The trade bloc is also reducing its quota of tariff-free steel imports, as trade tensions mount with Beijing. The EU’s goal is to reduce its near-$400 billion annual trade deficit with China. However, the move could hurt other steel exporters with whom the EU has solid relations, including the UK, Ukraine, and Japan. Brussels isn’t the first to make such a move: the Trump administration introduced a global steel tariff last year.
In a surprise announcement, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said over the weekend that he will resign within the next couple of weeks. Vučić has dominated Serbian politics since his party, the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), took power in 2012, serving first as prime minister and then as president. His popularity has waned significantly since a 2024 train station tragedy killed 16 people and ignited nationwide anti‑corruption protests tied to poor infrastructure investments, leading to persistent calls for him to step down. Although Vučić is resigning, many believe the decision is strategic rather than altruistic – he is likely to try to run again for prime minister ahead of elections this fall, which will take place earlier than scheduled because of his resignation. His departure from the presidency may nonetheless improve Serbia’s prospects for joining the European Union, as EU officials have long criticized democratic backsliding under SNS leadership.
Senegal has been in the throes of a political drama for over a month, sparked by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s firing his ally-turned-rival, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko. Seeking revenge for the move, the Sonko-aligned National Assembly on Monday adopted a constitutional amendment aimed at taking some power away from the presidency. Scores of Senegalese citizens protested the move outside the parliament as the vote took place, arguing the amendment will give the lawmakers too much power. The government said it would organize a referendum on the amendment – without giving a timeline. The amendment is expansive, and includes replacing the seven-member Constitutional Council with a new, nine-member Constitutional Court. The West African state of nearly 20 million people has been struggling with a debt crisis, which has only exacerbated these political issues.
Exiled Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was reportedly blocked from returning to her country by both the US and Venezuela over the weekend. As Venezuela’s weak, cash-strapped government continues to struggle with rescue and recovery from last week’s devastating earthquakes, Machado announced she would return to help. That apparently irked US officials, who reportedly saw it as a “stunt.” Machado remains popular in Venezuela. Her party’s candidate is believed to have won the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election, although strongman Nicolás Maduro claimed victory for himself. Still, despite her lavish courting of Donald Trump – she even gave her Nobel Peace Prize to him – the US has sidelined Machado since removing Maduro in January, preferring instead to work with his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez. As of Tuesday morning, the death toll from the quakes had surpassed 1,700, with thousands believed still to be under the rubble.
Americans, it appears, are in a foul mood.
In a recent Gallup poll, 76% of US respondents said they were dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the United States at this time.” An NBC news poll released on June 14 found that just 38% said they believe the nation’s best years lie ahead, and 64% in a June 15 Reuters/Ipsos poll said American democracy was in danger of failing.
What a shame, you might well feel, that America should mark its 250th birthday, a genuinely august historic occasion, at a moment when so many are dispirited, even disgusted, by the current state of our union. Claims the country has gone to the dogs have taken on a new bitterness, even if Americans of different tribes don’t agree on which dogs they mean.
But we’ve been here before. I’m probably the only member of the GZERO team with vivid memories of 1976, the moment of abject national misery in which we celebrated our bicentennial.
At the time, Americans, facing the reality that we’d just lost a war for the first time, also confronted secret audiotapes that proved our president was a liar. (My father was at least as appalled to learn that Richard Nixon regularly used foul language in the Oval Office). Newly emboldened Middle East oil barons had sent our gasoline prices surging, demonstrating in the process that mighty Washington could do little about it.
If there’s a great difference between then and now, it’s in the White House. Second-term Donald Trump seems more ambitious by the hour. Gerald Ford, the only US chief executive never elected president or vice president, was a pleasant man who would serve just 29 months as Leader of the Free World and forever after as an Accident of History.
