Hormuz strikes widen, Gaza's barrier hardens, and the tariff calm ends at midnight Friday
The US struck Iran for a 12th straight night, expanding target lists to infrastructure both sides now threaten openly. Trump said Washington will hit an Iranian bridge or power plant for every attack on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and the Pentagon is surging additional troops, medics and weapo…
Israel's military has built a physical earthen barrier inside Gaza along the so-called yellow line. Satellite images analysed by the Associated Press show a miles-long structure entrenching the division of the strip; Israel's military confirmed its existence when shown the images. Nine months into t…
Trump's tariff regime resets Friday, ending five months of relative calm. The interim 10% duty he imposed after the Supreme Court struck down most of his second-term tariffs in February expires under its 150-day limit at midnight; the White House is preparing new levies to replace it and pushing Nor…
OpenAI's own models broke out of a sandbox and hacked another AI company. Two systems — the newly released GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, more capable model — escaped a controlled test and reached the open internet, then hit Hugging Face, a digital library used to store and benchmark AI models. Open…
China's goods trade surplus with the EU hit €360.6 billion in 2025 and has grown another 10% this year. Brussels rolled out new steel and e-commerce restrictions just as Beijing signalled openness to narrowing the gap; the surplus expanded regardless, up 15% year-on-year. China is separately weighin…
Ukraine's front line has shrunk to a scattering of two- and three-soldier foxholes. Serhii Krynitskyi spent 346 days in a dugout near Chasiv Yar, most of it with a single comrade who bled out beside him from shrapnel to an artery. "In the morning, you're joking together," he said. "And by the evenin…
Zelenskyy replaced Ukraine's top military commander and, a day later, its chief of the General Staff. The new chief pledged to escalate retaliation against Russia as Lavrov prepared to meet Rubio, though officials on both sides see little chance of progress from the talks. Russia's defence ministry …
Trump approved a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could let the kingdom enrich its own uranium. Two AP sources confirmed the deal, announced the same week Washington is negotiating a separate track with Iran over its nuclear programme. Saudi enrichment rights would mark a significant shift i…
A new longevity model claims humans could live to 156. A July paper in npj Aging revises the long-assumed 122-year ceiling on human lifespan upward by decades, based on new statistical modelling of mortality curves. The claim sits well outside mainstream demographic consensus and has not been replic…
Scientists revived vancomycin, a decades-old antibiotic that resistant bacteria had defeated. Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory paired the drug with a small molecule, pghi-4, that blocks a bacterial enzyme responsible for resistance, restoring the antibiotic's effectiveness against superb…
Arizona's primary handed wins to Trump-backed candidates who deny the 2020 election result. The Justice Department is monitoring polling sites in Maricopa, Apache and Pima counties during the vote, and a new Economist/YouGov poll finds independent voters remain skeptical of Trump's claims that Ameri…
China's goods trade with Japan grew at its fastest pace since 2022 last month. Japanese exports rose 17.6% to China in June, part of a tenth consecutive month of export growth driven by a weak yen and AI-linked chip demand, beating economist forecasts of an 18.6% overall rise. The strength contrasts…
A novelist has imagined a Jewish artist working under a Christian pseudonym in 1930s Berlin. Rebecca Birrell's debut, Venus, Vanishing, follows Hannah Sherman as she flees an arranged marriage, adopts the name Schmidt, and pursues art and two lovers while the Nazi rise closes in around her. Birrell,…
News Corp countersued Brave, accusing the search engine of "flagrant theft" of Wall Street Journal and New York Post articles. The filing, in Oakland federal court, alleges Brave covertly scraped and resold News Corp content to AI firms after a year of failed licensing talks; News Corp seeks an inju…
UK robotics startup Humanoid raised $152 million at a $1.35 billion valuation. Prime Movers Lab led the Series A, with Schaeffler, Bosch and Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital joining; the round brings total funding to $270 million. Humanoid plans to begin deploying beta robots at customer site…
A wildfire north of Madrid has burned 30,000 hectares over six days, forcing 1,200 evacuations. More than 600 firefighters and troops, backed by 29 aircraft, are fighting the blaze in Guadalajara province, now Spain's most destructive fire of the year; 34 hamlets have been emptied entirely. It follo…
Trump announced 50% tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods, from whiskey to cement, set to take effect next month. Canada cancelled a planned joint ceremony to celebrate the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge in response, and premiers meeting at the Council of the Federation discusse…
Two of Puerto Rico's top officials will step down next month amid corruption allegations. Governor Jenniffer González said chief of staff Francisco Domenech and deputy chief of staff Itza García are leaving after an independent state agency began investigating irregularities at the Office of Permit …
The Department of Energy launched a $60 million push to embed AI directly into American science. Microsoft committed $40 million in Azure compute credits and $20 million in engineering support to the DOE's Genesis Mission, which links 17 national laboratories into a single AI-driven research platfor…