A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., July 29, 2026.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Longer-dated U.S. government bond yields edged higher on Friday as investor jitters over the Treasury Department's extended debt repurchase program and soaring national debt continued to hover over markets.
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The yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond, one of the targets of the buyback plan, rose more than 3 basis points to 5.273%. A week ago, the long bond yielded 5.21%.
The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield — the key benchmark for mortgages, auto loans and credit card debt — was up more than 3 basis points at 4.732%. Last Friday, the 10-year yielded as little as 4.63%.
The shorter-dated 2-year Treasury note yield, which more closely tracks short-term Federal Reserve rate expectations, was higher by more than 4 basis points at 4.23%. A week, the two-year low yield was about 4.10%.
One basis point equals 0.01%, or 1/100th of 1%, and yields and prices move inversely to one another.
Borrowing costs rebounded sharply Thursday, with both 10-year note and 30-year bond yields rising more than 5 basis points.
That wiped out the 10-year yield's decline from Wednesday, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent intervened in the government bond market, ramping up in repurchases and aiming at easing pressure at the long end of the curve.
Traders are now looking ahead to Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh's upcoming speech at Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, where he could offer insights on longer-term yields and the central bank's independence.
"The rise in bond yields and the Treasury's purchases all set the stage for what will be a very important Jackson Hole speech next week, which gives Warsh the opportunity to talk to markets, which are in need of more clarity on the central bank's plans," said Paul Stanley, Arca managing director and founding advisor.
"It seems as though Warsh wants the market to do the tightening for the Fed, and that's really what is happening with the recent surge in bond yields," he added.
Traders will also get the latest reading on the personal consumption expenditures price index, which is slated for release next Wednesday. %!s()
For a limited time in April, Paramount is offering a promotional deal for most new and returning subscribers that requires an unadvertised coupon. Get your first two months of Paramount+ for just $0.99 per month when you apply coupon code "p2mcs26prem" duiring checkout. I'd definitely suggest going with the Premium tier, which normally costs $13.99 per month, since it is ad-free and includes Showtime. Note that with Paramount+ codes, your mileage may vary.
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Paramount+ Premium with Showtime for $0.99/mo
2 Months of Paramount+ Premium Ad-Free Subscription
Apply the coupon code during checkout.
Paramount+ is one of the better populated streaming services available, especially if you're on the ad-free plan. Several high-profile movies are currently streaming exclusively on Paramount+, including The Running Man, The Naked Gun, and Primate. Its extensive library of media has been bolstered with the addition of Showtime, making it a great service for those who enjoy movies, original shows, live sports, and news. Popular TV shows include Dexter: Resurrection, Marshals (a recent spinoff of Yellowstone), Landman, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Tulsa King, Halo, and Yellowjackets.
If you're a UFC fan, then signing up for Paramount+ is a no-brainer. Dubbed "the home of UFC", your Paramount+ subscription gives you access to all UFC numbered events and Fight Nights on demand, from prelims to main cards.
If you watch American football, then you'll be stoked to hear that the regular season starts up on September 9. Paramount doesn't stream very many pre-season games, but that should change during the regular season as more NFL games start airing on your local CBS network and Paramount gets exclusive streaming rights to select games. The two free months won't get you through an entire football season, but hopefully there's another streaming deal floating around by then.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.%!s()
'I fear for them' - pundits lament 'desperate times' for Pakistan
Figure caption,
Highlights: England ease to huge win against Pakistan on day three at Headingley
ByMatthew Henry
BBC Sport journalist at Headingley
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Former England captain Michael Vaughan says he "really fears" for Pakistan and felt "quite sad" watching their heavy defeat by England in the first Test at Headingley.
Pakistan were thrashed by an innings and 103 runs in the series opener - batting for 85.4 overs across both innings combined.
A side that has produced some of the sport's most fearsome bowlers were also meek with the ball and poor in the field.
"They've been absolutely blown away," Vaughan told BBC Test Match Special. "They've been hammered. I've never seen them look so timid.
