Headlines

Pool/Getty Images



Japan’s prime minister is resigning after striking tariff deal. Shigeru Ishiba ate the frog and is now packing up his office after less than a year as prime minister, he announced at a news conference yesterday. But his departure has little to do with the deal itself: Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in the upper house of Japan’s Parliament in July, as voters worried about inflation and immigration more than the impending trade deal. As for said agreement, President Trump lowered tariffs on Japan to 15% in exchange for Japan agreeing to buy more American exports and invest $550 billion in the US. As for how long he’d been drafting his notice, Ishiba said only, “Who would seriously negotiate if I were to say, ‘I’m quitting?’”

POTUS watches Alcaraz best Sinner at US Open. President Trump, a former mainstay at the US Open, returned to Arthur Ashe Stadium yesterday for the first time since 2015, flanked by members of his family and administration to take in the men’s final. He and the other ~23,000 attendees witnessed Carlos Alcaraz of Spain defeat his rival and last year’s US Open winner, Jannik Sinner of Italy, in four sets. But many ticketholders experienced significant difficulty getting into the one entrance available due to security measures for the president. Despite a 30-minute delay to the start time, rows of seats were still empty as the match began. Trump received notable boos, as well as some cheering, from fans. He attended as a guest of Rolex. On Saturday, in the women’s final, Belarus’s Aryna Sabalenka beat American Amanda Anisimova to take home her second consecutive US Open victory.

Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande won big at MTV Video Music Awards. The 41st iteration of the show, at NYC’s UBS Arena, saw Mariah Carey win the annual Video Vanguard Award for outstanding contributions to pop culture and perform a long medley as her British alter ego (which included no Christmas songs). Lady Gaga won the award for artist of the year and popped in for a minute before dashing off to her concert at Madison Square Garden. Ariana Grande took home three awards, including video of the year. Sabrina Carpenter also won thrice, including best pop artist. Sign of the times: A Labubu dressed as a Moon Person appeared on the red carpet.—HVL

READ MORE...

Headlines

Picture Alliance/Getty Images




Hundreds arrested in immigration raid at Hyundai battery plant. Most of the 475 workers who were arrested at the Georgia factory, a joint venture between the automaker and battery company LG Energy Solution, were South Korean nationals. A US official said those arrested were not legally able to work in the US and called it “the largest single site enforcement operation in the history of Homeland Security investigations.” South Korea has raised concerns, and the arrests are likely to increase tensions between the US and South Korea, following intense tariff negotiations that ended with a 15% import tax on South Korean goods and a pledge by the country to invest $350 billion in the US.

Google fined $3.5b in EU ad-tech antitrust case. The European Union slapped the American search giant with its second-largest antitrust fine ever yesterday (the largest was also against Google), after its competition regulator found the company had unfairly favored its own advertising tech. The decision comes as President Trump has claimed the bloc discriminates against American companies in its tech regulation. In a Truth Social post yesterday, the president threatened a trade probe in order to “nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies.”

Anthropic to pay $1.5b to settle authors’ copyright claims. In the first major settlement by an AI company over training its model on copyrighted works, Anthropic has agreed to shell out $1.5 billion to resolve claims by authors that it downloaded pirated copies of their books for training. The settlement must still be approved by a judge, but if it had gone to trial and lost the case, Anthropic could have faced $1 trillion in damages to the authors of 7 million books, per Bloomberg. The deal comes as dozens of suits remain pending against Anthropic and its competitors in the AI space over the use of intellectual property to train their models.—AR

READ MORE...