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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, on October 23, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Modi to meet Xi, European bigwigs set to reimpose Iran sanctions, Egypt cracks down on influencers, & More
7: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping this weekend in Tianjin in what will be his first visit to China in seven years, a sign that tensions between the two massive countries are easing. Border disputes, technological rivalries, and China’s support for Pakistan have aggravated the relationship, but the US’s tariff policies appear to be pushing them closer.
30: The three most powerful European countries – France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – have got the wheels moving on restoring sanctions on Iran that they had lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal. The action comes amid concerns that Tehran is expanding its nuclear arsenal again. The sanctions could retake effect within 30 days.
151: Egyptian authorities have been arresting TikTok influencers with millions of followers. One human rights organization has tracked 151 such people being charged in the past five years in connection with their TikTok videos – and the full number could be even higher. The arrests are part of a broader government effort to clamp down on speech they see as antithetical to the official definition of family values.
250: Seven US deportees arrived in Rwanda yesterday as a part of a deal the East African country has struck with the Trump administration to ultimately accept up to 250 deportees. It comes after Kigali made a similar deal with the United Kingdom in 2022.
3: Thailand’s Constitutional Court permanently removed Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, dissolving her cabinet and deepening political turmoil in the country. She is the third of her family to be ousted from office, amid continued dominance by Thailand’s royalist-military establishment – despite her party taking electoral power from them in 2023.
Palestinians wait to receive food from a charity kitchen in Gaza City, on August 27, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Trump to talk Gaza plan, Niger’s anti-colonial crusade gives Russia an opening, Australia follows the money to Tehran
There is a US plan for Gaza
US President Donald Trump will convene a “large meeting” at the White House today to discuss a plan for managing Gaza once the war there ends. US special envoy Steve Witkoff even appeared to acknowledge that the US had a plan, adding that he hopes the war is resolved by the end of the year. The meeting comes as an inquest begins into Monday’s double Israeli strike on a hospital in Khan Younis that killed 20 people. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “tragic mishap.”
Russia uses Niger to go nuclear on France and the West
Russia may be focused on its invasion of Ukraine, but that hasn’t stopped it from making other moves to weaken the West: Moscow has offered to build a nuclear power plant in Niger that could hurt parts of France’s nuclear industry. Niger, a uranium-rich nation in the Sahara Desert, has previously exported the metal to France for further refining, but the ruling military junta has been cutting ties with the former colonial power ever since overthrowing the government in 2023 – and Russia eyes an opportunity. The plan is fraught with challenges, though, and the plant may never come to fruition.
Australia identifies Iran funding to synagogue attackers
Australia is following the money in its investigation of the antisemitic attack on a Melbourne synagogue last year, with officials saying Wednesday that the funds that the alleged perpetrators received traced back to Iran. It’s possible that those charged didn’t even know Tehran was involved. This revelation comes after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday that Iran orchestrated this terrorist attack, as well as another in Sydney. Australia isn’t the only country probing the role of Iran’s government in carrying out terrorism: British and Swedish security forces have also warned that the Islamic Republic were attempting to use proxies to commit attacks in their countries.
A member of the M23 rebel group walks on the outskirts of Matanda in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, March 22, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Civilian killings in the DRC, Musk scraps plans for third party, Swedish church moves to altar-nate site, & More
140: Rwanda-backed rebels killed at least 140 civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in July, per Human Rights Watch, and the number could rise to 300. The two sides had seemed on the path to peace after signing a peace deal in the White House in June, but the killings suggest the conflict is far from settled.
30: Eemeli Peltonen, a 30-year-old Finnish Member of Parliament, passed away in the parliament building yesterday. It appears he died by suicide. The death of Peltonen, who was a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, has shocked the country. He was one of the youngest politicians in the Finnish government.
79: A bus carrying Afghans who had been expelled from Iran crashed in western Afghanistan yesterday, killing 79 people. It was on its way from the border to the capital Kabul. Iran has deported hundreds of thousands of Afghans this year, in part over unsubstantiated claims that they were spying for the Israelis.
$290 million: So much for that third-party idea: Tesla owner Elon Musk is quietly shelving his own plan to fund a third party in the United States. Musk donated over $290 million to Republican campaigns ahead of the 2024 election, but had threatened to create a new party – and inject it with some of his cash – when Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill. It seems he realized he had a mountain to climb.
672: Talk about a pilgrimage! A 133-year-old church in northern Sweden – all 672 tons of it – completed its two-day relocation today, after shifting three miles down the road in the village of Kiruna. Risk of ground subsidence forced the move – the town’s history of iron ore mining meant the church was no longer on terra firma. To achieve the move, the whole building was placed onto a giant trailer and hauled at a steady pace of roughly 550 yards per hour.The Pentagon is seeking more than $3.5 billion in emergency funding to replenish US weapons and equipment for Israel, following Iran’s large-scale April 2024 missile and drone attack.
Graphic Truth: Pentagon seeks billions to restock Israeli defenses
The Pentagon is seeking more than $3.5 billion in emergency funding to replenish US weapons and equipment for Israel, following Iran’s large-scale April 2024 missile and drone attack. The largest single request, about $1 billion, is for RTX’s Standard Missile interceptors which are used to shoot down ballistic missiles. Another $204 million is earmarked for Lockheed Martin’s THAAD interceptors, which destroy ballistic missiles at high altitudes. Funds for radar upkeep, vessel refurbishments, and munitions transport are also on the bill. The requests, drawing on Congress’s 2024 Israeli Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, underscore the steep costs of sustaining a heightened US military presence in the Middle East.
