Editions

Climate & Energy

New York wrote a 2030 emissions target into law, deleted it, and ordered five gigawatts of nuclear instead →

Thirteen of the fifteen US states and districts that put a 2030 emissions deadline in law are behind it. New York's governor cancelled hers in May, and now wants more new reactors than the whole country has built since 2006.

Cybersecurity

Apple warned 14 Serbians that their phones had been hacked. Most are students who protest against the government. →

Researchers confirmed Pegasus spyware on one phone and a new version of NoviSpy on two more. Serbia's government denies spying, and 29 European lawmakers now want the country's application to join the EU slowed down.

Personal Money

Your bank did not lend out somebody's savings. On its own books, it wrote the money into your account. →

Nine tenths of the money Americans can spend is not notes and coins. It is a number in a bank account, and most of it was created the moment a bank agreed a loan.

Biotech & Longevity

Novartis lowered the blood particle that genes tie to heart attacks. In 8,323 people, the heart attacks did not fall. →

Pelacarsen cut lipoprotein(a), a fatty particle set largely at birth and long treated as a proven cause of heart disease. The people taking it had no less cardiovascular risk than the rest. Two rival drugs that cut the particle far deeper are still being tested.

Gaming

Steam took $15bn this year. Its hundred biggest new games are a sixth of that. →

Twelve thousand games launched on Steam in six months. Most of the money on the shop is going to games that were already there.

Space

In China a rocket company cannot sell shares until it has put something in orbit. Six new Chinese rockets have flown this year. →

The Shanghai Stock Exchange set the rule last December: a payload delivered to orbit on a medium-to-large reusable rocket. The firms queuing to list lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Food & Farming

Trump signed two orders to rebuild the US cattle herd. The country has 1.2 million farmers over 65 and 57,000 under 25. →

The orders reach wolves, beef labels and the meat packers. The herd is the smallest since the 1950s, and the government's own new insurance runs two years because that is how long a held-back heifer takes.

Finance News

US hiring came in three times too strong. Trump told the central bank to cut rates anyway, or he stops trade. →

American employers added 162,000 jobs in August against a 53,000 forecast, and traders moved to betting on a rate rise in two weeks. Hours later the US president demanded the lowest interest rates in the world and threatened to halt trade if he did not get them.

Mind & Body

The placenta is grown by the baby, not the mother, and it strips the muscle out of her arteries so they cannot squeeze shut →

The placenta carries the fetus's genes, not the mother's. It burrows into her womb wall and rebuilds her blood vessels so they stay wide open, and the two most dangerous conditions in pregnancy are that same job going too shallow or too deep.

Sports

A judge told the conference it cannot punish LSU. The conference sued its own member, and Clemson found a third rulebook. →

Three sets of rules now cover the same football match in Baton Rouge, and each one names a different body as the one that decides who plays.

World News

US envoys go to Russia first with a peace plan Ukraine has not seen →

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner land in Russia on Saturday and in Ukraine on Sunday carrying a proposal Trump will not describe, while a Russian drone hits Ukraine's security service headquarters and the United States starts billing Europe for aid it already sent.

Information Technology

ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all broke within ninety minutes. Only SpaceX said where. →

Three rival AI companies had their services fail inside ninety minutes on Thursday morning. SpaceX blamed its Memphis computer centre and apologised to its compute partners; OpenAI and Anthropic have not said whether they were among them.

World News

Spain's leader says the warnings were vague, and a leaked police note says extreme risk →

Pedro Sanchez told parliament no report warned him of a crisis the size of Ceuta. A leaked note dated the day before says otherwise, and both sides are reading the same papers.

Food & Farming

The strongest El Nino since 1950 is building. In Sri Lanka it takes the crop and the money to replace it. →

The UN's weather agency says this Pacific warming may be the strongest for more than 70 years, and the World Food Programme expects about 50 million more people to face acute hunger. In eastern Sri Lanka the wells and the farm incomes are drying together.

Gaming

Xbox cloud gaming stops being unlimited. Its top subscribers get 15 hours a month. →

From November, Microsoft caps how long Game Pass subscribers can stream games from its servers, and starts selling hours to people who do not subscribe at all. It says the change touches 4% of subscribers.

Sports

A podcast started the investigation. Five years on, the NBA used every punishment it had. →

The NBA fined the Los Angeles Clippers $30m, took five draft picks and suspended their owner for hiding money paid to Kawhi Leonard. Every penalty was the largest the rulebook allows, and it was a podcast, not the league, that turned the scheme up.

Biotech & Longevity

These drugs block nothing. They hold two proteins together and let the cell do the rest. →

The first medicine that destroys a protein instead of blocking it was approved this year, and Johnson & Johnson paid $3.05bn for a company with no approved drug at all.

Personal Money

Cashing a $500 cheque and a $1,000 one costs the same flat fee. The smaller one just paid double the rate. →

Low-income households in Britain pay hundreds of pounds a year more than richer ones for identical goods. Much of it is not a price aimed at them. It is one cost that does not shrink, divided by a smaller sum.

