Play The Diplomat’s Quiz: November 5, 2017 Edition

Unlike most disturbances at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that serves as the de facto China-India border, the Doklam standoff attracted a surplus of international attention and commentary. It was perhaps the most highly-scrutinized border incident between China and India in modern times, and the most volatile since a large military buildup in the Eastern Sector of the border dispute in the late 1980s.

With months left before the Trump administration puts out its first Nuclear Posture Review in early 2018, the nonpartisan U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a new report [PDF] on the costs of operating, sustaining, and modernizing U.S. nuclear forces over the next 30 years.

The topline takeaways are familiar: over 30 years, modernization of the air-, sea-, and land-based legs of the nuclear triad, in addition to associated improvements, maintenance, and operation costs, would bring total costs of U.S. nuclear forces to around $1.2 trillion. On a per-year basis, that’s about $41.4 billion.

In part, the numbers are reflective of the overall predominance of Chinese students among international students in South Korea — 55 percent of 123,858 students as of April 2017. Shin Jae-yong, director for the South Korean government’s Study in Korea Support Team, said the popularity of Korean dramas and K-pop in China is a major reason why so many Chinese students choose South Korea for higher education.

On October 14, Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon singled out the company Umed-88 as an insolvent business that the government had irresponsibly provided with a large loan. The following week, local media unveiled that just as Rahmon was speaking, Radjabali Odinayev, the founder and owner of Umed-88, had been arrested on charges of fraud, smuggling, tax evasion, and forgery.

Official sources outlined that Umed-88 was the beneficiary of a loan of 170 million somoni (around $19 million), which it inappropriately used to pay off large debts to its main lenders, instead of investing the sum into the project agreed upon with the Ministry of Finance. The ministry had facilitated the loan at the favorable interest rate of 18 percent, compared to the 30 percent market rate.

A year ago, 35-year-old developer Lindu Pranayama came across a great business opportunity: he realized that among the many mobile applications, there were no options for polygamists (those who have more than one wife or husband at the same), and there is a market for it.

Nowadays polygamy is practiced in 50 countries, including Indonesia, the country with the most Muslims in the world, where 80 percent of the 250 million population adheres to Islam.

Lindu’s aspiration was to unite all those men and women looking to create “great families.” So last April he launched Ayo Poligami (loosely translated as “let’s do polygamy”), an app with many similarities to Tinder, in which users slide the images left or right to indicate rejection or attraction.

Earlier this week, the Singapore government said that it would not allow two foreign Islamic preachers to enter Singapore as part of a religious-themed cruise set to take place in late November. The move is just the latest in a series of steps that Singapore is taking to crack down on radical ideology, and it also exposes both the city-state’s growing alarm at the terrorism threat as well as the lingering challenges states face in addressing it.

As I have noted repeatedly in these pages, Singapore officials have long been warning about the Islamic State threat in Southeast Asia, not just as another security problem but as an existential threat that could tear the country’s harmonious, multiracial society apart. In response, the city-state has been taking a series of steps to both contribute to confronting the challenge abroad as well as strengthening its response at home (See: “Singapore Warns of Islamic State Base in Southeast Asia”).