"The tactical side wasn't there. The skill level and the class between the sides, Pakistan look a long way short.
"I hope they can find something over the next couple of days.
"They'll get criticised and rightly so, hopefully that will force them to find something."
Pakistan have long been known for their turmoil off the field and their current struggles were perhaps best summed up in the post-match news conference.
Stand-in skipper Salman Agha laughed he is "more than happy" to hand the captaincy back to Babar Azam for the second Test, which starts at Lord's on Thursday.
A decade ago they were top of the Test rankings while iconic teams in the late 1980s and 1990s, featuring all-time greats such as Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, won three Test series in a row in England.
Now they are bottom of the World Test Championship, have lost five of their past six Tests and 14 defeats from 19 Tests going back to December 2023.
Former captain Ramiz Raja told TMS he "fears the worst".
"The first pillar has fallen, and that's the fans, they are disenchanted, they aren't going to back this team and who would?" Raja said.
"If you lose 17 Test matches in the last 20 you've played nobody's going to back this team."
Vaughan added: "I look at this side and feel quite sad watching them this week.
"I've seen many Pakistan sides play and this side just seem to be lacking all that spirit and fight we've come accustomed to seeing."
'What's the point in playing?' - where has it gone wrong?
Babar, who missed this Test with a hand injury, is the only Pakistan batter in the top 25 of the International Cricket Council's Test batting rankings.
Their bowling attack is without the likes of Shaheen Afridi and Naseem Shah, who have impressed at times in Tests but have often been used in shorter formats or struggled for form and fitness.
Four of their five victories since 2023 have come at home, where spinning pitches have often been prioritised in pursuit of wins.
Industrial fans, heaters and windbreaks were used to prepare a pitch during the series win over England in 2024.
"You try to produce a one-dimensional team that can only win on select surfaces," Raja said.
"You've discouraged pace bowling and because so many players want to play T20 cricket because it's a route to success, they're just not bothered about playing Test-match cricket.
"These are desperate times for Pakistan cricket to make a comeback through pace.
"It's always been our thing, if you discourage the DNA that completes us, what's the point in then playing Test cricket?"
Figure caption,
Three wickets in six balls - Tongue's terrific spell after lunch
'We are rebuilding' - captain calls for calm
Salman played down the worries around the future, instead suggesting this is a team undergoing a "rebuild".
Their top seven have each played at least 24 Tests - Imam-ul-Haq, Shan Masood, Abdullah Shafique and Saud Shakeel have also all played for Yorkshire - but only Muhammad Abbas in their bowling attack had played a Test in England before.
"We are a rebuild kind of team," Salman said. "It is not about worrying about the future. It is about making a future."
He added: "We didn't execute our plans at Headingley, but that doesn't mean we can't do the same in the next matches.
"We will sit down and think about the performance. And we will come back for sure."
Babar is expected to be fit to return at Lord's while Ubaid Shah, the younger brother of Naseem who can bowl greater pace than Abbas, Mohammad Ali and Khurram Shazad, is a candidate to come in.
Raja suggested there are further troubles below the Test team.
"The batting is below par, even at the Under-19 level and the Under-17 level.
"The bowling, yes, they've got two or three quicks [but] they aren't being exposed to this type of cricket. In the field they are still brittle."
Before we talk about Sandustry, the excellent new spelunking factory builder from Lantto Games and Hooded Horse, we need to revisit that most quintessentially vidyagame of topics, the post-industrial countryside of Wales. Early on in my recent 105-mile "review" of the MSI Cyborg 14 laptop, I walked through the old slate quarries near the village of Aberllefenni – the longest continually operated slate mining setup in the world until its closure in 2003.
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After passing some overgrown roofless cottages, I stopped for a tactical Seabrooks at the foot of a massive spoil pile: a hill of chopped and broken slate that must have begun with one man tipping over a wheelbarrow centuries ago, and then another barrow, and then another, while other men added bolsters and pounded paths through the mounting shards, until at last, their labour all but overshadowed the village beneath – a miraculously static expanse of slippery, plate-sized pieces, a geolithic coin drop machine right on the edge of paying out.
