Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at the governing coalition’s shake-up in Israel, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and a corruption investigation in South Africa.
Netanyahu’s Rattled Coalition
An Israeli ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism (UTJ), announced on Monday that it would quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government over a long-running dispute relating to the country’s new conscription bill. The move leaves Netanyahu with a parliamentary majority of just one seat; if more parties also resign, it could severely limit Netanyahu’s ability to govern and bring Israel a step closer to holding new elections.
Israeli ultra-Orthodox religious students have long been exempt from the country’s mandatory military service that applies to most other young Israelis. However, those exemptions were scrapped last year after the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that they amounted to discrimination against the country’s secular majority and ordered the government to begin drafting the religious students.
That decision sparked outrage within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, whose members argue that their men serve the country through their intensive religious studies and that mandatory military service would threaten that tradition and their way of life. Netanyahu has since worked hard to resolve the issue by pushing for a new military conscription bill in the parliament. The new bill lays out a plan to gradually integrate the ultra-Orthodox into the military while potentially cutting public funding for individuals or religious schools (known as yeshivas) that fail to participate in the program. Even still, UTJ lawmakers said that the proposal is too harsh.
In a statement announcing its resignation from the coalition, Degel HaTorah, one of the two factions that make up the UTJ, cited the “repeated violations by the government of its commitments to ensure the status of holy yeshiva students who diligently engage in their studies.”
It remains unclear whether Shas, the other ultra-Orthodox party within Netanyahu’s coalition, will make a similar move. Though Monday’s announcement puts Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, under greater political pressure, it does not yet signal that his government has collapsed. UTJ members have 48 hours before their resignation takes effect. Plus, the parliament is slated to go on summer break at the end of July, potentially allowing Netanyahu to dodge a vote to dissolve parliament and use the intervening period to coax UTJ back into the coalition.
“God willing, everything will be fine,” said Miki Zohar, a cabinet minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party.
The coalition shake-up could also further strain Netanyahu’s capacity to make concessions to Hamas in the ongoing cease-fire talks in Qatar, as the Israeli leader will have to rely on the coalition’s far-right parties, who strongly oppose an end to the war in Gaza, to maintain his parliamentary majority.
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What We’re Following
Albanese visits Beijing. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Tuesday. The exchange was a part of Albanese’s six-day state visit to China and was aimed at reaffirming economic ties between the two nations, especially amid increased global financial uncertainty caused by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
“Australia’s relationship with China is important – for our economy, our security, and the stability of our region,” Albanese wrote in a social media post. Meanwhile, Xi reiterated that Beijing and Canberra should continue to deepen their relationship “no matter how the international landscape may evolve.”
Even as trade remained a central focus, security concerns loomed over the meeting, with Canberra facing growing concerns about Washington’s commitment to AUKUS, the security partnership composed of Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Albanese’s trip coincided with Australia conducting its largest-ever military drills in collaboration with 19 countries, including the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and India.
Nvidia chips. Nvidia, a U.S. chipmaker and the world’s most valuable company, on Monday said in a company blog post that it would resume selling its advanced H20 computer chips to China after the Trump administration said it would approve such shipments.
“Today, I’m announcing that the U.S. government has approved for us filing licenses to start shipping H20s,” Jensen Huang, the company’s CEO, who is currently in China on a visit, told reporters. “It’s so innovative and dynamic here in China that it’s really important that American companies are able to compete and serve the market here,” Huang added.
The move is a reversal of policy that was previously announced in mid-April, when the U.S. government said that Nvidia would require a special license to sell the chips—which are used to develop artificial intelligence and were specifically designed to bypass export controls—to Beijing. The government’s decision in April effectively forced the company to halt its sale of H20 chips.
However, following recent U.S.-China talks in London and a lobbying effort by Huang and other tech leaders, who argued that the restrictions would limit U.S. competitiveness, the Trump administration appears to have altered its course.
Corruption allegations. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Sunday that he was suspending the country’s police minister, Senzo Mchunu, and creating a commission to investigate allegations of police corruption. The move comes a week after a provincial police chief accused Mchunu of interfering with police investigations relating to a criminal syndicate.
“In establishing this Commission of Inquiry, we are affirming our commitment to the rule of law, to transparency and accountability, and to building a South Africa in which all people are safe and secure,” Ramaphosa said in a televised address to the nation on Sunday. The independent body will have three months to present its initial findings.
The recent allegations come at a time of political turmoil for Ramaphosa, who campaigned on the promise to combat South Africa’s endemic corruption woes. Yet the announcement of a new commission was met with criticism. “These allegations provided the President with an opportunity to show bold and firm leadership,” South Africa’s second-biggest party, the Democratic Alliance, which is part of Ramaphosa’s governing coalition, said in a statement. “Instead, he has once again outsourced executive responsibility to a commission, and South Africans have grown cynical of talk shops, task teams and commissions which they see as buying time and avoiding accountability.”
Odds and Ends
Indian police looking for stranded tourists in a forested area of southern India last week instead made a startling discovery when they came across a Russian woman living in a remote cave with her two children. The 40-year-old woman, Nina Kutina, and her two daughters had been living in the cave for a week and in the wilderness for years, the police said, adding that Kutina’s visa expired in 2017. “We have big experience to stay in nature, in jungle. We were not dying,” Kutina told India’s ANI news agency, insisting that her daughters were “very happy.” However, police have deemed living in the cave, which is susceptible to landslides and poisonous snakes, to be “dangerous” and are taking steps to repatriate the family to Russia.