Notes

We were able to share a preview of the modernist composer Max Richter’s new album, Sleep Circle, in July. It’s out in full now. Here, in “Patterns / Solo (Pt. 1),” Richter plays lulling melodies on piano while a string quartet paints the sky with dusk. It’s brief, so it probably won’t make you doze off–even if that’s what Richter has in mind.

The Bristol-based producer who goes as A Sagittariun (you may remember him) has a new EP out, here with a full-throttle, Detroit-style techno at 139 beats a minute. It’s as frantic as watching the pedestrian traffic in Times Square subway station at rush hour, only on fast-forward.

The Liverpool band Ladytron has a new single out featuring a chilly house thump—and an ominous cult-like video to go with it. Fun to hear them do an up-tempo number, with Helen Marnie sounding as aloof and remote as ever.

The long-running British pop outfit Saint Etienne have released what they apparently intend to be their final studio album, International. This track is a perfect example of how the group approaches their mixture of nostalgia and longing with an upbeat melodic piano house banger, albeit about a former relationship. It’s true, there’s some “keep on climbing” positivity here—which you may welcome—but this is no less another memorable moment of the kind of sublime melancholia they’ve always been so distinctively able to evoke.

Who are Saint Etienne?

Another strange week in America: Federal judges block the domestic deployment of U.S. military troops while the president continues the operations anyway. His administration fires agency officials who resist radical policy reversals. Congressional investigations now target the investigators of the circumstances surrounding the January 6 riot. All in the same week. Each commanding attention as a separate emergency that demands immediate reaction—along with some tense music and a chyron at the bottom of the screen.

Step back from that screen, though, start talking to the right people, and something else might come into view: For all the endless, sometimes breathless descriptions of Donald Trump’s governing style as “unprecedented,” it actually follows a historical pattern some good scholars have been able to recognize. The Signal’s contributor Stephen Hanson identifies it as patrimonialism—a political tendency to build personal power and authority, at the expense of democratic institutions and standards, by treating government like a family business where loyalty matters more than rules—or much of anything else.

Why does that matter? Because the “achilles heel” of patrimonialism, as Steve has put it, is corruption. It’s how patrimonial politics gets done, and it’s how patrimonial politics can come apart. This week, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto discovered, to his immense surprise and consternation, what happens when patrimonial corruption becomes too much for the people his legitimacy depends on: Housing allowances for Prabowo-friendly legislators worth 10 times Jakarta’s minimum wage triggered deadly protests that forced the popular strongman into immediate retreat. Prabowo’s corruption may be relatively simple to see and understand, but it raises a question no patrimonial authority operating in a democracy can entirely answer: How long can I get away with this?

This week’s member’s despatch explores what makes patrimonial politics vulnerable—and why understanding corruption as one of its defining means, and inevitable ends, might change how we see what happens next.

The Ottawa native Kathleen Edwards has a new album out titled Billionaire. Her rootsy Americana music has a bigger sound than usual on this LP—partly on account of the producer, Jason Isbell, and partly on account of his band, The 400 Unit, sitting in. The title of this track might make it sound like a kiss-off song—but it isn’t; it’s about closing her coffee shop and returning to music after a few years off.

Adrian Sherwood, the longtime dub maestro and head of the label On-U Sound Records, returns with his second true solo album since 2012’s Survival & Resistance. This is deftly crafted dub music in the style of Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor. Sherwood mourns the loss of some collaborators and friends on this record, but you can hear his hope for better days to come.

Though not a household name in the United States, Europe, or most of the rest of the world, Mádé Kuti is Nigerian music royalty. His father is Femi Kuti, and his grandfather was Fela Kuti, a pioneer of the Afrobeat genre and the leader of Africa ’70 and Egypt ‘80, among other hugely successful African bands. Now, Mádé is breathing new life into the Afrobeat sound, with big horns and layered production, while playing multiple instruments, himself, including saxophone, trumpet, bass, and piano.

Cameo Blush is a producer in London, working in experimental dance circles, and the creator of this track, which we might best describe as post-dubstep … dubstep being the genre—with its distinctive, highly syncopated beats, prominent bass lines, and dark melodies—that brought producers like Burial and Joy Orbison to prominence the mid and late 2000s. “One Chance” has the bass-forward wobble of that original dubstep sound but with the high BPM count of modern techno (here, 141).

Most of us have noticed at one time or another, if we aren’t noticing it all the time, the way contemporary news coverage feels designed to compel us to check it constantly—even while the experience seems to make it harder to track what’s actually going on in the world as it unfolds over months or years, or longer.

At The Signal, we certainly notice this. And think about it a lot. Every once in a while, that leads us to make some adjustments in what we do—as I’m glad to say we’re doing this month.

Nite-Funk is the duo of Ramona Gonzalez (who usually records as Night Jewel) and her friend Damon Riddick (the funk keyboard ace known as DāM-FunK). Here, the pair release another alternative R&B gem—a plea for human connection with a G-funk sound.

The political landscape of the Plurinational State of Bolivia shattered on Sunday when the centrist senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira scored a stunning first-place finish in presidential elections, setting up an October runoff against the right-wing former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga. Paz, who had been polling under 10 percent, captured 32.8 percent of the vote while the Movement for Socialism (MAS)—which has dominated Bolivian politics for two decades—suffered a catastrophic collapse.

The scale of MAS’s defeat defies easy explanation. The party that won 68 percent of the vote in La Paz department just five years ago managed barely 4 percent this time. Its official candidate, Eduardo del Castillo, finished sixth with just 3.2 percent nationally. The party’s founder, the former president Evo Morales, had called on supporters to cast null ballots after being barred from running, but even that can’t account for the magnitude of the collapse.

Paz’s victory represents more than a political upset; it’s a repudiation of two decades of economic populism during Bolivia’s worst economic crisis in a generation. The country faces nearly 25 percent annual inflation, critical shortages of dollars and fuel, and widespread protests over rocketing prices. MAS built its dominance during the commodities boom of the 2000s and early 2010s, when high global prices for Bolivia’s natural-gas and mineral exports funded social programs that delivered tangible improvements in living standards, particularly for indigenous and working-class people.

The puzzle is how a senator from a wine-producing region polling in single digits managed to topple a socialist movement that had governed for 20 years and captured 55 percent support nationally just five years earlier.

What happened?

On Friday, the U.S. Justice Department released a 337-page transcript and audio recordings of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s July interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell is currently serving 20 years for sex trafficking and related charges. The disclosure represents an extraordinary departure from standard Justice Department procedures—and appears to be the first time a convicted defendant seeking clemency from a U.S. president has been interviewed personally by a deputy attorney general he appointed.

It all follows weeks of political crisis over the Trump administration’s handling of Epstein files. Initially, it refused to release additional materials despite earlier promises of transparency. After facing fury from both Democrats and Republicans, the administration reversed course, conducting these high-level interviews with Maxwell and releasing the results as what you could hardly be blamed for seeing as damage control.

In the interviews, Maxwell told investigators she never witnessed inappropriate behavior by President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, or Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during their interactions with Epstein. She insisted there was never any Epstein “client list,” contradicting the very widespread conspiracy to the contrary.

Maxwell said that Trump was “always very cordial and very kind”; that Clinton “absolutely never went” to Epstein’s private island, despite Trump’s repeated claims that Clinton visited “28 times”; that she “never witnessed anything untoward” in Trump’s friendship with Epstein; and that “I do not believe he died by suicide, in reference to Epstein’s death.

Notably, Maxwell was convicted partly for lying about her knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s activities. Now she’s telling investigators she never saw Trump, Clinton, or Kennedy do anything wrong; she’s meanwhile seeking a presidential pardon—all right after the Trump administration’s deputy attorney general conducted this unusual interview with her … following massive political pressure to release Epstein files.

What’s her testimony actually tell us, then?

On Thursday, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine conditions in northern Gaza, making this only the fifth IPC-confirmed famine in the organization’s 20-year history—and the first ever in the Middle East.

The IPC cites plummeting food consumption, with more than one in three people going days without eating; acute malnutrition rates doubling in some areas; and mounting evidence of starvation-related deaths. According to the World Health Organization, 74 Gazans died from malnutrition in 2025—63 in July alone. Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry reports 271 malnutrition deaths in total, including of 112 children, since the conflict began.

The Israeli government responded immediately, calling the report not only “an outright lie” but “a modern blood libel.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office cited successful humanitarian deliveries and falling prices for basic goods, arguing that shortages were on account of systematic thefts of aid by Hamas—while Israeli officials argued that while current shortages are connected to an 11-week aid blockade, that ended months ago; non-Israeli factors are driving circumstances now; and there is, in all events, no intentional Israeli starvation policy.

