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Crowds gather in Times Square to celebrate the surrender of Japan, V-J Day, New York City, New York, USA, U.S. Army Signal Corps, August 15, 1945
Hard Numbers: 80th anniversary of V-J day, Trump wants a stake in Intel, ICE eyes detention expansion, South Korean producers win “Baby Shark” lawsuit
80: Today marks the 80th anniversary of Victory over Japan Day, or “V-J Day”, the day that Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied forces, bringing an end to World War Two. We’ve previously covered how Japan and the US’ relationship have since evolved.
7%: Intel shares rose by 7% on Thursday after reports emerged that the White House was considering purchasing an ownership stake in the US-based chipmaker. The reports highlight Trump’s increasing willingness to intervene in private chip companies, with Nvidia and AMD agreeing to hand the White House 15% of their Chinese revenues earlier this week.
107,000: US President Donald Trump has reportedly ordered a major expansion of ICE’s detention facilities – raising the number of beds by over 41,000 to 107,000. While the Department of Homeland Security has not confirmed details, the project is being funded by Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill passed in congress last month.
6: Fear not, the hit children’s song “Baby Shark” is here to stay. After a grueling six-year legal battle, South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled against US composer Jonathan Wright, who filed a lawsuit accusing the producers of the song of plagiarism. You can listen to Wright’s version here and decide for yourself.
South Korea's former first lady Kim Keon Hee, wife of impeached former president Yoon Suk Yeol, arrives at a court to attend a hearing to review her arrest warrant requested by special prosecutors at the Seoul Central District Court, in Seoul, South Korea August 12, 2025.
Hard Numbers: South Korea’s ex-first lady jailed, Mexico transfers cartel members to US, Europe threatens to re-sanction Iran, Poland rearms
800 million: South Korea sent Kim Keon Hee – the 52-year-old wife of former President Yoon Suk Yeol – to solitary confinement on Tuesday, after arresting her for stock manipulation, bribery, and election meddling. Prosecutors accused Kim of making over 800 million won ($580,000) by manipulating the stock price of local BMW dealer, Deutsch Motors. Her husband President Yoon was impeached and detained after he tried to impose martial law in December last year.
26: Mexican authorities extradited 26 suspected cartel members to the US, at the Department of Justice’s request on Tuesday. The move comes as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to crack down on cartels and drug smuggling. A similar transfer of 29 prisoners was made last February.
3: The E3 – France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – threatened to reimpose previous sanctions on Iran at the end of this month unless Iran agrees to restart negotiations over its nuclear program. US-Iran nuclear talks were previously suspended after Israel and the US struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in June. Analysts observe that Iran faces some tough tradeoffs ahead.
$3.8 billion: Poland – which borders both Russia and Belarus – signed a $3.8 billion deal with the US on Wednesday to modernize its fleet of F-16 fighter jets. The deal is part of a broader rearmament push in the country, which was launched after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
FFM Mogami at the Yokosuka Naval Base on April 8, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Japan wins huge Oz carrier contract, Migrant boat sinks off Yemen, US to require bonds from visa-seekers, Taiwan arrests chip snoops
$6.5 billion: Japan won a $6.5 billion defense contract to build 11 new warships for Australia’s navy on Tuesday. The deal comes as Australia undertakes a major defense overhaul in order to counter China’s expanding presence in the Indo-Pacific.
68: At least 68 African migrants have died after a boat capsized off the coast of Yemen on Sunday. Yemen is a major transit route for migrants from the Horn of Africa – which includes Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, and Eritrea – who go to the Gulf monarchies in search of work. The overall death toll is feared to be greater than 140.
15,000: The US is planning to require some visa applicants to pay bonds of up to $15,000, as President Donald Trump continues his crackdown on immigration. The State Department said the measure will target countries whose citizens overstay their visas most often: looking at you, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Haiti, Venezuela, and Spain.
6: Taiwanese authorities have arrested six people suspected of stealing trade secrets from TSMC, the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturer. While their nationalities haven’t been made public yet, China’s Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) and the US’s Intel trail far behind TSMC, which supplies chips to Nvidia and Apple.Graphic Truth: Where US tariffs stand with key trade partners
After weeks of high-stakes negotiations, US President Donald Trump rolled out sweeping changes to tariff rates on Thursday. Here’s a look at where those tariffs stand for the United States’ principal trading partners, including info on whether these partners have struck deals with Washington so far.
Gerald Ford American President and Leonid Brejnev Soviet Leader, on July 30, 1975 at Conference on Security and Cooperation in Helsinki.
Can this Cold War agreement broker peace between Russia and the West?
Fifty years ago, leaders from 35 countries – including rivals from both sides of the Iron Curtain – gathered in the Finnish capital of Helsinki to attend the first Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE).
The talks capped three years of Cold War negotiations, culminating in the signing of the Helsinki Final Act – a landmark agreement that laid the groundwork for stabilizing relations between Eastern and Western bloc countries and paved the way for future economic and security cooperation.
“It was a very unusual assembly,” says Ian Bond, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform. “The fact that two sides that were brandishing nuclear weapons at each other were nonetheless able to find an agreement of this sort, is pretty extraordinary in itself.”
What exactly was so groundbreaking about the Helsinki Final Act? The two most significant legacies from the Helsinki Final Act were its principles on state sovereignty – which acknowledged that each state had the right to choose their own alliances, and political, social, economic and cultural systems – and human rights – which pledged signatories to respect fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religions or belief.
In the years that followed, Western governments and Soviet-bloc dissidents used these principles to protest abuses under Moscow and its satellite regimes, facilitating the transition of Central and Eastern Europe to democracy.
