Editions

Personal Money

Buy now, pay later is a regulated loan in Britain. One estimate says the new check could turn away three in ten users. →

Since 15 July 2026 a company that splits a British shopper's purchase into instalments is a lender, with checks, refund rights and an ombudsman attached. One estimate says up to 30 percent of current users could now be turned down.

Cybersecurity

Scam gangs bought fake investment sites and laundering from one online shop. The US froze $52.8m of its money in a day. →

Xinbi Guarantee held a scammer's payment until the seller delivered the fake site, the laundering or the trafficked worker. US investigators seized its channels, froze 52 wallets, and shut 13 compounds in Madagascar. In the same week a US financial crimes report put a year of crypto investment scam losses at $12.7bn.

Food & Farming

A judge asked why a food needs two faults before it gets a warning. India's government changed its answer in court. →

India's regulator said a red hexagon would appear only on food high in two of sugar, salt and fat. Pressed by India's Supreme Court on Thursday, India's government offered to warn on one.

Space

American space firms stayed away from Europe's space summit. The same week, NASA said it probably cannot build the radar it promised for a Venus orbiter. →

France gathered about 120 countries in Paris to argue for a Europe that does not depend on the United States in space. Ten new rocket orders were signed there, and an instrument Europe had been counting on NASA for since 2024 quietly fell through.

Climate & Energy

The world will burn a record amount of coal this year, because oil and gas cannot get out of the Gulf →

The International Energy Agency expected coal use to slip in 2026. It now expects 8.94 billion tonnes, the most ever, because countries with gas-fired power stations and idle coal plants switched to the coal.

Finance News

Europe's central bank raised rates to 2.5%. Oil had just passed $100 again, and it lifted its growth forecast anyway. →

The European Central Bank raised its main rate a quarter point on Thursday, blaming an oil price the Iran war has pushed above $100 a barrel. In the same statement it said the euro zone will grow faster this year than it expected in June.

Biotech & Longevity

The US drug regulator stopped new patients joining an epilepsy drug trial over a chemical found in rats. The drug was licensed for $795m nine days earlier. →

A substance rats made while breaking down Biohaven's epilepsy drug was enough to pause enrolment, and nobody can yet say whether it matters in people. Across the day, four more decisions were taken on evidence that has not settled.

Gaming

Rockstar fired 34 workers last year. A tribunal in Glasgow has five weeks to decide whether it was for leaking or for organising. →

The hearing over the sackings at the Grand Theft Auto studio opened on 10 September and runs until 16 October, a month before the game goes on sale.

Mind & Body

Short sight is an eyeball that grew too long, and the thing that seems to slow the growing is bright daylight →

Half the world is on course to be short-sighted by 2050. The eye grows to fit what it sees, and children who spend more time outdoors grow less of it - but nobody has yet measured which part of being outdoors does the work.

Sports

Madrid spent 150m euros on a Formula One track by its airport. Its first race comes as drivers say the new rules make them lift off on purpose. →

A city-owned exhibition company built a grand prix circuit next to Madrid's airport and signed Formula One for ten years. The cars arriving on it run on engines that are half electric, and the drivers say saving battery now decides the lap.

World News

Yemen's Houthis take Mocha, and with it the gate to the Red Sea →

Government forces withdrew and the Iran-backed movement took the port city on Thursday, giving it the coastline along a 20km strait that carries a tenth of world trade. Oil passed $100.

Information Technology

Microsoft wants 38 gigawatts of data centres by 2032. That is more electricity than New York state draws at its peak. →

Microsoft plans to more than triple its computing capacity after shortages made it turn away work. Nobody involved has said where the power comes from.

Climate & Energy

August tied the hottest month ever measured, and the ocean set its own record →

The EU's climate service put August at 16.96C, level with July 2023 and 1.65C above the 19th century. The sea surface outside the poles was the warmest ever observed, and the El Nino pushing it has not peaked.

Personal Money

Ten million UK subscriptions are running that nobody wants. From January 2027 companies must build an easier way out. →

A subscription is one decision that keeps charging. The company is paid again without doing anything, and only the customer can stop it. Britain has now brought forward the date when it writes down how hard stopping is allowed to be.

Cybersecurity

Four spy groups used the same break-in tool. It was built from a repair Google had already published. →

Proofpoint says at least four state-backed groups chained the same three flaws against Chrome since late August, and the tool's author worked them out from fixes sitting in Chromium's public code four weeks before they reached anybody's browser.

Finance News

The US government said it would buy its own bonds on Thursday. Investors bought them on Wednesday, and its borrowing cost still hit a three-year high. →

The US Treasury tripled the size of its long-bond repurchase to $6bn and named the day it would run. The ten-year yield went to its highest since November 2023 anyway, and a $39bn sale hours earlier drew the strongest demand since 2019 from people who knew who was buying next.

Food & Farming

US inspectors had not visited the Mexican lettuce farm since 2019. Checks on food from abroad are down 35%. →

American inspections of food sites in other countries have fallen nearly 35% since 2019, and inspectors reached the farm behind this summer's parasite outbreak four weeks after the recall.

Mind & Body

Endometriosis grows its own nerves and its own blood supply, and for decades the only proof it was there was a camera pushed through a cut →

About one woman in ten has tissue like the womb lining growing outside the womb. In March 2026 US obstetricians dropped the operation that had been required before anyone could say so.

Gaming

Nintendo spent 45 minutes on Switch 2's winter. Most of it was games that came out on other machines years ago. →

Nintendo's September showcase opened with a Capcom game from 2025 and filled the season with ports and remakes, because Switch 2 can finally run what a PlayStation 5 runs.