Meanwhile, as Gaza’s 2.1 million residents live through the circumstances, others near and far are parsing competing narratives from organizations with fundamentally different stakes in the outcome.

So what’s actually happening?

David Grubbs, the avant-garde guitarist and piano player (in Gastr del Sol and other bands), has put together a collaborative record with the Athens-based cellist Nikos Veliotis, the Japanese electronics ace Taku Unami, and the American percussionist-composer Sarah Hennies. As you might expect, none live in the same city—so they emailed files to each other to make this haunted drone-based record … under the name Bitterviper.

So far, 2025 has been a fairly quiet season for tropical systems in the Atlantic Ocean—but Hurricane Erin did its best to stir things up, even if it missed the East Coast and delivered only a glancing blow to the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos—and a brush past Bermuda.

Now it’s off toward Ireland and the United Kingdom …

But when it gets there next week, Erin will be an extratropical cyclone—a cold-core storm that will pack less of a punch than a warm-core storm would. The GFS model shows Erin spinning in the waters between Iceland and Ireland for several days, bringing rains from Tuesday all the way to Saturday in Dublin.

Then, a combination of wind shear and sinking air over the Atlantic will throw a blanket over hurricane season for a while. But the season for tropical systems in the Atlantic doesn’t end until November 30, meaning there’s plenty of time for more tropical mayhem in 2025.

The cover of Farshad Akbari’s new album, Echoes of Nothingness, shows a sand-bleached skull sitting on dunes of empty desert as far as the eye can see. In this track, you can hear echoes of soaring, symphonic synth artists of the 1970s and 80s, like Vangelis or even Tangerine Dream—but also more dissonant sounds that can be characteristic of Persian and Afghan compositions: Akbari was born and raised in Tehran, and now lives in Kabul. This is music to drift away to.

What is that dissonant sound in Middle-Eastern music?

Throughout July of last year, Bangladeshi student-led protests swelled in Dhaka and other cities. Prime Minister Sheikha Hasina, whose party, the Awami League, had arrogated power over the judiciary and the security services during her 15 years in office, insulted the demonstrators as “razakars”—a pejorative for people who’d collaborated with Pakistan’s armed forces in 1971, when most Bangladeshis wanted or even fought for their country’s independence.

This insult brought people from all classes—including, crucially, many women—into the streets. Some women used sticks and stones to fight against police and Awami League enforcers, and images of their courage only drove more support for the demonstrators. Police and paramilitary units reportedly killed at least 800 protesters, which violence in turn inspired more Bangladeshis to join the rebellion.

On August 5, Hasina fled the country to India, as protesters stormed the prime minister’s residence. The country installed a provisional government led by Muhammad Yunus, the 85-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who’d successfully used microcredit to promote economic development in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi prosecutors charged Hasina with crimes against humanity, the country’s Anti-Corruption Commission filed corruption charges against her, its International Crimes Tribunal sentenced her for contempt of court, and its interim government revoked her passport.

Yet one year later, the interim government appears to be following some of the tactics from Hasina’s authoritarian playbook: They’ve arrested critics and former Awami League supporters—on plainly bogus charges, including aiding genocide. They’ve banned the Awami League, which still has significant voter support; it’s the oldest party in the country and helped lead its struggle for independence. Neither is the government seriously pursuing the documentation and prosecution of human-rights abuses, including forced disappearances, of Hasina’s regime. Yunus’s government had delayed national elections, which only now, one year after the overthrow of Hasina, he’s finally scheduled for February.

What’s gone wrong?

Block out some time to take in Jens Lekman’s new single, from his upcoming album, Songs for Other People’s Weddings, out September 12. It runs a little longer than 10 minutes, telling the story of a wedding singer traveling to Leipzig for a marriage in a church where Bach used to work—and ends up sitting with strange people at the singles table. Don’t be fooled, now, by the fake ending around 4:30 …

The constitutional crisis that began with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s failed martial-law gambit in December continued this week when his wife, former first lady Kim Keon-hee, appeared in court over allegations that the couple exerted undue influence on the conservative People Power Party to nominate a candidate they preferred during the 2022 election. With Yoon himself under arrest on insurrection charges—the first sitting president in South Korean history to get himself in such a situation—the proceedings highlight how deeply the scandal has penetrated the country’s political establishment.

Eight months in, the crisis continues with no resolution in sight—and its effects are radiating: Unemployment spiked in December; the won, South Korea’s currency, has fallen to 15-year lows; and the central bank has cut growth forecasts. More troubling for Seoul’s international standing, the prolonged governmental paralysis has created what analysts have called a “quiet crisis” for the U.S.-South Korea alliance, with critical policy discussions stalled just as the Trump administration moves aggressively on multiple fronts. And domestically, the stakes go way beyond Yoon’s personal fate—to the question of how well South Korea’s 40-year-old democracy can withstand this level of institutional stress without suffering permanent damage.

How bad is it?

On August 8, Israel’s Security Cabinet approved a plan for the Israeli Defense Forces to occupy Gaza City, the Palestinian territory’s largest population center and one of the last areas that hadn’t been under full Israeli control. On August 10, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the escalation, saying Israel would clear Gaza City and central areas of civilians by moving them to “designated safe zones” where they’d receive “ample food, water, and medical care.”

Despite tens of thousands of Israelis protesting the plan, Netanyahu recommitted to his position this week, claiming it represents “the best way to end the war and the best way to end it speedily.” The announcement drew international condemnation, with Germany suspending military-equipment exports that could be used in Gaza and Australia imploring that Israel “not go down this path.” After 22 months of war that’s brought widespread destruction and loss of life to Gaza, Netanyahu’s persistence in the face of mounting opposition from advisors and allies alike draws out an ongoing uncertainty, as to how well anyone fully understands his government’s objectives—and how much remains deliberately ambiguous.

What can we say about this?

Updated: Saturday, August 16, 14:30 GMT.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met for nearly three hours in Anchorage on Friday, emerging without any agreement to end the war in Ukraine. Standing alongside Putin at a joint press conference, Trump said, “There’s no deal until there’s a deal.” He also said they’d made “great progress” and agreed on “many, many points.”

Putin thanked Trump for the bilateral summit, saying Trump was correct that the war wouldn’t have begun if he’d been president in 2022. As the two concluded their brief remarks, Putin said in English, “Next time, in Moscow”—prompting Trump to respond, “Oh, that’s an interesting one. I don’t know. I’ll get a little heat on that one. But I can see it possibly happening.” Both refused to take questions from reporters before walking off the stage together, leaving the substance of their discussions—and the path forward on Ukraine—shrouded in (it seems deliberate) ambiguity.

But Saturday brought the first concrete result: Trump abandoned his demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine, aligning himself with Putin’s preference to skip straight to final peace negotiations. “It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement,” Trump announced on Truth Social—a dramatic reversal that European leaders, who’d backed the ceasefire-first approach, learned about after the fact. This was hours after Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which Trump reportedly told him that Putin wants Ukraine to cede all of Donbas in exchange for a “promise” to end the war.

What was that?

The Northern Californian singer-songwriter Cass McCombs has a new LP out, Interior Live Oak, on August 15. It’s some easy-going Americana, with a leisurely beat and a tight backing band that mostly stays in the background. McCombs is telling you he doesn’t dream of hitting the open road: “You know I never lie in my songs. And I never dream about trains.”

Southern Europe continues to roast in its fourth heat wave of the season, with thermometers topping out above 40 degrees Celsius across Spain—and Paris isn’t far behind, with 36 Celsius at Orly Airport. On Tuesday afternoon. Malpensa Airport in Milan hit 33. And the heat is heading to the northwest, so it may get to London before long. (On Tuesday afternoon, Stanstead Airport in the U.K. pushed 31.)

Météo-France placed more than half the Republic under heat-wave warnings on Monday, with 12 out of 96 mainland French administrative units under the highest red alert, while Spain’s Aemet warned of “extreme danger” in Zaragoza and the Basque Country—issuing yellow and orange warnings for almost all the rest of the country.

Both weather agencies forecast temperatures above 40 degrees in the coming days and called for vigilance, forecasting “a very intense, even exceptional” heat wave in parts of the Continent.

French meteorologists say the heat is likely to break records on Monday and Tuesday, with temperatures passing 42 Celsius in the southwest. Last weekend, in the village of Tourbes, near Béziers, temperatures hit a record high of 41.4.

In Spain, Aemet expects temperatures to rise further on Monday in the Ebro basin—the southern and eastern thirds of the Iberian peninsula—and the eastern Cantabrian Sea. And it anticipates 37-to-39 degrees Celsius across the interior of the Iberian peninsula, with maximum temperatures above 40 in the interior of the Basque Country and highs that could reach above 44 in the lower Guadalquivir.

