Hard Numbers: Iran’s candidates, Stronach’s sex crime charges, Bulgarians vote again, US border crossings drop

June 09, 2024

Mehrdad Bazrpash, an Iranian politician and the Minister of Roads and Urban Development, is speaking to the media at a media center in the Iranian Interior Ministry building after registering as a Presidential elections candidate during the last day of candidates' registration for Iran's early Presidential elections, in Tehran, Iran, on June 3, 2024.

Morteza Nikoubazl via Reuters Connect

6: Iran’s Guardian Council — an unelected body of religious clerics — has approved six candidates to run in elections scheduled for June 28, after President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash last month. Five of the candidates come from the hardline conservative camp, one is a reformer, and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was barred from running again.

5: Austrian-Canadian billionaire and politician Frank Stronach has been charged with five sexual assault crimes dating between the 1980s and 2023. The 91-year-old’s lawyers denied any impropriety, and police are withholding details about the charges, which include rape, indecent assault on a female, sexual assault, and forcible confinement.

6: Bulgarians went to the polls for the sixth time in just three years on Sunday as the European Union’s poorest member struggles to form a stable government in the wake of anti-corruption protests. No single party is expected to gain a majority, which will continue to inhibit Bulgaria’s development and block access to funds from Brussels.

3,100: US Customs and Border Patrol apprehended roughly 3,100 migrants crossing the border with Mexico on Friday, reflecting a drop of about 20% from just days before. It may be an early indication that Biden’s new border crackdown, which went into effect last week, is working.

Budget clash puts South African government on brink of collapse

African National Congress (ANC) members of parliament react after South African lawmakers passed the budget's fiscal framework in Cape Town, South Africa, April 2, 2025.

REUTERS/Esa Alexander

The second largest party in South Africa’s coalition, the business-friendly Democratic Alliance, launched a legal challenge on Thursday to block a 0.5% VAT increase in the country’s new budget, raising concerns that the fragile government could collapse.

Hard Numbers: Iran’s candidates, Stronach’s sex crime charges, Bulgarians vote again, US border crossings drop

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The second largest party in South Africa’s coalition, the business-friendly Democratic Alliance, launched a legal challenge on Thursday to block a 0.5% VAT increase in the country’s new budget, raising concerns that the fragile government could collapse.

Remember the TikTok ban? The new deadline President Donald Trump set for the app to find an American buyer or be banned from US app stores, midnight Saturday, is rapidly approaching.

Overnight, the US moved to having the world’s highest tariffs by a long margin. Here is Ian Bremmer's Quick Take on the near and long-term fallout

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Subscribe to GZERO Media's newsletter: Signal

Have you stayed atop GZERO’s news coverage this week? Here's your chance to prove it.

Someone needs to take National Security Advisor Michael Waltz’s phone out of his hand.

Donald Trump’s much-anticipated “liberation day” tariff announcement on Wednesday is the biggest disruption to global trade in decades, so the political, diplomatic, and economic impacts will take time to become clear.

Donald Trump is reportedly telling people that he and Elon Musk have agreed that Musk’s work in the US government will soon be done. Politico’s story broke just as Musk seems to have discovered the electoral limits of his charm.

What's going to be the reaction to the Trump trade war against Europe but also against the rest of the world? Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm, Sweden.