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun
There has been huge loss of life when spoil heaps lose their shape. In 1966, coal heaps over Aberfan in South Wales collapsed after becoming saturated with rainwater, killing 144 people. Looking up at the piled slate, I felt as though I were inside a photograph of a landslide. I find it unnerving to think of spoil piles just swelling up near villages, compacting and blurring till they are naturalised as 'landscape', ultimately treated as though they were of the same order of creation as the slopes scooped out by glaciers.
Something similar happens in Sandustry, and something of the associated dread spills over into that game, mixing with the usual factory genre emotions of decreasing fuss and apocalyptic perfectionism. The game casts you as an alien prospector sent to a planet full of buried ruins, with the objective of turning all the sand into gold. Where the likes of Satisfactory play a little like survival games, with creatures to battle and constrained traversal, in Sandustry you're more of a glorified cursor, able to glide through your own buildings together with any materials you've excavated, though you'll need to dig a passage through the solid rocks beneath.
There are boss monsters down there, but no endemic smaller threats, and in the current early access build, at least, you don't need resources for construction, in itself, save for gold to unlock new types of machine. Challenge comes, instead, from the fact that the game's materials break down into pixels that have individual physics. Amongst other things, it gives great heap.
Image credit: Hooded Horse / Rock Paper Shotgun
Here's how the enheapening starts: you set up a small network of conveyors and elevators to first dunk sand in water, then transport it to a line of automated sifting trays to jostle out flecks of gold. Doing this also produces a sandy residue, however, which settles like dandruff on your collection hopper. So you carelessly stretch out a stack of launchers over your sifting trays, to intercept the reside and fling it off-screen. Then you find an auspicious cave and burrow down in search of special upgrade crystals, piston-punching your way into luminous caverns, while gold tinkles into the counter on your HUD. You return after a few moments, and find that your gold-mining operation now cowers beside a rising mountain of debris.
Sandustry is probably the first factory game I've played that really communicates the physicality of industrial waste, the appalling magnificence of it, for all the dinkiness of its 2D artstyle. It's the only factory game that really makes me think of post-industrial landscapes, like those colossal spoil piles above Aberllefenni. It also engineers a weird exuberance inside the concept of 'byproduct'.
Factory games pretty much always simulate the effects of excessive production, but the representation of these things is often clinically organised by the HUD and interface design – spreadsheets full of scrapmetal icons, neatly blocked-out 3D storage pallets, 100/100 indicators over warehouses, intangible pollution gauges. In Sandustry, by contrast, a pile of superfluous crap is an exquisite, granular entity that forms peaks and valleys and undulating plateaus; that finds its way into any crevices beneath; that chases you down tunnels as you excavate them, separating into smaller runnels and pockets of dirt; that will eventually overflow and choke your whirring machines.
Within the heap, different kinds of material form scatty seams of yellow, brown and green. The strata tell a story. You soon learn to understand how the heap was made at a glance, the forces that acted upon it, the mechanisms each grain moved through. This is useful, because your factories will likely be imperfect, at first, with gaps and bottlenecks and badly planned intersections that knock the pixels out of flow, leaving stray mounds in odd places. When you return from a foray into the caves - perhaps searching for fresh supplies of water, the game's first major resource pressure - you'll anatomise these heaps to understand your own errors.
Image credit: Hooded Horse / Rock Paper Shotgun
It makes for bizarrely captivating scenery, as utilitarian as Sandustry's presentation may be, and as bleak as it feels to be strip-mining a planet full of tapering, ancient structures that are infinitely more elegant and in tune with their surroundings than your impromptu conveyor labyrinths. The loosened matter that pools across the surface has a kind of splendour; it's tempting to finesse every pile of refuse with your auto-filtering Grabber. The other reason you might want to sculpt the refuse piles is that "waste" is not a permanent designation. As with realworld 'junk' slate, which may eventually be gathered and processed to make driveway gravel, garden mulch or drainage, so Sandustry keeps turning refuse into raw material.