Scorching.

The Jamaican singer and songwriter Naomi Cowan mixes pop, R&B, and reggae in her new album, Welcome to Paradise. Produced by the British DJ (and reggae aficionado) Toddla T, this track blends in ska horns and some one-drop rhythm for a dreamy recollection of a sound the world heard from Bob Marley in the 1960s and ‘70s.

What’s one-drop rhythm?

On July 26, Taiwan held recall elections for 24 members of the Legislative Yuan, the country’s legislature. To be clear, 24 is more than 20 percent of the Yuan as a whole.

The center-right Kuomintang (KMT) and their ally, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), won a majority in the Yuan after last year’s elections, but the center-left Democratic People’s Party (DPP) backed the recall effort to try to flip control of the chamber.

The DPP had controlled it—and the country’s presidency—since 2016, but President Lai Ching-te, a.k.a. William Lai, has met immovable opposition in the Yuan since the last elections.

The recall effort failed, but the campaign—and the months of divided government—have shown a deepening and dangerous partisan polarization in the country. The KMT wants a friendlier approach to mainland China, while Lai and the DPP see Beijing as an existential threat and want closer ties with the U.S. and the West.

But now the Kuomintang and the TPP are pushing to give the legislature greater powers over the presidency and to freeze spending—which the DPP says serves the interests of China.

The KMT-TPP allies say Lai and the DPP want a war with China and are using anti-democratic means to silence opposition: The government indicted TPP leader Ko Wen-je on corruption charges last December. During the recall campaign, KMT leader Eric Chu compared the DPP to the Nazis and Lai to Adolf Hitler. Yuan members from opposing parties even got into a huge brawl inside the chamber in May of 2024.

And amid all this, the Chinese Communist Party is stepping up social-media propaganda campaigns to demonize Lai and the DPP and to promote misinformation and conspiracies.

Is Taiwan’s democracy in trouble?

Black Sites is a duo out of Hamburg, composed of DJ Helena Hauff and mastering engineer Kris Jakob (AKA F#X). R4 is their first new record in 11 years. This track features a wonky 8-bit melody that sounds almost like someone left a Tetris machine out in the rain. But the thump under it never wavers.

The Kremlin announced Thursday that President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed “in principle” to meet “in the coming days”; on Friday evening Trump confirmed the summit will take place next Friday, August 15, in Alaska. The announcement followed a three-hour meeting in Moscow between Putin and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, the fifth such visit since Trump took office in January. While Putin had initially suggested the United Arab Emirates as a possible venue, Trump ultimately chose Alaska, saying he was open to the meeting without requiring Putin first to sit down with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—a condition the White House had initially floated.

The timing seems to have proved crucial: Trump had set a Friday deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or face new sanctions and tariffs, including 100 percent tariffs on countries buying Russian oil. Instead of compliance, Putin appears to have offered Trump something he’s long wanted—a face-to-face summit. Meanwhile, Trump simultaneously imposed 25 percent tariffs on India over its Russian oil purchases, showing he’s willing to follow through on economic threats even as he pursues diplomacy.

The summit will be the first between Russian and American leaders since 2021, before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s campaign promise to end the war “in 24 hours” has meanwhile receded into absurdity, while his administration has grown increasingly frustrated with Russia’s continued attacks on Ukrainian cities despite months of peace efforts. A Kremlin aide confirmed the Alaska meeting, describing the location as “quite logical” given the proximity across the Bering Strait.

What’s Trump's endgame here?

Israel’s security cabinet voted early Friday to expand military operations and take control of Gaza City. The plan—with its first phase deadline set for October 7, the two-year anniversary of Hamas’s deadly 2023 attack on Israeli civilians—would bring Israeli forces into one of the last areas not under full military occupation. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office framed the decision as part of five principles for ending the war, including disarming Hamas and establishing Israeli security control over Gaza.

The decision follows building domestic and international pressure on Israel for a ceasefire—and faces acute opposition from within Israel’s own military leadership, with Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir reportedly opposing the full takeover over concerns about endangering the estimated 20 hostages still alive and the strain on exhausted reservists. There’s also been swift and broad international condemnation: Germany announced it would suspend arms exports to Israel, while the UN warned of “catastrophic consequences.” Back in Israel, families of hostages have condemned the expansion as a “death sentence” for their loved ones. The move comes as Gaza faces what UN officials call an unfolding famine, with reports of Palestinians killed while seeking aid since May.

What’s Netanyahu thinking?

How about some lush deep house—from Sofia Kourtesis’s new EP, Volver. This track layers so many loops—bass, drums, high hat, congas—but Kourtesis never loses control. Thirty-nine years after Mr. Fingers’ “Can You Feel It,” house music is still vital and evolving.

Last week, wee looked at the heat searing Türkiye. This week, it’s Asia. In Japan, the national temperature record fell on Wednesday, as the city of Tamba in western Honshu reached 41.2 degrees Celsius breaking the previous record from 2020 by 0.1 degrees. On the same day, local temperature records broke in 39 locations—including in Kyoto, which reached 40 degrees for the first time—with almost a third of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s weather stations reporting highs above 35 degrees.

In South Korea, Seoul had a record-breaking 22 consecutive “tropical nights”, a term used by the Korea Meteorological Administration when overnight temperatures fail to fall below 25 degrees. On Thursday, the minimum overnight temperature in the capital was 29.3.

Vietnam also roasted, with the capital Hanoi experiencing its first-ever August day above 40 degrees Celsius on Monday. That beat the city’s previous August record of 39.8 degrees set in 2021.

Long-term forecast models suggest temperatures will trend above average throughout the latter part of August and into September—and may still set new records before autumn.

The Cambodian hip-hop artist VannDa has a new album on the way, and he starts it off with a blistering track on the border conflicts between his country and Thailand, which have raged and ebbed since, believe it or not, the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1904. Recently, in July, the conflict flared again, before the two countries announced a ceasefire on August 1. You hear pain in VannDa’s voice here about “losing my brothers to a war we never chose.”  VannDa burst onto the scene in 2021 in the post-Covid collaboration “Time to Rise” with the aging Cambodian lute star and singer, Master Kong Nay. The video was filmed inside Phnom Penh’s National Museum of Cambodia, showcasing the building’s distinctive architecture and featuring both VannDa and Master Kong Nay in traditional Khmer clothing.

A little more than a decade ago, a shot rang out in the courtyard of a Chinese government building. Practically nothing is known of what really happened, only that it was an execution—and that the execution was a reminder to Chinese state employees of the consequences of treason. The executed had sold secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency. Neither was it the only such case. Between 2010 and 2012, Chinese authorities killed at least a dozen sources working for the CIA and imprisoned more. One after another, they were arrested, tortured, and executed.

“The creation of the Chinese spy network,” Tim Weiner writes in The Mission, “was one of the highest achievements in the history of the clandestine service, its destruction an unsurpassed debacle.”

How could this happen?

This past week, Polish authorities arrested 32 people they suspect of coordinating with Russia on sabotage operations within Poland—remarkably direct evidence, if the cause for the arrests is true, of Moscow’s clandestine activities against a NATO member state. But it’s not an isolated campaign—and it’s not just Russia in the broader pattern. Earlier in July, Ukraine detained two Chinese nationals spying on missile programs, while China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi privately told EU officials that Beijing emphatically does not want Russia to lose the war—fearing it would free the Americans to focus on China.

Meanwhile, reports in February exposed Chinese companies rebuilding factories and infrastructure in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, helping legitimize territorial conquest through economic investment. Throughout 2025, European intelligence sources have reported to Reuters, Chinese factories have been producing Russian attack drones for the war effort. In Georgia, months of democratic backsliding culminated in the government awarding strategic port contracts to sanctioned Chinese firms—while also courting Iran, which has been rearming proxy groups across the Middle East with advanced weaponry, disrupting oil production in Kurdish Iraq through drone attacks, and ending months of calm in the Red Sea with strikes on commercial ships.

Each incident might seem isolated. Russian saboteurs here, Chinese spies there, business deals elsewhere. But the pattern suggests something potentially more systematic: autocratic powers dividing labor to undermine democratic institutions. China provides economic muscle and technology, Russia delivers military aggression and sabotage, Iran offers regional destabilization.

Is this an emerging, coordinated anti-democratic axis?

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas party have rewritten their country’s constitution to extend presidential terms from five to six years and allow indefinite re-election. The party and their allies in El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly used a supermajority to pass changes to five articles of the constitution in a 57–3 vote on Thursday. The reforms also eliminated runoff elections, meaning future presidents can win with simple pluralities.

