Joint call to end Gaza war. The foreign ministers of twenty-eight countries including Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom said in a joint statement yesterday that the war in Gaza “must end now.” They condemned Israel’s killings of civilians and Hamas continuing to hold hostages, as well as voiced opposition to “territorial or demographic change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” saying a recently announced Israeli settlement plan would be a “flagrant breach of international law.” Israel and the U.S. ambassador to Israel rejected the statement.
China’s rare-earth sales. China’s exports of rare-earth permanent magnets to the United States increased 660 percent between May and June following an agreement with Washington to lower trade restrictions. The magnet shortages had hit global industries such as cars and humanoid robotics. The June amount is around half the monthly level from one year earlier, however.
Call for Fed review. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stepped up criticism of the Federal Reserve yesterday, calling on social media for an internal review of its non-monetary policy operations. He accused the Fed of “mission creep” and said there needed to be more oversight of actions such as the bank’s building renovation. President Trump last week said fraud could be possible grounds for ousting the Fed chair and suggested there could be fraud related to the building renovation; the Fed posted details of its renovation plans to its website yesterday.
Plane crash in Bangladesh. The country’s military is investigating how a training aircraft crashed into a school campus yesterday afternoon on the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka. The incident killed thirty-one people and sent dozens to the hospital. An initial military statement cited a mechanical error. The plane was a Chinese-built fighter jet.
AI enters math Olympics. Artificial intelligence (AI) programs from Google and OpenAI achieved gold medal-level performance in the International Math Olympiad that ended Sunday—results that the companies hailed as proof their systems can rival human intelligence. Around 11 percent of the high school students who participated in the contest received gold medal scores. While AI models have performed well in the contest in the past, this year was distinct because the models did not require that the problems be translated into code before solving them.
Mozambique hydroelectric dam. The World Bank will provide loans, risk guarantees, and insurance to support Mozambique’s plan to build Southern Africa’s biggest hydropower plant in fifty years, bank President Ajay Banga said. Together with other private and multilateral financiers, the project may receive more than $100 billion. It is part of a plan to facilitate electrical connections for three hundred million people in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030; more than 80 percent of the world’s people without electricity live in the region.
NASA dissent letter. More than 280 current and former NASA employees signed a letter saying that ongoing and planned changes at the agency—including programming cuts and reorganizations—undermine human safety and U.S. national security. The letter follows recent dissent memos regarding the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. The NASA press secretary said in a statement that any cuts would preserve “safety-critical roles” and that the agency was shifting its focus from “lower-priority missions.”
IMF leadership shift. International Monetary Fund (IMF) Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath announced she will depart for academia in August, more than one year earlier than customary for her position. The U.S. government typically nominates people for the post. While the Trump administration did not immediately announce a nominee to replace Gopinath, it has signaled it seeks changes at the bank that include stepping back from climate-related goals.