But the patterns continually running through America’s political past are more prominent than they might appear. Did you know that future president William McKinley tried to use a tariff to force Canada to become the 45th US state? That Theodore Roosevelt sought to add distant islands to US territory for reasons others found hard to grasp? That both Woodrow Wilson, who created the League of Nations, and Warren Harding, who worked to keep us out of it, ran for president under “America First” banners? That in 1926 Calvin Coolidge marked the nation’s 150th birthday with a steel-cage martial arts bout on the White House lawn? (I may have made that last one up.)
But in 2026, something feels different. Trump has led the American superpower into one form or another of conflict with just about everyone. He has imposed tariffs on allies, enemies, and countries we rarely think about. Friends are called freeloaders. Foes are challenged, then unchallenged, then challenged again.
America has become erratic, and those watching from abroad aren’t sure where to place their bets. Will the upcoming midterms render Trump lame? Who will redesign the presidency next? The isolationist vice president? The more traditionalist lead diplomat? Another compromise(d) Democratic centrist or an eat-the-oligarchs populist of the Left? And if Washington veers abruptly at the next elections, how long before it races yet again down unmapped roads?
These questions can’t yet be answered, of course, which compels allies to hedge and invites rivals to test. That’s a big reason that geopolitics seems to have lost so many of its guardrails.
Yet, America’s changeability remains a crucial strength. The nation survived its bitter bicentennial and the toxically paranoid 1970s. The great Soviet rival collapsed just 15 years later under the crush of its internal contradictions, even as America’s innovative energies and irrepressibly dynamic society kept the nation’s chronic political dysfunction from bringing down a house that sometimes seems divided against itself.
It can happen again. America’s importance lies not in some imagined history as a “Shining City on a Hill,” but in the ever-present possibility that its capacity for change might one day make it better than it is or ever was.
In her 1981 book Practicing History, historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that, “If the great question, whether it is still possible to reconcile democracy with social order and individual liberty, is to find a positive answer, it will be here.” The patriotic part of me believes that promise remains possible.
And that’s reason enough to light a firecracker on Saturday.
The world is splitting into two camps: countries that hold power accountable, and those that don’t.
Deteriorating press freedom offers the starkest example. Where trusted information is scarce, abuses of power stay hidden, corruption flourishes, and citizens lose the ability to demand accountability.
This is a key finding in the fourth edition of the Atlas of Impunity – released yesterday and developed in partnership between Eurasia Group and a global advisory board of human rights experts – mapping accountability gaps across nearly 200 countries.
In simple terms, impunity is power without accountability. At its most extreme, it means the ability to commit crimes without facing consequences.
The Atlas is intended as a tool to educate and encourage action by policymakers. But impunity is not only a concern for governments or institutions — its consequences are felt worldwide. Where accountability is robust, citizens benefit from institutions that safeguard human rights and personal freedoms and check those who abuse power. Where accountability is weak or absent, repression takes hold, conflict escalates, and the most vulnerable are left exposed to violence and exploitation with little prospect of justice or redress.
Competitive pay. 401(k) contributions upon employment and 6% company match once eligible. Up to 16 weeks of combined paid maternity and parental leave. These benefits and more inspire generations – Daidrian’s 18-year Walmart journey motivated her son Jonothan to launch his own career as a Walmart associate. Learn more.
Cybercrime has evolved into a complex, interconnected ecosystem. Microsoft’s latest story unpacks five recent disruption efforts, showing how coordinated action across technology, legal, and global partnerships is reshaping how these threats are addressed.
By connecting insights across cases, it highlights a more integrated approach to anticipating and disrupting cybercrime at scale.
Read the full story here.
In his latest Quick Take, Ian Bremmer calls the United States under President Trump the dominant driver of global political risk, but argues that the world is increasingly pushing back.
He says that a more unilateral and transactional US foreign policy, combined with efforts to reduce institutional checks, has driven outsized global uncertainty over the past year and a half.
Ian points to escalating tariffs and the US-China standoff as an early example, noting Washington “effectively putting a boycott on the Chinese” before pulling back after economic and political pressure.
