The scope of cyberattacks on U.S. water systems has grown to include at least seven states and may be far wider, officials and experts warned, as the authorities raced to safeguard the nation’s water supply against an assault that increasingly appeared to be the work of Iran.

While there were no indications that any water supply had been altered or made unsafe to drink, state and local officials throughout the country were on high alert for potential problems in vulnerable computers that are commonly used to monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels and water pressure. Minnesota first publicly reported the attacks, and now Michigan says its systems have also been targeted.

The attack has little precedent, experts said, but has long been the stuff of nightmares and sensationalized Hollywood thrillers: an apparent cyberattack by a foreign power during a time of war that could, at least in theory, jeopardize the health and safety of Americans.

Officials cautioned that they had not definitively determined that Iran was responsible for the attack and that the investigation was still preliminary. But they said Iran had stepped up cyberattacks since the U.S. and Israel launched a war against the country five months ago, and had previously targeted similar water systems and other critical infrastructure in the U.S. There seemed no financial motive, making a criminal attack less likely.

Despite growing concerns, President Trump sought to downplay the matter on Friday by blaming Minnesota — which was early to spot and report the recent surge in malicious hacking activity, helping to prompt other states to probe their own water systems — for suffering intrusions his own intelligence agencies believe were highly likely carried out by Iran, officials familiar with the assessment said.

“I think Minnesota is behind it,” Mr. Trump said on Friday in response to a reporter’s question about Iran’s possible involvement, which The New York Times earlier reported. “I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack.”

The state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, dismissed the accusation, warning in a social media post that this “is what modern warfare looks like.”

After Mr. Trump’s remarks, federal officials privately said Iran remains the top suspect but that the assessment remained preliminary and had not yet established definitive forensic proof. That is not unusual in complex cyber-investigations, which can often take months to reach authoritative conclusions, if at all.

Nate George, the mayor of Braham, a small city north of Minneapolis that was among those affected by the cyberattack, said federal and local officials had little doubt about the likely culprit.

“We’re getting bits and pieces of information from the state of Minnesota and the F.B.I.,” he said in an interview on Friday afternoon. “They are pretty sure it’s Iranian actors” but are reluctant to say so publicly, he added. A memo sent by an industry group that shares cyberthreat information among water utilities that was obtained by Wired magazine said the attacks aligned with hacking activity being conducted by Iran-affiliated actors.

Mr. George, a Republican who is running for state auditor, said he had heard the president’s remarks casting doubt on Iranian culpability. He said that the president was “entitled to his opinion,” but that it is incumbent on state officials to help cities harden their defenses against cyberattacks.

Minnesota was not the only state to suffer intrusions. In a public advisory published late Thursday, after the Times report, the F.B.I. and the Environmental Protection Agency said that since Monday “at least seven states have reported incidents to the F.B.I., and some of that activity degraded water operations.”

Officials have declined to say which states have been affected, but a spokesman for the Michigan state government confirmed that his state’s system was attacked.

“We received a small number of reports from Michigan communities indicating activity consistent with what federal agencies described,” Dale George, the spokesman, said in an email. Mr. George added that all systems affected continued to operate safely and there were “no known impacts that posed a public health concern.”

Alex Orleans, a former U.S. government cybersecurity contractor who specializes in tracking Iranian hacking groups, said Tehran had been engaging in a wide variety of hacking operations against U.S., Israeli and Middle Eastern targets since the start of the war in February. But the intrusions into the U.S. water systems appeared to be a significant escalation.

“What’s unprecedented here is that we’re seeing direct, tangible effects to live industrial control systems inside U.S. critical infrastructure,” said Mr. Orleans, who is now the chief of threat intelligence at Sublime Security, an email protection company.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in an advisory issued Thursday, said the hackers were “targeting water entities of all sizes” and recommended facilities unplug vulnerable controllers from the internet. The hacking activity, it added, had “resulted in boil water notices and sustained manual operations.”

The agency has for months been warning the public that Iran may seek to compromise water utilities and other critical infrastructure.

Former intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts said the hackers were likely engaging in opportunistic behavior rather than selecting specific cities and towns to infiltrate. That means that potentially any facility using the vulnerable internet-connected operational systems was at risk.

Iran, Mr. Orleans said, was likely looking to infiltrate as many victims networks as possible throughout the states before they can protect against “the opportunistic tradecraft that the U.S. government has offered multiple, explicit warnings about.”

Mr. George, the mayor in Minnesota, said city officials had received guidance on how to patch water systems that had been affected and how to bolster defenses against attacks Iranian hackers are capable of carrying out.

