Good morning. Dip buyers hit the brakes on tech stocks’ tumble. Trump ramps up pressure on the Fed with a call for Lisa Cook to quit. And Dubai’s flagship FIVE hotel turns party culture into big business. Listen to the day’s top stories.
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Tetchy tech stocks took another leg lower as traders debated whether this week’s rout is just a hiccup or the start of a deeper selloff. Wednesday’s drop sapped billions of dollars from US equity value before late-session dip buyers softened the blow. Expensive stocks are “in the early days” of a bubble, according to Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks—though he’s not sounding the alarm just yet. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve minutes showing inflation remains policymakers’ main concern squelched gains in Treasuries.
Donald Trump intensified his campaign against the Fed with a call for Governor Lisa Cook to quit immediately, citing allegations by a staunch ally that she committed owner-occupancy mortgage fraud. Cook rejected the president’s prompt, saying in a statement she wouldn’t be “bullied to step down because of some questions raised in a tweet.”
A “NATO-light” proposal for Ukraine was put forward by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as European leaders weigh security guarantees for Kyiv. The Italian plan—one of many on the table—would commit allies to decide within 24 hours whether to provide military support to Ukraine if it’s again attacked by Russia. Meantime, the Netherlands said it will send two Patriot air-defense systems to Poland to bolster protection of NATO territory.
Microsoft has curtailed Chinese companies' access to advance notifications about cybersecurity vulnerabilities in its technology. The announcement follows a wave of attacks the company blamed on state-sponsored Chinese hackers who exploited flaws in SharePoint servers.
Baidu’s sales slid the most since 2022 in the June quarter, hurt by an economic downturn that’s capping its ability to fight bigger AI rivals and expand into new areas. In the US, Target slumped after another set of weak results that its newly appointed CEO urged staff to help reverse. Home-improvement supplier Lowe’s agreed to buy Foundation Building Materials for $8.8 billion in cash.
Deep Dive: SpaceX’s Expensive Explosions
Plagued by pricey failed test flights, Elon Musk’s space company is under pressure to show progress in its massive rocket program while keeping the budget in check, according to people familiar.
Photographer: Sergio Flores/AFP
Space isn’t cheap. NASA awarded SpaceX roughly $4 billion in contracts for Starship, the reusable rocket designed to carry humans to the moon and eventually Mars. But building the vehicle—and managing its fiery returns—costs hundreds of millions of dollars, plus additional environmental fees.
Reshuffling priorities. After a Starship rocket burst into flames in June, the company reassigned about 20% of its engineering group from its flagship Falcon 9 program to Starship for six months, the people said.
Lots left to prove. SpaceX still needs to show it can refuel Starship in orbit more than a dozen times through back-to-back flights—something it has yet to achieve at this scale. The rocket hasn’t even completed a full lap around the Earth or returned any intact heat tiles this year, both vital for data collection.