He also highlights Iran, where escalation and the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz forced the US to “back down,” underscoring limits to American coercive power.
While Ian expects continued disruption from the United States, he says growing domestic and international constraints will make it harder for Trump to fundamentally reshape the global system.
Sri Lanka is facing one of the worst outbreaks of the mosquito-borne dengue virus in years. Amid energy shortages sparked by the war in Iran, dengue cases are straining hospital resources. In a bid to eliminate mosquito breeding grounds, the Sri Lanka Air Force has launched drones to detect sites where the insects breed across the country’s rooftops. Once found, property owners must clear them, or face fines.
On July 4, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday. Over the past two and a half centuries, American society has changed profoundly, from an agrarian republic of 13 colonies to the urban, diverse, and economic superpower it is today. To mark the quarter-millennium, we decided to look back on how the country has demographically evolved since its last major milestone, the bicentennial.
One of the most striking developments since 1976 is the increasingly diverse face of the nation. As our Graphic Truth shows, Hispanic Americans have increased to roughly a fifth of the population – a more than fourfold jump – while the Asian American population has grown from under 1% in the 1970 census to 6% in 2024.
In 1970, only 4.7% of the US population was foreign-born, the lowest share in the country’s recorded history. That reflected the long shadow of the 1924 Immigration Act, which tightened immigration from everywhere other than the Western Hemisphere. That law, along with other restrictive immigration measures, wasn’t overturned until 1965. Because the US experienced relatively little immigration over the preceding four decades, the country’s demographic breakdown in the 1970s reflected a period of demographic stagnation.
Meanwhile, the share of non-Hispanic white Americans has dropped, from 83% to 56%. The near-30-percentage-point drop reflects a half-century of steady flows of immigration into the country, the growth of ethnic-minority groups, as well as an aging population and lower fertility rates, meaning deaths outnumber births among non-Hispanic white Americans.
There are data challenges when it comes to checking how America’s changing racial and ethnic makeup has changed. Since the 1970s, the way the US Census records race and ethnicity has changed. Only since 2000 has the census allowed Americans to tick off more than one box for race – prior to the 21st century, people of multi-racial backgrounds had to select the race with which they most identified.
In 2030, the census will change again. After decades of advocacy, people with origins in the Middle East and North Africa will receive their own ethnic category, and “Latino” will be included as an option under “race and ethnicity.” As the US approaches its 250th birthday, it’s clear the country remains a demographic in motion. The picture is always changing, and the next census suggests it will continue to evolve in ways that challenge assumptions about who Americans are.
At least a dozen Mexican lawmakers – including members of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party – have reportedly offered to be informants to the United States as part of Washington’s investigations into elected officials’ alleged collusion with cartels. Sheinbaum has denounced the investigations, using them as a rallying cry for her left-wing party. However, the Mexican leader doesn’t want to anger the White House for two main reasons: she wants to stave off a potential US strike on cartels, as a US hit on Mexican land will not go down well among the Mexican public, and to ensure that Washington maintains free trade (the US buys some 80% of all Mexico’s exports). Reports of lawmakers cooperating with investigators will only further increase Washington’s leverage over Sheinbaum, meaning she might have to sacrifice her standing with her own party to retain good relations with the White House.
The latest ceasefire agreement, signed on Friday, commits Lebanon to disarming the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah. Under the terms of the deal, Israeli forces would then exit southern Lebanon. There’s just one problem: Hezbollah, as you might imagine, rejects the agreement. The speaker of the Lebanese Parliament – a top political ally of the group – even said on Saturday it was an “incitement to civil war.” An all-out civil conflict remains a remote possibility – neither the Lebanese government nor Hezbollah wants a head-to-head collision with the other – but there are growing signs of unrest, as Hezbollah supporters blocked major roads in Beirut on Friday to protest the agreement. We’ll be watching closely for the militant group’s next move.