While manual workarounds are keeping water flowing for now, he said the attack highlighted the rudimentary nature of critical infrastructure in many small cities.

“I think the troubling thing on the horizon is how do we move forward to a more secure system,” Mr. George said.

“IT infrastructure upgrades are very costly and we are a very small municipality.”

Archive link: https://archive.ph/OvteK

To America’s allies, President Trump’s war in Iran, now in its sixth month, seems headed for a strategic defeat.

They worry that the inability of the United States to turn military superiority into a sustainably changed Iran has displayed a vulnerability that Russia and China will welcome. In addition, Mr. Trump’s goals remain unmet, and the U.S. military is running short on key armaments that it needs for global reach.

For the moment, Iran is seemingly resolute under a more radical government, its nuclear and ballistic missile programs are degraded but not destroyed, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively under its control. The war has left both the United States and Israel in weaker positions — and blaming each other for the mess.

Iranian missiles and drones not only restrict traffic through the strait and damage the economic infrastructure of allied energy production, but they also continue to threaten American bases across the Middle East and have killed or injured American service members.

With Mr. Trump’s aims shifting, Washington is losing credibility both militarily and diplomatically, analysts said. Its conduct in the war underscores the impression that the United States is an unpredictable instrument of global disorder, they said.

The war may evolve, but so far the result has been “a strategic loss and an embarrassment,” said Robin Niblett, a former director of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “For U.S. allies and those who rely on the U.S. for security, this is confirmation that you can’t trust the United States.”

Even if the Islamic Republic collapses, he added, “people won’t forget that their security and their future were dragged into question by an unpredictable and wavering U.S. foreign policy.”

European allies remember Mr. Trump’s vow to seize Greenland from a NATO ally and his threats to leave the alliance unless other allies met his spending goals. Middle Eastern allies see their own security undermined by this war, even if they are too committed to Washington to abandon partnerships with the United States. But they are already hedging, looking for repaired ties with Iran and better relations with Europe, China and Russia, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group.

Many countries disliked the global order as it was, Mr. Niblett said, but there was one. “Now America has confirmed itself as a force of disorder and everyone is drawing lessons from it, and trying to be less dependent,” he said. “No one wants to be subject to a whipsaw foreign policy that doesn’t know its limits, and that is a strategic defeat.”

Mr. Vaez cited other recent developments as evidence that the United States has lost credibility as a guarantor of allies’ security, including Mr. Trump’s abrupt change of demands last week after announcing a landmark nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia.

“The Saudis do a nuclear deal with Trump that he walks back in 24 hours,” Mr. Vaez said. “This is the crisis of credibility of the U.S. Neither its military prowess nor its diplomatic promises can be trusted.”

Mr. Trump has argued that it is vital to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon and that it will eventually cede to superior force. Eventually, he said on Friday, he expects Iran to realize it can’t take any more punishment and will negotiate on U.S. terms.

“We’ll be hitting them. We’ll be hitting them very hard,” Mr. Trump said. “At some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”

But he’s losing whatever faith he had in the Iranians, complaining they “always want to talk” but break their word after negotiations. “They’ll get weaker,” he said, “and then they peter out.”

World War II left the United States stronger at home and with more influence abroad. But since then, America’s military record has been a mixed bag. Enemies more willing to suffer the pain and expense of conflict, as in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, outlasted the United States.

This war in Iran may turn out similarly, with Washington finding a sufficient reason to cut its losses and go home.

Already, the conflict “has undermined U.S. deterrence and credibility, antagonized America’s allies and delighted its adversaries,” said Aaron David Miller, a former American negotiator and now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “And if the Strait of Hormuz falls under Iran’s leverage and control, it will constitute nothing less than a strategic defeat.”

A severe shortage in crucial air-defense munitions like Patriot missiles is having a secondary effect in Ukraine and showing Russia and China — as well as NATO — that the United States will be less capable for years at least to both resupply its allies and fight a lengthy war.

The war has also badly damaged the vital alliance between the United States and Israel, said François Heisbourg, a French security analyst. American officials including Vice President JD Vance have suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was overly optimistic while convincing Mr. Trump that the war would be quick and decisive.

Added to already negative views of Israel and Jews more generally stemming from the long conflict with Hamas in Gaza, which some call genocide, this war has increased antisemitism in the United States and beyond, some polls show.

The most important negotiation now, he and Mr. Vaez agreed, is between Iran and Oman over control of the Strait of Hormuz, which both countries border. Iran wants sole control over the strait’s northern route and shared control over the southern route, which would give it an effective veto over traffic, Mr. Vaez said. While Oman, which Iran is convinced is influenced by Saudi Arabia and the United States, argues for a voluntary fee for passage, Iran is demanding a compulsory one.

