Japan’s Iron Lady Won’t Go Wobbly Against China

In the land that introduced the world to Godzilla, a new giant has arisen. The Liberal Democratic Party's landslide victory in Japan's lower house elections on Sunday gave Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi the largest majority of any party in 80 years. So many party members won their districts outright that the LDP has to find extra candidates to fill the seats that are awarded based on percentage of the national vote.

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A Righteous Man in Japan

In the early 1940s, in the middle of World War II, a young Jewish student was arrested for wearing tefillin, phylacteries traditionally placed on the arm and head during prayer, on the rooftop of a store. This was somewhat of a surprise, for he was neither in Berlin nor Warsaw, but rather Kobe, Japan. Thousands of European Jews had obtained visas through the heroic kindness of Chiune Sugihara, vice-consul for the Japanese Empire in Kaunas, Lithuania, who risked his life to provide safe passage out of the reach of the Nazis and into Japanese territory. Included among these survivors were many students and teachers of the renowned Mirrer Yeshiva.

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Meta accused of deleting scam ads to dodge government regulation



Meta says it deleted ads off its platforms to get rid of scams, not hide them.

A review of internal documents, however, spurred allegations that Meta was attempting make certain ads "not findable" to government regulators.

'To suggest otherwise is disingenuous.'

According to a report by Reuters — which said it reviewed the docs — Meta began deleting possible fraudulent ads from its search function after Japanese regulators were upset over obvious scams on Facebook and Instagram that pushed fake celebrity product endorsements or investment schemes.

Reuters said that, according to the documents, Meta feared Japan would force the company to verify the identities of its advertisers.

In order to test Meta's work on "tackling scams," Japanese regulators allegedly used the search function on Meta's "Ad Library" to seek out fraudulent ads; the library acts as a "comprehensive, searchable database for ads transparency," the company states on its website.

This "simple test," as described in documents, was allegedly the avenue Meta took to make good with the regulators. Documents purportedly showed that Meta identified the top keywords and celebrity names that the Japanese were searching to find fraud, and then deleted ads that appeared fraudulent.

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Photo by Arda Kucukkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images

The deletions made certain content "not findable" for "regulators, investigators, and journalists," Reuters claimed.

A few months later, a Meta memo allegedly stated that "less than 100" of the unwanted ads had been discovered in the last week of a testing period, "hitting 0 for the last 4 days of the sprint."

This was apparently applauded by the Japanese government, and Japan did not end up forcing advertiser verification.

Meta then reportedly added the deletion tactics to its "general global playbook" to be deployed against, as Reuters described, regulatory scrutiny in other markets like the U.S., Europe, Australia, and more. The alleged playbook was a strategy to stall regulators and prevent advertiser verification requirements, the report claimed.

A Meta spokesperson has since called the allegations disingenuous, and argued that Meta deleting fraudulent ads off its platforms is a good thing, not bad.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone told the outlet that there is nothing misleading about removing the scam ads from the library. "To suggest otherwise is disingenuous," he insisted.

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Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"Meta teams regularly check the Ad Library to identify scam ads because when fewer scam ads show up there that means there are fewer scam ads on the platform," Stone added.

On top of claiming that verifying advertisers is "not a silver bullet," Stone said that chasing down scam ads is a job that will "never end."

Verification "works best in concert with other, higher-impact tools," the spokesman noted. "We set a global baseline and aggressive targets to drive down scam activity in countries where it was greatest, all of which has led to an overall reduction in scams on platform."

Meta also claimed that it has seen a 50% decline in user reports of scams over the past year.

Return reached out to Meta for additional comments. This article will be updated with any applicable responses.

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The Foreign Policy Winners and Losers of 2025

The first year of the second Donald Trump presidential term has been a carnival of outrages and delights. Historians will struggle to make sense of the whirlwind of activity around the Oval Office, but some big events are already clear. The year has had some big winners, including:

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Taking the fentanyl challenge: Whacked-out American junkies now big in Japan



The United States' fentanyl crisis is being mocked on the other side of the planet.

Videos with millions of views show Japanese content creators mimicking a bizarre and all-too-common sight in cities like San Francisco and New York: half-conscious drug addicts bent over sharply at the waist but somehow still standing.

'Japanese social media influencers are going viral for mocking America’s fentanyl addicts.'

Typically from the effects of heroin or fentanyl, this telltale folded posture has become known as the "fenty fold."

"Japanese social media influencers are going viral for mocking America’s fentanyl addicts who are often seen hunched over and flailing on the streets," one user wrote on X. An attached video that showed a young woman in Okinawa, Japan, hunched over has received more than 2.5 million views.

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Know when to fold 'em

On TikTok, similar videos have captions like "Bringing American culture to Japan" and show participants folding over in locations typical of American drug addicts, like a subway station. One such video has garnered over 1.2 million views.

Other videos take place in parking garages, city centers, and public parking lots. Most of the viral content uses a Japanese song labeled "Anime Girl," although the song is actually a combination of the songs titled "Don't Forget Me" by Schinya and "Sparkle" by Radwimps.

