Happy Wednesday and welcome to your wrap of the top news stories from around the world.
First up, a school shooting in the Austrian city of Graz has left 11 people dead, including the shooter.
The BBC is reporting that the incident took place at around 10am local time, with seven women and three men among the dead. The 21-year-old suspect, who is a former pupil who did not graduate from the high school, is believed to have killed himself.
Austria’s Chancellor Christian Stocker has declared three days of national mourning, which will begin tomorrow. He said today is a “dark day in [the] history of our country” and called the shooting a national tragedy.
Christian Stocker (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
To London now, where high-level trade talks between the United States and China have pushed through their second full day.
According to Reuters, a US Treasury spokesperson told reporters that talks had paused and would resume at 8pm local time. No details about what was discussed were revealed, although earlier in the day, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said discussions with his Chinese counterparts were “going well”.
Chinese exports of rare earth minerals crucial for technology components, as well as China’s access to US computer chips, were expected to be high on the agenda. Last month, both countries scaled back their hefty reciprocal trade tariffs but accused each other of breaching the deal.
Last week, Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke by phone and agreed to resolve tariff disputes. Trump acknowledged the trade relationship with China had got “a little off track”.
New Zealand has joined Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and Norway in imposing sanctions on two far-right Israeli politicians for their comments about the war in Gaza. The joint action against Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was announced earlier this morning.
Bezalel Smotrich. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said the two men were targeted, rather than the Israeli government, because they were using their leadership positions to “actively undermine peace and security and remove prospects for a two-state solution”, according to RNZ.
"Ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have severely and deliberately undermined that by personally advocating for the annexation of Palestinian land and the expansion of illegal settlements, while inciting violence and forced displacement," he said.
The two men will be banned from entering New Zealand, as well as the other four countries. The BBC also reports that any assets they have in the UK will be frozen.
In response, Israel has said it was “outrageous that elected representatives and members of the government are subjected to these kinds of measures”.
In business news, CNBC reports that the World Bank has slashed its global growth forecast due to the disruption caused by trade uncertainty.
It now expects the global economy to expand by 2.3% in 2025, down from its prior forecast of 2.7%.
“This would mark the slowest rate of global growth since 2008, aside from outright global recessions,” the bank said in its Global Economic Prospects report.
The bank said trade uncertainty had weighed on the outlook and upended many of the policies that helped shrink global poverty and expand prosperity after the end of World War II.
“Our analysis suggests that if today’s trade disputes were resolved with agreements that halve tariffs relative to their levels in late May 2025, global growth could be stronger by about 0.2 percentage points on average over the course of 2025 and 2026,” World Bank chief economist Indermit Gill said.
The World Bank building in Washington.
Finally, in market news, Wall Street's main indices were up in afternoon trading.
The Dow Jones Industrial Complex, the broader S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq were all between 0.2% and 0.6% higher.
Reuters reports that markets are awaiting the results of the US-China trade talks, with investors betting on improved trade terms after a preliminary deal was struck last month.
"The expectation is that they'll figure this out, and that the Liberation Day tariff levels are never going to be seen. You can't get to market valuations where we've got them and have those tariff levels get anywhere close to reality," Horizon Investments chief investment officer Scott Ladner told Reuters.
