Play The Diplomat’s Quiz: June 18, 2017 Edition

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, a decisive turning point for the Allied effort in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. The U.S. Navy, led by Admirals Chester Nimitz, Frank Jack Fletcher, and Raymond A. Spruance trounced the Imperial Japanese Navy after 3 days of battle, yielding the first major inflection point in the eastern war after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor some six months earlier.

Otto F. Warmbier, a U.S. citizen who had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea last year, has been released.

Warmbier, a 23-year-old college student who was arrested in North Korea in January 2016, was medically evacuated from the country on Tuesday after a U.S. official envoy learned that he had been in a coma for more than a year.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson issued a statement announcing Warmbier’s evacuation from North Korea on Tuesday, noting that the U.S. State Department was continuing talks with North Korea on the remaining U.S. citizens being held in the country.

On Friday, North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) announced that it had tested a “new cruise rocket” system on Thursday morning. The country’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, presided over the launch, which took place from near Wonsan and featured multiple launches.

Released pictures of the event through North Korean state media confirm that the system tested on Thursday was first seen at the April 15 parade in Pyongyang, which commemorated North Korean founder Kim Il-sung’s 105th birth anniversary. Between the parade and Thursday’s launch, North Korea appears to have changed the system’s camouflage scheme from a naval-themed blue to regular forest camouflage.

The system is a new integrated coastal defense cruise missile (CDCM) launcher with four canisters for what may be an iterative improvement on the Kumsong-3, North Korea’s anti-ship cruise missile system that was first seen publicly in 2014 and is a variant of Russia’s Zvedza Kh-35 anti-ship cruise missile.

The KCNA statement touted that the new system, like the Pukkuksong-2 medium-range ballistic missile launcher first seen in February and the launcher for the new “ultra-precision” Scud short-range ballistic missile shown in late-May, uses a tracked transporter-erector-launcher. North Korea has made a point of showing off these types of launchers this year, all of which have been developed indigenously and increase the survivability of its various missile systems.

Taiwan has lost another diplomatic ally. On June 12, Panama’s President Juan Carlos Varela announced during a televised speech that his country was establishing diplomatic relations with China – and severing ties with Taiwan. That brings the total number of countries that have official relations with the Republic of China government in Taipei to 20.