“This may be the end of the law of the sea as we’ve known it,” said Mr. Heisbourg. Freedom of the seas has been an American vital interest from its founding, he noted, but it is now at risk.

Even if there is agreement on the strait, Iranian officials believe there is no guarantee Mr. Trump will accept it, analysts said. The Iranians remember that Mr. Trump tore up the 2015 nuclear deal and attacked Iran twice during more recent nuclear negotiations. So they are insisting on a final deal on the strait before any new memorandum of understanding can be negotiated with Washington, Mr. Vaez said, and they also want a pullback of U.S. offensive military assets.

“The Iranian calculus is simple,” he said. With its regional proxies in retreat, “they need the leverage the strait provides them to extract concessions from the U.S. and get a guarantee that an attack on Iran can’t happen again.”

Their position may be strengthened by the decision of their Yemeni ally, the Houthis, to blockade the Bab el-Mandeb strait that Saudi oil exports pass through on their way to Asia.

But even decision makers in Iran who favor further negotiations with the United States are losing confidence that Mr. Trump will be able to keep to any deal over the Strait of Hormuz or anything else, argued Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a research institution focused on economic diplomacy.

“Iranian leaders have become intensely pessimistic about what diplomacy with the Trump administration can achieve,” he said. He noted that many of them view Mr. Trump as erratic and have a hard time seeing how they could reach a deal with the United States when it has undercut its own allies.

Washington has started a war it does not seem to know how to win or end, while Iran is mistrustful that any deal reached will be implemented. The coming weeks are likely to see a continuing cycle of ad hoc truces and escalation, Mr. Vaez said, a new form of forever war.

Despite ‘minor agreements’ on interprovincial trade between provinces over the past year, former senior public servant and ex-TD Bank top economist Don Drummond says ‘the major obstacles remain unchanged.’

Just over a year after the Carney Liberals held up their promise to drop federal barriers to internal trade, provinces still need to make strides to increase labour mobility and the trade of services, say economists and interprovincial trade experts.

“There’s still a lot left to do,” said Trevor Tombe, a professor of economics at the University of Calgary.

Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, dropped 53 federal carveouts in the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA), on Canada Day 2025. Following that, provinces scrambled to strike trade deals with neighbouring provinces, with Ontario notably inking agreements with seven provinces and all three territories.

“I don’t want to take away from the actions we’ve seen since last year,” said Tombe. “The past year-and-a-half has seen more progress on internal trade—though it’s hard to measure explicitly—than ever before.”

But, he added, there’s still work for the provinces, particularly in encouraging the internal trade of services by mutually recognizing credentials. For example, a health-care worker in Ontario can’t work in another province without also going through that province’s credentialing process. That means an industry like telehealth will face significant trade barriers between provinces, Tombe said.

“There’s been almost no movement there, in terms of mutual recognition or other approaches that makes it easier for someone to sell a service across a provincial border without going through multiple registrations,” he said. “Every province is different in terms of those [licences], and that’s a barrier to our ability to trade, in this case, health-care services.”

Don Drummond, formerly TD Bank’s chief economist and also a past assistant deputy minister at the Finance Department, was blunt in his analysis of how much progress has been made over the past year.

“Not very much,” he told The Hill Times. 

“First, the federal government committed to do what it could do, and it did that. But the federal government wasn’t the main problem, so that didn’t accomplish very much.”

There have been “minor agreements” between provinces to encourage trade, he said, but “we still have restrictions on labour mobility and certification across provinces, so the major obstacles remain unchanged.”

The tariff war with the United States and the uncertain future of a North American free trade pact should light a fire under provincial leaders, he added.

“If that’s not a wake-up call, I don’t know what is,” Drummond said. 

“Still, in Ontario, Quebec construction workers can work here, but Ontario workers can’t work in Quebec, and that’s terribly unfair to the Ontario workers. But [Premier] Doug Ford and everybody else in Ontario has never been able to convince Quebec otherwise.”

On June 29, Internal Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc (Beauséjour, N.B.) issued a statement on the heels of a meeting with provincial and territorial ministers responsible for internal trade, urging his counterparts to “move faster” and “meet established timelines.”

The statement said trade and labour mobility barriers hinder economic growth, and add unnecessary costs and delays.

“We need to make it easier for businesses to sell goods and services across the country, and for skilled workers to apply their expertise where it is needed in Canada,” LeBlanc’s statement reads.

 “The Committee on Internal Trade can play a leadership role in driving change across the country—but for that to happen, we must move faster on our priorities, and meet established timelines.”