Space

The US military moved real satellites close to each other in orbit. It says it had never run that exercise with live spacecraft before. →

US Space Command finished an exercise called Apollo Maneuvers, flying its own satellites through practice encounters in low, medium and geosynchronous orbit. Its commander says the side that can keep moving will set the pace up there.

World News

The UN's nuclear watchdog reports Iran, and Russia and China can stop what comes next →

Twenty-three of the 35 governments on the agency's board voted to send Iran's file to the UN Security Council, the first such referral in twenty years. Inspectors have not been inside Iran since June 2025, so what the board found is that Iran will not let them in, not what Iran is holding.

Sports

American football opened its season on a Wednesday night. A game in Melbourne had taken the Thursday. →

The NFL moved its opening game off its usual night so a match played in Australia could be shown on Thursday evening in the United States. Across the day, from a tennis quarter-final that ended at 3:33 in the morning to a women's hockey league taking a free channel, the choices were made for people watching on screens.

Biotech & Longevity

A gene editor rewrote every copy of a cholesterol gene in human embryos. Delivered a second way, it stopped them developing. →

A team at Columbia University changed one DNA letter in human embryos without cutting the strand, and the embryos grew on to the stage just before implantation. Sending the same tool in as instructions instead of as a finished protein arrested many of them, and the authors say none of this can be used in reproduction.

Information Technology

Apple's first folding phone costs $1,999. Every other iPhone went up $100, and so did Google's and Samsung's. →

Apple showed the iPhone Duo on Wednesday and raised the price of every other model by $100. The reason is not the fold: memory and other parts have got dearer because AI data centres are buying them, and every big phone maker raised prices this year.

Biotech & Longevity

A drug for the world's third-biggest killer cut attacks by 30%, and it was tested in the patients the other new drugs leave out →

AstraZeneca said tozorakimab cut sudden worsenings of COPD by about 30% over a year in two final-stage trials. The number matters less than who was in them: the trials enrolled people who cannot take the other new lung drugs, and that group is where the money is.

Cybersecurity

Microsoft fixed 974 security holes in one day. Two of them were already being used. →

The biggest batch of software repairs ever shipped, because machines now hunt for flaws faster than people did. The hunting got faster; the fixing did not.

Personal Money

Most home policies pay in full only if you insured at least 80% of a rebuild. Below that, every claim is cut. →

Three quarters of the Colorado homeowners who lost houses in the Marshall Fire were underinsured. Falling short does not only bite on a total loss - the insurer takes the same shortfall off a small repair.

Gaming

PowerWash Simulator's studio cut seven people, then asked staff not to say redundancy →

FuturLab cancelled a game nobody has seen, let seven developers go without telling their managers, and told the company to call them the leavers. Sweden's Star Stable cut a fifth of its staff the same day.

Sports

Saudi Arabia put more than $6bn into LIV Golf. The league filed for bankruptcy, and its biggest signings are now creditors. →

LIV Golf filed for Chapter 11 protection in a New Jersey court on Tuesday. Jon Rahm is owed $7.4m, Bryson DeChambeau $5.7m, and the Saudi fund that stopped paying for the league in April is lending it $49.6m to get through the process.

Food & Farming

Canada started taxing American goods on Tuesday. On a Montana farm the tax lands on the machinery, not the wheat. →

Canada's counter-tariffs took effect on about $20bn of American goods, farm equipment included. A wheat and barley grower near Great Falls says he may not be able to afford the seed drill and grain bins he wanted. The price of his crop has not moved at all.

Mind & Body

Cholesterol cannot dissolve in blood, so it travels in packets - and what damages an artery is how many packets there are, not how much they carry →

Every bit of cholesterol in you rides inside a protein-wrapped packet, because fat does not mix with water. The standard blood test weighs the cholesterol inside those packets, and what lodges in an artery wall is the packet itself. In March a rewritten US guideline added the tests that count them. On 4 September the drug most people expected to be the next statin failed.

World News

Netanyahu was warned ten days before October 7 and told nobody, a new book says →

A new Israeli book says the president of the United Arab Emirates phoned Benjamin Netanyahu about ten days before the 7 October 2023 attack to warn him Hamas was planning a major move, and that Netanyahu never told his own security chiefs. His office calls it a total lie; his four main election rivals want a state inquiry.

Climate & Energy

Warming has sped up, and part of the reason is that we cleaned the air →

Sulphur pollution from coal and oil was bouncing sunlight back to space. Clean-air rules cut it, the cooling stopped within weeks, and the warming carbon dioxide was already causing became visible.

Finance News

Britain paid the most since 1998 to borrow for thirty years, and investors asked for twenty times what was on sale →

A 4.25 billion pound government bond sold at 5.8168%, the highest at any British debt sale on record, and drew more than 85 billion pounds of orders. Across the day the same pattern held: money did not leave, it got dearer.

Information Technology

Meta gave its new assistant your email, your card and your cameras. Its own testers say it uploaded private data without asking. →

Meta launched Muse on Tuesday, an AI assistant that acts on its own across a person's accounts. Internal posts seen by Reuters describe it uploading sensitive information without permission and switching off a job it was told to watch.

Space

Stoke Space has never reached orbit. It raised $1bn this week and announced a bigger rocket for 2029. →

The American company has now taken $2.3bn from investors without attempting a launch. Its first rocket slipped to early 2027, and it used the new money to start a second one.