World
The truth: Nearly 130 heads of state are flying to New York this week for the UN General Assembly, and the two meetings most likely to decide something are somewhere else.
Monday, 21 September 2026
309 stories · 12 beats · 4 signals
Signals
Missiles hit Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital, and a barrel of oil rose to $104.68. QatarEnergy says ships cannot reach Qatar, so the country is shipping very little of the gas the rest of the world buys from it.
A barrel of oil stayed above $103 all day. The daily cost of hiring a tanker to carry it has reached a record.
In Dhaka, Bangladesh, Parvin Akter sometimes waits until midnight to cook, because the piped gas comes and goes. South Korea shipped 129,000 barrels of jet fuel a day to Europe this month, after the war cut off about half of Europe's usual supply.
An outside panel found Chubu Electric, a Japanese power company, had given the country's nuclear regulator manipulated earthquake figures for two reactors. Its president and chairman are going, and the eleven-year bid to restart them has been dropped.
A class action says insurance companies owned by Mark Walter told regulators that 3% of their customers' money went into businesses he controls, when the real figure was about 42%. He owns two of the biggest clubs in American sport, baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers and basketball's Los Angeles Lakers.
China's share regulator has slowed approvals for makers of human-shaped robots that want to sell shares to the public. In some of those companies the buyer was a local government that had also paid for most of the company, so the regulator is asking who really wanted the robots.
The law giving American drivers a tax break on car loan interest passed in July 2025. The rules that make it possible to claim were published today, fourteen months later.
Drug companies are already building an artificial retina and printing human tissue on the International Space Station. No medicines regulator anywhere has written down how anything made up there would be approved for sale.
The European Union is drafting a law to make shops check a buyer's age before a download. Its own definition of an online game is wide enough to cover a single-player game that goes online only to fetch a repair.
Antivenom is a hundred years old and cheap, and in four Indigenous districts of the Brazilian Amazon it sat in city hospitals hours or days away. Moved into the villages' own health units, the share of snakebite patients treated within six hours went from two in five to three in four.
Doctors in England can now prescribe a breast cancer drug the health service refused for years. The makers did not substantially cut the price; the health service raised the most it will pay for one extra year of good health, from 30,000 pounds to 35,000.
The World Food Programme has received $206 million for Sudan so far this year, against $645 million for the whole of last year. It has halved the rations it hands out there.
12 editions
World
The truth: Nearly 130 heads of state are flying to New York this week for the UN General Assembly, and the two meetings most likely to decide something are somewhere else.
Finance
The truth: The Bank of Japan gave markets the rate rise they expected and would not promise another, so the yen fell and Japanese officials began ringing banks about buying it back.
Tech
The truth: China's securities regulator is not asking whether humanoid robots work.
Mind & body
The truth: In four Indigenous districts of the Brazilian Amazon, health workers were trained to keep antivenom and give it themselves.
Climate
The truth: Chubu Electric spent eleven years trying to get two reactors past Japan's nuclear regulator, and what finally stopped it was a whistleblower's tip rather than an inspection.
Space
The truth: Drug companies are already making things in orbit: an artificial retina, printed liver and kidney tissue, and a cancer drug reworked after research on the space station.
Biotech
The truth: The NHS in England did not decide that Enhertu was worth more, and Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca did not substantially cut what they charge.
Money
The truth: The law giving American drivers a car loan tax break passed on 4 July 2025, and the rules that make it claimable were only published today.
Sports
The truth: Mark Walter's insurance companies promised ordinary customers a fixed income for life.
Gaming
The truth: The European Commission wrote the KIDS Act as a law about children and social media, and its own definition of an online game covers anything you can buy or update online.
Food
The truth: China is on track to meet the soybean promise the US government says it made, a promise China's own government has never publicly accepted.
Cyber
The truth: ShinyHunters says it broke into cl0p's website because cl0p stole its Oracle break-in tool last year, so this is two gangs fighting over who owns a way into other people's computers.