Cleaning up

Drug seizures have increased under the Trump administration, resulting in a slight increase from FY2024 versus FY2025.

However, if FY2026 continues on trend, there will be a significant jump in the amount of annual drugs seized (measured in pounds), according to CBP statistics.

RELATED: Mexico has cartel armies. Blue America has cartel politics.

Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

For example, in October 2025, approximately 51,500 pounds of drugs were seized by the federal government. In October 2024, that number was 40,700 and just 37,400 in October 2023 under President Biden.

Overdoses down

Fentanyl, however, represents one of the least confiscated drug types in terms of weight, likely due to its potency. Marijuana, methamphetamines, and cocaine are the most seized by weight, in that order.

At the same time, overdose deaths have significantly dropped in the United States between April 2024 and April 2025. There was a 24.5% decrease during that time period, the CDC reported. The number of overdoses peaked around August 2023 but have since been declining.

Some of the biggest decreases in overdoses have come in states like Louisiana, New Hampshire, New York, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

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NO HANDS: New Japanese firm trains robots without human input



A Japanese tech firm says it is moving toward superintelligence with a big step forward in AI.

Integral AI, which is led by a former Google AI employee, announced in a press release that it had made significant progress with its artificial general intelligence model, which can now acquire new skills without human intervention.

'Integral AI’s model architecture grows, abstracts, plans, and acts as a unified system.'

The AI system allegedly learns its new skills "safely, efficiently, and reliably," the company said, while claiming that the AI had surpassed its defined markers and testing protocols.

As such, the AGI is allegedly capable of autonomous skill learning without using pre-existing datasets or human intervention. Integral also said the system is able to develop a "safe and reliable mastery" of skills, meaning that it does produce any "catastrophic risks or unintended side effects."

What those risks or side effects might be is unclear.

RELATED: Artificial intelligence is not your friend

Photo by David Mareuil/Anadolu via Getty Images

The last parameter, which Integral AI said its system adhered to, was to be energy-efficient. The system was tasked with limiting its energy expenditure to that of a human seeking to acquire the same skill.

"These principles served as fundamental cornerstones and developmental benchmarks during the inception and testing of this first-in-its-class AGI learning system," the press release said. Integral added that the system marked a "fundamental leap beyond the limits of current AI technologies."

The Tokyo tech company also claimed its achievement was the next step toward "superintelligence" and marked a new era for humanity, with the AI's learning process allegedly mirroring the complexity of human thought.

"Integral AI’s model architecture grows, abstracts, plans, and acts as a unified system," the company wrote, adding that the system will serve as the groundwork for "unprecedented adaptability," particularly in the field of robotics.

This means that with the help of this AGI, autonomous robots would be able to observe and learn in the real world and conceivably pick up new skills in real-world environments without the help of pesky humans.

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Photo by David Mareuil/Anadolu via Getty Images

Jad Tarifi, CEO and co-founder of Integral AI, called the announcement "more than just a technical achievement" that is "the next chapter in the story of human civilization."

"Our mission now is to scale this AGI-capable model, still in its infancy, toward embodied superintelligence that expands freedom and collective agency," Tarifi added.

According to Interesting Engineering, the Lebanese founder said he worked at Google for a decade before starting his own company. He allegedly chose Japan over Silicon Valley because of Japan's position as a world leader in robotics.

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As Europe Steps Back, Asia Steps Up

The Trump administration has once again horrified European public opinion. The National Security Strategy was released with little fanfare in the United States but landed like a bomb across the Atlantic. Lines like, "Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize … cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations," reveal both the impatience a faction in the Trump administration feels toward Europe and its inability to win the internal debate.

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Courage Under Fire

First came the water pouring down the slopes of Japan's Mount Fuji on October 19, 1979. Then on top of the torrents came the fire that killed 13 U.S. Marines and burned dozens more. Though investigators afterward may not have consulted the Bible, they ended up attributing the unusual mix of elements involved to the same force that, per the Book of Exodus, enveloped ancient Egypt in hail and fire. "It was an act of God," investigators concluded.

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‘Could Not Have Gone Better’: MSNBC Guest Praises Trump’s Trip To Japan

'The U.S.-Japanese alliance is still strong'

Shots Heard Round the World

In the year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, separate regional wars in Europe and Asia became a world war that engulfed hundreds of millions of people in conflicts spanning the globe. The year witnessed the Axis alliance at the height of its power, as well as significant Allied victories that would pave the way for the liberation of captive peoples within three blood-drenched years. This was also the year when the Nazis operationalized the Final Solution, condemning millions to be murdered in death camps in Poland and in less structured ways elsewhere. Before 1942, the United States was an economic behemoth but militarily weak; by the end of the year, America had taken huge strides toward becoming a superpower in every sense of the term, with Ford Motor Company alone outproducing the entire nation of Italy. In 1942, Peter Fritzsche, professor of history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a noted authority on Hitler, National Socialism, and the Third Reich, surveys the changes wrought by this formative year in World War II.

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