'The more T20 cricket is played, the less people start defending,' Gambhir says after his team's home series loss.

A time for feasts, prayers and fireworks, Diwali is one of the most important festivals in India.

Over the past several weeks, people around the world have been celebrating the season of Halloween—dressing up, taking part in parades and festivals, hosting parties, and braving trips through haunted houses (and at least one haunted car wash). Collected below are photos that capture some of these scary (and fun) pre-Halloween festivities in Wales, Japan, India, Romania, Spain, Ireland, Thailand, the United States, and elsewhere.

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The latest salvo in the decades-long conflict between Iran and Israel lit up the predawn sky over Tehran on Saturday. Israeli aircraft encountered little resistance as they struck military targets in retaliation for an Iranian attack earlier this month. Although Iran appeared to downplay its impact, the strike was Israel’s largest ever against the Islamic Republic. It raised not only the specter of full-scale war but also a prospect that experts told me has become much more conceivable in recent weeks: the emergence of Iran as a nuclear-armed state.

Think of Iran’s defenses as a stool with three legs. Two of them have suddenly gone wobbly. The first is Iran’s regional proxy network. This includes, most notably, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which Israel has dismantled through air strikes, incursions, and high-profile assassinations. Israel has even gone after Iran’s top military commanders. The second is an arsenal of missiles and drones, which Iran used to directly attack Israel for the first time in April, and then again this month. Not only did the strikes prove ineffective—Israeli and U.S. defenses largely thwarted them—but they also failed to deter Israel from continuing to hack away at the first leg and strike back as it did over the weekend.

That leaves the third leg: the Iranian nuclear program. Now that Israel has demonstrated its superiority over Iran’s proxies and conventional weapons—and degraded both in the process—Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may decide to pursue a bomb in a risky attempt to salvage some measure of national security. He won’t have far to go. The program has made major advances since 2018, when the U.S. withdrew from its multilateral nuclear agreement with the regime, which now has enough near-weapons-grade uranium to produce several bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This already gives the country considerable leverage, but “there is a risk Khamenei decides that in this environment, a nuclear threshold won’t cut it, and Iran needs nuclear weapons,” Eric Brewer, a nonproliferation expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told me.

Although Brewer and other experts I spoke with did not predict that Iran will go nuclear in the near term, they agreed that it is likelier than ever before. If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons during the metastasizing conflict in the Middle East, it could become the first country to do so while at war since the United States in 1945. But Iran also has many ways to wield its nuclear program that stop short of getting a weapon, injecting further peril into an already volatile new nuclear age.

In recent years, current and former Iranian officials have insisted that the country is either already able to build a nuclear bomb or very close to that point. In the past month, as Iran awaited the retaliation that came on Saturday, its pronouncements got more pointed. Although the regime still denies that it’s seeking a weapon, a senior adviser to Khamenei warned that any Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites—which were spared over the weekend—could alter the nation’s “nuclear strategic policies.” That same week, a group of 39 Iranian lawmakers urged the Supreme National Security Council to eliminate its formal ban on the production of nuclear weapons.

[Read: What if Iran already has the bomb?]

The latest rhetoric in official circles could be a response to Iran’s shifting public discourse. Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian nuclear decision making at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month seems to have piqued Iranian public interest in their country’s nuclear program. She’s noticed a greater number of Iranian commentators on Telegram discussing Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a Texas A&M professor who studies nuclear statecraft and Iranian politics, has also observed this shift in Iranian public and elite sentiment. But he traces it back further, to America’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal and then, two years later, its assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. When the deal took effect in 2015, Tabaar told me, the regime was responsive to public pressure to limit its nuclear program and improve relations with the United States. Discussing the nuclear-weapons option was, as he put it, “taboo.” But in recent weeks, he said, he’s seen “a lively debate” on social media about whether or not to pursue a bomb, even among critics of the regime outside the country.

