World roundup: July 28 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Thailand, Russia, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 28, 1821: Having entered Lima a few weeks prior and having been named “Protector of Peru” by local officials, South American revolutionary leader José de San Martín proclaims Peru’s independence from Spain. Annually commemorated as Peruvian Independence Day.

Peruvian painter Juan Lepiani’s 1904 Proclamation of the Independence of Peru (Wikimedia Commons)

July 28, 1915: The US military occupies Haiti following a revolt that culminated in the assassination of pro-US Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Woodrow Wilson ordered the occupation out of concern that Germany could use the uprising to establish a foothold in the Western Hemisphere (and to make sure Haiti repaid the sizable loans it had received from several US financial institutions, but we don’t like to talk about that part). The US didn’t return control of Haiti to Haitians until 1934.

INTERNATIONAL

ProPublica reports on a new study suggesting that the overuse of underground aquifers is having a disastrous impact:

As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.

Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.

The paper “provides a glimpse of what the future is going to be,” said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an earth systems scientist working with Arizona State University and the lead author of the study. “We are already dipping from a trust fund. We don’t actually know how much the account has.”

The research, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, confirms not just that droughts and precipitation are growing more extreme but reports that drying regions are fast expanding. It also found that while parts of the planet are getting wetter, those areas are shrinking. The study, which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, concludes not only that Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying” in lower latitudes, but that it is the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world that now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in those areas, which generally don’t have glaciers.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The introduction of ten hour daily “tactical pauses” in three parts of Gaza has done nothing to reduce the Israeli military’s (IDF) daily body count. It killed at least 78 Palestinians in the territory on Monday, including at least 25 who were attempting to retrieve aid. An unnamed “UN official” told the AP that, the supposed “pauses” notwithstanding, “nothing on the ground has changed” regarding aid flows and the IDF had not opened any “alternative routes” for distribution.