China’s military is practicing putting a choke hold on Taiwan – a strategy that defense experts increasingly believe could be an effective alternative to a full-scale invasion. What would such a blockade mean for Taiwan, and its allies?

• Elon Musk promise: Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, calls on law enforcement to investigate billionaire Elon Musk for his promise at a weekend pro-Trump rally to give away $1 million each day until Election Day.
• Cuba protests: People in Havana go into the streets banging pots and pans to protest nights without power and water after the nation’s power grid failed starting Thursday evening.
• Moldova EU vote: Electoral data shows that Moldovans have voted by a razor-thin majority in favor of securing the country’s path toward European Union membership.
• WNBA’s record season: The New York Liberty won its first Women’s National Basketball Association championship after beating the Minnesota Lynx 67-62 in Game 5. The women’s professional basketball series has been a fitting conclusion to a season of record-breaking interest.

Read these news briefs.

As a journalist, our correspondent has documented Sudan’s descent into a brutal civil war. But the conflict isn’t just a story for him. It’s also the terrifying backdrop of his own life, as he explains in this essay about the birth of his daughter.

Gaza’s residents know what Lebanon is going through, as Israel pursues its campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah, and as civilians are killed or are forced from their homes. But they worry that the world’s attention has been diverted.

Even veteran politics watchers who’ve “seen it all” aren’t shying away from calling the rapidly approaching U.S. presidential election unprecedented. A senior Washington reporter for the Monitor joins our podcast to parse the extraordinary preconditions – and the work of reporting it all right down the middle. First of two parts. 

Our picks for the 10 best books of October include a bracing novel by Louise Erdrich, a continent-spanning mystery by Louise Penny, and a richly observed biography of civil rights icon John Lewis. 

In early October, a group of public organizations and private funders backed a novel strategy to slow deforestation in the Amazon basin. It plans to provide financial incentives for cattle ranchers in Colombia to restore degraded pasturelands in the world’s largest rainforest.

The ranchers, in other words, would be on the front line in mitigating climate change, joining many of the world’s rural areas in a shift in values on land use.

“We can choose our values, and how to live with them,” Marília Moura, a spokesperson for one of many farming collectives across rural Portugal formed in response to climate change, told The Christian Science Monitor.

By some estimates, the world requires $2.4 trillion a year to address global warming. That need is driving innovations in climate finance. Each year, dozens of new funding tools emerge to help businesses and communities adapt to climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

“It used to be ecology versus economics,” Portuguese farmer Pipo Vieira told the Monitor. “Now people realize it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of ... exploiting nature, we can live differently.”

In Colombia, cattle ranching occupies 80% of agricultural land, employing more than 800,000 people. Since the signing of a peace accord in 2016 that ended a half-century of conflict between the government and a guerrilla group, a few projects have shown how restoring farming communities and surrounding ecosystems can lead to economic renewal.

The new finance model is one of 10 pilot projects endorsed by the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance. It brings together investors and cattle ranchers in potentially lasting partnerships. Instead of saddling farming families with debt, the investments are based on deferred profit-sharing after five years.

Many countries are expanding their thinking on what is possible with the climate challenge. In the Caribbean, for example, people need a “cultural confidence,” said Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, in a 2020 speech, “that plays to our strengths and which captures the imagination of our own people” in response to the region’s problems, such as vulnerability to natural disasters.