“There is this realization that, yes, the regime and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are repressive, but we live in this neighborhood and maybe we need to have” nuclear weapons, Tabaar told me before the latest strike.

That decision belongs to Khamenei, but the increased public interest that Tabaar has observed creates an opening for Iranian leaders to advance the country’s nuclear program. As Tabaar noted, such decisions are often informed by the views of elites and by the regime’s “fear of popular revolt.”

Still, neither Grajewski nor Tabaar anticipates that the regime will immediately seek a bomb. Iran could instead use its near-nuclear status to its advantage, including by escalating threats to go nuclear, announcing progress in uranium enrichment, rebuffing international oversight, or exiting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, Iran could try to reinforce the other legs of its security—by working with partners such as Russia and North Korea to upgrade its conventional military capabilities, and by bolstering proxy groups such as the Houthis in Yemen while seeking to rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah.

But strengthening these other legs could take years, and Israel appears poised to press its military advantage. That leaves a crucial question for Iran’s leaders: Is the country’s nuclear-threshold capability enough of a deterrent?

If they decide to cross the threshold and go nuclear, Iranian leaders know that their adversaries will likely detect their efforts and try to intervene, potentially undermining the very security Tehran may be seeking. The latest U.S. estimates indicate that Iran might require only a week or two to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. But concealing such a move from IAEA inspectors without kicking them out of the country would be challenging. And Iran could need more than a year—or at least several months, by some estimates—to convert its uranium into a usable weapon.

Those months constitute “a pretty big window of vulnerability” in which “Israel or the United States could disrupt Iran’s work to build a nuclear weapon, including through military action,” Brewer explained. So he thinks it’s “unlikely” that the supreme leader will wake up one morning and declare, “Damn the torpedoes. All hands on deck. We’re going to weapons-grade today.”

A more plausible outcome, Brewer and Grajewski believe, is that Iran covertly resumes the research on weaponizing fissile material that it halted in 2003. The goal would be to “shorten the window of vulnerability” between amassing weapons-grade uranium, putting it into a nuclear device, and fashioning a deliverable weapon, Brewer told me. This weaponization work is more difficult (though not impossible) to spot than uranium enrichment, at least at declared facilities still monitored by the IAEA. International inspectors retain access to facilities containing fissile material, but Iran has reduced the frequency of inspections since 2018, when the U.S. exited the nuclear deal. The regime has also ended IAEA monitoring of other sites related to its nuclear program, raising the possibility that it has moved some centrifuges to undeclared facilities. Nevertheless, U.S. officials said this month that they could probably detect any decision to build nuclear weapons soon after Iranian leaders make it.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear]

American officials often speak about whether Iran’s leaders have “made the decision” to attain nuclear weapons, but Tabaar argued that Tehran’s calculations don’t work that way. Think of a dimmer, not a light switch: Iran is “making sure all components are there to preserve its option to develop nuclear weapons, gradually more and more.” Tabaar added, however, that there are “two very extreme scenarios” in which he could imagine Iranian leaders suddenly making the call to flip the nuclear switch. The first is a “window of opportunity” in which Iran’s enemies are distracted by, say, a major conflict elsewhere in the world. The second is “a window of threat” in which Iranian leaders fear that their adversaries are about to unleash a massive bombing campaign that could destroy the country or regime.

Brewer posited one other wild-card scenario: The supreme leader might proceed with weapons-grade enrichment at declared facilities if he assumes that he can achieve it before Israel or the U.S. has a chance to destroy those facilities, thereby establishing some measure of deterrence. “That would be a very, very risky gamble,” Brewer said—particularly if Israel learns of Tehran’s decision in time to unleash preemptive strikes. Additional enrichment might not ward off an Israeli or American attack anyway. Although 90 percent enrichment is typically considered the level required for weaponization, experts believe that Iran might already be able to use its current stock of 60-percent-enriched uranium to make a bomb. Anything higher wouldn’t necessarily establish greater deterrence.