On Sunday, Pakistan launched deadly airstrikes near the countries’ 1,600-mile shared border, in retaliation for an attack on Pakistani paramilitaries on Saturday. There’s a dispute over the nature of the deaths: the Afghan Taliban said the airstrikes killed at least 36 civilians, while Islamabad said it killed 32 militants. Violence has been ticking up in recent weeks, shattering a relative period of calm between the two neighbors who’ve been fighting since late February. Pakistan accuses the Taliban of harboring members of the Pakistani Taliban, which has carried out attacks on Pakistani police and security forces in recent years – the Afghan Taliban denies these charges, but has privately acknowledged that some Afghan militants have joined the group. The latest violence heightens the risk of further escalation as the Chinese-led peace talks stall.
The Supreme Court is set to make several high-stakes decisions in the final week of its term. Birthright citizenship, campaign finance laws, and whether transgender girls and women can play on female sports teams in public school and college are all left on the docket. One major ruling was delivered on Monday morning: the Court blocked the Trump administration from firing a sitting Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, while allowing the firing of a Federal Trade Commission member without cause. The decision gives the White House greater control of independent agencies – just not the central bank
As the war in Ukraine drags through its fifth year, Russia’s fortunes are beginning to sour. In recent months, the Ukrainian military has made its most significant gains since the summer of 2023. Kyiv’s weapons meanwhile are expanding their range, striking energy facilities deep into the heart of Russia while also pummeling the oil infrastructure in Moscow with strikes that subjected residents to days of “black rain.”
Caught in the middle of all this is Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko.
Often referred to as “Europe’s last dictator,” Lukashenko has ruled over former-Soviet Belarus, a country of 9 million people that borders both Russia and Ukraine (as well as the Baltics and Poland), ever since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
He has clung to power through a mix of domestic repression and foreign help from Russia. Minsk remains reliant on Moscow for financial support, economic trade, and defense – it sits under Russia’s nuclear umbrella. Ever since Lukashenko violently quelled the domestic protests of 2020 against his regime, the West has snubbed Belarus, applying sanctions and other pressure that have made the country yet more reliant on the Kremlin.
“Lukashenko has nowhere to go and is not in position to break with Vladimir Putin and repeatedly speaks about his loyalty to Russia,” Valery Kavaleuski, a former Belarusian diplomat who opposes Lukashenko and advocates for better EU-Belarus relations, told GZERO.
Now the Russian president wants some payback. For months, Putin has reportedly been urging Lukashenko to increase Belarus’s role in the invasion of Ukraine. Minsk already provides logistical support, and has hosted Russian military drills as well as tactical nuclear weapons, but Putin wants more.
“This enhanced involvement could range from offering more use of Belarusian airspace, to infrastructure to conduct Russian drone attacks, to Russian military entering Ukraine from Belarus, to Belarusian armed forces engaging in combat against Ukrainians,” said Kavaleuski.
Lukashenko has recently been expanding the country’s armed forces, militarizing schools, and mobilizing civilian institutions for potential combat support, according to a report that the Belarusian opposition recently presented to the Ukrainian government. On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that the construction of various Belarusian military infrastructure projects along the Ukraine-Belarus border were “nearing completion.”
But Lukashenko is reluctant to increase his involvement too much. For one thing, Zelensky threatened to strike Belarus if it continued to allow Russia to use its ground stations for drone strikes. Lukashenko has, of course, already seen what Ukraine is able to do to Russia and it is unlikely that his forces could mount any better defense against Ukrainian drones. In fact, the Ukrainian president’s threats against Belarus appeared to strike a chord: the Belarusian ground stations are no longer in use, according to Zelensky. What’s more, Lukashenko made clear on Wednesday that he doesn’t want to fight Ukrainian soldiers.
