Coming Up This Week

• Eid al Adha began on Saturday and ends on Wednesday.

Commodity Prices

• Aluminum: $2,518/ton
• Antimony (ingot min. 99.65% fob China): $22,800/ton
• Cobalt: $27,150/ton
• Copper: $9,742/ton
• Gold: $2,320/toz
• Lead: $2,140/ton
• Natural Gas (Nymex): $2,81/MMbtu
• WTI Crude Oil (Nymex): $78.43/barrel
• Zinc: $2,768/ton

Israel

• Israel's army announced plans for a daily daytime "tactical pause" along certain aid routes around Rafah to facilitate humanitarian aid distribution.
• PM Netanyahu was reportedly displeased with army's foray into policy - "we have a country with an army, not an army with a country" - but hasn't reversed its daily pause order yet.
• As some analysts had expected after Benny Gantz walked away, Netanyahu dissolved the war cabinet he convened in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.
• The war cabinet was the sole moderate high-level voice in the Israeli government, but with Gantz gone and far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir pushing to replace him in the cabinet, Netanyahu chose to disband the body rather than let the far-right control it, too.

China

• The G7 ended its meeting in Italy with some warnings for China: G7 leaders threatened to sanction actors (cough, cough, China) that "materially support Russia’s war machine" and also criticized China's "non-market policies."
• Separately, a new Chinese law that came into effect Saturday authorizes China's coast guard to seize foreign ships that "illegally enter China's territorial waters" and detain their crew for up to 60 days. That's contentious because China's maritime focus has been on asserting its claims to parts of the South China Sea that the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan dispute as their "territorial waters."
• Today a Chinese vessel collided with a Philippine supply ship in one of the most hotly disputed "territorial waters" of the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands. Both countries blamed each other, as usual.
• Finally, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published its latest report on global nuclear stockpiles today, and this year's edition assessed that China's arsenal is the world's fastest growing: SIPRI predicts China could have as many active intercontinental nuclear missiles as the U.S. and Russia by 2030. That's consistent with the Pentagon's estimates from Oct. 2023.

Iran

• Iran released an EU diplomat and a dual Swedish-Iranian national; and Sweden released Hamid Nouri, who a Swedish court convicted of crimes against humanity for his role in the 1988 mass execution of 5,000 political dissidents.
• Critics say prisoner swaps like this only reward Iran for wrongfully arresting foreign nationals and dual citizens to trade for Iranians who were rightfully convicted abroad.

Afghanistan

• The Taliban announced that it would join the UN's conference on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar on June 30. This will be the first Taliban delegation to join a UN conference on Afghanistan since the Taliban took over again in Aug. 2021.

Sahel

• Al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) claimed a June 11 attack in Mansila, Burkina Faso (near the border with Niger) that JNIM said killed 107 Burkinabe soldiers. The head of a German NGO that works in Burkina Faso lamented to Al Jazeera that "almost every day now, there are incidents like this."

Ukraine

• The 90 countries that joined this weekend's summit on Ukraine reaffirmed their commitment - with varying degrees of enthusiasm - to supporting Ukraine, but failed to make any meaningful progress towards a peace plan (Russia's recent advances have put Ukraine on the defensive and made the ten-point "peace formula" Pres. Zelensky had hoped to advance seem like a far-off ideal).

Russia

• Russian special forces brutally squashed a short-lived prison mutiny in Rostov-on-Don yesterday, killing six terrorism suspects who had broken out of their cells and taken control of the facility. One of the suspects waved a black Islamic State flag in a(n unverified) local news video.

South Africa

• South African lawmakers re-elected Pres. Ramaphosa after his African National Congress (ANC) formed a government of national unity with the second largest party, the Democratic Alliance, and two smaller parties.
• Meanwhile, ex-Pres. Zuma - Ramaphosa's bitter rival - said his new MK party would shun the unity government and join the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters and center-left United Democratic Movement in an opposition bloc that will control around one-third of the legislature.