7/14 to 7/20, 2025

Welcome back, folks. We’ve got inspectors looking over their shoulders, surgeons getting a little too scissor-happy, a Big Tech water grab, and yes, a man still hawking newspapers on the Paris streets like it’s 1965. Plus floods, pop stars, boat disasters, and political wannabes. This Week, Basically, hosted by Robyn Davies. Every week I’ll give you a roundup of the biggest stories, from politics to pop stars, in under ten minutes. Let’s get into it.

Let’s start with politics.

Inspectors general — those government watchdogs whose whole job is keeping agencies honest — are nervous these days. Under Trump’s second administration, many of them have already been fired, and the ones still in their chairs are looking over their shoulders. At the Pentagon, the acting watchdog is reviewing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal post that essentially gave advance notice of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen. The key question is whether this stays a procedural review — a safe little audit about how information is handled — or if it turns into a full investigation. And that matters, because under Trump, watchdogs know one wrong move could cost them their jobs. Morale has tanked, staff say they feel targeted, and some even worry about being doxxed. These offices are supposed to be independent, but when the people in them fear retaliation, oversight gets a lot weaker.

Meanwhile, the U.S. organ transplant system is under pressure, and patients are paying the price. The push for more organ donations has led to troubling cases where people thought to be dead were anything but. Take Misty Hawkins in Alabama. After choking and falling into a coma, she was declared dead and wheeled into an operating room. But when surgeons opened her chest, they realized her heart was still beating. She died shortly after — but it wasn’t the first time. Across the country, people slated to be organ donors have shown signs of life during prep. Some gasp for air, some cry, one even bit down on a breathing tube. These incidents happen during what’s called “donation after circulatory death,” where someone isn’t brain-dead but doctors don’t think they’ll recover. This category of donations has tripled in just five years and now makes up about a third of all transplants. The problem is training. Doctors admit they can misread movements or reflexes as meaningless, when sometimes they’re signs of awareness. Research even suggests that up to one in four people labeled “unresponsive” might actually have some level of consciousness. The system is saving more lives than ever by getting more organs, but it’s also raising hard ethical questions about whether some of those donors were really ready to give them.

From medicine to machines: in Newton County, Georgia, the taps are running dry, and neighbors say Big Tech is to blame. Beverly and Jeff Morris saw their water pressure collapse soon after Meta started building a massive $750 million data center nearby. Their appliances broke down, residue clogged their pool, and the estimate to dig a new well? Twenty-five grand. Meta’s servers need nonstop cooling, and those cooling systems guzzle enormous amounts of water. Multiply that across an entire county, and you get bills shooting up and projections that Newton County could face an actual water deficit by 2030. For families living near the site, it feels like their basic needs are being drained so the internet can stay online. One resident put it simply: water is the new oil, and Meta just tapped the well in their backyard.

On the other side of the world, tragedy struck Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay. A tourist boat carrying nearly 50 people capsized during a sudden thunderstorm. At least 35 people died, according to state media. Rescue crews, including naval commandos, worked through the night to pull survivors from the water, but images showed the boat flipped completely upside down, its hull sticking above the waves. Of one family with two parents and two kids, only the mother survived. The prime minister of Vietnam ordered the Defense and Public Security Ministries to throw everything they had into the recovery. Ha Long Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage site, famous for its limestone cliffs and caves, and it sees hundreds of tourist boats on the water every day. But this was the worst accident locals say they’ve seen there in 25 years. Vietnam has seen disasters like this before, a speedboat crash killed 17 in 2022, and in 2009, 40 died when an overloaded ferry sank. This latest tragedy is another reminder that even iconic tourist destinations can carry very real risks.

Back in the U.S., Texas is still reeling from devastating floods. Homes, cars, and entire neighborhoods were swept away. But out of the destruction has come a remarkable volunteer effort: people across the country are working to return lost belongings to survivors. Family photos, wedding albums, baby shoes — all the things you can’t just replace with insurance — are being cataloged and shipped back home. Volunteers in different states are picking items out of mud, drying them out, and tracking down their owners through social media. It’s painstaking, but it’s also deeply human. Floods can erase whole lives in minutes. This effort is about piecing them back together.

Meanwhile, in Paris, one man is holding on to a tradition most of the world left behind decades ago. Ali Akbar, 72 years old, is the last newspaper hawker in the city. Every day he zips through Saint-Germain-des-Prés on a scooter, shouting headlines and joking with regulars as he sells folded papers from under his arm. He’s such a fixture that President Emmanuel Macron awarded him the Légion d’Honneur, one of France’s highest honors, for keeping a piece of old Paris alive. At a time when most people get their news by scrolling on a screen, Akbar is still shouting “Extra! Extra!” on the street corner, a living throwback to another era.

Over in South Korea, a new kind of K-pop is making waves. The boy band Big Ocean has started incorporating Korean Sign Language into their performances. Their choreography already involves razor-sharp synchronization, but now their songs are literally speaking to deaf fans in a way that most pop music never has. For fans, it’s not just entertainment — it’s representation. And for K-pop, which has always been about spectacle, adding sign language brings a whole new layer of artistry.

In Japan, another kind of performance is playing out: this one political. Sohei Kamiya, a former fringe politician, is rising fast by borrowing straight from the Trump playbook. His rallies feature brash language, attacks on elites, and a populist “us versus them” framing that feels very familiar to anyone who’s watched American politics the past decade. The question is whether Japan will buy into the same style of grievance-fueled populism, or whether Kamiya is just staging a noisy sideshow. Either way, the echoes of Trump are unmistakable.

Closer to home, New York City’s mayoral race is heating up, and if you’re confused by it, you’re not alone. Twenty-one questions were put to the candidates, and the answers showed just how scattered the field is. On housing, crime, transit — everyone’s got a plan, but none seem to stand out as the clear solution. The city’s problems are big, the candidates’ answers are often small, and voters are left wondering whether anyone actually has a vision that can stick.

And finally, let’s talk about a man who calls himself the “Sports Betting King.” He boasts about winning streaks, flashes his luxury lifestyle, and sells betting picks to fans who want in on the action. But like every gambler, the odds aren’t always in his favor. The image of certainty he projects is part marketing, part bravado, and very much part of the sports betting boom that’s swept across the U.S. Whether he’s really a king or just another hustler with a loud crown, time — and the odds — will tell.

So that’s the week. From watchdogs under siege to organ donors at risk, from Big Tech drying up wells to floods that washed away lives, and from the last hawker in Paris to the newest K-pop revolution, it’s been a reminder that oversight, resilience, and reinvention are happening everywhere, all at once.

That’s all for now. As always, this is This Week, Basically. I’m Robyn Davies. Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you next week.