World roundup: August 7 2025
Stories from Lebanon, Sudan, Russia, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
August 7, 1819: Simón Bolívar’s victory over colonial Spanish forces at the Battle of Boyacá allows his army to seize Bogotá and secure the independence of the colony of New Granada (roughly Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama). It’s considered one of the first key battles in Bolívar’s campaign to liberate northern South America.
August 7, 1946: The Soviet Union informs the Turkish government that its management of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus has been detrimental to other Black Sea countries (i.e., the Soviets themselves) and that it would seek to reopen international negotiations on the subject. This was the main event of the “Turkish Straits Crisis” and pushed Turkey to drop its stance of neutrality and align itself with the US/NATO. It was also a key factor in the development of the “Truman Doctrine,” about which FX subscribers can read more here.
INTERNATIONAL
The United Nations is hosting another summit this week in search of a global treaty on plastic pollution. At The Conversation, Cat Acheson, Alice Street, and Rob Ralston outline what’s at stake:
Plastics are everywhere – they’re even in you right now – and are making many of us sick. Now, global negotiators are fighting over whether that matters.
As 180 countries meet in Geneva to seek agreement on a global treaty on plastic pollution, a landmark review published in medical journal The Lancet has made the stakes clear. Plastics, the evidence shows, are a threat to human health – from womb to grave.
They’re linked to miscarriages, birth defects, heart disease and cancer. Plastics are harming people at every stage of the plastics lifecycle – from initial oil extraction to the production and use of plastic products, and their eventual disposal via landfill, incinerator or just being left in the environment.
Yet the possibility of a strong, health-centred treaty hangs in the balance. Campaigners, scientists and healthcare groups are pushing for strong measures to cap production and ban hazardous chemicals. But petrochemical producers and industry lobbyists are pushing back – arguing, against mounting evidence, that plastics are essential to saving lives.
The UN meeting in Geneva is the culmination of several years of negotiating. In theory, delegates will agree on a global treaty by August 15.
There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical that they’ll reach an agreement at all, let alone a meaningful agreement, in the face of heavy lobbying by the global oil industry. As is often the case I’d be happy to have my pessimism proven wrong.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
Two Israeli military (IDF) airstrikes killed at least five people in eastern Lebanon on Thursday, according to Lebanese officials. I haven’t seen any indication of comment from the IDF as yet but it’s probably safe to assume that it will claim some sort of Hezbollah-related justification. At least one other person was killed in an overnight IDF strike in southern Lebanon that Israeli officials claim targeted Hezbollah.
On that note, the Lebanese cabinet once again expressed its intention to disarm Hezbollah on Thursday, voting its approval in principle of a US proposal under which both Hezbollah’s disarmament and the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon (including a cessation of these airstrikes) would take place by the end of this year. The proposal, introduced by US envoy Tom Barrack in June, also includes the promise of a demarcation of the Israel-Lebanon border and international support for Lebanon’s economic recovery. Hezbollah has rejected disarmament and ministers associated with it and its parliamentary allies walked out of Thursday’s cabinet meeting before the vote.
The AP published a report earlier this week on the survivors of last year’s “pager attack” by the Israeli government, whereby intelligence operatives implanted explosives in electronic devices thought to be used by Hezbollah personnel and then blew them up indiscriminately across Lebanon. It’s a difficult read that includes disturbing photos of people, in some cases children, who were maimed in that attack. I’ve decided to embed the accompanying video but please don’t play it if you’re concerned about seeing those photos:
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli cabinet was scheduled to meet on Thursday to discuss Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent plan for a fuller military occupation of Gaza, despite concerns reportedly raised earlier this week by IDF commander Eyal Zamir. I have yet to see any reporting on the outcome of that meeting, but prior to its start Netanyahu told Fox News that Israel will “take over” the territory but will not “govern” it. Instead it will turn that responsibility over to some unspecified Arab body while the IDF establishes what Netanyahu called a “security perimeter.” It’s unclear whether he’s modified his earlier plan in light of Zamir’s concerns though what he articulated on Thursday seems markedly different from what had been reported earlier this week. It may be worth emphasizing that the “Arab body” he’s imagined assuming governance in Gaza doesn’t currently exist.
Whatever Netanyahu and his cabinet decide to do it’s clear that the Trump administration isn’t planning to stop them. US attention seems instead to be focused on humanitarian matters, which in theory is reasonable given that the World Health Organization is now estimating that 12,000 children in Gaza under the age of five are suffering from “acute malnutrition.” But the administration’s method of addressing humanitarian need in Gaza is, you guessed it, expanding the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” scheme. US ambassador Mike Huckabee told Fox News earlier this week that the plan is to open 12 new GHF distribution sites across Gaza, in addition to the four sites already in operation, and to “begin to operate them as much as 24 hours a day, to get more food to more people more efficiently.” The administration also reportedly brokered a meeting between senior GHF officials and UN personnel, though it’s unclear what that was supposed to achieve and there’s no indication that the meeting achieved anything at all.
