World roundup: May 8 2025
Stories from Saudi Arabia, India, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
May 8, 1429: The Siege of Orléans ends with the withdrawal of the besieging English forces and, therefore, a French victory. This siege was the first victory by the French army under the leadership of Joan of Arc and helped reverse French fortunes in the Hundred Years’ War. It was not a devastating defeat for the English army, but had the English army captured Orléans it likely would have been able to conquer all of France so the victory prevented a total French defeat. The ensuing Loire Campaign was more decisive, opening up the city of Reims to the French army and giving the French Dauphin Charles the legitimacy to have himself crowned King Charles VII.
May 8, 1945: The German high command in Berlin signs the “instrument of unconditional surrender,” providing for the withdrawal and disarmament of the German military and the ouster of the Nazi-led government and ending World War II in Europe. Because the instrument was signed late into the evening, and thanks to the wonder of time zones, Victory in Europe, or “V-E,” Day is celebrated on May 8 in points west of Berlin and on May 9 in most points east of Berlin, like Russia and Israel.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) carried out “several” airstrikes across southern Lebanon on Thursday, killing at least one person and wounding eight others in one of its most active days in Lebanon since the onset of November’s ceasefire—yes, that’s right, the one the IDF keeps ignoring. Israeli officials claimed that they’d targeted sites connected with Hezbollah. Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who for some reason seems increasingly irritated that the IDF keeps bombing his country, took to social media to say that “all Israeli violations of UN Resolution 1701 and ceasefire agreements must come to an end. The Lebanese government has not – and will not – stop pushing for Israel’s full withdrawal from our territory.”
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Civil defense officials in Gaza say that most of their vehicles are no longer functioning due to lack of fuel, drastically limiting the work of first responders in the territory. They’re also reportedly struggling with shortages of generators and oxygen. It is the latest in a series of breakdowns caused by the Israeli government’s total blockade on humanitarian supplies entering Gaza, which is also now forcing the closure of World Central Kitchen-supported community kitchens across the territory since WCK said earlier this week that it’s run out of food.
The Trump administration claimed on Thursday that a “new foundation” will soon be announcing plans to get food into Gaza, an organization that according to the AP is calling itself “the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” that could be led by former South Carolina governor and World Food Program director David Beasley. This is supposed to soften the edges of the Israeli government’s plan to restart a very limited distribution of aid in the territory by taking direct control over that project out of Israeli hands, though the foundation would still be subject to Israeli oversight. Beasley apparently has ties to the private firm that supported the Joe Biden Memorial Pier project so his bona fides with respect to Gaza and humanitarian relief speak for themselves. In fairness this approach is probably an improvement on letting the Israelis control aid distribution themselves, though not much of one.
SAUDI ARABIA
According to Reuters, the Trump administration has decided to move forward on a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia without making it contingent on a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement. The Saudi government has been pursuing US technical support for the development of a nuclear power program for some time now. The Biden administration made that support part of a package of concessions it was offering to the Saudis to secure the normalization agreement. But Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has refused to normalize relations with Israel absent substantive progress toward a Palestinian state, and the Israeli government has refused to consider anything of the sort. Israeli media is reporting that Donald Trump is “frustrated” with Israeli leaders over their obstinance in Gaza ceasefire talks and that may explain the decision to decouple a Saudi nuclear deal from normalization. But there are other considerations as well, like preventing the Saudis from seeking their nuclear knowhow elsewhere (i.e., China).
Removing the normalization piece eliminates one roadblock to a deal but not the only one. US nuclear deals with other countries are limited by Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which stipulates that any country getting US help for its nuclear program must give up any sort of domestic uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing capability, as those are the two routes via which a civilian nuclear program can become a military nuclear program. The Saudis have refused to surrender those capabilities so they’ll need to find some kind of workaround to get past US law and congressional concerns about a potential Saudi nuclear weapon.
IRAN
The Trump administration on Thursday blacklisted a Chinese firm and three port operators for allegedly receiving and refining Iranian oil in violation of US sanctions. The firm runs a so-called “teapot” refinery, which is a term used to describe small, ostensibly independent operations that are less vulnerable to Western sanctions than large firms.