But, as Brewer has noted, history offers several examples of regional crises prompting states to “break out,” or race for a bomb. Shortly before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel reportedly rushed to assemble nuclear devices out of concerns about possible Egyptian strikes on its nuclear facilities. Amid tensions with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir, Pakistan is believed to have begun building nuclear weapons by 1990. That same year, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein ordered an impractical (and unsuccessful) effort to quickly build a nuclear weapon. “I can give you lots of really good reasons why breaking out would be a terrible decision by the supreme leader,” Brewer told me. “I can also give you lots of reasons why the crash nuclear-weapons program in Iraq was a terrible decision. But [the Iraqis] still made it.”

I asked my Atlantic Council colleague Danny Citrinowicz, who from 2013 to 2016 led the Israeli military’s analysis of Iranian strategy, whether Iran is more likely to become a nuclear-weapons state today than it was at any point in the many years that he’s monitored its nuclear program. He didn’t hesitate: “Definitely.”

Citrinowicz broke down that answer into relative probabilities. He pegged the chances of Iran “storming” to a bomb—by, for example, detonating a nuclear device for demonstration purposes—at 10 percent, the highest he’s ever assessed it. Before Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, he would have said “close to zero.” He assigned a 30 percent probability to the scenario of Iran enriching uranium to weapons-grade, though perhaps only a minimal amount to show off its capabilities.

To my surprise, the scenario he deemed most likely—at 60 percent—was Iran pursuing negotiations on a new nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers. Citrinowicz could envision Kamala Harris and even Donald Trump—perhaps reprising the openness to nuclear diplomacy that he displayed with North Korea, despite his typically hard-line stance on Iran—being amenable to such talks after the U.S. presidential election. A diplomatic agreement would probably inhibit Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it could also provide the country with economic relief. As an added benefit, a deal with Washington might serve as a wedge between the United States and Israel, the latter of which would likely oppose the agreement. Israel would be less inclined to strike Iranian nuclear facilities if it couldn’t count on U.S. support, or at least it would be less capable of penetrating their heavy fortifications without help from America’s arsenal.

[Read: The unraveling of Trump’s North Korea policy]

Still, there are many reasons to be skeptical about the possibility of a new nuclear deal with Iran. Russia and China, both parties to the 2o15 pact, are far more hostile to the United States today than they were then. Khamenei has expressed a general willingness to reengage in negotiations, but he has also instructed his government that the U.S. can’t be trusted. And Iran will be much less likely to enter into a comprehensive agreement again now that Washington has already pulled out of one and reimposed sanctions, delivering a shock to Iran’s economy. Getting the regime to agree to anything beyond limited concessions on its nuclear program appears implausible.

One way or another, though, Citrinowicz expects 2025 to be “decisive.” Without a new agreement, Iranian leaders could start procuring a bomb. Or Israel and the U.S. could take military action to stave them off. And either of those scenarios could trigger the other.

If Iran heads for the bomb, or leverages its threshold status for geopolitical gain, that could encourage other countries, including U.S. partners, to develop their own nuclear programs. “I absolutely do worry that we could live in a world in the future of not necessarily more nuclear-weapons states but more countries that have this capability to build nuclear weapons,” Brewer said.

In some ways, Iran has already passed the point of no return. By enriching uranium to 60 percent, Tehran has demonstrated that it probably possesses the technical expertise to further enrich that material to weapons-grade, which requires minimal additional effort. Destroying Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure would be exceedingly difficult. Wiping out Iran’s nuclear knowledge base is not possible. Even if Israel or the U.S. takes military action, the threat of a nuclear Iran will almost certainly persist, at least as long as the current regime remains in power.

Should Iran get nuclear weapons, that would likely embolden its regime at home and abroad, elevate the risk of nuclear terrorism, upend deterrence dynamics between Iran and Israel along with the United States, and spur either an extension of the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Arab partners in the Middle East or a nuclear-arms race in the region—among a host of other potential consequences.

