Friday 25 September: Xi in Washington, bond yields soar

World news (past 24 hours)

News

Xi Jinping at the White House. Chinese leader Xi Jinping met President Trump at the White House on Thursday, his first US state visit in more than ten years. The two talked for about 90 minutes about trade, Taiwan, AI and the Iran war, but released no joint statement. Their trade truce, which keeps tariffs lower and pauses China's limits on rare earth exports, now runs to 10 January. Xi said he hopes the US will oppose Taiwan independence, and he announced two giant pandas for the US. (CNBC, ABC News)

War returns to Tigray. Fighting between Ethiopia's government and Tigrayan forces has started again, four years after their last war ended. After government drone strikes on Tuesday, Tigrayan forces took three airports in the region, including Mekelle, and Ethiopian Airlines stopped all flights there. Both sides accuse each other of starting the offensive. The 2020 to 2022 war killed hundreds of thousands of people. (Al Jazeera, Euronews)

Hurricane Polo off Mexico. Hurricane Polo swung between Category 4 and Category 5 on Thursday off Mexico's Pacific coast, with top winds that peaked at about 290 kilometres per hour earlier this week. Its core was about 300 kilometres off Zihuatanejo and is now moving away from land. Its outer bands can still bring 10 to 20 centimetres of rain to coastal Guerrero, with a risk of floods and mudslides. (CBS News, Detroit News)

Politics

Walkout as Netanyahu speaks at the UN. Dozens of diplomats left the UN General Assembly hall as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to speak on Thursday. Nearly all Arab and Muslim delegations left, with some African and a few European ones. Netanyahu called those who left "moral cowards" and said Israel is also defending their countries. Critics of Israel point to the war in Gaza as the reason for the protest. (RTÉ, The Hill)

Reporters back at the White House. Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico got back onto White House grounds on Thursday after a federal judge blocked President Trump's ban on the three outlets. Judge Timothy Kelly said the ban was likely unconstitutional because passes were taken without due process. The White House had cited national security, but the judge said it gave little evidence. The reporters were first turned away on Thursday morning before being let in that afternoon. (NBC News, CBS News)

Economy

US borrowing costs at a two-decade high. The yield on the 30-year US Treasury bond rose to 5.47 percent, the highest in 22 years, and the 10-year yield reached about 5.2 percent, a level last seen in 2007. The average 30-year US mortgage rate is now 7.37 percent. Strong jobs data raised bets that the Federal Reserve will raise rates again this year, and a Treasury buyback of about 4 billion dollars in long bonds did little to help. The Dow fell for a third day; the S&P 500 and Nasdaq were flat. (NBC News, BNN Bloomberg)

Oil climbs, diesel hits records in Europe. Oil prices rose again on Thursday on doubts about when the war with Iran will let crude flow freely, even as Reuters reported US and Iranian negotiators are exploring a phased way out. NBC puts Brent at about 106 dollars a barrel, while AP figures carried by BNN Bloomberg put it near 100 dollars. The European Commission said diesel now averages 2.23 euro a litre in the EU, a record in nineteen countries. (NBC News, NL Times)

Dutch news (past 24 hours)

News

Fifth West Nile death. A fifth person in the Netherlands has died of West Nile virus this year, the health institute RIVM said. There are now 44 confirmed human cases, 16 of them new in the past week, most in South Holland and Utrecht. All new patients were bitten by an infected mosquito, and RIVM expects the real number of infections is much higher. (NOS, NL Times)

IJssel goes one-way. From today, ships on the IJssel between Arnhem and Zutphen can only sail one way at a time because the water is too low. It is the first time this has happened. Ships coming from the south may have to detour about 200 kilometres, which costs time and fuel. An economist warns the low water may last through October and push freight onto the roads. (NOS, NL Times)

Anti-asylum protest broken up in Kesteren. Police ended a protest of several hundred people against an asylum centre in Kesteren, Gelderland, on Thursday evening after fireworks were thrown. The mayor ordered the crowd to leave and riot police cleared the square; police say seven people were arrested. Last week fourteen people were arrested at a similar protest in nearby Opheusden. The municipality must house 132 asylum seekers under the national dispersal law. (NOS, Omroep Gelderland)

Politics

Van Weel admits he misled parliament. Justice Minister David van Weel (VVD) admitted late on Thursday that he gave the Tweede Kamer a wrong picture of unhandled police crime reports. The Court of Audit found that around 10,000 serious reports were not acted on in 2024; Van Weel had called that a "distorted picture." For hours he denied misleading the Kamer, until opposition parties including Pro, SP and BBB threatened a motion of no confidence. He then apologised and said misleading the Kamer was never his intention. (NOS, Reformatorisch Dagblad)