“For the first time in years, Lukashenko moved quickly and visibly in response to pressure from someone other than Putin,” according to the Atlantic Council’s Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist who is wanted by Russian authorities. “Kyiv has found the language that works with Minsk – and everyone around Lukashenko noticed.”
What’s more, experts say, deeper involvement might risk a backlash from his own population. Although public opinion polling is sparse in Lukashenko’s police state, a poll from the outset of the Ukraine war in 2022 showed only 5% wanted their country to get involved. Given Russia’s fortunes in the war, it’s hard to imagine that figure has risen since then.
And while Belarus’s opposition is still under tremendous pressure, Lukashenko may be wary of giving them an opening of any kind.
“The opposition knocking him off his perch still requires a political opening that isn’t visible yet,” said Liubakova. “But the foundations of his position – that Russia is strong, that loyalty to the Kremlin pays, that there is no other leverage – are under more pressure than at any point since 2020.”
All of this means Lukashenko is “increasingly concerned about the direction of the war,” according to Kavaleuski.
“He is afraid not only of Russia, but also of Ukraine. On a larger scale, Belarus is under severe pressure from all its five neighbours. This layout has created dangerous conditions for sovereignty and independence of Belarus.”
The death toll from the Venezuelan earthquakes continues to rise, nearing 600 by Friday morning. The US believes that figure could rise to a staggering 10,000 once all the dead are located under the rubble. The human and economic toll are immense. But as is often the case with natural disasters of this scale, there will be a political dynamic too. After ousting strongman Nicolás Maduro in January, the US chose to work with his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, rather than risk the instability of immediate regime change or fresh elections. That proved unpopular among Venezuelans. Now, in the aftermath of one of the country’s worst natural disasters in a century, that arrangement is being tested. Is the current government up to the tasks of rescue, aid, and reconstruction? If so, it could boost the legitimacy of the new system. If not, popular anger could quickly boil over, posing a big challenge to Rodriguez and her masters in Washington.
If you were organizing a soccer match on a day meant to celebrate LGBTQ+ rights, Egypt and Iran would hardly be top of your list for participating nations, would they? After all, both countries de facto criminalize same-sex relations. But tonight they face off in Seattle in a World Cup match that the city’s hosting committee has, independently of FIFA, dubbed the “Pride Match,” with spectators expected to bring rainbow flags into the stands. Both countries complained about the occasion to FIFA when the game schedule was released last year. Football’s governing body distanced itself from the framing of the match, but said it wouldn’t outlaw the appearance of rainbow flags. It’s only the latest in several high profile clashes in sports over celebrating Pride. In the English Premier League in 2024, a player refused to wear a rainbow armband, citing his Muslim beliefs. Meanwhile in Major League Baseball, controversy is swirling around the San Francisco Giants after several players wrote bible verses on their caps to protest the team’s recent Pride Night game.
On the scene: GZERO’s Alex Gibson will actually be at the Egypt-Iran match. We look forward to hearing what he sees there!
On Thursday, Iran fired a drone at a Singapore-flagged cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, hours after releasing a public warning that passing ships must submit a transit request in order to travel freely. The US and Iran last week agreed to reopen the narrow waterway for 60 days as part of a preliminary agreement, giving a respite to months of shipping disruptions that impacted global trade and oil prices. But the pact leaves ample room for interpretation on what the future administration of the Strait will look like. Today’s strike suggests Tehran is interpreting its freedom of action more broadly than the US is, and that the Islamic Republic remains intent on exerting a measure of control over the strait.
This is not Fahrvergnügen. The company is set to axe one-sixth of its work force. The move reflects the tough fortunes of Germany‘s auto sector, which is under pressure from the flood of lower-cost Chinese car exports, as well as the effects of the Iran war and US tariffs.
Think you know what's going on around the world? Here's your chance to prove it.
France shattered its all-time heat record at 111.7°F, then broke it again the next day. What unexpected debate has the heat wave ignited?
Take the quiz to see if you guessed correctly!