But such outcomes are hard to forecast, because so much of what we know about the interplay between nuclear weapons and international affairs is based on the Cold War and post–Cold War periods. We are now in a third nuclear age, in which nuclear and near-nuclear states come in a greater variety of shapes and sizes. Arms-control agreements have unraveled, diplomatic channels between adversaries have vanished, and establishing nuclear deterrence has never been more complicated.

After the advent of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, at least one new country acquired the world’s most destructive arms every decade until the 2010s, when the streak ended. Nearly halfway through the 2020s, it seems like we may revert to the historical pattern before this decade is done.

Ottawa says the close ally of India's PM is involved in an intimidation campaign against Sikh separatists.

The life of Pashtun leader Bacha Khan, who fought to end British colonial rule in India by non-violent means.

Huge explosions were seen in two incidents involving stores of fireworks being set on fire in India.

Perhaps the most levelheaded defense of Donald Trump’s misguided plan for steep global tariffs is that they’ll never be imposed. Trump surrogates have lately been assuring the business world that the former president will, if elected, use merely the threat of across-the-board import taxes of 10 to 20 percent to pressure other countries to lower their own barriers to American goods. The result: freer trade among participating nations, and more revenue for American companies, without ever firing anything more than a warning shot.

Howard Lutnick, a billionaire co-chair of the Trump transition, recently made a version of this argument on CNBC, using the auto industry as an example. “If we said, ‘We’re going to tariff you the way you tariff us,’ do you think they’re going to allow Mercedes and all these Japanese companies and Porsches and BMWs to all of a sudden have 100 percent tariffs in America?” he said. “Of course not. They’re going to come and negotiate, and their tariffs are going to come down, and finally Ford and General Motors are going to be able to sell in these places.”

The idea that the White House can use import restrictions to affect foreign governments’ policies is not entirely without precedent. Research shows that from the 1970s through the early 1990s, various administrations sometimes succeeded in prying open foreign markets by threatening tariffs or other protectionist measures. A reasonable case can even be made that Trump’s 2019 promise to slap 10 percent tariffs on Mexican imports helped push our southern neighbor to cooperate more fully on restricting illegal immigration.

Trump’s new global tariff threat, however, would likely be far less successful, and would impose significant costs even if the tariffs were never applied. The “just a threat” strategy sounds nice in the abstract but in reality suffers from fatal flaws: It ignores not only America’s checkered history of such gambits but also the economic damage that threats alone can inflict on the American and global economies.

[David Frum: Trump’s plan to raise your taxes]

The occasional tariff-threat success stories are exceptions to a broader negative trend. In a comprehensive analysis of every U.S. unfair-trade investigation from 1975 to 1993—91 cases targeting foreign discrimination against U.S. goods, services, and intellectual property—Kimberly Ann Elliott and Thomas O. Bayard found that American efforts to pressure foreign countries to open up their markets were successful less than half of the time. The authors’ definition of “success” was generous to U.S. officials: It could include just the partial achievement of U.S. objectives and result in no actual trade liberalization. Even then, the wins occurred mostly when a single country was dependent on the U.S. market—a situation that applies to only a few countries today—and during a short period in the mid-1980s, when the U.S. had far more economic heft in global markets than it has now. (China in 1991, for example, shipped almost one-third of its exports to the United States; today, the number is about 15 percent.) When the U.S. government actually applied trade restrictions, moreover, the strategy worked only twice in 12 tries. In the other 10 cases, foreign governments did not acquiesce to American demands; despite new U.S. protectionism, they kept in place the policies and practices to which Washington objected.

