Monday, 31 August 2026
451 stories · 12 beats
12 editions
World
The truth: The Strait of Hormuz stays shut because sanctions and a blockade already took away the trade Iran used to send through it, so the one move Iran can still make there costs Iran almost nothing.
Finance
The truth: The country that owes the most money is hosting the meeting about the world's trade imbalances, and the half of the imbalance it controls - its own deficit - is not on the agenda.
Tech
The truth: Almost none of this week's big technology cases will produce a ruling: the companies bought certainty with money or a policy change, and the rules everyone else works under stay unwritten.
Mind & body
The truth: Smell is being turned into a cheap early-warning test for brain disease faster than it is being understood, while the treatment for losing it is still four bottles and three months of sniffing.
Climate
The truth: The clean-power slowdown showing up in this year's numbers is not a fall in demand for clean power or a rise in the cost of the machines - it is a fall in what investors will accept for lending money against a fixed price agreed years ago, and the projects being abandoned are the ones that borrow the most before earning anything.
Space
The truth: An industry that answered the risk of being attacked by buying more satellites has been told by its own security researchers that the extra satellites share the few things that could take them all out at once.
Biotech
The truth: A vaccine that cuts one disease's hospital stays by 70 per cent barely moves the total number of hospital stays, and both figures come from the same half-million people.
Money
The truth: Argentina's $250bn dollar hoard is not lawlessness or a lack of faith in the country; it is what people do when the money they are paid in cannot safely be held for six months.
Sports
The truth: Most of this week's decisions were about membership rather than performance: who gets a place, who may come back, and who is allowed to decide - and every one of those lines was drawn by people already inside.
Gaming
The truth: Sony is not arguing that it told buyers what they were getting; it is arguing that every digital shop works this way, so nobody could have been surprised.
Food
The truth: Iceland was not asked whether to join the European Union; it was asked whether to spend four years finding out, and the answer that settled the matter that night won.
Cyber
The truth: The US cyber-defence agency has measured its own field and found that the largest share of real break-ins comes from a handful of coding mistakes it has been asking software makers to stop making since 2007, which means the problem is not that the attacks are clever but that the same product decisions keep being made.