Bukele first took office in 2019 and has become a polarizing figure: His tough-on-crime policies have dramatically reduced homicides, making him popular with voters; yet human rights groups have documented that around 3,000 children have been wrongly caught up in his security crackdown—including a 17-year-old girl forced to plead guilty to collaborating with the MS-13 gang despite her denials.

He meanwhile has strong international backing, not least from U.S. President Donald Trump, who’s praised his approach to crime and punishment. Last year, Bukele told Time magazine he wouldn’t seek a third term, though now of course he’s free to change his position.

How far could he take things now?

The Belgian outfit Soulwax—principally, the brothers David and Stephen Dewaele—have appeared here with some collaborators and an up-tempo dance number about running away with “the music.” It’s hard to argue with.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on Brazil this week—for reasons that had nothing to do with trade. In his letter to the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Trump explicitly cited his anger over the prosecution of Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, calling it a “Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”

It’s a new frontier in trade weaponization—using economic policy to intervene in another country’s judicial proceedings. The economist Paul Krugman called the move “grotesquely illegal”—noting that among other issues the move raises, “not liking what a country’s judicial system” is doing violates international trade law.

But here’s where things got even more curious: Trump simultaneously exempted nearly 700 Brazilian products from the tariffs, including airplanes, iron ore, aluminum, natural gas, orange juice, fertilizers, petroleum, and lumber. Brazilians responded by adopting the mocking acronym “TACO”: Trump Always Chickens Out. And there are certainly at least similar patterns with other countries: 30 percent tariffs on Mexico and the EU starting August 1—but with goods covered by the  United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade deal that replaced NAFTA, still exempt.

What is he doing?

The UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification—the organization’s food security monitor—issued its starkest warning yet about Gaza this week: It faces a “worst-case scenario of famine.” According to the IPC report based on data up to July 25, more than 20,000 children have been admitted for acute malnutrition treatment since April, with more than 3,000 severely malnourished. Yet this remains an “alert,” not a formal declaration of famine, because the third criterion—demonstrable deaths from malnutrition—cannot be confirmed.

Meanwhile, a curious split opened between official Israeli and U.S. assessments. When asked about starvation, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told reporters, “The reality is the opposite,” while U.S. President Donald Trump said there is “real starvation” and announced plans for U.S. “food centers”—and that both he and his wife, Melania, have been “deeply affected by the images.” The mechanics of aid distribution add another layer of complexity: The Israeli- and American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation says it’s distributed over 89 million meals, but aid experts warn most items require water and fuel for cooking—resources that are now largely unavailable.

So what convinced Trump?

And now, the very essence of cheesy European 1980s synth-pop—a catchy candy track from Baltimora with a chorus that echoes Johnny Weissmuller’s famous cry from the 1930s Tarzan films. Fun for anyone up for the kitsch of it—but also a prime example of Italo disco that made it into the top-five on the charts during the summer of ’85 across West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Norway, and eventually the United Kingdom.

What is Italo disco?

Last Friday, just before noon, local time, Silopi in southeast Türkiye hit a blazing 50.5 degrees Celsius (122.9 Fahrenheit ), which is a new all-time maximum temperature record for the country. The last one was set in August 2023, at 49.5 Celsius (121.1 Fahrenheit) in Türkiye’s northwest—the real surprise here being that the new record beat the old one by more than a whole degree. Usually, new records are only by fractions of a degree. Meanwhile, 132 weather stations across Türkiye also reported record-breaking high temperatures the same day.

The United States government is trying to get Apple out of China, threatening to slap its products with tariffs unless it moves production back home. In response, Apple has promised to invest US$500 billion in the U.S, building plants from coast to coast and hiring 20,000 people over the coming four years. At the same time, it’s ramping up assembly operations in India and Vietnam.

And yet Apple has made such promises before: During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, it said it would build three new plants in America; instead, it ran out the clock on Trump. Apple’s leadership concluded that leaving China would be far too risky.

Why?

The German-British composer and pianist Max Richter has a new album, Sleep Circle, out on September 4. The new work both revives aspects of his 2015 Sleep and From Sleep albums—which he combined for an eight-and-a-half hour listening experience—and extends them in an ode to REM sleep. The violinist Lousia Fuller and the cellist Max Ruisi accompany with achingly beautiful lines over Richter’s piano—here, with an invitation to slow down and connect with our inner selves.

After U.S. President Donald Trump declared his Liberation Day tariffs on April 2, stock markets around the world—and the value of the U.S. dollar—plummeted. The market for American bonds plunged dramatically, too, a consequence that plausibly helped push Trump to pause the tariffs just a week after unveiling them.

Which didn’t help the dollar. Its value against other currencies has declined more in the first half of 2025 than in any year since 1973. America’s first-quarter GDP fell by 0.5 percent, its first negative quarter since the pandemic. Economists worldwide have marked down their forecasts for U.S. growth this year, and many analysts were saying the era of U.S. global economic primacy was over. Meanwhile, Trump still says that on August 1, he’ll impose his tariffs on every country that hasn’t cut a new trade deal with Washington.

But U.S. markets—and the broader economy—don’t seem bothered by any of this. Not only has the S&P 500 stock index regained everything it lost after April; it hit an all-time high in late June—and has just kept rising. In the second quarter of this year—right when Trump declared nearly universal tariffs—the S&P provided returns of 10.9 percent to investors, higher than the index’s average annual return over the past 100 years.

The NASDAQ exchange, led by tech firms, also set new records in June—and is also still climbing. Tech giants like Nvidia and Oracle have never been more valuable, while investors bought more U.S. tech stocks this year than in any year since 2009. Prices of U.S. government bonds are now up for the year. And despite all the tariff chaos and uncertainty, the country’s GDP appears to have grown by 2.4 percent in the second quarter, according to the latest estimate by the Federal Reserve.What’s happening here?

What’s happening here?

Sectarian violence between Syria’s Druze minority and Bedouin tribes that began July 11 with the robbery and assault of a Druze merchant has killed hundreds and displaced more than 128,000 people in Sweida province. What started as reciprocal kidnappings quickly escalated when thousands of armed Bedouin fighters from across Syria converged on the Druze-majority province, prompting Israeli airstrikes, which, according to authorities in Jerusalem, were to protect the Druze community.

Syrian government forces initially deployed to quell the violence, but locals then accused them of siding with the Bedouins and committing abuses against Druze civilians—some of which abuses were filmed and went viral online. After Israel struck Syrian positions, President Ahmed al-Sharaa ordered multiple ceasefires and began evacuating Bedouin families, declaring that fighters had been cleared from Sweida city.

The immediate trigger was a highway robbery, but the underlying question is whether Syria’s new Islamist-led government can protect religious minorities and prevent the country’s sectarian fractures from tearing apart its fragile post-Assad transition. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the violence a “direct threat to efforts to help build a peaceful and stable Syria.”

So how big a threat?

The British DJ and composer who records as Facta (Oscar Henson to his friends) got his start in electronic music back in the post-dubstep 2010s—and his bass tones are still booming. Facta’s latest album is titled GULP, and its mechanistic tech house is a twitchy joy—seven songs, clocking in at an economical 27 minutes.

The UN World Food Programme this week accused Israeli forces of opening fire on crowds of Palestinians seeking food from a 25-truck convoy in northern Gaza, with the agency stating that the crowd “came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire.” The incident occurred “despite assurances from Israeli authorities that humanitarian operational conditions would improve; including that armed forces will not be present nor engage at any stage along humanitarian convoy routes.”

WFP warned that “without these fundamental conditions in place, we cannot continue providing life-saving support across the Gaza strip” and described Gaza’s hunger crisis as having "reached new levels of desperation" with "people dying from lack of humanitarian assistance.” The Israeli military has disputed aspects of the incident, with competing claims that could not be independently verified on account of media-access restrictions.

Of course, casualty figures remain contested, too, given the complexities of Hamas’s influence over their reporting. But the deeper question appears to be whether the existing framework for delivering humanitarian aid in active conflict zones has fundamentally broken down—creating a horrible paradox in which aid delivery is essentially endangering the lives of the people it’s meant to save.

What’s at stake here?

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed President Donald Trump in May that his name appears in files the Department of Justice possesses related to the disgraced financier, convicted sex offender, and now late Jeffrey Epstein. This was weeks before the DoJ decided against releasing the files, despite Trump’s campaign promises of transparency, specifically about the Epstein case.

Trump has since filed a US$20 billion lawsuit against the Journal over reporting about an alleged birthday letter to Epstein, while dismissing the entire controversy as a “hoax” and lashing out at his own supporters who demand follow-through on his transparency promise. It’s all created an unusual fracture within Trump’s movement and coalition, with prominent movement figures and Republican lawmakers joining Democrats in calling for the release of the documents.

