The Kurds' American funding ends the day the last US troops leave Iraq

World

The truth: The counter-Islamic State budget line is closing on schedule, while the force it paid for is now being shot at by a different enemy entirely.

Finance

The truth: A chairman who says markets should stop reading him spent a month saying nothing, and then moved prices everywhere with one speech.

Tech

The truth: The rules on advanced AI chips were enforced by the companies selling the chips, and in Taiwan the people running the checks were paid commission on the sales they were checking.

Mind & body

The truth: For most people the barrier against infection is not the immune system but a full room, and the drug that clears an infection clears the tenants too.

Climate

The truth: An order sold as protection against sabotage is also a decision to shrink the list of companies allowed to sell into the American grid.

Space

The truth: Sunday's telescope was funded to measure dark energy.

Biotech

The truth: A result that reads as a failed drug is mostly a measurement of how well the older drug already works.

Money

The truth: A single posted price was never a promise of fair treatment - it was the best a seller could do while they could not tell buyers apart, and the data that ends that ignorance is already collected and sold.

Sports

The truth: A product that nobody can yet call legal spent the argument signing up the very clubs and leagues that would have to unwind the deals if it loses.

Gaming

The truth: Google paid 260m pounds to stop a judge deciding whether its 30% cut was unfair, and the question is still open.

Food

The truth: A town with one supermarket for 45,000 people looks like plain decline, but private contracts forbid anyone selling food on its best empty sites.

Cyber

The truth: Berlin saw data leaving one department on 7 August and left it connected for another week, because disconnecting it also stopped the payments that department makes.