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The House jammed through a stopgap funding patch 370-48, keeping the lights on through December 11 and averting an October 1 shutdown as the fiscal year expires today. It's a real win for Speaker Mike Johnson, who had no appetite for a shutdown fight five weeks out from the midterms. Twelve full-year appropriations bills are still unfinished business.
August PCE came in softer than expected — headline up 0.3 percent monthly, 3.4 percent annually, down from 3.7 — and core eased to 3 percent. Stocks shrugged: the Dow dropped 443 points to close near 50,906 and the S&P slipped a quarter percent. The bond market is the real story, with the 10-year touching 5.29 percent, its highest since 2007, and 30-year mortgages at 7.58 percent.
Boeing beat Northrop Grumman for the F/A-XX contract, worth north of twenty billion dollars to develop the Navy's next-generation carrier strike fighter. It's Boeing's second sixth-generation program after winning the Air Force F-47 last year. The jet is slated to start replacing Super Hornets and Growlers in the 2030s.
The Citadel founder announced a three-billion-dollar gift to Carnegie Mellon University, which the school is calling a new model for higher education. It's one of the largest single donations in the history of American universities. CMU says the money is aimed at rethinking how the institution operates, not just padding an endowment.
Global oil exports bounced back to their highest point since the US war with Iran began, gutting Tehran's main source of leverage. In a remarkable turn, Revolutionary Guard leaders went around the regime's usual channels to appeal directly to American voters, urging them to vote against Trump's supporters in November. Qatar is still shuttling a seven-day ceasefire proposal between the two sides.
CENTCOM confirmed today that the final US forces completed what it called an orderly departure from Iraq, leaving from an air base in the north. The withdrawal closes out more than a dozen years of continuous American military presence under a bilateral agreement with Baghdad. It is, quietly, the end of an era.
Russia threatened a nuclear response over the fate of Kaliningrad, the heavily militarized exclave wedged between NATO members Poland and Lithuania. It's the latest escalation in Moscow's increasingly blunt threats against European countries arming Ukraine. Russia has separately warned it could strike defense manufacturers inside NATO states.
Astronomers reported strong evidence today that those baffling minutes-long X-ray flashes across the sky are produced when two neutron stars smash together and forge a magnetar. It closes a real gap in one of astrophysics' stranger open questions. Separately, NASA's Perseverance rover turned up a far more complicated water history in Mars' Jezero Crater than anyone expected.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope switched on its 300-megapixel infrared camera, which will sweep up enormous swaths of sky at Hubble-class sharpness. Engineers also determined the observatory is carrying enough fuel for at least twenty-two years of science — more than double its ten-year design life. Not bad for a telescope that launched just last month.
Israeli authorities say a Flydubai pilot attempted to hijack a flight bound for Tel Aviv, prompting a struggle in the cockpit. Someone got to the transponder and dialed in the hijack code before the situation was contained, and every passenger walked off safely. Aviation experts are calling the outcome a miracle while investigators pick the whole thing apart.