The administration’s compromise—requesting the release of limited grand jury testimony—is satisfying neither critics nor supporters. The question right at the moment isn’t so much what’s in the files—we’ll see—but whether Trump’s aggressively defensive posture is politically viable, given Trump’s previous political exploitation of suspicions among his base about Epstein’s powerful connections and the circumstances of his death.

What do we know?

We set the dials on the time machine for 1974 with a track that helped launch a whole radio format, known as smooth jazz. The keyboardist Bob James had a big hit with this song, even if he later embraced a more classic jazz style. “Nautilus” features a soaring performance on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, laid down in the famous Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. It’s also had a remarkable afterlife, having been sampled by numerous hip-hop artists, including Ultramagnetic MCs in 1986, Run-DMC in ‘88, and Naughty by Nature in ‘91.

Does anyone still listen to smooth jazz?

In last week’s member’s despatch, we looked at the sudden disappearance of Lac Rouge in central Quebec. One day it was there, the next, its banks overflowed, and its water rushed into the next lake, Lac Doda, six miles to the northeast.

It turns out that the sudden disappearance of lakes has become a trend in the contemporary world. It may happen because of geology, as it does each year for Lost Lake in Oregon. Or South Prairie Lake, in Washington State. Because the Northwest U.S. had so much volcanic activity thousands of years ago, that corner of the nation is riven with what are called lava tubes, some big enough to drain lakes in summertime—but not big enough to handle winter’s snow and ice.

Then there’s the classification of GLOFs, or glacial-lake outburst flood. Glacial lakes are under threat from the warming climate—not least, from jökulhlaups, the Icelandic word for GLOFs, in which meltwater created by volcanic activity breaks open a lake’s banks. Eyjafjallajökull is an Icelandic volcano completely covered by an ice cap. Memorably, it erupted in 2010, cancelling more than 95,000 flights all across Europe for more than a week—and causing a number of jökulhlaups, too.

Lakes disappear for other reasons, too. Some wither in prolonged droughts. Geologists tend to think China’s Poyang Lake resulted from a diversion out of the Yangtze River. Mongolia’s Hulun Lake has lost 291 square kilometers of surface area to farming since 1996. Bolivia’s Lake Poopó, likewise.

Before the 1970s, the financial sector produced less than 20 percent of American corporate profits; by the turn of the century, the number had risen to 40 percent. Much the same is true in Europe. Between 2005 and 2014, Sweden’s financial corporations reported more profits than all Swedish non-financial corporations put together; in Germany and Britain, they took nearly half of the total profits.

Investment, too, has flowed toward finance rather than industry. From 1979 to 1989, investment in British financial services grew by 320 percent while investment in manufacturing rose by less than 13 percent. Before the 1970s, British banks held assets equal to roughly half the national GDP; by the time of the 2008 financial crisis, they held more than five times the GDP.

How’d this happen?

Polynation is a pair of producers from Amsterdam, Stijn Hosman and Hessel Stuut. Together, they make a pastoral and warm sort of electronic music, some of which could work in some club settings—though hard to imagine it here. “Wald” blends synthesizers with guitars and uptempo drums, seamlessly. It’s gentle, melodic, and fun.

It looks like a new era for Europe’s military defenses. Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz signed a security pact on July 17, with each country pledging to defend the other.

Three days earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that NATO’s European members would buy huge stocks of critical—and expensive—weaponry like missile-defense systems, along with ammunition, to send to Ukraine’s armed forces.

At the NATO summit in late June, member countries agreed to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, after decades of pressure from Washington for them to pay more of the costs of security on the Continent—and in the face of Russia’s increasing aggression across it. Germany even changed its Constitution so it could spend more on defense.

But this picture is more complicated. Spain, the sixth-largest country in NATO, got an exception to the budget increase. All member countries will have 10 years to meet the new target. And it’s not really 5 percent of GDP on defense—it’s 3.5 percent on defense and another 1.5 percent on security-related outlays, which they defined to include infrastructure like roads and bridges.

And their expenditures won’t be coordinated but broken up into 29 member-country budgets and militaries. They won’t pool resources for greater purchasing power, so some spending could—and almost certainly will—be redundant. European countries will probably continue to favor domestic arms producers, raising questions about the interoperability of the countries’ equipment.

What are Europeans actually getting for their new defense spending, then?

Governments worldwide are finding new ways to silence opposition voices under the cover of legitimate law enforcement this week.

El Salvador’s most prominent human rights group says it’s been forced into exile, citing threats and harassment from the government of President Nayib Bukele. Meanwhile, Cambodian authorities have made 1,000 arbitrary arrests after Prime Minister Hun Manet ordered a crackdown on cybercrime operators.

The pattern: These incidents represent a troubling trend where authoritarian leaders package political repression as routine law enforcement. Bukele, who has been praised internationally for reducing crime, is now targeting anti-corruption activists. Cambodia’s mass arrests under the cybercrime banner provide a convenient template for other governments.

What’s particularly concerning is how these crackdowns are being framed as legitimate governance rather than political persecution, making it harder for the international community to respond effectively. The methods are becoming more sophisticated—legal justifications that give domestic populations plausible reasons to support what might otherwise appear as obvious political repression.

A key question is whether these aren’t just isolated power grabs but new developments in dictators’ global playbook.

What’s the evidence?

The Melbourne-based synthpop band Cut Copy has its first new album in five years coming out on September 5—and what we have here is its opening track, “Solid.” The band is calmer and more mature now than they were in 2008, when their second album, In Ghost Colours, blasted across America after the Brooklyn cool set picked it up: “Make it if you want it, baby / We’ll be solid.”

The U.S. Justice Department issued finding this week that caught many—not least among President Donald Trump’s political base—by great surprise: The DoJ concluded they have no evidence supporting the theory that the convicted sex offender, disgraced financier, and now deceased Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a “client list,” or was murdered.

This directly contradicts years of promises from Trump and his allies about exposing deep conspiracies, of which the Epstein theory figured most prominently. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had told Fox News that the Justice Department planned to publish “a lot of flight logs” and “a lot of names” related to Epstein. Meanwhile, the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, and it’s deputy director, Dan Bongino, were, in their former roles as social-media influencers, prominent among those who disputed official accounts that Epstein died by suicide.

Trump’s base accordingly erupted in fury, while the president responded that those turning on him over the issue are being “weaklings,” who are falling prey to Democratic “bullshit,” and declared he doesn’t want their support anymore. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson broke with the president, calling for the files to be released.

The whole episode reveals a structural vulnerability in populist governance: Movements that gain power by promising to expose institutional corruption must eventually become those institutions. Trump built his brand on distrusting government agencies, but now his own appointees run those same agencies—and they’re producing findings that contradict the conspiracy theories that helped elect him.

Which raises the question of what happens when populist mythology collides with institutional reality.

Well?

U.S. President Donald Trump announced this week that the United States would dramatically increase weapons supplies to Ukraine and impose 100 percent tariffs on Russia, along with any countries that buy Russian oil, if Moscow doesn’t agree to a ceasefire in the next 50 days.

The play: The United States will sell around $10 billion in weapons to NATO allies in the first wave, who will then send the weapons on to Ukraine, while at the same time choking off Russia’s cash flow.

Trump meanwhile told the BBC he’s “disappointed but not done” with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

The whole move represents a dramatic shift from Trump’s previous positioning on the conflict—and creates an unprecedented economic ultimatum, targeting not just Russia but any nation buying Russian oil. It escalates both military and economic dimensions of the conflict while setting a specific timeline that could trigger massive global trade disruptions.

The central question is whether the gamble will force Putin toward negotiations or provoke further escalation—potentially destabilizing global energy markets and fracturing international alliances.

So what are the key considerations here?

There’s a rich collection of Arab-pop performances kept alive by reissue labels like Habibi Funk Records, based in Berlin, and this a standout example from 1983 Egypt recorded by Hamid al-Shaeri. Al-Shaeri was born in Benghazi, the son of an Egyptian mother and Libyan father. This style you hear came to be known as Al Jeel—“the generation”—for its smooth mixture of Arab rhythms and instruments with new Western synthpop. Al-Shaeri’s success stretched from the ‘80s to well into the 2000s—here, with an ode to “her eyes.”

What’s Habibi Funk Records?

In last week’s member’s despatch, our weather report was on the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki. In the days since, we have seen new eruptions in Iceland, where Sundhnúkur has ripped open a new fissure in the barren landscape. Hawaii’s Kilauea is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, and it’s also been erupting this summer, shooting lava jets as high as 350 meters into the air in May. Volcán de Fuego erupted in Guatemala in June. Elsewhere in June, Sicily’s Mount Etna erupted.