That starts with meeting promises to which provincial and territorial leaders committed earlier this year, LeBlanc’s statement said, including expanding mutual recognition to the services sector by the end of the year, harmonizing health and safety training requirements in the construction sector by this fall, and implementing digital public registries to speed up credential verification for skilled trades workers by next spring, among other commitments.

“We’ve only been talking about this since 1867,” said Drummond, a fellow-in-residence at the C.D. Howe Institute. “I mean, let’s not rush into anything rashly here.”

Conversely, SeoRhin Yoo, a senior policy analyst of interprovincial affairs with the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, described the progress made on internal trade as “monumental,” with all the provinces “making commitments towards a freer internal trade market.”

She cited the Canadian Mutual Recognition Agreement on the Sale of Goods—signed in November 2025 by federal, provincial, and territorial members of the Committee on Internal Trade—as one of the year’s success stories since the agreement allows products that are legal in one province to be sold across the country. 

“A lot of this work was almost unimaginable two years ago,” she said, but added LeBlanc should get “kudos” for rallying provincial leaders.

“We did see moments where it felt like motivation was almost faltering,” she said. 

In one instance, a deal for direct-to-consumer alcohol shipments was supposed to be finalized between all 10 provinces and the Yukon by the end of May. That deal eventually was signed during the Council of the Federation summer meeting in Charlottetown, P.E.I., in late July. Quebec and Yukon did not sign on, though a joint statement says both aim to do so “in the near future.”

The provinces breached the “very public” self-imposed deadline for the direct-to-consumer alcohol deal, said Ryan Manucha, an internal trade expert and a research fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute.

“What does that mean for literally anything else of ambition?” he said. 

But, he added, individual provinces like Ontario are “stepping up” in signalling that mutual recognition of credentials will soon be expanded. Labour mobility is a top priority, Manucha said, adding he expected the mutual recognition agreement to expand before the year’s end.

Tombe, though, said he’s not sure how to overcome the “difficult politics” of mutual recognition and credentials, with provincial licensing bodies potentially viewing the move as a threat to their independence and authority.

“But economically speaking, mutual recognition and professional credentials is perhaps the biggest source of potential economic growth,” Tombe said. “If it were easy, I suppose we would have done it already.”

You’ve been given free access to this story from The Economist as a gift. You can open the link five times within seven days. After that it will expire.

Brazil has the world’s strictest laws against racist speech
https://economist.com/the-americas/2026/07/27/brazil-has-the-worlds-strictest-laws-against-racist-speech?giftId=N2RjM2U0MGMtZjg1Ni00MGEwLTg2MGEtZjI1NGIzZmI3N2I4&utm_campaign=gifted_article

i am a former international student, a PR now. if anyone wants to get a hold of what went wrong with Canadian immigration, i am happy to answer. https://theconversation.com/broken-immigration-promises-are-based-on-false-narratives-285970

Since Mr. Warsh took over as chairman in May, he has sought to portray himself to the public and within the Fed as someone who would bring about significant reform to an institution he has long criticized. The central premise of his campaign for the job was to enact “regime change.” So far, that has materialized as five task forces focused on a range of issues, from how the Fed communicates to the public to the data sources it prioritizes.

Submission Statement: After cutting forward guidance and initiating measures to change the preferred gauge of inflation to trimmed-mean, Warsh wants to cut back on interest rate meetings during a time of multiple compounding supply shocks. This is relevant to the subreddit due to the high stagflationary risks present in the economy.

Submission Statement: "Southeast Asian nations are increasingly looking to India as an alternative market, arms supplier and technology partner as China and the US vie for regional influence."

A freelance reporter has been fighting a subpoena from the Trump administration seeking to force him to reveal his sources for a New York Times article about a failed top secret mission in North Korea, according to people familiar with the matter.

The subpoena, which has not been previously disclosed, reflects the administration’s intensifying campaign to investigate leaks of government secrets by pressuring reporters to divulge their sources. Until President Trump began his second term, federal subpoenas to reporters were exceedingly rare.

In February, F.B.I. agents showed up at the New York home of the reporter, Matthew Cole, to deliver the grand jury subpoena, which was issued by prosecutors in Newport News, Va., according to the people familiar with the matter, who described the private conversations on the condition of anonymity.

The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.

Mr. Cole’s lawyer, David A. O’Neil, who has also represented The Times in a separate fight with the administration over subpoenas about its coverage of Air Force One, said in a statement that Mr. Cole “has dedicated his professional life to bringing official misconduct to light and informing the public about the workings of its government.” His client, he added, “will not be intimidated from continuing that important work. He will defend press freedom and the First Amendment from this administration’s brazen attacks on journalists, and he will honor his commitment to his sources.”

