At the 2 a.m. watch, gunshots aren’t far away. Automatic rifles trade fire in rounds that echo across the old buildings of Tel Tamer. At a compound adjoining the hospital, two watchmen with Free Burma Rangers stand guard, their faces framed between a glow of red lights coming from the emergency room and green lights of a minaret from the mosque across the way.

Unable to sleep, I join them, and ask whether this much shooting is normal. 

“As long as the bread factory is going, we know we’re OK.”

SAUDI ARABIA: The FBI is now working with the presumption that the Friday shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola that killed three Americans and wounded eight others “was an act of terrorism.”

IRAN is building up an arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles in Iraq, part of a widening effort to assert power across the Middle East that comes as protests drive media coverage from the region and the United States is occupied by impeachment proceedings and pullouts from that part of the world.

UPDATE, JAN. 2: Preemptive Love Coalition provided an online response on Dec. 4 to this story, calling it “false” and asking WORLD to issue a retraction. In response, WORLD again contacted local officials to ask about PLC’s list of 37 locations where the group said it had provided assistance. That included “3,000 family food packages—1,800 of which have already been distributed, and 1,200 more to be distributed shortly.”

BRITAIN: The London Bridge attacker was depicted as a success story in the rehab program where the convicted jihadist launched his knife attack Friday. He killed two people and wounded three others before bystanders chased him down and police shot and killed him.

HONG KONG: Pro-democracy candidates swept Hong Kong district council elections over the weekend, a “democratic tsunami” pressuring the territory’s Beijing-backed government to bow to demands for greater freedoms.

Co-winner in our Understanding the World category is After ISIS by veteran journalist Seth Frantzman. He chronicles contorted alliances in the wake of ISIS and shows how to understand conflict in Syria, Iraq, and even Africa as part of the three-way battle of Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—with a proactive Russia and a retreating America hovering over the scene.