For context, the NGO Doctors Without Borders has characterized the GHF project as “orchestrated killing” and “a deadly scheme that must be dismantled” in a new report it released on Thursday. It described the facilities as essentially unsecured, despite the presence of Israeli soldiers and Muslim-hating mercenaries who seem very willing to gun down aid seekers but apparently do nothing to protect those people from looters. Expanding the GHF to additional sites should probably be viewed more as a threat than a legitimate attempt to address Gaza’s humanitarian needs.
IRAN
The Trump administration on Thursday blacklisted another 18 people and entities allegedly tied to Iranian sanctions violations. These included at least two financial institutions accused of helping Tehran procure funds.
ASIA
ARMENIA
According to Reuters, when Donald Trump hosts Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the White House on Friday they will sign the framework of a peace agreement under which the US will take responsibility for developing a transit corridor that cuts through southern Armenia and connects Azerbaijan proper to the country’s Nakhchivan exclave. It will be known as the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.” Azerbaijan has been demanding this as a major condition of a peace deal but the Armenian government has been hesitant, fearing that the corridor could become an Azerbaijani land grab. The US will be obliged to ensure that the corridor remains open for Azerbaijani traffic without affecting Armenia’s territorial cohesion.
There are a number of US interests at play here. Chief among them involves Trump’s fixation on mineral wealth. He’ll almost certainly be demanding expanded US access to Azerbaijani oil and natural gas at a minimum. He’s also hoping that an Armenia-Azerbaijan deal could encourage Aliyev to enter into an expanded “Abraham Accords” framework with Israel, a country with which Azerbaijan already has diplomatic relations so this would involve expanded commercial and potentially military ties (with Iran as a common enemy). Beyond Azerbaijan the aim would be to encourage Central Asian governments to cut their own deals with Israel. There’s also Trump’s increasingly naked ambition for a Nobel Peace Prize to consider, though his case for that award so far amounts to concluding a bunch of shallow and potentially exploitative peace agreements in multiple conflict zones around the world without doing any of the detailed and time-consuming work required to actually implement and secure genuine peace.
PAKISTAN
A roadside bomb killed at least two police officers and wounded at least 14 other people in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Wednesday. There’s been no claim of responsibility but given the location it’s likely the bomb came courtesy of the Pakistani Taliban or an offshoot.
THAILAND
Cambodian and Thai delegations led by the countries’ respective defense ministers, Tea Seiha and Nattaphon Narkphanit, wrapped up a four day conference in Malaysia with an agreement to reinforce their ceasefire by inviting the deployment of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) monitors. Each government will form its own monitoring team comprised of ASEAN personnel and overseen by ceasefire mediator Malaysia. After the two countries spent several days accusing one another of violating the ceasefire last week the accord seems to be holding pretty steady, despite a dispute over the Thai military’s continued detention of 18 Cambodian soldiers.
AFRICA
SUDAN
An investigative report by The Guardian suggests that a Rapid Support Forces attack on North Darfur’s Zamzam displaced persons camp was far deadlier than previously reported:
More than 1,500 civilians may have been massacred during an attack on Sudan’s largest displacement camp in April, in what would be the second-biggest war crime of the country’s catastrophic conflict.
A Guardian investigation into the 72-hour attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on North Darfur’s Zamzam camp, the country’s largest for people displaced by the war, found repeated testimony of mass executions and large-scale abductions. Hundreds of civilians remain unaccounted for.
The magnitude of likely casualties means the assault by the RSF ranks only behind a similar ethnic slaughter in West Darfur two years ago.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, M23 militants killed at least 319 civilians last month in the Rutshuru territory of the eastern DRC’s North Kivu province. Türk called this “one of the largest documented death tolls in such attacks since the M23’s resurgence in 2022.” Previous reporting had put the death toll in Rutshuru at 169. The UN has traced most of the killing to four villages in the territory across a series of attacks that took place between July 9 and July 21.
The militants and the Congolese government signed a statement of intent toward a peace deal on July 19, which may explain why the violence in Rutshuru tapered off, though they’ve since made virtually zero progress on a series of agreed-upon confidence building steps and there are questions as to whether negotiations on a full peace deal will begin in Qatar on Friday as scheduled. M23 leader Bertrand Bisimwa claimed on Thursday that he had yet to receive an invitation to those negotiations from the Qatari government and he apparently hasn’t dispatched a negotiating team.
ZIMBABWE
The US State Department announced on Thursday that it’s halting routine visa processing involving Zimbabwean nationals, effective Friday, “while we address concerns with the Government of Zimbabwe.” The freeze will probably not affect diplomatic and other official visas. This appears to be another measure, like the new visa “bond” program the Trump administration introduced earlier this week, meant to reduce rates of overstay. I’m sure the fact that these measures have so far only targeted African nations (the bond program applies to travelers from Malawi and Zambia) is purely coincidental. All three of these countries were among the 36 (25 of them African) that the Trump administration threatened with travel bans back in June. At the time it demanded that the governments of those countries take steps to “improve their citizens’ travel documentation” and “address the status of their nationals who are in the United States illegally.”