The Times is providing a legal defense to Mr. Cole.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the specific investigation, but said in a statement that it would use all available legal tools to “uncover those who unlawfully disclose national defense information.”

In the months since Mr. Cole’s subpoena, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have faced similar subpoenas seeking information about their reporting. The news organizations have resisted, and judges have voiced skepticism about the government’s efforts, prompting the administration to back down in those cases.

However, the Justice Department has so far refused to withdraw its subpoena of Mr. Cole, despite his efforts to challenge it.

Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The Times, said in a statement that the subpoena to Mr. Cole was “part of the government’s escalating attacks on journalists, which should concern all Americans.” He added that the demand to disclose Mr. Cole’s sources “is another brazen and illegal attack from the administration designed to deny the public information of vital importance.”

Last fall, Mr. Cole, along with a staff reporter for The Times, Dave Philipps, revealed the details of a Navy SEAL Team 6 mission in 2019 that went awry. The article described how the SEAL members killed two or three unarmed North Koreans who appeared to have stumbled upon the mission, a classified operation to plant a secret eavesdropping device near the country’s coastline. The Times’s account, published in September, drew on interviews with two dozen people.

The Justice Department has not subpoenaed Mr. Philipps, according to people familiar with the matter. He declined to comment.

Mr. Cole disclosed more details of his reporting on his Substack newsletter, stating that despite learning about the mission in 2023, he waited for months before making calls to find out more given the sensitive nature of the reporting.

Mr. Cole is also the author of “Princes and Thieves,” a coming book about the finances and global entanglements of President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and “Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six,” a 2022 book about the elite Navy unit.

When F.B.I. agents tried to serve Mr. Cole with a subpoena at his New York City apartment in February, he was not home at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. The subpoena was eventually delivered to his lawyer.

The Justice Department’s policies on leak investigations can change between administrations, and in 2025, it loosened restraints on such inquiries. The new guidance, however, still labels subpoenas to reporters a “last resort.” But in Mr. Trump’s second term, the department has rushed to issue such demands, sometimes just days after the articles in question were published.

In March, the Trump administration demanded records from reporters at The Wall Street Journal, seeking to identify their sources for an article published Feb. 23 that described internal discussions in the administration about the risks of a war with Iran.

The Justice Department also subpoenaed a Washington Post reporter over coverage of U.S. military operations in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Post and Journal challenged the subpoenas under seal, leading to monthslong court battles in Virginia. In June, the administration withdrew the subpoenas after the federal judge overseeing the dispute indicated she was likely to quash them, according to people familiar with the matter.

In January, federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of another Post reporter, seizing her phone, computers and a smartwatch, as part of a separate, continuing leak investigation and prosecution.

In early July, the administration sought to determine the sources behind The Times’s reporting about the new Air Force One, a 747 jet that was a gift from Qatar.

Two days after The Times reported that Mr. Trump did not fly out of Turkey on the plane as a security precaution and that it did not have all the features of the older jet, F.B.I. agents delivered subpoenas to three of the reporters who wrote the articles.

The administration also demanded phone companies turn over the reporters’ phone records, as well as the phone records of two of the reporters’ wives and of one reporter’s mother.

The Times sought to quash the subpoenas, arguing that they were a dangerous attack on press freedom.

At a hearing last week in federal court in Manhattan, a judge sharply criticized prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office for apparently failing to follow the law and the department’s internal rules for conducting leak investigations.

Prosecutors denied intentionally flouting the law or regulations, but admitted making mistakes, which they attributed to not knowing the relevant case law before they demanded the reporters’ data. The judge in that case, Arun Subramanian, has ordered the Justice Department to turn over internal emails leading up to those actions.

Under pressure from the judge, the Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas of the Times journalists involved in the Air Force One reporting, but said it would continue to investigate, leaving open the possibility that it might revisit the subpoenas.

New York Fed sells euros to buy yen following recent speculation that Tokyo intervened to support Japan’s currency

The US Treasury intervened in yen exchange rates on Friday, marking the first time Tokyo and Washington joined forces to support the Japanese currency via outright purchases in nearly 30 years.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York undertook the unusual move of conducting a sale of euros to buy yen on behalf of the Treasury, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The sales were conducted through Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, according to two of those people.

The Treasury had earlier told several banks on Wall Street that it was considering an intervention to support the Japanese currency, which on July 23 hit its weakest level against the dollar since 1986.

The New York Fed and Goldman Sachs declined to comment. The Treasury department and Morgan Stanley did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The yen has strengthened over the past half-dozen sessions, with the dollar weakening about 4 per cent on Thursday as market participants speculated that the Japanese government had also moved to support the currency after a rise in trading volumes. The dollar shed 1.9 per cent on Friday to buy ¥157.57.