You'll soon unlock other uses for sand residue, for example: it can be burnt and compressed to produce seed alongside additional gold. The unlocking of the tech tree accompanies a further revisiting of your heaps. Suddenly all that garbage you piled up near your initial gold-panning operation has value – ugh, if only you'd known that, before you stacked all those filtering belts on top of it! So expansion becomes a process of tracking and tending to dispersed and unruly hummocks of stuff that remain pleasantly fiddly to manipulate, even once you unlock a larger reticule for your Grabber and other ways of streamlining collection.
It's satisfying, and kind of horrifying. I'm very early on in Sandustry, in case you hadn't guessed, so I can't tell you how elaborate and hierarchical the production networks become. But I'm entertaining the suspicion that some things are never quite lost or destroyed in the game, only transformed and transformed and transformed. The Midasian premise might seem like a bog-standard narrative of space capitalism running amok, but there's a desperation to it. Sandustry wants everything to become gold not because gold is desirable, but because gold is one of the few factory products that vanishes completely once you make use of it, converting to unlocks and upgrades without leaving any terrible mountains of spoil behind.
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The first deportation flight to Haiti since the US supreme court upheld Donald Trump’s power to strip 350,000 Haitians – and others – of a key type of legal status in the US landed in the troubled nation on Thursday.
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The flight was carrying more that 160 Haitian nationals and landed in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city, aboard an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter.
The arrival point was selected because the main international airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is considered too dangerous. The US government currently has a ban on US commercial flights to Haiti’s capital through early September because of ongoing gang violence.
The deportees were clad in white, and many covered their faces out of safety concerns as journalists filmed their arrival. Nearly all declined to talk with the media, with some indicating they fear being targeted by gangs that control an estimated 70% of Port-au-Prince and swathes of land beyond.
The US Department of State’s travel advisory for US citizens is at the highest alert level, its website saying: “Do not travel to Haiti for any reason. US citizens are at risk due to crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.”
The deportation flight was the first since the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for those Haitians living and working in the US with that protection, and comes after US officials warned Haitian authorities to expect an increase in removals.
ICE is believed to have carried out eight flights from the US to Haiti so far this year, including a flight on 16 July carrying deportees with criminal records.
Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti’s national office of migration, told the Miami Herald that the flight also included people who were born in Chile and the Dominican Republic, but were sent to Haiti because they had a Haitian parent.
The deportees from the US were reportedly given the equivalent of US$76.40 to get home – less than the price of a ticket to the Caribbean nation’s capital Port-au-Prince from Cap-Haïtien but enough to get through some gang-controlled roads.
The end of TPS status for Haitian nationals came earlier this month when Washington DC district judge Ana Reyes removed a stay on deportations, following a decision by the US supreme court backing the Trump administration’s efforts to end the program.
Enacted by Congress in 1990, TPS in theory protects people who are already in the US when a natural disaster, epidemic, armed conflict or other extraordinary and temporary circumstance affects their country of origin. The Trump administration has been stripping protections from nation after nation and the supreme court ruling gives little chance for redress.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigrant-serving non-profit Global Refuge, said that it was a “stunning contradiction” that an administration that advises Americans against all travel to Haiti would “compel hundreds of thousands of Haitians into such dire circumstances is an unconscionable abdication of our moral responsibility”.
Overlooked also, say critics, are the contributions Haitian nationals under TPS make the the US. “We work hard, we pay our taxes, we give back to our communities and we are a big part of the engine that keeps the United States workforce in many essential industries moving,” Josiane Valsaint, a Haitian who had TPS, wrote for the Guardian. “We deserve to stay here, with our families and loved ones.”
But amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said earlier this month: “These individuals can either self-deport or we’ll arrest you and send you back. It’s that simple.” %!s()