While it isn’t yet well understood, there appears to be a link between volcanic eruptions and the climate. When a volcano erupts, it emits volcanic gases, aerosol droplets, and ash into the stratosphere. Some of those volcanic gases, like sulfur dioxide, can cause global cooling at that altitude. But eruptions can also release a lot of carbon dioxide, which can do the opposite.

The observed impact, however, is striking: “Several eruptions during the past century have caused a decline in the average temperature at the Earth’s surface of up to half a degree (Fahrenheit scale) for periods of one to three years,” according to scientists at the United States Geological Survey.

Before June 13, when Israeli forces struck Iran, the United States had been negotiating with it over its nuclear program: In exchange for curtailing parts of its nuclear capabilities, Tehran would get some measure of sanctions relief.

Now, after two weeks of intense fighting, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says, “Iran has in recent days received messages indicating that the U.S. may be ready to return to negotiations.” U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff says the two countries were discussing the resumption of talks. U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, says, “They had a war, they fought, now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”

But for now, it’s sanctions redux: The U.S. maintains Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy from his first term, sanctioning much of Iran’s economy in the hope that Tehran will make a deal.

Has this ever worked?

Saint Etienne is building up to the release of their “final” album, International, due on September 5, 2025—but this is a non-album single made in collaboration with the Spanish house music veteran David Penn. It may be a chorus in search of a song, but with beats like this, who’s gonna complain?

Even after Western countries cut off nearly all trade with Russia—and hit it with unprecedented sanctions—Moscow surprisingly recorded strong GDP growth, above 4 percent in 2023 and 2024. The U.S., having the strongest economy in the developed world, didn’t manage growth of even 3 percent either year, while the EU was under 1 percent.

The Kremlin still found plenty of eager buyers for its oil and natural-gas exports, mostly in China and India, and its domestic war machine provided plenty of jobs and demand for goods and services.

But now, things seem to be changing. GDP growth for the first quarter of this year was only 1.4 percent. In June, President Vladimir Putin hosted the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum—a massive, spectacular show meant to attract new investment and display Russian strength. But no Western companies attended the event, and even Moscow’s allies mostly sent junior officials and businesspeople. At the forum, Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said the country was on the brink of a recession.

Is it?

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok descended into anti-Semitic rhetoric this week after xAI released an updated version designed to be less “politically correct.” The chatbot began posting inflammatory content on X, including praising Adolf Hitler as “history’s prime example of spotting patterns in anti-white hate and acting decisively on them” and reproducing anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish surnames and Hollywood control.

The controversy erupted just days after Musk announced significant improvements to Grok on July 4, boasting that users would “notice a difference” in the chatbot’s responses. Grok’s new system prompts explicitly encouraged it to make claims that are “politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated,” but by Tuesday it was generating responses that drew from extremist forums like 4chan and endorsing violence.

The fallout was swift and severe: Turkey imposed the world’s first nationwide ban on an AI chatbot, Poland reported X to the European Commission, and the Anti-Defamation League condemned the output as “irresponsible, dangerous, and anti-Semitic.” Most dramatically, X CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned Wednesday—just one day after the anti-Semitic posts surfaced—without providing a specific reason for her departure. XAI scrambled to remove the inappropriate content and implement new guardrails, with engineers claiming the issues were now “fixed.”

So how did a chatbot designed for “truth-seeking” become a platform for hardcore Nazi rhetoric?

Gelli Haha is a new alias of the Los Angeles-based singer Angel Abaya. Here she’s linked up with Sean Guerin, of De Lux, to launch an alter ego of sorts. It’s high-concept dance pop, with a line of surreal humor running through the lyrics. Is it better to be known as funny or serious? Listen in on the debate.

Catastrophic flash flooding devastated central Texas on July 4, killing at least 121 people and leaving over 160 missing. The Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in just three-quarters of an hour during overnight torrential rains, with the hardest-hit area being Kerr County where Camp Mystic, a Christian girls’ summer camp, lost 27 campers and counselors. Weather models had predicted the possibility of 10-20 inches of rain, but the National Weather Service’s official forecast called for only 1-3 inches with isolated amounts of 5-7 inches.

Emergency alerts were delayed; a local firefighter requested a CodeRED alert at 4:22 a.m., but it took nearly six hours for some residents to receive warnings. Questions have emerged about whether recent staffing cuts at the National Weather Service affected the response, though officials state both relevant offices were fully staffed during the event. Camp Mystic counselors reportedly lacked walkie-talkies and emergency evacuation training, while Kerr County had been denied federal funding for warning sirens after previous applications in 2016 and 2017.

So how did a predictable weather event with advance warning systems result in such devastating loss of life?

This week, there was a pivotal moment in ceasefire negotiations in Gaza, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met twice with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, while Israeli and Hamas negotiators engaged in proximity talks in Doha. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff reported that three of four major sticking points had been resolved, expressing optimism for a 60-day ceasefire deal “by the end of this week.” The proposed agreement would see Hamas release 10 hostages and 18 bodies in exchange for a temporary truce, a surge of humanitarian aid, and the release of Palestinian prisoners.

However, the fundamental impasse remains unchanged: Hamas demands guarantees that the ceasefire will lead to a permanent end to the war, while Israel insists on completing its military objectives against Hamas. Netanyahu, emboldened by recent U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, told Congress that Israel “still has to finish the job in Gaza” and eliminate Hamas’s military and governance capabilities. Meanwhile, Israeli forces expanded ground operations in northern Gaza’s Beit Hanoun, where five soldiers were killed in an ambush, and continued deadly strikes across Gaza during the diplomatic meetings. Israeli officials claimed 80-90 percent of the deal terms were settled, but acknowledged the core issue of ending the war remained unresolved.

Why do ceasefire negotiations in Gaza seem to keep cycling through the same deadlock?

Sonita Alizadeh is one of the leading rappers in the Afghan hip-hop scene, and this is her new single. Alizadeh wants freedom and equality for Afghan women and girls—and to make sure the message is received, she delivers it in English and Dari.

There’s an Afghan hip-hop scene?

Last week, in the member’s despatch, we looked at the recent phenomenon. More than 350 millimeters of rain fell there on June 18. As it happens, the same region was hit with catastrophic flooding in 2024 that reached all the way to Porto Allegre, Rio Grande do Sul’s capital city, significantly to the east of the 2025 flooding.

That system, in April 2024, dropped more than 300 millimeters of rain in less than a week, closing the international airport, sweeping through major sports stadiums, and closing several highways. The floodwater didn’t recede for a month.

While the American media’s news cycle has become higher-paced than ever, millions among the American people are turning away from it. According to the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute, there’s “a clear decline in interest in news” in the U.S. 43 percent of those polled say they avoid some form of the news, and 8 percent follow it either less than once a month or never.

What’s happening?

The British synth ace James Holden has collaborated with the Polish clarinet star Waclaw Zimpel before, mostly on singles and short formats—but now, they’ve moved up to a first full, freeform-improvisational album. It’s deeply spacey and warm, like a stroll along a burbling stream. On this track, Holden plays instruments including “walnuts” and “teacups” while Zimpel plays a radiant lap steel guitar.

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs on nearly every country in the world on April 2, it seemed like the day might transform the global economy. But one week later, after stock and bond markets plummeted worldwide, Trump paused the tariffs for 90 days.

Except on China.

What began as a round of universal tariffs turned into an exceptional new trade war with Beijing. Each side raised rates multiple times, with the U.S. eventually putting a 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports and China imposing import duties of 125 percent on American goods.

But a month later, in Geneva, each side agreed to reduce tariff levels by more than 100 percentage points. Soon after, though, the U.S. enacted a new array of tough trade restrictions on China, mostly on high-tech items. Yet by June, Washington had canceled those policies. At the end of the month, Trump declared the trade war was over and the two countries had made a deal.

Neither side has released details of the agreement, but it looks like China didn’t have to make any concessions or change anything in the way it had traded with the U.S. before the tariff fight.

Why not?

Hong Kong’s League of Social Democrats announced its dissolution on Sunday, June 29, marking the end of the territory’s final pro-democracy opposition group. The LSD cited “immense political pressure” from a five-year-long national-security crackdown, leaving the China-ruled enclave with no formal pro-democracy opposition presence. Established in 2006, the League became one of the rare political groups in Hong Kong to openly challenge both the Hong Kong government and Beijing’s growing presence in the city’s affairs.

The party’s demise follows a systematic elimination campaign. Its founder Leung Kwok-hung, commonly known as “Long Hair,” is currently serving time under the National Security Law, while Jimmy Sham, another central figure, was detained in 2021 for allegedly plotting to subvert state power. In February, the Democratic Party, the city’s largest and most popular opposition party, announced it would disband after senior members told Reuters they’d been warned by Beijing that failure to do so would mean serious consequences including potentially new arrests.

