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An Israeli activist is seen recording illegal settlers driving past a village in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, on October 28, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Israel arrests violent settlers, US House ends extended recess, Botswana eyes majority stake in diamond giant, & More
4: Israeli police arrested four Jewish nationalists Tuesday after dozens of them attacked Palestinians and set fire to property in the West Bank. The issue of settler violence in the region has grown over the last two years – in tandem with the war in Gaza – but has spiked further in recent weeks, as Palestinians have been taking to the fields to harvest olives.
54: Who wouldn’t enjoy an almost eight-week break? Well that’s just what members of the US House of Representatives have had, but they are finally returning from their 54-day recess to vote on a continuing resolution that will end the government shutdown. Expect a vote later today.
49: A Catholic mother in the Normandy town of Dozule claimed in the 1970s that she had seen Jesus (of Nazareth) not once, not twice, but 49 times. The Vatican disagrees, though, affirming today that reports of those sightings were not genuine. The last Vatican-confirmed Jesus sighting was in 2013, when his face reportedly appeared at a church in India.
14: Hungary has extended a profit-margin cap to 14 more consumer products, including apples and processed cheese, as inflation remains elevated. Ahead of next spring elections, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is increasingly under pressure from Peter Magyar, the popular Fidesz defector who is now leading him in some polls.
15%: Botswana is bidding to acquire a majority stake of the diamond giant De Beers, up from its 15% share of the firm. The southern African nation’s move is part of an effort to reverse the diamond industry downturn – read all about that here (and watch a video about it here).
People walk past a jewelry store in the Diamond District of Manhattan, New York City, USA, on August 6, 2025.
Diamonds are forever, but their high prices aren’t
If you’re thinking of slipping an engagement ring on your partner’s finger this year, you may find some deals out there.
The price of all diamonds, both rough and lab-grown, has plummeted in recent years. The price of a natural, one-carat diamond dropped 26% over the last three years. The drop is even bigger for their lab-grown equivalents: a one-carat factory-made diamond now costs much less than half what it did in 2022. Since 2016, the value of these one-carat lab-grown diamonds is down 86%.
The reasons for this are clear: with prospective spouses increasingly switching to lab-grown rocks for ethical, environmental and cost purposes, there is less and less demand for natural ones. A study from The Knot last year found that more than half of couples used a lab-grown diamond on their engagement ring, and that popularity for these alternatives has increased 40% in recent years.
Wouldn’t higher demand for lab-grown rocks increase their value? Ordinarily, yes, but the manufacturers are flooding the market as they seek to capitalize on the wave of new demand for factory-made gems.
The consequences of these changes stretch beyond the industry – Botswana, the largest producer of extracted diamonds, has particularly suffered. The sector accounts for over 90% of the southern African nation’s exports, per the World Bank, and a quarter of its gross domestic product. The diamond downturn has tanked the economy, with the unemployment rate reaching nearly 28% last year.
The country’s politics has been turned upside down, too: human rights lawyer Duma Boko capitalized on this economic downturn to win last year’s election and become Botswana’s president. He ousted the Botswana Democratic Party, which had ruled for nearly 60 years. Boko had pledged to create up to half a million jobs and to spread wealth across the nation.
To better understand why the diamond industry has tanked, and the consequences of this for geopolitics, GZERO spoke to its in-house diamond expert: Eurasia Group’s Commodities Director Tim Puko. This interview is edited for length and clarity.
GZERO: Why is the diamond industry crashing?
Puko: We’ve just seen a dramatic change in what’s available and who wants it. The thought formerly was you needed thousands and thousands of years to produce these things, and only the highest levels of authenticity were acceptable. But as we’ve seen with many other commodity products, even with diamonds, there are ways to replicate that get the job done just as well for consumers. And so you have this whole growth of lab-grown diamonds. That’s led the price down pretty precipitously.
GZERO: Which countries are worst affected?
Botswana is far and above the most affected. Russia and Angola, and some of Botswana’s neighbors in sub-Saharan Africa also make the list. But there’s nowhere that the amount of diamond sales, the revenue, matters quite as much as Botswana. Russia is a big diamond seller, but it just doesn’t compare to their oil industry. Botswana is kind of a one-industry country, right? It doesn’t have the alternatives for its economy. And so, even though Botswana has a pretty good reputation as being a place where diamonds are pretty ethically produced, if the whole market is going to crash like this, it’s a big, broad threat to Botswana on the whole.
GZERO: What are the political ramifications of the diamond price collapse?
