Good morning, and welcome to the world according to The Conversation. While the headlines at home have been all tariffs all the time, with a dusting of Prime Minster Mark Carney’s post-election visit to the White House, this missive gives you a global perspective on the week’s news, gathered from our African, Australian, U.K. and U.S. editions.

I’ll use this opportunity to share the origin story of The Conversation Africa, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Since staff sent the first newsletter out from a Johannesburg office in 2015, it has expanded to cover Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal. This week, Gabriele Cosentino at the American University in Cairo shares a sobering article about how TikTok has exploded Egypt, with an estimated 33 million users, and the government not only monitors its use, but detains viral video makers for allegedly violating family values (mostly aimed at policing women), spreading false information and even terrorism.

In other authoritarian news, a North Korean IT specialist was arrested in China for allegedly stealing drone technology, but Linggong Kong at Alabama’s Auburn University suggests this “rare semipublic spat” signals a rift between the communist allies, driven by North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and its cosy relationship with Russia, which threatens China’s strategic relationship with its main patron. This story got little play in English-language media, so this Northeast Asian security scholar’s analysis is a fascinating deep dive into the geopolitics of two of the world’s most secretive countries.

Strategic, geographic and ideological compatriots are important, and on Thursday, Second World War allies celebrated Victory in Europe Day, which marked the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender and the liberation of the Netherlands – an eight-month campaign that claimed the lives of more than 7,600 Canadian soldiers.

From Edinburgh Napier University, Hazel Hall reports on research that shows how a podcast developed from the wartime diary of a 26-year-old British woman had a stronger emotional impact than the same material packaged as text and photographs. The study participants who listened to the digital story also drew parallels between the Second World War and the present-day war in Ukraine, which provides “an example from history to warn us about the dangers of the current political climate in Europe.”

On Friday, Russia celebrated Victory Day, its version of VE Day, and international politics professors Jennifer Mathers, from Aberystwyth University in Wales, and Allyson Edwards, from Bath Spa University, analyze how Vladimir Putin’s government takes advantage of the public holiday to promulgate its military-might propaganda through patriotic education groups, including one that encourages youth to collect first-hand accounts of war from veterans. “By encouraging young people to feel a personal connection to Russia’s history of war, Moscow hopes to ensure that society will regard war as an inevitable part of life,” they write.

The war in Ukraine was at the heart of a critical minerals deal between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which Ukrainian members of parliament agreed to ratify on Thursday. Eve Warburton at Australian National University and Olga Boichak at the University of Sydney explain why the American-Ukrainian Reconstruction Investment Fund, which will give the U.S. the right to develop and profit from Ukraine’s natural resources in return for military assistance, was “the result of clever bargaining.”

The world’s attention shifted to the brink of another war after India launched missiles into the disputed region of Kashmir, in retaliation for a terrorist attack that killed mostly Indian tourists there in April. Ian Hall, a professor of international relations at Australia’s Griffith University, breaks down the decades-old conflict between India and Pakistan and what each country has to lose should it escalate into a war.

In happier news, the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics have a new pope, and their leader is the first to have been born in America – Chicago, to be precise. Dennis Doyle, a religious studies professor emeritus from the University of Dayton in Ohio, explains why Cardinal Robert Prevost, who chose Pope Leo XIV as his name, will have to build on Pope Francis’ legacy and be “a person of vision.”

Meanwhile, after Trump offended Catholics by saying he’d like to be Pope and circulated an AI-generated picture of himself in papal garb, the American president is facing a different kind of judgment. Paul M. Collins Jr., a legal studies and political sciences professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explains why American judges – even Trump-appointed ones – are ruling against him. The Constitution, existing laws and legal precedents limit what they can do, but – and there’s always a but – the author points out Trump is already trying to get cases before judges “who have an expansive understanding of executive authority.”