US companies get a fifth of Venezuela's oil, and Venezuela keeps the ownership papers

World

The truth: A government the United States installed in January has signed away a fifth of its country's oil to US companies, ten weeks before US elections in which the price of petrol is the governing party's hardest problem.

Finance

The truth: America's oil companies priced Venezuela's fields and refused them, so the government bought a share instead, using an instrument that costs it almost nothing until the oil actually flows.

Tech

The truth: The 25% chip tax excused almost everyone who actually buys chips, so the real fight is over the list of exceptions, not the rate.

Mind & body

The truth: Iron has no exit, so everything that looks like managing it is really one decision taken at the gut wall, over and over, for a whole lifetime.

Climate

The truth: A deal announced on social media, with no contract published, converts a country whose oil data nobody can check into an American supply line, at the same time as the group that used to set oil prices is quietly falling apart.

Space

The truth: SpaceX has already committed a $100 billion spaceport, its next satellite design and the retirement of its only working rocket to a vehicle that has never once reached orbit.

Biotech

The truth: Six people whose arthritis had beaten eight drugs each got better once doctors stopped turning the immune system down.

Money

The truth: Fund companies open far more funds than they expect to keep, and every one they shut takes its record out of the table the survivors are still being judged in.

Sports

The truth: College football now sets a spending limit it cannot enforce, so the real limit is whatever each school can raise, and that number is quietly deciding how the sport is played rather than only who wins.

Gaming

The truth: The cheapest games on the shop are cheap because they are sold to whole groups at once, and the most expensive are expensive because they are sold to one person at a time.

Food

The truth: Both governments are taxing the goods they can afford to tax and quietly leaving alone the one thing that would really hurt - the Canadian fertiliser salt that four out of five American harvests depend on.

Cyber

The truth: A crew that could poison the software the world builds on could not stop being findable, because being findable is what ordinary life online does to everybody.