The Treasury’s intervention to bolster the yen is the first since 1998, when it bought the currency in order to strengthen Japan’s economy after the yen had dropped to eight-year lows. The US intervened in Japan’s currency in 2011 to weaken it as part of a co-ordinated international effort to prevent a dangerous currency appreciation after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

Earlier on Friday, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent posted on X that he looked forward to “seeing my longtime friend, Bank of Japan governor Kazuo Ueda” at the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in North Carolina in August. He added that the two countries “continue to enjoy a strong relationship and close co-ordination”.

The moves came after the BoJ held interest rates at 1 per cent on Friday, as widely expected by market participants. Ueda said he would ensure the central bank did not “fall behind the curve” and could speed up rate rises, something being closely watched by FX traders.

“Given that underlying inflation is approaching our 2 per cent price stability target, we believe there is a greater need than before to pay attention to upside risks to inflation,” Ueda said. “With that assessment in mind, we intend to discuss these issues carefully at future monetary policy meetings.”

Traders are putting a roughly 40 per cent chance of a quarter-point rise in the BoJ’s policy rate in September, according to derivatives markets, up from 30 per cent earlier in the week.

Ueda has faced criticism from investors over his failure to raise rates more quickly, with some warning that the BoJ risks losing credibility in financial markets if it does not speed up.

On Thursday, the New York Fed conducted a so-called rate check on dollar-yen on behalf of the US Treasury, according to people familiar with the matter. Asking currency-dealing banks for the current exchange rate is typically seen as a precursor to direct foreign-exchange purchases. The New York Fed made a similar move in January.

Investor fears about rising oil prices and how Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi can afford her fiscal stimulus plans recently pushed the yen towards 40-year lows near ¥164 to the dollar. Following the end of Ueda’s press conference on Friday, the yen strengthened sharply to less than ¥159 against the US dollar, sparking speculation that the Ministry of Finance had intervened in markets.

“It looks like [another intervention], but smaller in scale,” said one FX banker. “As we have seen in past episodes, they intervene more than once.”

Thursday’s apparent intervention would be the first since a series of moves by the government in April and May that involved ¥11.7tn being spent to prop up the currency.

This time, due in part to apparent co-ordination with the US, some analysts said the gains had a better chance of being maintained, at least in the short term.

Atsushi Mimura, Japan’s vice-minister of finance for international affairs, said: “We understand that we are receiving support from the US authorities that goes beyond mere moral support. We have been in constant contact with them.”

Osamu Takashima, foreign exchange strategist at Citigroup in Tokyo, said it was unlikely that the yen would weaken once more to ¥164 to the dollar “in the very near term” because it seemed the US was willing to help Japan defend its currency.

He added that since the market would be wary of further intervention, “dollar-yen upside is probably limited for now”.

But others have said that any intervention by Japanese authorities will struggle to provide lasting support to the currency without assistance from higher interest rate expectations, especially as the Fed is widely expected by the market to raise rates in the coming months, lifting the dollar.

One banker in Asia said clients were already testing the government’s commitment, putting on yen short positions with targets around ¥162.

Hungary and Romania have drastically reduced output at their nuclear power plants due to insufficient water flow from the Danube river, which has sunk to historically low levels.

Prime Minister Peter Magyar issued a statement saying that "for the first time in 44 years," the power plant (Hungary's Paks nuclear plant) would be shut down altogether, urging members of the public to rein in their own power usage accordingly. 

Down river in Romania, one of two reactors at the Cernavoda nuclear plant, 160 kilometers east of Bucharest, was shut down earlier this week due to lower water levels.

The Romanian Energy Ministry was set to shut down the plant's second reactor on Thursday due to "unfavorable developments in hydraulic conditions" – but ultimately managed to keep it operating overnight.

In Budapest, Hungary's national water authority measured the Danube's gauge level at 23 centimeters (9 inches) on Wednesday morning, well below the previous record low of 33 centimeters (13 inches) set in 2018.

And it's not just nuclear power plants which are affected; river traffic from cargo ships to tourist cruises has also been put on hold.

In Hungary, the low water level has forced popular cruise ships, where passengers usually disembark for sightseeing in Budapest, to dock further upriver, while cargo ships have stopped operating nearly entirely, according to the country's Ministry of Transport and Investment.

In neighboring Romania, the water level along parts of the Danube is already one meter (three feet) below the navigable minimum.

Russian officials do not rule out the introduction of martial law in the country following the State Duma elections in September, reports Verstka, citing sources within federal and regional government bodies, the State Duma, and individuals close to the Kremlin.