The LSD’s closure completes what amounts to the political sterilization of Hong Kong. The key question is what it says about Beijing’s ultimate intentions for the territory—and what the broader implications might be, in turn, for the international order.

The Canadian electronic musician Dan Snaith, who releases music under the names Caribou, Manitoba, and Daphni, has done something surprising with this new single. It’s a sequel to his 2022 hit ‘Cloudy.’ Same sort of descending piano riff, and a slow-to-emerge vocal sample. It’s a touch faster—but if you listen to the two back-to-back, you won’t miss it.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive tax-cut and spending legislation cleared its final hurdle in Congress on Thursday, as the Republican-controlled House of Representatives narrowly approved the package in a 218-214 vote. The legislation— dubbed oddly, if in a distinctively Trumpian idiom, the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—contains trillions of dollars in tax cuts and enhanced immigration-enforcement spending, offset by significant reductions in spending on Medicaid—the U.S. government’s health-insurance program for low-income Americans—and other programs. The bill would add US$3.4 trillion to America’s $36.2 trillion debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The final push was dramatic. The Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, broke records with a nearly nine-hour filibuster speech—the longest in the chamber’s history—decrying the bill before the final vote. Despite concerns within Trump’s own party over the bill’s price tag and health-care cuts, only two of the House’s 220 Republicans voted against it, following an overnight standoff. Trump signed it into law at 5 p.m. ET on Friday, the United States’ Independence Day.

The scope of the new law is staggering. It represents the most significant U.S. domestic-policy overhaul in decades. But as such, it also raises the question of what it means to American democracy for such massive changes to pass by a handful of votes in what’s at the moment—and foreseeably—a deeply divided country.

Well?

Russia launched its largest drone attack of the war in Ukraine against Kyiv on July 3-4, killing one person and injuring at least 23 others in a massive assault involving 539 drones and 11 missiles. The attack lasted from early evening until dawn, forcing families to shelter in underground metro stations as acrid smoke hung over the city center. Kyiv officials reported damage to about 40 apartment blocks, railway infrastructure, five schools and kindergartens, and numerous vehicles across six districts.

The attack happened just hours after a phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, during which Trump said there was “no progress at all” on efforts to end the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the attack “deliberately massive and cynical,” noting that air-raid sirens began blaring at the same time as news of the Trump-Putin call came out.

It’s a striking sequence of events—that pose a fundamental question about the American president’s approach to ending the conflict: Can diplomatic engagement with his Russian counterpart effectively de-escalate the war, or is the outreach to Putin just providing cover for more escalation?

Which is it?

Michael Gordon is a prolific classical composer based in New York City. Here, back in 2021, he collaborated with the European ensemble Cello Octet Amsterdam. In the studio, they played in a circle—an arrangement they seemingly ended up reflecting in the album’s cover art. Best experienced with good headphones. And if you happen ever to have heard of the influential art-music collective Bang on a Can, Gordon is one of its founders.

What is Bang on a Can?

In the West, people invoke “the West” so often, you might take it for granted. If you’re from Colorado or Cornwall, you might be unlikely to stop and think about what it really means. But when you think about it, it’s kind of a strange term. And if you’re from Chongqing or Chennai, what it really means might not feel so obvious. The French call it “L’Occident,” but imagine saying that in English—“the Occident.” The very word would raise the question of what it meant. But in the West, the simplicity and habit of the term “the West” help that question go unnoticed.

So what does it mean?

The decorated New York City jazz guitarist and bandleader Mary Halvorson has a new record out, About Ghosts—a cause to rejoice for fans of contemporary jazz. This song from the album is rich in guitar and horns, trading lines in a way that feels like a game of beanbag. Notable: The eclectic American jazz magazine DownBeat rated her as the best guitarist in her field from 2017 to 2019.

The U.K. electronic mastermind Kieran Hebden, who records as Four Tet, is back with a single that turns a sample from Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See from 1993 into the loop in a dance track. It’s uptempo; it’s also nice to hear Hope Sandoval’s sleepy tones on a club track. For anyone who happens to have made it to the Barcelona Music Festival Primavera Sound earlier this month, Jamie xx played this tune there in his set.

A native of Rio de Janeiro, Amon Tobin now lives in Montreal, after living, well, literally all around the world. His father is Irish, and at the age of two, he and his family moved to Morocco, the Netherlands, London, Portugal, and Madeira. As a teenager, he then settled in the United Kingdom—where, in Brighton, he started composing his own takes on downtempo, breakbeat, and trip-hop styles of music. It’s all given him an extremely eclectic set of influences. Still, against it, you can hear the lope of samba drums—particularly the pandeiro—ticking behind it on this track.

What’s a pandeiro?

You’ll have seen them if you’ve been to Miami or Monaco, or perhaps you’ve read of Russian billionaires having theirs seized off the coast of Greece or Spain: the superyachts. They’re huge—and hugely expensive: Jeff Bezos’s 127-meter Koru cost him half a billion dollars and has a mast so tall that after its construction it couldn’t sail under Rotterdam’s iconic Koningshaven Bridge. Dissemble the bridge, Bezos suggested. Locals replied, threatening to pelt Koru with eggs.

And there are now more and more of them. Since 1990, the number of yachts longer than 250 feet (76.2 meters) has gone from less than 10 to more than 170. In the past 20 years, the average length of a yacht has grown by a third, to 160 feet. But they’re terrible assets. As the Financial Times once put it, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”

So why buy them?

Off to New Zealand for some A-grade indie rock by Yumi Zouma, a Christchurch-based four-piece. Someone has mistreated their singer, Christie Simpson, and she’s not taking it lying down. To the offending party, “Blister,” she wails, “Why you gotta do me like that?”

Early in the morning on Saturday, June 14, a man drove a black SUV with flashing police lights to the home of Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman, a top Democrat in the state legislature. He was wearing a badge and tactical vest and carried a taser. When she answered the door, he introduced himself as a police officer—and then shot and killed her and her husband, Mark.

Now infamously, he wasn’t a cop. He was planning a killing spree in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Before assassinating the Hortmans, he shot state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. When the true police caught him the next day, they found a list of about 70 intended targets—mostly Democratic politicians but also doctors and officials at Planned Parenthood centers.

On the same day as the killings in Minnesota, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo was shot and killed while demonstrating in Salt Lake City as part of the nationwide protests against U.S. President Donald Trump. At another demonstration, in Culpepper, Virginia, a man drove an SUV into a crowd of protesters.

Neither are these the only recent examples of political violence in America. Just in the last three months, Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro’s house was set on fire while he and his family were asleep inside; two Israeli Embassy workers were shot and killed in Washington, D.C.; protesters in Boulder, Colorado, calling for the release of Israeli hostages were set on fire; and in New Mexico, the Republican Party headquarters was firebombed—along with a Tesla dealership.

It seems political violence in America is getting worse.

Is it?

A massive study on children’s screen time and mental health—following more than 4,200 young people across the U.S. for four years, and published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association—found no correlation between the longer screen time at age 10 and suicidal behaviors at age 14. It found something more specific.

The children most at risk for suicidal tendencies were those who used technology in an addictive way—meaning, they had trouble putting it down or felt the need to use it more and more. At age 14, kids with high or increasingly addictive behaviors were two to three times as likely as the others to have suicidal thoughts or to harm themselves.

The problem is, addictive usage is very common. When it comes to mobile phones, almost half of the children showed addictive usage. And addictive usage is more common among minorities and children in families at lower socio-economic levels.

So what now?

This single, from Los Angeles-based Neggy Gemmy’s upcoming album, is a perfect lost Saint Etienne song. It begins with a flute loop, then the 1990s club beats come in, and we’re off to the races. And what about this mysterious girl? “She smells of L.A. / She’s only going to break your heart.”

The number of state-based, armed conflicts recorded last year was the highest since 1946, topping the record set the previous year, according to a report released on Monday by the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

Across 36 countries, there were 61 state-based, armed conflicts—28 in Africa, the highest number on any continent.

Almost 130,000 people died in conflicts worldwide last year, the vast majority in the Ukraine war and Gaza. Largely because of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the past three years have recorded more conflict-related deaths than any other period in the last 30.

“The world today is far more violent, and far more fragmented, than it was a decade ago,” says Siri Aas Rustad, the author of the study.

Why so much fighting?

All week, Israel and Iran attacked one another through the air. On Friday, Israeli jets hit targets across Iran, while an Iranian missile damaged several buildings in Beersheba, in southern Israel—a day after another missile struck the region’s main hospital, wounding more than 240 people.

On Friday, European diplomats met with Iranian officials to negotiate over Tehran’s nuclear program and find a way out of the conflict. The Europeans didn’t say whether they’d made any progress; Iran says it would consider diplomacy only after Israel stopped its attacks.

