While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Aug 20, 2026
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An electronic display showing the national debt in Washington, DC on Aug 19.
PHOTO: AFP
US debt crosses $50 trillion threshold
Total US debt has topped US$40 trillion (S$50 trillion) for the first time, the Treasury Department said on Aug 19, drawing fresh warnings that a fiscal crisis is brewing as ballooning costs for social safety-net programmes and interest payments far outstrip revenues held back by tax cuts.
The Treasury’s latest daily cash and debt balances statement showed total public debt outstanding at US$40.047 trillion on Aug 18, a total that includes Treasury securities held by the public of US$32.266 trillion and intra-governmental debt holdings of US$7.782 trillion.
The federal government’s IOU has now more than doubled in less than a decade, from US$19.95 trillion when President Donald Trump was sworn in for the first time in January 2017.
Roughly one-third of that increase occurred during two years of frantic government borrowing to fund the Covid-19 pandemic responses undertaken by Trump and former president Joe Biden, while the fiscal policy choices of both presidents combined with long-running tax-and-spending imbalances to account for the rest.
Trump says he will meet North Korea’s Kim later this year
PHOTO: REUTERS
US President Donald Trump said on Aug 19 he would meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this year, in what would be their first encounter of Trump’s second term.
Trump also said that North Korea had 57 “very powerful” nuclear weapons, in a rare and unusually specific assessment by a US president of Kim‘s atomic arsenal.
“Yeah, I will be,” Trump told reporters during a tour of a new helipad he is building at the White House, when asked if he planned to meet Kim later in 2026.
‘Breakthrough’ mRNA cancer drug curbs melanoma
PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO
US drugmakers Merck and Moderna said on Aug 19 a personalised cancer treatment had shown success in reducing the recurrence of melanoma tumours in a late-stage trial hailed by experts as a “breakthrough”.
The news sent shares in Moderna soaring 145 per cent to US$154 while Merck’s stock was up more than 12 per cent to US$152.
The drug, called “intismeran autogene,” is based on the same messenger RNA (mRNA) technology behind Covid-19 vaccines.
Ecuador intel chief, Americans killed in helicopter crash
Ecuador’s intelligence chief and five US citizens died when a helicopter carrying tourists crashed in central Kenya on Aug 19, killing all seven people on board, officials said.
The accident happened at 9:13am local time (2.13pm in Singapore), in Samburu county, north of the capital, Nairobi, according to the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA), after the aircraft departed from the Loisaba wildlife reserve.
Images shared by the Kenya Red Cross on X in the afternoon showed a crash site in flames.
Balogun World Cup furore risks eroding faith in officiating
PHOTO: REUTERS
The fallout from FIFA’s decision to allow US forward Folarin Balogun to play despite a World Cup red card risked undermining trust in football’s disciplinary and officiating processes, warned the Premier League’s refereeing head Howard Webb and chief executive Richard Masters.
Balogun’s dismissal was one of the most contentious episodes of the tournament after US President Donald Trump publicly intervened and FIFA subsequently lifted the American striker’s suspension through a process that critics said lacked transparency.
Webb and Masters said the affair had created unnecessary distraction and fuelled suspicions that could extend beyond the global tournament and into the domestic season that begins on Aug 21.