ASIA
INDIA
New Indian-Pakistani clashes on Thursday have raised concerns that the repercussions of the Indian military’s Wednesday strikes on Pakistan may yet escalate into full-fledged war. According to Indian authorities, the Pakistanis targeted several military sites in India’s Jammu and Kashmir regions with drones and missiles, to no apparent effect in terms of either casualties or damage. Pakistani officials are claiming that their air defenses downed 29 Indian drones, some of which targeted the cities of Karachi and Lahore. The two governments have acknowledged at least 45 people killed collectively over two days of fighting. Thursday’s exchange of fire was definitely a step down in intensity from Wednesday’s but not enough of a step down to say that this situation is definitely on the road to deescalation.
MYANMAR
At least 327 people have fled from Myanmar into Thailand over the past day, according to Thai authorities, in the wake of a rebel attack on a Myanmar military outpost. The Karen National Liberation Army and the Karen National Defense Organization struck the facility, located in Myanmar’s Kayin state, on Wednesday. It’s unclear whether these evacuees were predominantly military personnel or civilians. They’re being housed in temporary facilities along the border and the Thai government has stepped up security in the area.
AFRICA
SUDAN
AFP reports on the effect of repeated drone strikes by the Rapid Support Forces militant group on Port Sudan:
Paramilitary drone strikes targeting Sudan's wartime capital have sought to shatter the regular army's sense of security and open a dangerous new chapter in the war, experts say.
Since April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) group has been at war with the army, which has lately recaptured some territory and dislodged the paramilitaries from the capital Khartoum.
The latter appeared to have the upper hand before Sunday, when drone strikes began blasting key infrastructure in Port Sudan, seat of the army-backed government on the Red Sea coast.
With daily strikes on the city since then, the RSF has sought to demonstrate its strength, discredit the army, disrupt its supply lines and project an air of legitimacy, experts believe.
According to Sudanese analyst Kholood Khair, “this is intended to undermine the army’s ability to provide safety and security in areas they control”, allowing the RSF to expand the war “without physically being there”.
Elsewhere, a likely RSF drone strike killed at least two people, both children, in the city of Omdurman on Thursday. The Sudanese military controls most of that city but the RSF does hold positions to the west and south from which it could have launched the strike.
SOUTH SUDAN
The UN World Food Program and UNICEF reported on Thursday that continued fighting between forces aligned with South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and forces aligned with Vice President Riek Machar have blocked humanitarian food shipments from reaching “some 60,000 malnourished children” in South Sudan’s Upper Nile state for almost a month. The fighting has apparently made shipping those supplies along the White Nile River nearly impossible and has led to a spike in looting that has also impacted aid shipments. UNICEF says it may run out of supplies in Upper Nile by the end of this month under current conditions.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
Vladimir Putin’s V-E Day ceasefire took effect on Thursday and within hours both the Russian and Ukrainian governments were accusing one another of potentially hundreds of violations. So it’s going really, really well. The Russian military even acknowledged capturing another Ukrainian village, though it insisted that it did so before the ceasefire went live.
Elsewhere, the Ukrainian parliament on Thursday ratified the country’s new minerals deal with the United States. Maybe that explains why Donald Trump is continuing to reposition himself on Ukraine’s side of this conflict. He spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by phone on Thursday and afterward took to social media to say that “the US calls for, ideally, a 30-day unconditional ceasefire” while threatening new sanctions “if the ceasefire is not respected.” Putin has resisted previous calls for a 30 day ceasefire, an idea that the Trump administration first broached back in March. Trump has seemed increasingly irritated by Putin’s intransigence in recent weeks, as his relationship with Zelensky has improved.
GERMANY
Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has decided to suspend its decision to designate the Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party as a right-wing extremist group. AfD apparently filed for an injunction against the designation in a court in the city of Cologne, where the BfV is headquartered. The agency will wait for the court to rule before it proceeds.
DENMARK
The Danish Foreign Ministry summoned US chargé d’affaires Jennifer Hall Godfrey on Thursday to answer for claims made in a Wall Street Journal report earlier this week alleging an increase in US intelligence activity pertaining to Greenland:
Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.
The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island.
The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland.