Space

NASA has one working ride to the space station. It has a leak, and no new launch date. →

An oxidiser leak grounded the next crew flight. The second vehicle NASA paid for has not carried anyone since 2024, and the rocket under the first one is being retired by its owner.

Climate & Energy

China's carbon fell because of oil, not coal - the first time ever. Travel held steady and fuel use dropped 9%. →

In the three months to June, China's carbon dioxide fell 1% while its power stations burned more coal. The whole fall came from oil. People kept moving; the fuel to move them did not.

Mind & Body

Your cough and your sense of taste run on the same tiny gate, so the drug that quiets one blanks the other →

A cough is the airway's alarm. In about one adult in ten it never switches off, and the first drug built to quiet the nerve behind it takes taste with it.

Finance News

One US central bank governor said hold, and a week of rate-rise certainty came apart in a day →

Christopher Waller said he would back leaving US interest rates alone on 15-16 September if August inflation keeps cooling. Government borrowing costs fell, gold rose 2% and bitcoin gained 6% - and the figure the whole thing rests on is not published until 11 September.

Information Technology

OpenAI says its new model can break into computers on its own. It shipped it anyway. →

Astra is the first OpenAI model to hit the top step of the company's own danger scale for cyberattacks. It went out on Thursday. Anthropic now sells one model in a guarded and an unguarded version, and a startup sells open models with the refusals removed.

Cybersecurity

A dark web shop sold 153 million driving licence scans. The pictures were made to prove the licences were real. →

A service called Nexus offered scans of more than 153 million driving licences from the US and Canada, including infrared and ultraviolet images taken to check the documents were genuine. A reporter traced the timestamps to car rental counters and a dispensary, and to one identity-checking firm the FBI is now investigating.

Cybersecurity

A botnet survived 23 years by having no headquarters. Its own tidy-up rule switched it off. →

Police in four countries and the security firm CrowdStrike cut off more than 15,000 computers running Sality, by feeding false addresses into the lists each infected machine keeps of its neighbours.

Food & Farming

India's food warnings need two faults. A cereal that is 27% sugar has only one. →

India's food regulator would print a warning on a pack only when a food is high in two of three things - sugar, salt and fat. No other country does it that way, and the products that are worst at a single thing walk through.

Sports

Premier League clubs spent a record 3.5bn pounds on players. Nearly half of it went to each other. →

England's top football league closed its transfer window at 3.528bn pounds, and 1.627bn of that was one Premier League club buying from another. English clubs are now so much richer than the rest of Europe that they are often the only buyers available - so the prices are set by comparing each deal to the last one inside the same twenty clubs.

Gaming

The games industry is cutting 14,666 jobs this year and has more workers than it did in 2022 →

More than two thirds of the cuts land in North America while hiring rises across Asia, and the growth paying for all of it is piling into twenty games.

Personal Money

A bank asks for papers. A savings circle asks the nine people who will see you next week. →

Across much of the world, people who cannot borrow from a bank borrow from each other in turns: ten people, ten months, one pot, and nobody charges interest. Lending money is the easy part of lending. Being sure of getting it back is the expensive part, and what a lender can hold on to decides everything about the price.

Biotech & Longevity

Old mice on a weight-loss drug lived 12% longer. Mice simply fed less got most of the same. →

Researchers in the United States gave semaglutide to healthy mice at an age close to a 60-year-old person. The treated mice lived a median 834 days against 742. Mice fed exactly as little as the drugged ones chose to eat lived about as long -- but did worse on memory and blood sugar.

Space

NASA has no new Mars lander or rover planned, for the first time in 30 years. It just paid $700m for the radio link. →

The US space agency picked Blue Origin on 1 September to build a Mars spacecraft that gathers no data of its own. Its whole job is to carry other missions' messages home — and the two rovers already driving there are relying on orbiters launched in 2001 and 2005.

Climate & Energy

The UN says the world will pass 1.5C within a few years. Its plan now is how to get back down. →

A new UN report drops the goal of holding warming to 1.5C and replaces it with overshoot, peak and decline. The return trip only works if the peak stops at 1.8C.

Finance News

US firms hired 38,000 people in August, the fewest since January. A rate rise two weeks away is still the bet. →

American hiring nearly stopped last month, and traders still put a rate rise on 16 September at about two in three. The thing pushing prices up is an oil price no interest rate can reach, and the last jobs figure before the meeting lands on Friday.

Mind & Body

Your body cannot make vitamin C. The broken gene is still in there, missing five of its twelve pieces. →

Almost every mammal builds its own vitamin C. Primates lost the last enzyme, so a shortage that takes months to appear still puts people in hospital - and the amount a healthy body needs was never really measured.

Information Technology

Google was ruled an illegal ad monopoly in April 2025. A US judge has now decided it sells nothing. →

A US federal judge accepted that Google's advertising business is an illegal monopoly and still refused to break it up. The rules Google must follow instead are sealed for 14 days.

World News

Egypt takes $1.3bn a year from the US, and gives China a military welcome →

China's leader flew to Egypt and told the Middle East to build its own security arrangement, while the United States is fighting a war inside the region. Egypt signed security, chip and currency deals with China and kept every dollar of American military aid.