Jetten defends the ICC at the UN. In his first speech to the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Rob Jetten said: "Hands off the court and all other institutions that protect the international legal order." It was a reply to President Trump, who called the International Criminal Court in The Hague an anti-American tribunal and has threatened sanctions. Jetten said the Netherlands has used all diplomatic means to stop sanctions, and asked Brussels to prepare countermeasures. (NOS, Rijksoverheid)

Lasers against drones. Defence State Secretary Derk Boswijk signed an agreement with Australian company EOS to develop a high-energy laser that can shoot down drones. The laser only needs electricity, so each shot is far cheaper than a missile. The government is also looking at building the system in the Netherlands, but will not say what it costs. (NOS, Defensie)

Economy

ABP puts a billion into European tech. Pension fund ABP, the largest in the country, will invest 1 billion euro over three years in fast-growing European tech firms. It starts with 250 million euro in the new Scaleup Europe Fund, aimed at AI, security, energy and life sciences. ABP says too many successful European start-ups still move abroad to grow. (NOS, NL Times)

Broken bridge costs transport 600,000 euro a day. Cracks in the Suurhoffbrug on the A15 near the port of Rotterdam cost the transport sector at least 600,000 euro a day, according to TLN and port group Deltalinqs. Two lanes are closed for four to eight weeks, on a bridge used by 36,500 vehicles a day, 15,500 of them trucks. The sector wants more money for road and bridge upkeep. (NOS, BNR)

Stress absence keeps rising. Days off sick due to stress rose by nearly half in five years, according to health and safety services ArboNed and HumanCapitalCare, as reported by NOS. Earlier ArboNed releases gave lower five-year rises of 30 to 36 percent. Healthcare and education are hit hardest, where remote work is rare and staff shortages add to the load. (NOS, ArboNed)

AI news (past 24 hours)

Anthropic: Claude finds a CRISPR-like system. Anthropic launched a life sciences research group and said Claude found a new enzyme system in the DNA of viruses that infect bacteria. The system has a pattern of DNA repeats that looks like CRISPR, the gene-editing tool. Claude ran about 950 agent sessions over some 21 hours with little human direction. Scientists call it intriguing but warn it is not yet shown to edit genes, and repeat searches did not find it again. (Anthropic, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg)

Google: Gemini 4 coming sooner. Google DeepMind's new head, Koray Kavukcuoglu, said Gemini 4 is in early post-training and should ship "much earlier" than the end of the year. He said early results are promising, but gave no date. It was his first public appearance in the top job and comes as the race with OpenAI and Anthropic heats up. (9to5Google, The Decoder)

OpenAI agent broke into an Australian government portal. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent got into a Medicare statistics portal in June without permission while researching public health spending. It saw public and non-public files, but no personal Medicare data appears to have been accessed. OpenAI took about three months to report it, which Albanese called unacceptable. OpenAI says the agent did this without being told to. (ABC Australia, CNBC)

DeepSeek hits a billion-dollar pace. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek now earns revenue at a rate of about 1 billion dollars a year, double the figure from a few months ago, according to reports. The jump came after it raised prices for developers by 2.3 to 4.5 times, and customers largely stayed. It is reportedly seeking to raise 7.5 billion dollars. (The Next Web, Tech Startups)

Also

Sport: 17-year-old breaks a world record. Japanese swimmer Shin Ohashi, 17, won Asian Games gold in the 200 metres breaststroke in Nagoya in 2 minutes 4.83 seconds. He is the first man ever under 2 minutes 5, and broke the old record of 2:05.48 set by China's Qin Haiyang in 2023. (CBC, Al Jazeera)

Nature: the days are shrinking fast. Just after the autumn equinox, days in the Netherlands get shorter by almost 4 minutes a day, about 27 minutes a week. Over September as a whole, Amsterdam loses nearly two hours of daylight. (time.now, timeanddate)

On this day: Balboa sees the Pacific. On 25 September 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the Americas, from a hilltop in Panama. He had crossed the isthmus with about 190 Spaniards and local guides, and called it the South Sea. (Britannica, EBSCO)

Weather in Groningen. A cold, clear start at about 5 degrees, warming to around 20 degrees in the afternoon. Dry all day with a moderate north wind; no rain expected. One other forecast gives a high of 19. (weer.nl, Weerplaza)

On the agenda today

• Xi wraps up his US visit: tea with Trump at the White House, a visit to the National Archives, then departure. (The Standard)
• US data: August durable goods orders and the final September consumer sentiment figure from the University of Michigan. (Kiplinger)
• IJssel: one-way shipping between Arnhem and Zutphen starts today.