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Riot police officers fire tear gas canisters to disperse demonstrators during anti-government protests dubbed “Saba Saba People’s March,” in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru, Kenya, on July 7, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Kenya’s president cracks down further, UK and France open an atomic umbrella, Trump meddles in Brazil
Ruto orders police to shoot looters as Kenya protest escalate
Amid ongoing anti-government protests, Kenyan President William Ruto has ordered police to shoot looters in the legs. The order is meant to stop attacks on businesses, but could lead to more casualties after 31 people were killed on Monday alone. The youth-led protesters want Ruto to resign over high taxes, corruption allegations, and police brutality. According to Mercy Kaburu, a professor of international relations at United States International University in Nairobi, Ruto’s government “is not at risk of collapse before the next general election” which is set for 2027. But, she cautions, he “could be threatened if nothing changes.”
United Kingdom and France to open their nuclear umbrella
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron signed a landmark deal aimed Thursday at restricting the flow of migrants across the English Channel. But the cross-channel agreement that may draw more attention globally is a pledge from Europe’s only two nuclear-armed nations to extend their nuclear umbrellas to allies on the continent who face an “extreme threat.” This is a big step toward “common European defense” at a time when Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and uncertainty about the US long-term commitment to NATO have prompted more urgent action in Europe.
Trump uses tariffs to meddle in Brazil
US President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that the US will slap 50% on Brazil starting on August 1. The reason? Trump blasted Brazil for its “unfair” treatment of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing firebrand and close Trump ally who is currently on trial for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2022 Brazilian election. Trump also cited an “unsustainable” US trade deficit with Brazil, though official data show the US actually runs a small trade surplus with Latin America’s largest economy. Brazil’s leftwing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, reportedly blindsided by the announcement, has vowed to respond with reciprocal measures.
See below for Ian Bremmer’s Quick Take on what Trump’s move really means.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves (right) crying as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer speaks during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, London, United Kingdom, on July 2, 2025.
UK PM’s freefall is a warning to centrists
A week is a long time in politics, so the expression goes. A year? Well that must feel like a lifetime – especially for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
It was just over one year ago that Starmer took up residence at 10 Downing Street. With a 174-seat majority in parliament, and the opposition Conservatives in shambles after their worst election ever, the new Labour PM seemed ready to hit the ground running with a center-left agenda of better healthcare, lower immigration, and economic growth that benefits everyone.
He’s stumbled out of the starting blocks.
Just last week Starmer suffered a ringing defeat on a key agenda item, failing to pass welfare reforms that would have saved a mere £5.5 billion ($7.5 billion) by 2030 – just a small fraction of the overall government deficit. Members of the prime minister’s own party had objected to the cuts to disability benefits. To make matters worse, Starmer’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves was seen crying in the House of Commons after the government had to gut key provisions of the legislation.
The debacle reflected larger problems for the prosecutor-turned-politician. Starmer has failed to revive the UK’s long-sputtering economy, struggled to make good on a promise to stop illegal migrant crossings by boat from mainland Europe (they are actually rising), and had little-to-no effect on long waits for National Health Service appointments and treatments. These issues have overshadowed the prime minister’s successes elsewhere, notably the trade deals with the US and India.
The result: the Labour Party is now polling at just 24%, and Starmer’s net approval rating is a crushing -40.
“I think of him more as a barrister than a politician,” Lord Gavin Barwell, who was former Prime Minister Theresa May’s chief of staff, told GZERO. “You deal with issues sequentially, like a barrister deals with one case at a time, [but then] you don’t have any kind of overall narrative about what the government is for.”
To be fair to Starmer, he inherited some of his troubles from his predecessors. The UK’s challenging fiscal situation and the turbulent international environment would be hard for any prime minister to address within a year. What’s more, while the Conservatives are in the wilderness, there is a resurgent opposition group in the form of Nigel Farage’s nativist Reform UK. It is now polling ahead of both Labour and the Tories, the two parties that have held a duopoly on power in the UK for nearly a century.
Even so, the prime minister has often been his own worst enemy. Polling data from the opinion-research firm Early Studies suggests the government’s priorities haven’t aligned with those of the voters, especially when it comes to cost of living – 15% of voters said it’s their top concern, making it the biggest singular issue of all, yet it attracts just 1% of parliamentary attention. What’s more, Starmer’s communication with Labour backbenchers has been lacking, so rebellions – like the one on the welfare bill – occur more frequently than they should.
“I've heard from a few Labour MPs that they've never spoken to him,” says Jon Nash, a fellow at the London-based think tank Demos. “It does feel like there’s a bad level of organization within the party.”
Ominous signs for centrists. Starmer’s struggles highlight a broader issue that centrist parties across the world face: they tend to work too methodically and timidly within a system that a growing number of voters think is broken, all-the-while focusing on short-term issues while glossing over longer-term ones. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change conducts focus groups in most major Western democracies, and has found that the public’s frustrations are broad-based.