Meanwhile, the big question is whether the U.S. will join Israel in attacking Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked U.S. President Donald Trump to work with Israel. On Thursday, Trump said he would take two weeks to decide.

What exactly would it mean for the U.S. to join the war?

Buscabulla is a duo that met and started working together in Brooklyn, though they’re both from Puerto Rico. This track is off their just-released record, Se Amaba Así—and you’ll hear a lot of Brooklyn synth-pop in it. The album title translates to “The way love was.” It’s their first new recording since they were vaulted into prominence through a collaboration with Bad Bunny on his 2022 album, Un Verano Sin T.

Bad Bunny?

How important is innovation to winning wars? Matthew A. Tattar, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, thinks it’s less important than conventional wisdom would have it. To win wars, military leaders often think they have to innovate as early as possible once the fighting starts—and as often as possible as it progresses. This idea is reflected, for example, in many of the breathless reports from the battlefields of Ukraine on the race for the latest drone technology. Tech, of course, is crucial in combat. But in Innovation and Adaptation in War, Tattar makes the case that militaries imitate and learn to counter new technology so swiftly that the benefits of being the first to have it evaporate before long. By now, for instance, both Ukraine and Russia have drones—and both sides know how to counter them. Adapting, not innovating, is what matters most. … See Michael Bluhm, “Welcome to the machine.”

This majestic piano-and-vocals track is a blues for climate change from Ben LaMar Gay, the Chicago-based cornetist and composer: “Ain’t gon’ snow no more / Rain gon’ pour and pour / Fire don’t stop no more.” The jazz flourishes here build to a sense of cataclysm.

As protesters and law enforcement clashed in Los Angeles throughout the week, one of the most striking and defining images of the battle over immigration in the U.S. has been the Mexican flag. It’s become divisive: Many protesters carry it as a sign of support for Mexican immigrants; others, for other reasons—including, apparently, as a symbol that American citizens with roots in Mexico are Americans, too. Critics say it shows the pervasiveness of illegal immigrants in the city—and an unpatriotic, anti-American sentiment.

But meanwhile, Mexico itself just began an experiment that many are now saying could be a turning point for democracy in the country: On June 1, voters elected judges nationwide, as Mexico became the first country to choose all judges through popular elections. Half of all judicial offices were on the ballot in early June; the other half will be elected in 2027.

Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, proposed the new system, saying that giving voters control over judges would root out corruption and elitism in the judiciary and help cut down on the widespread violence of the country’s drug cartels—and the culture of impunity reinforced by lax prosecution. The change, AMLO said, would also rein in the damage done by powerful foreign corporations: “The corrupt judges—are they going to continue defending foreign companies that come to loot, rob, and affect the economy of Mexicans?”

Yet critics call the popular election of judges a grave threat to the country’s democracy. Local and international business elites, bar associations, and democracy activists argue that elections would only serve to increase the power of AMLO’s political party, the Movement for National Regeneration, or Morena, which controls most state governments—and handled the decisions about which candidates appeared on ballots. Critics point out that the Supreme Court blocked many of AMLO’s constitutional reforms, and the elections give Morena a chance at a more favorable Court.

In the end, only 13 percent of the electorate cast ballots, and Morena’s preferred candidates seem to have won in many jurisdictions—including a majority on the Supreme Court.

What’s all this mean for democracy in Mexico?

Media coverage of the war between Israel and Iran has focused, understandably, on the dramatic exchange of airstrikes and the possible escalation of fighting. Reports from inside Iran often showed satellite images of the damage to the country’s nuclear facilities or the destroyed homes of military officials and scientists.

But it was rare to find reports about how people inside Iran felt about the unprecedented attack, because the regime imposes severe internet censorship, blocking access to nearly all Western social media. Tehran has about 10 million people, and they were awakened around 3:30 a.m. by the first wave of Israeli attacks. Israel struck targets in the eastern, western, and northern neighborhoods of the city. Friday’s attacks were the first time that Israel has struck civilian targets in Iran, and the capital’s residents awoke on Friday to scenes of destruction they’d never seen in their city before.

How are they responding?

This coming September, Baxter Dury will return with his ninth album, produced by Paul Epworth. The R&B signer JGrrey is here with the hook, as the woman in the story who ultimately stands Baxter up before he slinks back to his hotel in the rain. Baxter is the son of the post-punk icon Ian Dury—with a half-singing, half-talking style similar to his dad’s. He’s made plenty of hip-hop in recent years but this time, he apparently told Epworth he wanted to make a record like Charli XCX’s Brat.

Protesters and police clashed in Los Angeles and other American cities this week over raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seeking undocumented immigrants. Authorities reported more than 1,200 arrests of demonstrators in at least 12 cities this week, with about 630 of them in Los Angeles—most are charged with failure to disperse and curfew violation, although a few have been charged with violence against police or property.

The protests have grown as ICE has increased the number and intensity of its raids; people in California reported seeing ICE agents chasing farmworkers through blueberry fields.

After protests turned violent in Los Angeles last weekend, President Donald Trump called in California National Guard troops; California’s Governor Gavin Newsom sued the federal government for the mobilization, saying the White House had illegally seized authority over the state forces. Senior District Judge Charles Breyer ruled in favor of Newsom on Thursday, barring Trump from taking over the Guard; but an appeals court stayed his ruling until the sides argue the case in court next Tuesday—giving Trump control over the forces until then.

What’s this all about?

Israel’s stunning attacks on Iran. Overnight on Friday, Israeli planes, drones, and missiles attacked Iran’s nuclear sites and tried to assassinate the country’s military leadership and top nuclear scientists. Media reports say Israel seriously damaged Iran’s main nuclear facility, in Natanz, and killed more than 20 senior military and civilian officials, including the head of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, General Hossein Salami. Iranian authorities say 78 people were killed and more than 300 wounded in the airstrikes.

Israeli missiles continued to hit Iran throughout Friday. That night, Iran retaliated, saying it had fired 100 drones at Israel, targeting military sites. Israeli hospitals reported 17 wounded people. But for several weeks now, Iran and the U.S. had meanwhile been engaging in apparently serious negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program, and media reports said both sides had made concessions to move closer to a deal.

Now what?

This past week, we lost two giants of 1960s music: Sly Stone, the bandleader and composer for Sly and the Family Stone, and Brian Wilson, the primary songwriter and composer behind The Beach Boys. Both cast long shadows.

What’s so important about Sly Stone and Brian Wilson?

In the 1990s, London was the number-one destination for corrupt businessmen from the former Soviet Union, most of whom had made their fortunes by leveraging their political contacts when their country’s state-owned enterprises were privatized. Russians bought Kensington mansions, Mayfair townhouses, and all kinds of business interests. Perhaps most famously, the oil magnate Roman Abramovich bought the legendary Chelsea Football Club. In time, London was home to so many ex-Soviet billionaires that it became known as “Londongrad.”

Why London?

Sofia Kourtesis, the blazing, Berlin-based DJ, has teamed up with Dan Snaith (AKA Caribou), as his dance-music alias, Daphni, for a new album, Volver. It comes out August 1. What we get in this track: a foundation of disco house with the Salsoul Orchestra strings, big chunky beats, and high hats.

It was a shocking operation. Ukrainian officials say they spent almost a year planning it. They smuggled drones deep within Russia, many just a few miles from the country’s most important military airfields. And then, on Sunday, they all took off together, destroying more than 40 Russian planes capable of carrying nuclear and ballistic missiles.

With video of the operation available everywhere on social media in the days since, it’s a major, spectacular success for Kyiv—and a profound embarrassment for the Kremlin.

But how much difference did it make? Just two days later, Russia launched a ballistic missile and 103 drones at targets throughout Ukraine. Overnight on Thursday, Russian bombs demolished the state administration building in the major Ukrainian port city of Kherson.

Russia still has another 80 strategic bombers like the ones destroyed on Sunday. This year, Russian armed forces have detonated more than 27,000 bombs and more than 20,000 drones in Ukraine—much higher numbers than in the first half of last year. And Ukraine’s stunning drone operation didn’t alter positions on the war’s front line by an inch.

So what’s the actual state of the war?

The Icelandic composer and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds has a new record coming out July 11, A Dawning—cut with Eion French, the late Irish singer-musician who worked as Talos. This early track is cinematic in scope, with swelling synths and a processed handclap beat. A beautiful little present from the beyond.

Yussef Dayes is a British jazz drummer known for exploring polyrhythms far outside the American-jazz frame of reference—here, with a second percussionist in the mix. A lot of that exploration has been in South London, where he’s from, collaborating with artists in the area’s drill-rap scene.

What’s drill rap—and what happens when you mix it with American jazz?