August is closing out with a lot to unpack. A flood disaster in Nepal is still unfolding, Washington just struck a huge deal in Venezuela, and a telescope the size of a school bus left Earth this weekend. Here’s what’s actually worth your time today.

1. Nepal’s flood death toll passes 700, with thousands still missing. A glacier collapse near Langtang Lirung sent flash floods tearing down a 45 mile stretch of the Trishuli River, and rescue crews are still searching tunnels and hydropower sites for survivors.
2. US strikes Iranian rocket launchers near the Strait of Hormuz. It’s the first American strike on Iran in about a month, and it raises the stakes for oil shipping through one of the world’s busiest chokepoints.
3. Trump says the US has struck a deal for 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. The 25 year agreement would hand the US a majority stake in a new joint venture, though no one has released the actual text yet and Venezuela’s oil infrastructure needs years of repair.
4. Canada pushes back after Trump renames Lake Ontario “Lake America”. Ontario’s premier put up a billboard defending the lake’s name, a small but telling sign of how strained US Canada relations have gotten.
5. The US national debt just topped $40 trillion for the first time. It has more than doubled in a decade, and interest payments alone now cost the government over a trillion dollars a year.
6. Meta agrees to pay $18 billion over claims it harmed teens, and dares TikTok and YouTube to match it. The deal pushes Meta to cap teen screen time and tighten age checks, and it puts real pressure on its rivals to do the same or risk facing similar lawsuits.
7. Apple sets September 9 for its “Surprise and Shine” iPhone event. Expect the iPhone 18 Pro and a foldable iPhone Ultra to headline the show, though the cheaper iPhone 18 won’t arrive until next spring.
8. Fake Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart clips are spreading online, and they’re getting harder to spot. Late night hosts make easy targets for AI deepfakes because there’s so much footage of them talking straight into a camera, which makes the fakes unusually convincing.
9. IBM and the University of Chicago pull off a quantum computation no classical computer could match. Using 70 error corrected qubits, the team solved a problem in about 15 minutes that would take ordinary supercomputers an impractical amount of time, a real marker of progress toward useful quantum computers.
10. NASA’s Roman Space Telescope launches aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Once it’s in position, Roman will scan huge swaths of sky to map billions of galaxies and hunt for planets beyond our solar system, work that would take Hubble decades to finish.