U.S. stance on Ukraine. The United States will send Patriot defense missiles to Ukraine, Trump told reporters on Sunday, saying that European nations would pay for them. Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy said Friday that paused shipments of U.S. military aid had been restored; U.S. special envoy Keith Kellogg is in Kyiv today. Meanwhile in Washington, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte is meeting with Trump today to discuss weapons sales, while bipartisan senators promote a “sledgehammer” Russian sanctions bill.
IDF “error” kills six children. An Israeli air strike killed ten people including six children at a water collection point in Gaza yesterday, emergency service officials said. Israel’s military blamed a “technical error” and said it would investigate. Israel’s strikes killed at least 32 people in total on Sunday, driving the Palestinian death toll since the start of the war in Gaza to above 58,000, according to health officials.
Clashes in Syria. At least thirty people were killed and one hundred injured as violence erupted on Sunday between Sunni Bedouin and Druze groups in southern Syria, according to the country’s interior ministry; a United Kingdom-based war monitor put the number dead at more than fifty. The ministry said it was deploying security forces to the region, calling the clashes a “dangerous escalation.” Israel also struck military tanks in the area.
ICC warning on Sudan. The country’s civil war “has reached an intolerable state,” the deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) advised the UN Security Council last week. The tribunal believes that war crimes and crimes against humanity are currently occurring in Sudan’s Darfur region. The United Nations has estimated that 40,000 people have so far been killed and almost 13 million displaced in the conflict.
China-Russia talks. The foreign ministers of the two countries met in Beijing yesterday and discussed relations with the United States, as well as possible ways to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to statements from both sides. They also discussed Iran and the Korean Peninsula, according to China’s foreign ministry.
U.S. State Department layoffs. The department has started terminating more than 1,300 employees as part of a massive restructuring under Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Plans call for a 15 percent reduction in the department’s domestic staff of around 18,000. Before the layoffs, around 1,600 staffers accepted deferred resignations. A senior official told the Wall Street Journal that there were no plans to cut staff in embassies or consulates overseas.
Malaysia chip restrictions. Permits are now required on U.S. artificial intelligence chips entering the country, Malaysia’s trade ministry announced today. The move aims to curb illegal trade and crack down on regulatory gaps, the ministry said; it follows a report last month that a Chinese company was using Nvidia and other chips to train models in Malaysia. Individuals and countries must now give thirty-days notice before shipping or exporting chips with U.S. origin to the country.
Former Nigerian president dies. Muhammadu Buhari, who served as the president of Nigeria from 2015 to 2023, died in London yesterday at age eighty-two. Buhari first led the continent’s most populous country after a military coup in the 1980s. He later became the first Nigerian president to oust an incumbent through the democratic process, and was known for his anticorruption agenda.