We’ve already seen once-in-a-generation turnover of political power in Botswana. Even the new government – it still feels like their power is tenuous, because the economic downturn and political unrest around it has been so intense.
What’s more, Botswana had been the most stable, certainly the richest of all the sub-Saharan African countries, and a source of stability for the region. Botswana, in many cases, has been providing security forces in other countries that have had coups or destabilized events of one type or another. But if the number one source of its economic growth is gone, they’re just not going to be spending externally. How destabilizing is that for its neighbors that can’t count on Botswana’s help? And they’re not the only ones in the region facing problems like this. It might be the most intense for them, but the DRC has perpetual conflict on its eastern flank, a lot of that is related to copper and gold. This is a story that a lot of the neighbors in that region of the world are experiencing right now.
GZERO: Is it possible for diamond prices to recover? Or are diamonds no longer forever?
I always say the commodity cycle is undefeated, and all these things are cyclical, but the deck is really stacked against diamonds right now. And if you think about the direction that the world is heading on forces that have nothing to do with diamonds – world trade, inflation and interest rates, cost-of-living crises, the friction that’s happening around the world, often led by the richest countries – it trickles down to everyone and so many of the policies that, especially the protectionist policies that the United States and some of its peers have been exploring, make the world more expensive for everybody. And if the rich people in these rich countries, who used to be the number one source of demand for these diamonds, feel economic insecurity themselves, paired with ethical concerns that are predominant, will they value this type of luxury item? I’m not going to call the death of the diamond market forever, but for the foreseeable future, I don’t know what the saving grace would be for conventional diamonds and the countries that mine them.
Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook attends the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's 2025 economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA, on August 23, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Trump says he’s firing a Fed governor, French PM faces the guillotine, Botswana declares public health emergency
In latest attack on Fed, Trump says he’s firing a governor
US President Donald Trump said he’s firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, citing alleged false statements on her mortgage agreement as cause for her sacking. The legal authority for this move is unclear. Cook, the first Black woman to be on the Fed’s board of governors, said the president has no authority to remove her, and her lawyer vowed to reverse her dismissal. The president had repeatedly targeted Cook in recent days, the latest move in a series of extraordinary attacks on the Fed’s independence since he returned to office. The move prompted a sell-off of long-term US government bonds.
French Prime Minister faces likely ouster, markets reel
Prime Minister François Bayrou has called a confidence vote for Sept 8 on his €44 billion deficit-cutting budget — a move widely expected to topple his minority government, as key opposition factions have vowed to vote against him. If Bayrou loses, France would face another government collapse, prolonging political gridlock and raising the risk of snap elections that could hand the right wing an outright majority. Markets reacted immediately: France’s 10-year borrowing costs surged to 3.53%, and the CAC 40, France’s benchmark stock index, fell for a second straight day.
Botswana declares public health emergency
A shortage of medicines and medical equipment, including for cancer and tuberculosis treatments, prompted Botswana President Duma Boko to declare a nationwide public health emergency yesterday. A country of 2.5 million people in southern Africa, Botswana has suffered badly from a downturn in the diamond industry, fueling unemployment and poverty. US aid cuts have exacerbated these issues: the United States used to fund a third of Botswana’s aid response, per UNAIDS. The shortages are a major test for Boko, who is in his first year office after ousting the party that had governed for 58 straight years.African elephants drinking at waterhole in Mashatu Game Reserve, Botswana.
Horton hears a diplomatic snafu
Let’s talk about the elephant(s) in the room — all 20,000 — that Botswana’s leader is publicly threatening to unleash on German soil. President Mokgweetsi Masisi issued this warning after Berlin’s environment ministry, in the name of conservation, weighed a ban on hunting trophy imports from Africa: “If you like [elephants] so much, then please accept this gift from us.”
Masisi’s side: Botswana is home to over 130,000 elephants, more than any other country in the world. Herds can cause property damage, eat crops, and even trample residents, and Masisi says hunting is necessary to control the exploding population. Banning the trophies would also contribute to poverty, he said, as hunting can be an important source of income for rural communities.
Germany’s side: Animal rights groups argue that hunting elephants is cruel and should be banned, regardless of population size. A PETA spokesperson went so far as to say that hunting is merely “a hobby of rich, jaded people who have more money than morals.” Plus, the German Association for Animal Welfare insists that hunts exacerbate societal inequalities in communities instead of diminishing them.
What’s next: While Masisi assured that this “is not a joke,” German officials say Gaborone has “not yet contacted” them to discuss sending Dumbos to Deutschland.