Thursday, 25 June 2026

World

The Senate votes to end a war that's already winding down — and Trump calls it meaningless

US senators reclaimed their war power over Iran on a 50-48 vote, four months after the fighting began and with a ceasefire already in place.

Finance

Markets bet the Fed will raise rates, not cut them — and almost everything moves at once

A week ago, almost nobody expected a US rate hike.

Tech

The most valuable company in AI this week makes the boring part

Micron's memory-chip revenue quadrupled to $41 billion as AI's hunger for memory turned a commodity into the scarcest thing in tech — while Qualcomm muscled into Nvidia's turf and OpenAI revealed its own chip.

Mind & body

How pain actually works — and why what you feel is the brain's verdict, not a readout of the damage

Pain isn't a wire that runs straight from the injury to your awareness.

Climate

France hits its hottest day ever, and quietly reaches for the one fix it spent years resisting

A record-breaking heatwave is forcing Europe to confront air conditioning — the cooling it needs to survive heat that more cooling helps create.

Space

A NASA rover found carbon on Mars that life can make — and so can lifeless rock

Perseverance detected complex carbon in an ancient Martian riverbed.

Biotech

A US company will sell an unproven anti-ageing gene therapy abroad to skip the FDA

Minicircle is about to offer a longevity gene therapy in Honduras, the Bahamas and Panama with no rigorous trials and no regulator's approval — while the field that plays by the rules saw real cures, real failures, and a pioneer go bankrupt.

Money

Why your first years of mortgage payments barely touch what you borrowed

A fixed mortgage payment never changes, but what it buys does — early on, almost all of it is interest, and the part that actually shrinks your debt starts tiny and grows slowly for years.

Sports

College sports asks Congress for the one thing the courts took away — permission not to compete

A bill to shield the NCAA and its conferences from antitrust lawsuits cleared a key Senate vote, while the two richest leagues fight it.

Gaming

Game bosses say AI is making studios more creative. The people making the games disagree.

A week of dueling accounts — executives at EA and Epic praise AI's "rise in creativity" while developers, a union, and even a former AI chief say the opposite — set against fresh layoffs, a record GTA 6 price, and indie breakouts the giants didn't see coming.

Food

Ecuador's mangroves are being cleared for shrimp ponds — and the people who lose are the ones who never sold anything

A booming shrimp export trade is eating the coastal forests that fed fishers, sheltered the coast, and stored carbon — none of which had a price.

Cyber

Malware learns to talk its way past the AI now reading it

A North-Korea-linked backdoor hides fake messages meant to fool the AI tool analysing it — one of three new tricks aimed not at the machine, but at the artificial judge now standing guard.