July 4 update

Some 3,000 Palestinians fled a refugee camp in the city of Jenin after Israeli troops, backed by drones and armoured bulldozers, continued an assault on it. The attack is Israel’s biggest raid on the West Bank in more than 20 years. At least ten people have been killed and over 50 wounded since the incursion began early on Monday, according to Palestinian officials. Israel’s army said it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” belonging to the Jenin Battalion, a militia. Palestinians accused Israel of a war crime. Israeli forces have repeatedly raided Jenin in the past year as violence has flared in the region.

Meta will launch Threads, a new text-based social-media platform to rival Twitter, on Thursday. The app will be linked to Instagram, which Meta owns, allowing users to follow their Insta friends and keep the same username. The launch—revealed after Threads appeared in Apple’s App Store, available for pre-order—comes days after Twitter announced a temporary cap on the number of posts users could read in 24 hours, sparking criticism.

Russia said Ukraine attacked Moscow with at least five drones, which were shot down or jammed and caused no injuries, according to Russian officials. Flights at Vnukovo International Airport, one of the capital’s biggest airports, had to be rerouted for several hours early on Tuesday morning. Ukraine did not claim responsibility for the attack.

China said it would limit exports of two critical metals used in semiconductors, electric vehicles, and other chipmaking and communications equipment. From August exporters will need a government permit to ship germanium or gallium. On Friday the Dutch government said that it would limit the export of advanced chip-making equipment. America took a similar step in October 2022.

The share prices of electric-vehicle makers soared after a number of firms, including Tesla and Rivian, an American startup, reported better-than-expected production and sales results. Tesla delivered a record 466,000 cars in the second quarter of 2023, an increase of 83.5% from that quarter last year. BYD, a Chinese EV-maker, said that its sales almost doubled in the first half of this year from the same period in 2022.

China called for Japan to suspend a plan to release radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific ocean. Rafael Grossi, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is in Tokyo for a four-day visit, during which he will meet Kishida Fumio, Japan’s prime minister, and deliver the results of a safety review of the scheme. The UN body is expected to approve the plan.

Senegal’s president, Macky Sall, said that he would not seek re-election. The announcement ends months of speculation that he would run for a constitution-bending third term. The west African country has recently seen a wave of violent street protests, sparked in June by the sentencing of an opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, for “corrupting youth” (he denies any wrongdoing).

Figure of the day: 48m, the annual output of nickel, in tonnes, needed to meet the world’s decarbonisation goals by 2040. Read the full story.

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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Macron meets the mayors

On Tuesday Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, will host a meeting of more than 200 mayors of towns and suburbs that have been battered by nightly violence and rioting in the past week. Among them is Vincent Jeanbrun (pictured, gesturing), the centre-right mayor of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a southern suburb of Paris, whose front gate was rammed with a car that was set on fire on Saturday night. Mr Jeanbrun’s wife broke her leg escaping with their children as fireworks were hurled at them.

The rioting, which began after a teenage driver was shot dead by police during a traffic check on June 27th, seems to have peaked. But it obliged Mr Macron to cancel a state visit to Germany so that he could manage the crisis and meet the leaders of both houses of parliament. The president hopes that deploying tens of thousands of policemen will keep things calmer. His government will now start to unpick the reasons for the sudden social upheaval.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Putin returns to the world stage

On Tuesday Vladimir Putin met global leaders for the first time since the Wagner rebellion rattled his regime. Russia’s president is participating in a virtual summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, along with the leaders of China, India, Pakistan and former Soviet states in central Asia. In theory, the broad-based regional talking-shop should offer a welcome setting for Mr Putin to assure his counterparts that all is well in the Kremlin. The SCO is one of the few international groupings in which Russia still enjoys some support.

Yet Mr Putin could yet face some awkward questions. India, for instance, the host of this year’s summit, is moving towards the West. Narendra Modi, its prime minister, has just concluded a state visit to America. At last year’s SCO summit Mr Modi urged the Russian leader to pursue peace in Ukraine. Kazakhstan’s leader has gone further than Mr Modi, directly criticising the war. Mr Putin will be hoping that his flagging invasion will not have emboldened them to go any further.

PHOTO: AP

Germany’s resilient economy

On Tuesday Germany reveals its foreign trade figures for May. Going on the previous month, the outlook looks better than feared: in April, Destatis, the German statistics agency, reported an increase of 1.2% for that month, whereas a contraction of 2.5% had been predicted. Most notably in April, exports to China increased by 10.1% to €8.5bn ($9.3bn). That has also helped improve Germany’s long-standing trade deficit with its largest trading partner. German exports to America, the country’s biggest market, also increased, by 4.7% compared with March. That helped offset falling trade with Britain and a precipitous drop with Russia.

The data release comes as investor sentiment darkens over Germany’s technical recession (defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth). The country’s manufacturing sector shrank in June as both new orders and production dwindled. Good news from the statistics office could help lift the gloomy mood.

PHOTO: ALAMY

Australia’s monetary balancing-act

There are signs that interest rates are starting to bite down under. Australia’s annual inflation dropped to a 13-month low of 5.6% in May, from 6.8% in April. But GDP growth is also slowing.

That prompted the Reserve Bank of Australia to hold interest rates at 4.1% when it met on Tuesday. But analysts expect at least one more hike in the coming months. Core inflation (which strips out volatile food and fuel prices, as well as holiday travel) remains above the central bank’s target of 2-3%. The labour market remains tight and house prices, against the odds, are rebounding.

The bank’s governor, Philip Lowe, says he wants to “keep the economy on an even keel”. But much more tightening and it could start to list. For many Australians, that would be a new experience. Barring a brief downturn during the pandemic, when wages were anyway subsidised, the country’s last recession ended over 30 years ago.

PHOTO: ALAMY

Teachers rally in Florida

This week the National Education Association holds its annual meeting in Orlando, the “backyard” of Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. It is America’s biggest labour union’s first fully in-person conference since 2019, and will include a “Freedom to Learn” rally. The union opposes Mr DeSantis’s education policies, which they say curtail teachers’ and students’ rights. New laws in Florida that block discussion of race and sexuality have led teachers to reconsider how they teach the history of slavery, and school libraries to ban books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

But Mr DeSantis seems to be digging in. The Republican presidential hopeful pitches himself as a defender of “parental rights”—against, implicitly, those of teachers. Other Republican governors have also accused teachers of indoctrinating pupils with critical race theory. At least eight states have enacted new so-called school-choice laws this year, such as giving residents vouchers they can use to pay private-school tuition, bypassing public education altogether.