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Wednesday’s reporting about the outcome of Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff’s visit to Moscow has proven partially correct, in that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are now planning a summit in the near future (though date and location are still up in the air at the moment). However, claims of a potential meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whether on their own or including Trump as well, seem to have been mistaken.
Trump had reportedly told European leaders that he would insist on a three-way session with Putin and Zelensky after his one-on-one with Putin, while an anonymous White House press official had suggested that Trump would require Putin to meet with Zelensky as a “precondition to an audience with Trump” (POLITICO’s phrasing, not mine). It turns out neither of those is happening because Putin simply refuses to meet with Zelensky under any circumstances, and Trump isn’t going to insist on it.
It’s unclear whether Trump still intends to impose new economic penalties against Russia on Friday, or if he’s so happy with the outcome of Witkoff’s visit that he’ll back off of that threat. He was noncommittal when asked about it on Thursday.
UKRAINE
According to The Wall Street Journal the Ukrainian military has stifled and started to drive back its Russian counterpart’s offensive in northern Ukraine’s Sumy oblast. Russian forces at one point appeared to be closing in on Sumy city but that no longer appears to be an imminent concern for Kyiv and the Ukrainians have recovered a small amount of the territory the Russians seized earlier this year. Nevertheless there are major concerns that the Russian military could redouble its efforts in the province, reflecting the fact that even if its forces aren’t making massive territorial gains they still outnumber and outgun the Ukrainians.
AMERICAS
VENEZUELA
The Trump administration doubled the US bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Thursday. It’s now prepared to pay $50 million for his arrest. I’m sure that will do the trick.
HAITI
Haiti’s transitional government appointed businessperson Laurent Saint-Cyr to head its presidential council on Thursday. By the terms under which the transitional government was established last year the chair of that council was supposed to rotate regularly so this is not an unexpected development. The fact that the corresponding ceremony had to take place in a suburb outside Port-au-Prince did highlight the negligible progress the transitional administration has made in restoring government control over the Haitian capital (which remains around 90 percent controlled by militants), though on the plus side a threatened attack on the ceremony by criminal militant leader Jimmy Cherizier failed to materialize. In theory Saint-Cyr could be the final chair of the presidential council before the transitional government gives way to a general election early next year, though under Haiti’s present circumstances it’s hard to imagine how a legitimate election could take place.
UNITED STATES
Finally, Donald Trump’s tariff regime finally took effect on Thursday, which in theory should end months of uncertainty about pretty much every aspect of this policy. But The American Prospect’s David Dayen argues that the tariff saga isn’t over, and that’s probably not good for the US economy:
Evidence is growing that the decent U.S. economic picture this spring was mostly a mirage. Employment has close to flatlined over the past three months, with large downward revisions for May and June. (This is what happens when you defund government data collection: The initial numbers are inaccurate and the revisions are larger. Errors are likely to increase given that on Friday, President Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in retaliation for the bad figures.) Labor force participation is down and the only real job growth is coming from health care and related services, precisely the industries that were savaged with at least $1 trillion in cuts in the Republican mega-bill. The economy is converging toward stagflation, with higher inflation and higher unemployment.
Paul Krugman argues that the data finally reflected the significant tariff uncertainty among businesses. Since April, no company has had any idea what their long-run costs of production would be; this has chilled investment and therefore hiring. There was a discrepancy between soft survey data, which confirmed this investment freeze, and the hard data, which didn’t. But the hard data has caught up.
So there was a stagnation. But now we have more certainty … maybe. The day before Trump’s August 1 deadline for tariff deals, he released a new tariff schedule set to go into effect this Thursday. The schedule reflects a baseline tariff rate of 15 percent, with some add-ons for countries like India and Canada and Brazil. There’s a possibility that businesses now know what they’re facing, and can adjust.
But the idea that all these deals set the new rules of the road in stone doesn’t tell the whole story. Beneath the surface are more carve-outs, exclusions, and special gifts for the industries with enough well-placed lobbyists to obtain them. “This is all just a con,” said Melinda St. Louis of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “[Trump] successfully used the real anger that people have about the status quo free-trade regime to claim he was upending things, when in fact we are seeing him double down on this corporate-rigged trade model.”
Alongside this, Trump has a pathological need to make more threats to demand more tribute and announce more “wins.” So the negotiations never really end, and the certainty never really sets in. That’s damaging not only to the global economy but to the credibility of the country. Trump perceives the leverage of the U.S. market more highly than the countries he’s trying to shake down. In the long run, they could just bolt, and that’s always been the biggest danger from the tariff mania.