A protest wave topples a minister, and a Russian ally breaks ranks

World

India's government bows to weeks of youth protests, a treaty ally tells Putin to end the Ukraine war, and US-Iran strikes pause after 13 days.

Finance

Official inflation is cooling, yet the prices people actually pay keep rising, and a fresh wave of tariffs is adding to the load.

Tech

Anthropic's Opus 5 lands at half the cost, Microsoft's own models undercut OpenAI by up to 89%, and Google ships a cheaper Gemini - the frontier's pricing power is eroding fast.

Mind & body

Oxygen and carbon dioxide cross the wall between air and blood by pure diffusion.

Climate

Fourteen nations backed a 6,000km Atlantic gas line to Europe - one of a run of decades-long fossil bets being locked in this week, even as solar quietly overtook coal.

Space

A first-of-its-kind fission-powered Mars spacecraft, a 13th Starship test, and a fresh round for in-orbit refueling all chase the same problem this week - the exponential fuel penalty of going far.

Biotech

Pharma is pouring money into AI and supercomputers to sift a chemical space too vast to check by hand.

Money

A quirk in how the mind weighs outcomes makes losses loom larger than equal gains - so people hold losing bets too long, sell winners too soon, and overpay to avoid small risks.

Sports

Record British transfer fees this summer hide a quieter shift - clubs are paying a premium for proven players because the old edge in cheap, unproven talent has been competed away.

Gaming

Amazon dropped free cloud games into Prime Video and Xbox began testing ad-supported streaming this week - two moves to detach games from expensive hardware, because the money was never really in the box.

Food

A trading scramble in New York pushed coffee well above $3 a pound, while grain prices climbed, cocoa kept squeezing chocolate makers, and 1.6 million dozen eggs were pulled over salmonella.

Cyber

Attackers spent the week walking straight past the defences we lean on most - a password, a second code, a fresh patch.