“There are these deep systemic trends where basically, voters and non-voters alike, just feel that around them is this pervasive sense of decline,” Ryan Wain, an executive director at TBI, told GZERO. “It’s mainstream politics’s job – I include the center-right in that, as well as the center left – to arrest and reverse that decline.”
And if centrist parties don’t reverse that decline, others are waiting in the wings to take their place, says Jon Nash of Demos.
“That inability to get anything done is what opens up the door to others coming along and saying, ‘Look, we’re going to do things differently. Vote for me, I’m a businessman,’ or, ‘vote for me, I’ll do something radical.’”
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan leave the St Paul’s Cathedral, where a service of commemoration took place to mark the 20th anniversary of the deadly July 7, 2005, London bombings in which four suicide bombers targeted London's public transport system, in London, United Kingdom, on July 7, 2025.
Hard Numbers: UK marks London bombing anniversary, Japan suffers a thousand tremors, Paris’ main river reopens, & More
20: The United Kingdom today commemorates the 20th anniversary of the suicide bombings on London’s public transport services that killed 52 people and injured over 700 more. The four perpetrators were all UK citizens. Two had trained with al-Qaeda the previous year.
1,000: The Japanese government is warning of more earthquakes this July after 1,000 tremors rattled islands in the Kagoshima prefecture, including a 5.5-magnitude quake Saturday on the island of Kyushu. Authorities have stressed that none of this is related to the popular manga series, “The Future I Saw,” whose prediction of a catastrophic Japanese quake went so viral that it dented tourism – the number of visitors from Hong Kong fell 11% in May compared to the same month last year.
$4 million: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) staff reportedly did $4 million worth of work modeling the costs of relocating Palestinians from the Gaza strip, and supported the launch of the controversial US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). BCG has since disavowed its involvement and emphasized that the company “was not paid for any of this work.”
$1.5 billion: The River Seine in Paris reopened to the public this weekend, following a $1.5 billion clean-up project commissioned ahead of the Olympics last year. Swimming in the Seine has been banned for more than 100 years due to concerns over pollution and river traffic.
1: Suriname’s National Assembly elected Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, 71, as the country’s first female president on July 6. A doctor by profession, Geerlings-Simons has promised to meet the needs of young people and will oversee Suriname’s impending oil boom, which is set to start in 2028 with a major offshore project.
Eastern Cape EMS Rescue team searches for missing Jumba Senior secondary school students at Efata bridge next to Mthatha Dam in Mthatha, South Africa on June 10, 2025
HARD NUMBERS: Flooding in South Africa, one lucky Canadian & More
49: Flooding in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, the result of snow and heavy rain, has left at least 49 people dead, including several people on a school bus that was swept away by the waters.
15: South Korea has switched off the loudspeakers that blast propaganda across the border into North Korea – the noise can be heard 15 miles away at night. The move comes a week after Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, who favors de-escalation with the North, won the presidential election.
3%: The United Kingdom’s National Health Service was the big winner of the Government’s spending review on Wednesday, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves increased the annual healthcare budget by 3% – amounting to another £29 billion ($39.2 billion) per year. Other departments, like the Foreign Office and the Environment Department, suffered cuts.
4: All of us dream of winning the lottery just once, but one man in Alberta, Canada, has now done it four times! David Serkin pocketed $730,000 from his latest jackpot – his third in the last year. He also happens to be a cancer survivor. He Serkin-ly has the luck of the draw!Leading Republican senators during their weekly briefing in the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., USA, on May 20, 2025.
What We’re Watching: “Big Beautiful” bill heads for the Senate, UK gives up Chagos Islands, Taiwan pivots to drones
House passes Trump’s tax agenda, but senators will now have their say
By a margin of just one vote, the US House early on Thursday passed a budget bill containing President Donald Trump’s tax agenda, which centers on making his 2017 tax cuts permanent. Some last-minute changes to the bill helped to get it over the line: House Republicans increased the SALT-cap to $40,000 and accelerated the introduction of work requirements for Medicaid. But can the GOP get the bill through the US Senate? Lawmakers in the upper chamber are already plotting changes to the legislation...
You can Chagos your own way: UK hands islands back to Mauritius, leases back base
More than two centuries after taking the Chagos Islands from France, the United Kingdom relinquished the Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius, but will continue to lease a US-UK military base there, on the island of Diego Garcia, for another 99 years. The UK says the deal, which creates a 24-mile buffer zone around the base, is meant to ensure its long-term security amid growing Chinese aggression in the area. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomed the deal.