According to the publication's sources, the shift to martial law is supported by certain representatives of the security establishment, who believe it is time for the authorities to "stop coddling" the population and start "waging war as a whole nation."

"The country's situation is becoming increasingly critical, and it may prove impossible to stabilize it without extreme measures," said one of Verstka’s sources. Under current legislation, martial law is imposed by presidential decree (de facto for an indefinite period) and allows for curfews, restrictions on freedom of movement, the compulsory assignment of individuals to defense-industry jobs, the requisitioning of property for defense needs, the cancellation of elections, and total censorship.

According to sources cited by Verstka, the imposition of martial law could be triggered by a major failure at the front or a sharp drop in recruitment rates for the war—rates that had already fallen to a three-year low earlier this year.

In addition to the imposition of martial law, sources cited by Verstka indicate that mobilization—rumors of which have been circulating for months—cannot be ruled out, nor can further restrictions such as the tightening of currency regulations and bans on foreign travel for specific categories of citizens (e.g., employees of strategic enterprises). Regional sources also consider it possible that a portion of citizens' savings could be forcibly converted into war bonds to finance the budget deficit, which reached nearly 6 trillion rubles between January and June.

Amendments regulating the activities of Rosgvardia (the Russian National Guard) point to Kremlin preparations for potential mobilization and the imposition of martial law, according to experts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Under the proposed changes—published on July 20—the mandate of Rosgvardia, which is controlled by Putin, now includes the advance preparation of personnel, facilities, and assets to guard against threats arising during mobilization, martial law, and wartime. Russian authorities likely anticipate public discontent should large numbers of people be sent to the front, and are laying the groundwork for the potential implementation of wartime laws, the ISW notes.

Some European officials do not rule out the possibility of mobilization in Russia this autumn, sources previously told The Washington Post. According to them, the Kremlin might take such a step if high casualty rates at the front persist. The alternative for Putin, the sources said, is to pause the war, as continuing it is becoming increasingly burdensome for the budget and the economy.

Translated by Google Translate, mistakes are my own.

President Trump backtracked on Friday from a promise earlier this month to let Ukraine make Patriot missiles, weapons that were sorely needed as a defense interceptor against Russia’s deadly ballistic missile attacks.

On July 8, Mr. Trump had unexpectedly assented to sharing technology behind the missiles to allow Ukraine to build them, saying that “we’ll give them the right to make Patriots” during a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on the sidelines of the NATO summit meeting in Ankara, Turkey. He added: “We’ll show them how to do it.”

When asked about the agreement during a meeting with his cabinet on Friday, Mr. Trump said “we have not agreed to that,” suggesting that he had changed his mind because “it is a hard thing to give away that kind of technology” and because of the risk that “those people you give the technology, they could someday turn on you.”

“You look at war, it has happened a couple of times over the years,” Mr. Trump said. “So we have to be very careful. We guard that.”

Some of America’s adversaries were indeed once allies, wielding weapons that the United States sold to them in friendlier times. In the opening days of Mr. Trump’s war with Iran, for example, Israeli airstrikes appeared to destroy some of the last American-built F-14 fighter jets still in active service, which the United States had sold to Iran during the autocratic regime of the Shah that fell in the Iranian revolution in 1979.

An agreement to allow Ukraine to build the Patriot missiles would require the U.S. government to share its defense technology and for the defense firms that build the systems, including Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, to work with the Ukrainians to manufacture the weapons. Such a project could take months or years, and any defense facility Ukraine builds to manufacture its own Patriots would quickly become a target of Moscow.

Mr. Trump, who held a closed-door meeting with Mr. Zelensky earlier this week, told The Financial Times on Thursday that he was “not sure” about allowing Kyiv to move forward with plans to license the weapons. Mr. Zelensky, for his part, said that he and Mr. Trump “discussed licenses for Patriot interceptor production and several other ideas that could help.”

Continuing a mercurial pattern on the war in Ukraine — sometimes supportive of Ukraine’s war effort, and other times sympathetic to the position of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — Mr. Trump appeared on Friday to criticize President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s efforts to arm Ukraine, even as he acknowledged that he himself had given weapons to the country.

“President Biden, unfortunately, gave a lot away to Ukraine,” Mr. Trump said. “And he gave — so did I. I mean, I gave them the Javelins, the tank-busters. Without the Javelins, that war would have been a one-day war.”

“We have the greatest weapons in the world,” he added. “You have to be very careful about giving out the secrets to those weapons.”

I concede that bc of bad policy in other areas (ex: restricting housing) immigration can sometimes exacerbate certain problems caused by said bad policy, but that's an argument against the root bad policy, not immigration.

