Well, this is an upsetting statistic: The number of executions around the globe spiked to a 44-year high in 2025, according to a new report from Amnesty International, with state-sanctioned killings nearly doubling in the United States in the span of a year.

More than 2,700 people were killed in 17 countries related to criminal charges ranging from drug offenses to acts of political dissidence, the human rights organization reported Sunday. That marks a 78% rise in executions from the previous year, when Amnesty recorded 1,518 executions. That’s a lot!

NPR reports that Iran accounted for most of last year's executions, putting 2,159 people to death — more than double its executions in 2024. In September, Amnesty said that Iran in 2025 had already reached its highest number of executions in 15 years. It attributed the surge partly to the country's increased use of the death penalty “as a tool of state repression and to crush dissent,” since 2022, when a sweeping women’s rights protest movement erupted.

Iran has long been one of the world’s most frequent users of capital punishment. Yet the pace of sentencing and hangings appears to have surged over the last two months, amid the war with the United States and Israel, according to several Iran-focused rights groups. In most of those cases, the groups say, the executed prisoners did not receive due process.

Many countries used the death penalty to enforce strict drug laws, according to Amnesty, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which executed at least 356 people in 2025. The U.S. similarly saw a sharp increase in prisoner executions—47 across 11 states in the last year, up from 25 in 2024. The U.S., where the death penalty applies only to murder or treason cases, is the only country in the Americas to have carried out criminal executions last year. And just last week, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for Texas to carry out its 600th execution on Thursday, May 14.

Donald Trump has reiterated his threats against Iran, as negotiations to end the conflict between U.S. officials and Tehran continue to flounder. In a Sunday morning post on social media, the president warned that time was running short before a fresh wave of military action might be launched.

Officials say Trump wants a deal to end the war, but Iran’s rejection of many of his demands and refusal to make meaningful concessions on its nuclear program has put the military option back on the table. He reiterated to Axios that “the clock is ticking” and warned that if the Iranian regime doesn’t come with a better offer for a deal, “they are going to get hit much harder.” Trump is expected to convene his top national security team in the Situation Room tomorrow to discuss military options.

Top Iranian official Mohsen Rezaei has warned the U.S. to lift its blockade of Iran’s ports “before the Sea of Oman becomes your graveyard”. Meanwhile, oil prices continue to creep higher. The global benchmark Brent crude was rose over 2% to $111 a barrel Sunday evening.

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Over the weekend, Demna took his vision for the next chapter of Gucci straight to the white-hot center of American consumerism: Times Square. The fashion house shut down the Midtown plaza on May 16, splashing advertisements for real and imagined Gucci products across 50-some skyscraper-climbing screens before sending an assortment of very New York character-models down the runway. If we needed any reminder of just how major and how culture-interwoven the house of Gucci is, the move left few questions.

With Kim Kardashian and Mariah Carey in attendance and Cindy Crawford, Tom Brady, and a (newly brunette) Paris Hilton on the catwalk, the show lived up to its frenetic venue.

Apparently, Demna was inspired by Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” photo series of figures in corporate suiting executing extreme, balletic moves—ordinary people rendered extraordinary. “To do something that felt real to New York, I wanted to show this collection on the kind of people you might pass on the street,” he said in his show notes, “individuals with their own way of wearing clothes, a plurality of styles that intersect like the streets of the city.”