Hormuz reopens to warships, not tankers; China's growth target slips; publishers find a spell in AI licensing.
The US resumed blockading Iranian ports and struck dozens of new targets overnight. Trump abandoned a planned 20% fee on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz even as strikes continued, a retreat the BBC called evidence he is "struggling to end" a war that has now run more than four months. The coll…
Israeli strikes killed a man, his wife and their six-year-old daughter in Deir Al-Balah on Wednesday. Habeeba's brother survived with injuries; a separate strike in Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood killed one more person, per medics cited by Reuters. The cumulative toll since the October truc…
The Fed's own survey shows inflation easing just as the war that eased it resumes. The Beige Book, compiled from data collected on or before July 6, found price growth the same or slower across all twelve districts and employment rising without straining wage bills — a snapshot already overtaken by …
China's economy grew 4.3% in the second quarter, its slowest pace since late 2022. The figure missed Beijing's own growth target for the first time this year, per CNN, as weak domestic consumer spending collided with Iran-war oil costs and a looming US tariff cliff. Exports, meanwhile, hit a record:…
Mira Murati's startup released its first model, more than a year after she left OpenAI to found it. Named Inkling, the 975-billion-parameter model is open-weight — downloadable and customizable, unlike the proprietary systems from her former employer. It arrives into a gap Western labs have mostly c…
CXMT priced its Shanghai IPO at $8.6 billion, doubling its original target. Apple has been quietly negotiating with the state-backed Chinese memory chipmaker to secure supply, despite the Pentagon blacklisting CXMT over alleged military ties — Tim Cook reportedly appealed to the White House directly…
Senate Democrats blocked the $1 trillion annual defense bill Wednesday. Chuck Schumer led the protest specifically over the Iran war, the first concrete legislative pushback since fighting resumed. The National Defense Authorization Act, normally passed on bipartisan autopilot, is now hostage to a w…
Spain reached the World Cup final after beating France 2-0 in Dallas. Marc Cucurella started the semi-final and will play Sunday; fans flooded Madrid's Plaza del Sol and New York simultaneously as the match ended. It is a rare unambiguously good headline in a week otherwise dominated by war and econ…
Gibraltar and Spain will end border checks under a post-Brexit deal years in the making. The agreement removes the daily commuter bottleneck for tens of thousands of workers and creates, per Courthouse News, Europe's newest Schengen frontier. It closes a Brexit-era loose end that outlasted the withd…
Japan's parliament reclassified cryptocurrency as a financial asset rather than a payment instrument. The change, expected to take effect within a year, brings crypto under securities law with new insider-trading rules and tougher disclosure and penalty regimes, per Reuters. It also lays groundwork …
The Bank of Canada held its rate at 2.25% for a sixth consecutive meeting. Governor Tiff Macklem struck his most upbeat tone of the year, forecasting 2.5% annualized second-quarter growth after a first-quarter stall tied to Middle East disruption and US trade uncertainty. The bank cut its full-year …
Puerto Rico's government is pushing liquefied natural gas as the fix for daily blackouts. A US Department of Energy study, validated by University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez engineers, found the island could meet more than 100% of its electricity demand through wind, solar and storage by 2050. Renewabl…
A South River, New Jersey mother is regaining movement in hands and a foot doctors reattached after a June stabbing. Mayor Peter Guindi says she remembers everything from the attempted murder-suicide that killed her husband, and is now recovering at Cooper University Hospital in Camden. "Her will to…
Bloomsbury held its annual profit forecast steady on the strength of AI licensing revenue. The Harry Potter publisher, which struck an AI partnership with Google last September, expects adjusted profit around £49.9 million and says its academic division is growing across all territories. Publishers …
Japan's crypto reclassification lands the same week CXMT priced its record $8.6bn IPO and DeepSeek sought $1.5bn ahead of a $71bn valuation. Anthropic is meanwhile racing OpenAI toward public markets with an October IPO roadshow already scheduled, per reporting on the filing timeline. Capital format…
Spain will play Sunday's World Cup final after eliminating France 2-0 in Dallas. Cucurella started the semi-final and celebrations spread from Plaza del Sol to Manhattan within the hour. Meanwhile Spain's deputy prime minister Carlos Cuerpo told Ukrainian outlet NV ahead of a Kyiv visit that "defend…
Canada is joining an international next-generation fighter jet program with the UK, Italy and Japan. Defence Minister David McGuinty is expected to formalize the announcement in the UK next week, per the CBC, deepening defence-industrial ties just as the Bank of Canada flags US trade policy as the c…
A Puerto Rico government agency exposed roughly 1 million Social Security numbers. A cybersecurity loophole in an official mapping service left the data easily accessible, according to reporting by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and ProPublica. It lands the same week the island's energy auth…
A South River mother is regaining movement in hands and a foot doctors reattached after a June stabbing. Mayor Peter Guindi says she remembers everything, and her two children are being cared for by their Coptic Orthodox church rather than placed with the state. "That's why it's so close to me," Gui…