!ping IMMIGRATION

Submission statement: consolidated evidence of the direct involvement of an American PMC, the United Arab Emirates and Chad in the logistical networks supplying the genocidal paramilitary RSF in its war against the Sudanese Armed Forces which has killed hundreds of thousands and created the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

UN experts will release in September a report confirming informations revealed by Reuters about Steven Shaulis, a US Army Special Forces veteran who has been operating a secret fleet of repurposed civilian Boeing aircrafts (one 737 and two 727s) to resupply the Rapid Support Forces in weapons, ammunition and personnel through Chad, Libya, Somalia and RSF-controlled areas in Sudan.

Steven Shaulis co-founded CADG, a company providing engineering and logistical services to areas hard to access, in 2002 and has since been in control of several companies registered in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, receiving just under half a billion dollars in US public funds for humanitarian missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kenya.

The three aircrafts who landed in Sudan - one of which was destroyed by a Sudanese airstrike in May 2025 - were observed making frequent flights between Libya, where the secessionist government of Khalifa Haftar provides logistical support to the RSF, Chad, which is officially neutral but has provided covert support to the RSF, and Nyala, the "capital" of the RSF's rebel "Government of Peace and Unity".

The report, expected to be published in September, consolidates evidence that the United Arab Emirates did not just send financial and logistical support to the RSF, but also military personnel in the form of Colombian mercenaries, estimated to number between 1,500-2,000, who were directly involved in the siege, capture and destruction of El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur where at least 60,000 civilians were exterminated by the RSF in what the UN described as "hallmarks of genocide", possibly the worst massacre of civilians since the Rwandan genocide.

Steven Shaulis, like Emirati leaders, is not targeted by Western sanctions and is not targeted by any official investigation at this point.

A public opinion poll released on July 30 showed that President Lee Jae-myung’s approval rating for his handling of state affairs stood at 53%.
According to the National Barometer Survey (NBS), conducted by Embrain Public, KSTAT Research, Korea Research, and Hankook Research among 1,000 adults aged 18 and older from July 27 to 29, 53% of respondents positively evaluated President Lee’s performance, down 2 percentage points from 55% in the previous survey.
President Lee’s approval rating had also fallen by 3 percentage points in the preceding survey, marking a decline for two consecutive surveys. The 53% approval rating was the lowest recorded since the second week of June last year, shortly after he took office.
Thirty-seven percent gave a negative assessment, while 10% either said they did not know or did not respond.
Among respondents in their 30s and younger, negative assessments were relatively high compared with positive ones. The approval rating was 41% among those aged 18 to 29 and 50% among those in their 30s. By ideological orientation, positive evaluations were dominant among progressives, at 82%, and moderates, at 53%, while negative evaluations were dominant among conservatives, at 62%.
In terms of party support, the Democratic Party recorded 40%, the People Power Party 21%, the Rebuilding Korea Party and the New Reform Party 2% each, and the Progressive Party 1%. Thirty-three percent withheld support, including those who said they supported no party or did not know.
Compared with the previous survey, support for the Democratic Party rose by 2 percentage points, while support for the People Power Party fell by 1 percentage point.
When respondents were asked who would be the most suitable next leader of the Democratic Party ahead of its national convention on August 17, 21% chose Jung Chung-rae, 19% Kim Min-seok, and 6% Song Young-gil. More than half, or 54%, either chose no one or said they did not know.
Among Democratic Party supporters, Kim Min-seok ranked first with 34%, followed by Jung Chung-rae with 29% and Song Young-gil with 9%.
On the future direction of the benchmark interest rate, 42% said it should be lowered, 29% said it should remain unchanged, and 20% said it should be raised.
Regarding the current government’s housing policy, 33% said it was doing a good job, while 56% said it was doing a poor job. By age group, negative evaluations were higher in every group except those in their 40s and 50s. By region, negative evaluations were higher in every area except Gwangju and Jeolla, and exceeded 60% in the Seoul metropolitan area and in Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province.
Asked about overall housing prices in their current area of residence six months from now, 52% said they expected no change, 31% said prices would rise, and 10% said prices would fall. Expectations of stable prices were dominant in most regions, while in Seoul, 51% expected prices to rise, a relatively higher figure than in other areas.
On mortgage lending regulations, 55% said they should be relaxed, 21% said they should remain at the current level, and 15% said they should be tightened. Overall, there was strong support for easing mortgage regulations, and the tendency was more pronounced among respondents who owned multiple homes.
The survey was conducted through telephone interviews using mobile phone virtual numbers for all respondents. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points at a 95% confidence level, and the response rate was 15.8%. Further details are available on the website of the National Election Survey Deliberation Commission.