Geoff Bennett:
Rutte’s comments add a level of uncertainty to Spain’s announcement over the weekend that it had reached a deal to be excluded from the new 5 percent target. Last year, Spain allocated just over 1 percent on its defense, making it the lowest spender in the alliance.
President Trump’s media company is buying back $400 million worth of its own stock. Such moves often help lift a company’s trading price. Shares of Trump Media and Technology Group, which runs the TRUTH Social platform, have dropped more than 40 percent this year. The stock ended about a third of 1 percent higher following the announcement.
As for Wall Street as a whole, stocks rallied after that relatively restrained military response from Iran. The Dow Jones industrial average added around 375 points. The Nasdaq jumped nearly 200 points. The S&P 500 also ended higher to start the week.
The largest digital camera ever built has released its first snapshots of the universe. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile captured these images showing stars, nebulas, and entire galaxies thousands of light years from Earth. The U.S.-funded observatory will survey the southern sky for the next decade, with the goal of documenting some 20 billion galaxies.
Just a few days ago, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also in Chile, released this image of a nearby spiral galaxy.
And the acclaimed war correspondent Rod Nordland has died. Over four decades, he covered most of the world’s major conflicts for The New York Times and other publications. Nordland also wrote a memoir called “Waiting for the Monsoon” about living with glioblastoma. That’s an aggressive form of brain cancer.
He spoke to our Nick Schifrin last year about how the disease changed him for the better.