Gabbard’s office has released a statement criticizing the WSJ for “aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information,” which you’ll note is not a denial of what was in the report.
VATICAN CITY
The cardinal-electors of the Catholic Church elected themselves a surprising new head of state on Thursday in the person of Cardinal Robert Prevost, who took the regal name “Pope Leo XIV.” Prevost had been considered one of the possible candidates to succeed the deceased Pope Francis, but the main thing that seemed to be working against him was the fact that he’s a US national. He’s now the first US national to become pope. The new prelate is thought to be fairly moderate in his views but he has advocated for the rights of migrants in the past and suggested in his first address as pope that he would take after Francis at least in some regards.
UNITED KINGDOM
Late in the day on Wednesday, Donald Trump took to social media to let everyone know that come Thursday morning he’d be announcing “a MAJOR TRADE DEAL WITH REPRESENTATIVES OF A BIG, AND HIGHLY RESPECTED, COUNTRY.” It turns out he lied: the deal with with the United Kingdom.
I kid, sort of.
In truth the deal doesn’t seem all that major, either. It leaves Trump’s 10 percent across the board tariff in place on most British products but does reduce tariffs on UK auto and steel imports and it lowers the UK’s tariffs on US products. There are some additional agricultural components but the whole thing seems fairly underwhelming given the hype. It’s possible this is just the first stage of a more comprehensive US-UK trade arrangement but who knows?
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, it feels like it’s been a little while since we checked in on Co-President Elon Musk, but you’ll no doubt be pleased to learn that he’s doing pretty well for himself in the public sector. As the Trump administration attempts to push the US military budget up over the glorious $1 trillion/year mark, albeit through a bit of legislative trickery, The Intercept’s Nick Turse says that Musk is likely to make off with a healthy chunk of that money:
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a personal adviser to the president, claimed that he would cut costs at the Pentagon with his minions at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Instead, experts say that, if approved, Donald Trump’s bloated Pentagon budget will almost certainly benefit Musk and his company SpaceX with huge new projects.
The first is a missile shield, dubbed the Golden Dome, which is reminiscent of the Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile-defense boondoggle. Trump’s budget plan also calls for an undisclosed flood of funding for “U.S. space dominance to strengthen U.S. national security.”
Musk’s SpaceX firm, which is already a major Pentagon contractor/beneficiary, is likely to win a big “Golden Dome” contract to put hundreds of missile detection satellites in orbit. He’s apparently trying to do this on a “subscription model,” whereby the US government would have to continue paying SpaceX in perpetuity to keep the system working. And I mean “working” in the loosest possible sense, because as Turse notes the idea that this system will actually be able to protect the United States from a major missile attack is pure fantasy.
(For what it’s worth, the General Accounting Office now says that the Pentagon “needs to accelerate the pace at which it addresses its long-standing issues” if it hopes to meet its goal of finally passing an audit by the end of 2028. The US Congress required the Department of Defense to submit annual audits back in 2018 and it has yet to pass a single one. At this rate it may be more likely that Congress will repeal the requirement than that the DOD will ever actually produce a clean budget.)
It actually gets better for Co-Pres. Musk. Not only is the US military looking to shovel more money at him, according to The Washington Post the Trump administration is using its international heft to push more business his way:
A series of internal government messages obtained by The Post reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name. The documents do not show that the Trump team has explicitly demanded favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs. But they do indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm at a moment when the White House is calling for wide-ranging talks on trade.
In India, government officials have sped through approvals of Starlink with the understanding that doing so could help them cement trade deals with the administration, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect private deliberations.
“It’s not likely to be an explicit element of the trade negotiations with the U.S., but the Indian side sees this as an important lubricant that facilitates a deal,” said one of the people briefed on the matter by Indian leadership.
Asked for comment on the satellite firm, the State Department said in a statement: “Starlink is an American-made product that has been game-changing in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity. Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.”
Yes I’m sure this is all very simple and believable as far as the China angle is concerned, but it sure does seem like an interesting coincidence that Co-President Musk bankrolled Donald Trump’s campaign and now stands to make a mountain of money from these totally-not-quid-pro-quo Starlink deals. Good for him, I guess.