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.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with Judiciary Officials in Tehran, Iran, on July 16, 2025.
Iran’s next act?
– By Willis Sparks
Iran’s government is in big trouble.
Twelve days of war earlier this summer demonstrated that Iran has little capacity to defend its cities or its nuclear facilities from Israeli and US strikes.
Meanwhile, its most potent proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthi rebels — have taken bad beatings over the past year. Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s principal state ally in the Middle East, now lives in Moscow rather than Damascus.
And within Iran, no one knows exactly what will happen when the ailing 86-year-old supreme leader makes his final exit. Everyone in a position of power in Iran must wonder how a succession, which the country hasn’t experienced in 36 years, will affect his influence, power, and access to wealth. And simmering beneath all of that, the risk of civil unrest inside Iran is always present – it can be triggered by a single incident on the street or inside a police station.
But the regime still has a not-so-secret weapon, and it’s precisely the one that Israel and the United States attacked in June.
Despite those airstrikes, Iran still appears to have a nuclear program, though how much of one remains a matter of dispute. Just after the attacks, President Donald Trump called the US strikes “a spectacular military success” that had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s most important enrichment facilities. A US intelligence report published on July 17 asserted that 12 bunker-busting bombs dropped from US B-2 bombers had severely degraded Iran’s enrichment facility at Fordo and inflicted significant damage on other sites.
But other damage assessments have raised doubts about these conclusions. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, said at the beginning of July that it was “highly speculative” to estimate Iran’s new breakout time (the time needed to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make one nuclear weapon), and assessed that, while “Iran has lost centrifuges at the three facilities that suffered damage, it also likely has an undeclared stockpile of centrifuges.”
The bottom-line: Iran still has options. If its leaders want to try for a bomb, they almost certainly can. And Iran’s wounded and humiliated regime now has every reason to race to build the only weapon that can guarantee its security.
If they do, that could force a big decision on Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: whether to take down the Iranian government itself. In the closing hours of the operation in June, Israeli fighter jets struck the headquarters of the paramilitary militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing hundreds of its members. That’s a direct attack on the core of the regime — and a reminder of what’s possible if Iran’s leaders try to rebuild the nuclear program.
Whether the next Iran-related emergency involves an even more destructive and direct US-Israeli attack on Iran, or a surge of destabilizing unrest inside the country, or both, we may remember June’s “12-day war” as the opening act of a much more consequential drama.
But one thing is nearly certain: the catastrophic events of the past two years have likely made a nuclear weapons program more valuable for Iran’s leaders, not less.
An oil tanker is being loaded at Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura oil refinery and oil terminal in Saudi Arabia May 21, 2018.
Hard Numbers: OPEC+ further expands oil output, Ukraine attacks drone corruption, UK releases gonorrhoea vaccine, & More
547,000: OPEC Plus, the eight-member oil cartel de facto led by Saudi Arabia, announced on Sunday it would increase oil production by 547,000 barrels a day, the latest in a series of increases that first started in April. In response, oil prices dropped more than 2% on Monday.
6: Anti-corruption authorities in Ukraine charged six people with embezzling funds intended for drone purchases in a “large-scale” bribery scheme. The arrests include one sitting legislator, a National Guard commander, two officials, and two businessmen.
100,000: The United Kingdom rolled out its gonorrhoea vaccines on Sunday, a move that the National Health Service believes will prevent 100,000 cases of the sexually transmitted infection. The vaccine is 30-40% effective, but the hope is that it will stem the growing number of antibiotic-resistant cases of the infection.
12: Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was sentenced to 12 years under house arrest on Friday for witness tampering and fraud. He was also barred from public office and fined $578,000, but the right-wing ex-leader plans to appeal the conviction.
0000: Iran’s parliament proposed cutting four zeros from is currency, the rial, as decades of high inflation, sanctions and economic mismanagement have eroded its value. The proposed change would aim to simplify financial accounting and reduce printing costs.View of Tehran at sunset on February 26th, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Iranian water shortages prompt public holiday, Trump admin to burn contraceptives, Ozzy leaves the stage for the last time, & More
1: Iran announced an impromptu one-day public holiday on Wednesday for Tehran’s residents, in an effort to save on water and electricity. Intense heatwaves have added strain to an already-worsening water crisis in the country, brought about by climate change and mismanagement.
$10 million: The Trump administration will incinerate nearly $10 million worth of US-funded contraceptives – intended for poorer nations – in France, after storing them for months in a Belgian warehouse following cuts to USAID programs. The White House reportedly rejected offers from the United Nations and other NGOs to buy or distribute the supplies themselves.
$4 billion: A Saudi business delegation arrived in Syria on Wednesday, where it is expected to sign $4 billion worth of joint projects and deals with Damascus. Riaydh has been a key financial backer in Syria’s post-war rebuilding efforts.
100: Over 100 humanitarian organizations issued a joint statement on Wednesday calling on governments to take decisive action against mass starvation in Gaza. Demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire, the statement warns that Israel’s partial aid blockade on the enclave has left assistance workers – alongside Palestinian civilians – “wasting away.”
76: Heavy metal pioneer Ozzy Osbourne died at 76 on Tuesday. Just weeks ago, the ailing rock icon held a final reunion concert with Black Sabbath, the supergroup that he started as a young lad in Birmingham, United Kingdom, more than half a century ago. So long Oz, may the Crazy Train keep chugging on into eternity.