Trump-era trade actions have encountered similar difficulties. No nation lowered its tariffs on U.S. goods in response to tariffs imposed, or merely threatened, during the Trump administration, and most of those U.S. tariffs remain in force today. Even worse, several foreign governments—in China, the European Union, India, Turkey, Canada, Mexico, and Russia—retaliated against U.S. exports, which in some cases remain depressed. Since then, Trump’s “Phase One” deal with Beijing, signed in early 2020 and hailed as proof that the tariffs were working, because China had agreed to buy American farm goods and open certain domestic markets, has fizzled out; China has largely failed to follow through. And, as the current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai just confirmed, the China tariffs have not changed Chinese government policies or behavior.

Overall, a recent analysis of the Trump-era retaliation shows that “a one percentage point increase in foreign tariffs was associated with a 3.9 percent reduction in U.S. exports.” So Trump’s previous strategic tariff experiment resulted in less trade, not more, and America is still paying for it.

Just the threat of a tariff also can inflict considerable economic costs, because it increases uncertainty for business, which has been found to reduce U.S. investment, output, and hiring. An unpredictable policy environment gives private companies an incentive to stay out of the U.S. market until policy is clarified, resulting in a lower level of current economic activity overall. Numerous studies have confirmed these effects, but they’re really just common sense: Who would want to wager millions of dollars on a new U.S. facility that might soon face higher production costs, or be unable to sell products abroad, thanks to possible tariffs?

Various measures of what economists refer to as “trade policy uncertainty,” or TPU, spiked during Trump’s time in office as he routinely announced or teased radical changes to U.S. tariff policy on Twitter. According to one index, average TPU during the Trump administration was the highest recorded under any president since 1960, when the series began. A study in the Journal of Monetary Economics estimated that the increase in Trump-era uncertainty reduced aggregate U.S. investment by $23 to $47 billion in 2018 alone.

American trade law compounds this uncertainty by giving the president broad and ambiguous power to quickly impose new tariffs without congressional input or approval. As my Cato Institute colleague Clark Packard and I detail in a new paper, following the Smoot-Hawley tariff debacle of the 1930s—in which Congress dramatically increased U.S. protectionism and thereby set off a global trade war that deepened the Great Depression—the legislative branch delegated much of its constitutional trade authority to the executive. Congress assumed that the president, with national constituency and foreign-affairs responsibilities under Article II, was less likely to repeat Smoot-Hawley. This approach to U.S. trade policy making worked reasonably well for 80-plus years, but Trump (and, to a lesser degree, Joe Biden) exposed a key flaw: The laws at issue are so broad and ambiguous as to allow a president to unilaterally impose or maintain damaging tariffs on dubious grounds.

[Rogé Karma: Reaganomics is on its last legs]

Over the past seven years, moreover, U.S. courts have rejected every challenge to the Trump-era tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Chinese imports, and to the laws under which the tariffs were imposed. Judges have proved to be particularly deferential to the executive branch in cases alleged to involve “national security,” a term so broad and undefined that one Trump-administration lawyer famously refused to concede that it couldn’t apply to imported peanut butter.

Given this precedent, the next president will effectively have a green light to impose new tariffs—and dictate U.S. trade policy—with little concern that the other branches of government will stand in the way. Any such tariffs, as well as their size and scope, will thus come down to the whims of one person in the Oval Office, who might be Trump. Future courts might find global, across-the-board tariffs to be fundamentally different from past actions and thus beyond the bounds of whatever law was used to justify them, but that outcome is far from guaranteed. Until Congress changes the law, trade policy will be vulnerable to abuse and will therefore continue to thicken the fog surrounding trillions of dollars in annual U.S. trade.

That fog is, unfortunately, again building up as trade-policy uncertainty has climbed back to levels not seen since Trump’s time in office. His victory next week would likely boost uncertainty even more, with inevitable collateral damage to the U.S. investment climate and economy. Indeed, with reports of corporate angst and delayed investment already proliferating, the damage appears to have already begun.

The Tata Aircraft Complex will produce Airbus C-295 transport military aircraft in collaboration with Airbus Spain.

New Zealand seal the three-match series - their first in India - with a 113-run win in the second Test in Pune.