“Turning the commitments on human rights provided leverage, not only to Western governments to raise human rights issues with communist bloc counterparts, but to internal opposition within those countries,” says Bond. “This laid the foundations for the fall of the Soviet Union.”
Today, Moscow and the West once again find themselves at odds, principally over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In some ways the relationship is worse now than it was during the depths of the Cold War.
“We’re in a phase where the two sides aren’t really talking to each other and are not really interested in talking to each other,” says Bond, “and that’s particularly true on the Russian side.”
So, could a new Helsinki process broker peace between Russia and the West again? Perhaps, says Bond, but the will to find peace needs to be there first. Helsinki wasn’t a tool for managing active conflict, rather, it was designed to guide parties already committed to de-escalation.
In the lead up to the Helsinki Act, the driving force was a shared recognition that tensions between the East and the West were reaching a breaking point.
“Diplomats tend to overestimate the ability of diplomatic processes to find a solution when the two parties to a conflict…have not themselves already decided that they want [in] a settlement,” says Bond. “The precondition is that both sides have decided that they will get more out of de-escalation than maintaining the conflict. And we’re not at that stage yet.”
For another Helsinki-style breakthrough to happen, both sides need to already be ready to ease tensions and look towards rebuilding some basic level of mutual trust.
What relevance, if any, does the Helsinki Final Act hold today? While the prospect of Russia and West returning to the negotiating table still remains distant, preserving Helsinki’s foundation for cooperation and core principles is vital for any future de-escalation.
“All wars end eventually, and at that point you will need some sort of mechanism for managing the relations between adversarial powers,” says Bond. “And that’s basically what the Helsinki Final Act provided and might provide again.”
Fleeing office workers run from the scene of an active shooter in Midtown Manhattan, Monday, June 28, 2025, in New York City.
Hard Numbers: Shooter kills four in New York skyscraper, Deadly floods in China, Abducted Nigerians killed after ransom payment sent & More
4: A gunman killed four people, including a police officer, at a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper in New York City on Monday. The shooter, identified as Shane Tamura, was armed with an M4 assault rifle when he entered the building, which is home to the headquarters of the National Football League (NFL) and other corporations. Tamura was carrying a note claiming that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy – a degenerative brain disease common among football players – because of the NFL.
38: At least 38 people are dead after days of heavy rains and flooding in Northern China, prompting President Xi Jinping to initiate “all-out” search and rescue efforts on Monday. The extreme weather has also led officials to evacuate 80,000 residents from Beijing, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
35: Nigerian gunmen killed at least 35 hostages despite receiving a ransom payment of 50 million naira ($32,600) for the release of 56 people that they had abducted from a village in northern Nigeria. Mass kidnappings are commonplace in Africa’s most populous country, and there has been a spate of them in the first half of 2025 (read more here).
1: In a bid to better control online information and protect “moral and ethical values”, Kyrgyzstan’s government has decreed that all internet traffic will be handled by one state monopoly. As part of the move, the small Central Asian nation has also banned online “skin flicks” (sorry for the archaic term, readers, but we’ve got spam filters to beat!)
13: After a case that lasted 13 years, a Colombian lower court judge found former President Álvaro Uribe guilty of bribery on Monday, in what was the first major criminal conviction of an ex-leader in Colombia. The conservative Uribe, who led the country from 2002 to 2010, will likely appeal the ruling, meaning the case is far from over.
An armed PKK fighter places a weapon to be burnt during a disarming ceremony in Sulaimaniya, Iraq, July 11, 2025, in this screengrab obtained from a handout video.
What We're Watching: Kurdish militants melt away the past, Trump to shift focus away from Congress, Germany gets a taste of US-style court battles
Kurdish militants burn their own guns
In a symbolic ending to more than 40 years of rebellion against the Turkish government, fighters from the PKK — a Kurdish militia — melted a cache of weapons in a gigantic cauldron on Friday. Earlier this year jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan called for disarming as part of a process expected to deliver more cultural autonomy for Kurds, who make up 20% of Turkey’s population. The move shifts attention onto the future of affiliated Kurdish militias in Syria, as well as to Turkey’s parliament, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is courting support from Kurdish parties as he seeks to soften term limits.
Is the White House done with legislating?
A week after signing the One Big, Beautiful Bill into law, and just six months since taking office again, US President Donald Trump is reportedly done with pushing major legislation through Congress. As he goes into campaign mode ahead of the 2026 midterms, he will instead focus on key issues like trade and immigration via executive actions, which don’t require congressional approval but are susceptible to legal challenges. However, it seems not everyone is aligned: House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he still wants to pass two further budget reconciliation packages. Which is it? More bills or no more bills?
German constitutional court clash embarrasses Chancellor Merz
Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz's government had to shelve a vote on appointing three judges to the Constitutional Court after one of them was accused – spuriously, it turned out – of plagiarism, and criticized by conservative coalition members for supporting abortion rights. Critics are likening the drama to US-style culture wars over the judiciary, and have warned it undermines the legitimacy of Germany’s top court. The debacle also reflects the fragility of Merz’s three-month-old coalition, which holds just a slim, 12 seat majority in the Bundestag.
Graphic Truth: The BRICS+ in a "G-Zero" world
The BRICS, a loose grouping of ten “emerging market” economies led by Brazil, Russia, India and China, held their 17th annual summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this weekend. While the official readout from the summit emphasized their commitment to multilateralism, the guestlist begged to differ. Five of the 10 leaders were no-shows, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While the group’s declaration took aim at tariffs increases and recent attacks against Iran, it stopped short of mentioning the US or naming President Donald Trump directly. For more, here’s GZERO writer Willis Sparks’ explainer on why the BRICS are a bad bet.