Top Stories — Monday, September 8, 2025
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- A View From Inside Iran — nyt News
- Japan's Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba, Resigns: What to Know — nyt News
- France, at an Impasse, Heads Toward Another Government Collapse — nyt News
A View From Inside Iran
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/8/2025, 10:00:05 AM
What I saw in Iran: a country on edge
It's very hard for journalists to get visas into Iran. But I recently managed to spend about a week reporting in Tehran, taking the temperature of the country in a difficult moment — the aftermath of its 12-day war with Israel.
The visual evidence of the war is beginning to fade, but nobody believes it's really over.
I spoke with all kinds of people. They shared a sense of apprehension about what was to come. But I saw vast differences during my time in Tehran.
I visited a memorial for one of the Iranian generals killed in the attack — the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful part of Iran's powerful security forces. Mourners flowed in, greeted by commanders who themselves were replacing other generals who had been killed by Israel only weeks earlier. They pumped their fists and chanted, "Death to America" and "Death to Israel." "My blood is boiling with anger," one man in the crowd told me. "I am the soldier of Khamenei," he said, referring to the country's supreme leader.
That's a familiar image of Iran that the world often sees. But that's not all of the country.
Iran is a young country, with a median age of 33 and a population that's extremely plugged into the outside world via the internet, despite government restrictions. And in some places, like a coffee shop I visited named Cafe Godot, after the play by Samuel Beckett, you can find young Iranians with very different ideas about their country. Although the government supplied our translator, whose work we verified, and fear of the authorities is pervasive, many people spoke with surprising candor.
Since the death of a young woman in police custody in 2022 that set off huge protests, many young women are no longer wearing the mandatory hijab. And that's just one part of a broader generational reckoning.
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Japan's Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba, Resigns: What to Know
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/8/2025, 9:31:14 AM
Japan entered a period of renewed uncertainty on Sunday, when its embattled leader, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, announced his intent to resign after less than a year in office.
Now Japan, one of the world's most stable democracies, faces a political reckoning as it grapples with a host of pressing challenges, including a strained relationship with its chief ally, the United States; an increasingly assertive China; and stubborn economic woes that have alienated a generation of young people.
Mr. Ishiba's resignation has set off a "profound leadership crisis" in Japan, said Mireya Solís, director of the Center for Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The risk, she said, is that Japan returns to "the politics of indecisiveness," with a revolving door of prime ministers. Another possibility is that it more forcefully embraces far-right populism, which has been on the rise recently, with right-wing groups making striking gains in a recent parliamentary election.
In either case, Ms. Solís said, "the world would be deprived of a much-needed steady hand at the wheel."
Here's a look at why Mr. Ishiba's resignation matters and what it means for Japan's future.
Japan has been going through a period of unusually rapid change. Inflation, which had been absent for decades, is now running at around 3 percent. Anti-foreigner sentiment is surging amid an influx of international workers and tourists. Trade talks with the Trump administration have been rocky and unpredictable, and many Japanese have felt betrayed by its tariff threats.
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France, at an Impasse, Heads Toward Another Government Collapse
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/8/2025, 9:31:06 AM
A politically paralyzed France has had four prime ministers in the past 20 months and appears on the verge of adding a fifth, a degree of instability suggestive of institutional crisis and unknown since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
François Bayrou, a centrist prime minister who has been in office for about nine months, three times as long as his predecessor, has called a vote of confidence for Monday in what appears to be a suicidal move. The vote centers on his unpopular austerity budget proposal, designed to confront a severe deficit and a worsening national debt, in part by freezing welfare payments at their current levels.
Both the far-right National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen and a group of left and far-left parties have said they will oppose Mr. Bayrou. This would ensure the fall of the government, a political void and renewed pressure on President Emmanuel Macron, who has become an isolated figure.
The far right and the left hold 330 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament. A majority of votes cast in opposition to Mr. Bayrou would be enough to bring his government down.
With Parliament divided into far-right, centrist and left-wing blocs, each large enough to create an impasse, France has been in a state of ominous drift since Mr. Macron called snap parliamentary elections in June 2024, another apparently capricious gesture that upended French politics.
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