Hard Numbers: Pence documents, UK loses refugee kids, Yellen callin’ on Beijing, Gates vs. burps

Former US Vice President Mike Pence, speaks at Cornerstone Church.
Former US Vice President Mike Pence, speaks at Cornerstone Church.
DPA via Reuters

Roughly 12: A lawyer for former Veep Mike Pence has found “about a dozen” classified documents at Pence’s Indiana home. First Trump. Then Biden. Now this. The only real question now is: Who among us has NOT left the White House with classified materials?

200: The UK says it can’t account for 200 asylum-seeking children, who are missing from a temporary accommodation shelter. Some of the children are under the age of 16, and almost all of them are from Albania. Since taking power in October, PM Rishi Sunak has been criticized for failing to deal adequately and humanely with a wave of asylum-seekers arriving on small boats from France.

6 billion: US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, speaking on the Zambian leg of her Africa trip, called on China to forgive $6 billion in debt that the country owes to Beijing. Yellen said China’s intransigence was holding up a broader restructuring of the country’s $17.5 billion in external debt. Let’s see how kindly Xi Jinping takes to the US telling him what to do with his money.

12 million: An Australian climate tech startup backed by Bill Gates has raised $12 million to make special food that stops cows from… burping so much. If you didn’t know, the emissions of cows — coming from both ends of the animal — are a major source of greenhouse gases.

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Why are some countries issuing travel advisories for visiting the United States? How are the political tensions in Netanyahu's government impacting the war with Hamas? Will public outcry over the arrest of Istanbul's mayor lead to major political reforms or shifts within the Turkish government? Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.

Joachim von Braun, president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, speaks at the “Risks and Opportunities of AI for Children: A Common Commitment for Safeguarding Children” event.

© Alessia Giuliani/IPA via ZUMA Press via Reuters

In a conference at the Vatican last week, Catholic leaders called for global action to protect children from the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Semiconductor chips are seen on a circuit board of a computer in this illustration.

REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration

A coalition of nine European countries is discussing how to accelerate the continent’s chip independence, the group said on Friday.

Midjourney

Just a few short months ago, Silicon Valley seemed to have the artificial intelligence industry in a chokehold. Startups OpenAI and Anthropic blazed the trail on large language models while Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech incumbents invested billions to keep up. But when the Chinese startup DeepSeek released its AI models in January, claiming they matched American ones in performance at much cheaper prices to develop, the US lead was suddenly called into question.

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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A key insight revealed by the Yemen military strike group chat: The entire Trump cabinet is saying we shouldn’t be helping the Europeans, and if we have to then they should be paying for it. It's not collective security, it’s purely transactional security.