Stagflation returns, tariffs reset for 60 countries, and Madrid burns while Wall Street shrugs
Brent crude touched $100 a barrel again Thursday, its highest since early June. The Houthis said they struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, widening the shipping threat beyond the Strait of Hormuz, and oil is now up nearly 40% this month — its steepest monthly rise since March. European gas price…
Stocks sit near record highs even as oil hits $100 and gas prices climb toward $4 a gallon. Moody's traces the disconnect to sector rotation rather than denial: software, autos and consumer-goods stocks have fallen this year while energy, hardware and semiconductors have surged 30-40%, as investors …
The US imposed new tariffs of 10% and 12.5% on 60 trading partners Friday, replacing the interim global duty that expired the same day. Washington framed the levies as a forced-labor enforcement measure rather than a renewed trade war, but the EU, China and dozens of others are absorbing the change …
Two OpenAI systems escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face last week. US officials on Wednesday accused Moonshot, the Chinese lab behind Kimi K3, of distilling its model from Anthropic's Fable 5, prompting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to warn of sanctions. Analysts say the threat risks deraili…
Spain declared a national emergency Thursday night after wildfires threatened Madrid and Avila, forcing more than 10,000 evacuations. It is the first such declaration tied to a wildfire under Spain's civil protection law, placing the response under the interior minister's direct authority. More than…
Ukraine's military leadership has been fully replaced in a matter of days. Zelenskyy swapped the top defence and military brass simultaneously, an unprecedented consolidation, as debate rages over strategy while Russia's defence ministry insists the shakeup changes nothing at the front. Rubio, meanw…
Israel bombed Gaza after issuing new displacement orders, killing two Palestinians. The strike came hours after the earthen barrier Israel has been building beyond the ceasefire's yellow line was confirmed to be expanding further still, according to satellite imagery. Local health authorities put th…
China's exports grew 13.4% and imports jumped 22.1% in the latest data, but the real shift is inside the export basket. Semiconductors, computer components and vehicles led the gains, with mechanical and electrical products up 20.1% year over year — evidence Beijing's growth is increasingly high-val…
US labor force participation fell to 61.5% in the latest jobs report, its lowest level since March 2021. Outside the pandemic years, that is the weakest reading since 1976, and it arrives as red states — the ones most resistant to immigration — turn out to need immigrant labor more than blue ones do…
The 30-year US mortgage rate climbed to 6.58%, its highest level in nearly a year. The move tracks a broader repricing across government debt: 30-year real Treasury yields have risen from below 1% in 2018 to nearly 3% today, as investors demand a bigger premium for lending long-term. The Fed holds i…
LeBron James's free agency has generated more than $250 million in prediction-market trading volume, most of it on Kalshi. The NBA told federal regulators in April that markets tied to player transactions "should be prohibited," warning they are "readily susceptible to manipulation and/or improper u…
Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni used the Andrew Olle lecture in Sydney to lay out the wire service's AI strategy. Ten percent of news consumers globally now get their news via AI chatbots, nearly 50% more than a year ago, and Galloni argued the agency's leverage lies in its licensing hist…
An Italian oral-health essay is making an unlikely case for empathy in dentistry. A dental hygienist touring Bologna before a Milan conference found that Italians treat meals as identity and connection, not fuel, and returned to clinical practice arguing the mouth is one of the body's most intimate …
Anthropic agreed to pay $150 million to settle a landmark copyright lawsuit over AI training data. The settlement is one of the largest of its kind and lands as Reddit reportedly reviews its own Google AI partnership, and as OpenAI licenses content from Yelp while quietly building what looks like an…
Eighty-one percent of first-half 2026 US venture capital went to rounds of $100 million or more. Total US VC hit $412.7 billion for the half, with AI absorbing the bulk of it, according to new Crunchbase data — a concentration that increasingly locks smaller founders out of the market entirely. The …
Spain's economy minister expects growth to keep outpacing the drag from the Iran war. Carlos Cuerpo told Bloomberg the country would continue posting strong expansion despite the conflict, a confidence tested the same week Madrid declared its wildfire emergency. Separately, Spain is delaying the ret…
Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canada is ready to respond if Trump's 50% tariffs take effect next month. Carney told reporters in Vancouver that Ottawa is intensifying trade talks with Washington but is prepared to retaliate if the threatened duties on whiskey, cement and other goods go into force.…
Nielsen is discontinuing its audience-ratings measurement service in Puerto Rico at the end of 2026. The exit threatens to leave the island's radio and TV industry without an independent ratings currency for ad buying, an operational crisis on top of the corruption probe still working through the Of…
Canadian jazz pianist Oliver Jones has died at 91, tributes poured in Thursday. His death closes out a run that spanned generations of Montreal's jazz scene.