Taiwan adds new drone units as part of shifting military strategy
Ever wary of a potential Chinese invasion, Taiwan announced that it will introduce its first-ever drone units this year. The move is part of Taipei’s evolving strategy of effectively deterring Beijing rather than preparing for a direct fight. “Overall, the cross-strait military balance still tilts toward China’s favor, since China spends a lot more on defense,” says Eurasia Group regional expert Ava Shen. “So it’s more pragmatic for Taiwan to be a ‘porcupine,’ so to speak.”Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini brief the media at the European Council in Brussels, Belgium, on December 11, 2017.
What We’re Watching: Pressure on Israel, Jitters in Bolivia, Podcasts for Democrats
Israel under fresh pressure
The UK and EU threatened Tuesday to revise trade ties with Israel unless PM Benjamin Netanyahu stops the new offensive in the Gaza Strip and allows sufficient humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave. This comes after the UK, Canada, and France threatened Israel on Monday with “concrete measures,” like sanctions. Netanyahu and his far right coalition allies say they are intent on destroying Hamas, though critics warn Israel is becoming a “pariah.”
The Morales of the story: Bolivian heavyweight to defy election exclusion
Bolivia’s socialist powerbroker Evo Morales, who governed from 2006 until he was ousted in protests in 2019, is officially ineligible to run in this August’s presidential election because of term limits. Yet he has pledged to mobilize his supporters to defy this rule, setting up a potentially destabilizing contest as his once-formidable leftwing MAS movement splinters into rival factions.
Democratic donors try a pivot to podcast
Faced with the vast array of conservative or MAGA-friendly online influencers who helped Donald Trump to win the 2024 election, Democrats and their donors are now trying to cultivate a creator economy of their own ahead of the 2026 midterms. There’s lots of money and pitches, but can you really create a viable ecosystem of influencers overnight? Authenticity, the heartbeat of any political campaign, is hard to create in a lab. You’re either a born killer or you’re not.
Trump’s call with Putin fails to deliver Ukraine ceasefire
Ian's takeaways:
On Trump’s Ukraine policy: “Absent a ceasefire, there is no breakthrough deal between Trump and Putin. None of that’s going to happen.”
On Western backlash over Gaza: “At the end of the day, unless Trump is going to squeeze Israel hard and say, 'Suspend intelligence and aid,' the way he did with the Ukrainians, I have a hard time seeing the Israelis in any way backing down from what is at this point an completely unconscionable military intervention and ethnic cleansing across the board in Gaza."
On tech power vs. government: “In the US digital space, it’s the tech CEOs who hold the power and the government isn’t ready for what’s coming.”
President Joe Biden at an event with Kamala Harris on lowering drug costs for America.
HARD NUMBERS: Biden diagnosed with cancer, Russian drones hammer Ukraine, Israeli forces enter Gaza, Pope Leo gets political, UK and EU are friends again, Austria wins Eurovision
9: Former US President Joe Biden, 82, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has metastasized to the bone. Biden’s cancer has a “Gleason score” of 9 out of 10, which means it is highly aggressive, but since it requires hormones to grow, may respond to treatment that deprives the tumors of hormones. Both US President Donald Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris expressed their sorrow on social media and wished the former president a successful recovery as he and his family review treatment options.
273: Russia launched 273 drones in the Kyiv region of Ukraine Sunday, killing one woman and causing widespread damage in its biggest drone attack of the war. Ukraine accused Russia of also intending to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile, but Moscow did not comment. The escalation comes ahead of US President Donald Trump’s calls with the presidents of Russia and Ukraine on Monday, to broker a ceasefire deal.
140: Palestinian health officials say Israeli air strikes killed over 140 people in Gaza Sunday, raising accusations of ethnic cleansing by the UN. Israel subsequently began a ground offensive in the territory after peace talks stalled in Qatar, with officials saying that the strikes were part of its plans to “achieve all of the war goals in Gaza” and establish “operational control” of parts of the territory.
200,000: An estimated 200,000 well-wishers, including a slew of world leaders, packed St. Peter’s Square in Rome for the first sermon of Pope Leo XIV - and the pontiff didn’t leave out the politics. Leo stated that his role is to serve without “yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat,” remarked on Ukraine being “martyred,” and deplored the people of Gaza being “reduced to starvation.”
12: The United Kingdom and the European Union have decided that there are plenty of fish in the sea for them to share: London granted EU boats access to UK waters for the next 12 years in return for fewer checks on British food exports to the 27-country bloc. The deal also includes a significant security pact. It’s a significant moment for UK-EU relations, just nine years after their infamous divorce.
160 million: Austria took top prize in the 69th Eurovision song contest Saturday, with classically trained countertenor JJ wowing an estimated 160 million viewers with his soaring pop-opera ballad, Wasted Love. Second place went to Yuval Raphael of Israel with a moving trilingual performance of New Day Will Rise, while Tommy Cash of Estonia came in third with his frothy fast-dancing confection, Espresso Macchiato.