Maul. Instead, “they basically folded pretty quickly.” That experience, along with the evaporation of the Iraqi army in the face of the Islamic State group, led DIA to “over-correct” when judging how Ukraine would fare when Russia invaded last year. “We had a similar thought that they were just overwhelmed on paper.” It has proved a teachable moment. Mr Maul brandishes a 40-page “tradecraft note”, published this January, which re-examines how the agency measures a country’s will to fight.

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