Editions

Personal Money

Britain's full state pension is on course to pass the tax-free allowance next April. Only pensioners with no other income have been promised no tax. →

Wages grew 3.9%, so the triple lock points to a full new state pension of about 13,036 pounds a year from April 2027, above the 12,570 pounds a person can earn before income tax. Also today: the Bank of England expects prices to rise past 4%, the euro area raises its interest rate, Trump promises two payments, and Britain's regulator widens its hunt for dirty money.

Cybersecurity

A hacking gang says it broke into the FBI's jobs website and took files on its staff. It wants a warning withdrawn, not money. →

ShinyHunters defaced the FBI's recruitment site and says it copied 2 to 3 terabytes of data on employees and applicants. The FBI says only that it is investigating, and nobody outside the gang has checked the data.

Climate & Energy

El Nino's heat could cause about 450,000 extra deaths by February, most of them in hot, poor places, a University of Chicago lab estimates →

The Climate Impact Lab says this year's record El Nino could cause up to 451,000 extra heat deaths between June and February, with the Sahel hit hardest. Also today: US states sue to stop paid-off wind farms, North Carolina refuses Duke a gas turbine, California makes data centres pay their own way, India wastes clean power for lack of wires, and traffic through Hormuz falls to two ships.

Space

NASA's chief says China is heading for the same few landing spots on the Moon. Partners now have to bring something NASA needs, in time. →

Jared Isaacman told a US defence conference that the best Moon base sites near the south pole are few, China is going there, and NASA will take only good deals; a European lander offer for the mid-2030s was waved away.

Biotech & Longevity

Telix is buying ITM for at least $1.65 billion, a month after the US regulator turned down ITM's cancer drug over how it is made →

An Australian maker of radioactive cancer medicines is buying a German rival whose lead drug the FDA rejected in August, and a day later Novartis agreed to pay a Chinese company for another. Also today: FDA advisers meet on a blood test for many cancers, Amgen wins the first late-stage trial in Sjogren's, and the US Treasury weighs whether drugmakers may keep buying medicines from China.

Finance News

Meta's AI app Muse topped the download charts. Schwab fell 6.1% and Allstate 5.5%, and Shopify rose nearly 7% after letting Muse shop →

Investors sold US banks, brokers and insurers on Tuesday, afraid an AI helper will shop around for their customers. Firms that plug into Muse rose instead.

Mind & Body

Ebola vaccines teach the body the shape of the virus's outer protein, and the Ebola spreading in Congo has a different one →

Congo has confirmed 6,757 Bundibugyo Ebola cases and 3,267 deaths since May, and the only licensed Ebola vaccine was made for a different species of the virus. Also today: US overdose deaths fell for a third year, a second weight-loss pill was approved, and more studies found no link between paracetamol in pregnancy and autism.

Information Technology

Anthropic and OpenAI cut the price of their new AI models. They are the first releases since both backed a call to slow down. →

Anthropic's Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than the model before it, and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and Luna cost half as much. Customers are suing the labs over their slowdown pact, record labels sued Suno again, and robotaxis grew wherever a permit allowed.

Food & Farming

Russia takes control of Nestle's six factories and Auchan's 229 shops, without buying them →

A decree from Russia's president handed the Russian businesses of Nestle and Auchan to a state-picked manager. The owners keep them on paper and lose the right to run them.

World News

Trump tells the UN Iran can have a deal after the US midterms or be annihilated, as his envoys talk to Iran through mediators →

In his speech to the UN General Assembly, Trump said a deal with Iran would come right after the US midterm elections on 3 November, or he would destroy its government. That afternoon his envoys spent three hours passing messages to Iran's foreign minister through mediators, and Iran named its price for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Sports

The Presidents Cup starts on Thursday. The Americans have lost it once in 15 tries, and the PGA Tour runs both teams. →

Golf's Presidents Cup begins at Medinah, near Chicago, with the United States heavily favoured again. The PGA Tour owns the event and runs both sides, and the International captain says his team needs more independence.

Gaming

Xbox gives Halo to Activision and moves to close Ninja Theory, the Hellblade studio. 268 more jobs go. →

Microsoft's games business moved its most famous series to the Call of Duty publisher, merged several studios and began consultation on closing Ninja Theory after two deals to sell it fell through.

Cybersecurity

Google is fined 403 million euros over how it handled people's location data →

The fine covers 2018 to early 2020, and it comes from one office in Dublin that handles Google's privacy cases for all 27 European Union countries.

Personal Money

England now offers a free school meal to every child in a Universal Credit home. Nobody is signed up automatically. →

England removed the GBP 7,400 income limit on free school meals in September. About 500,000 more children can have one, once a parent applies.

Food & Farming

Trump says the US will buy potash from Belarus. The fertilisers American farms cannot get are nitrogen and phosphate. →

Potash is the one fertiliser American farms are not short of. The two they are short of, nitrogen and phosphate, are held up by the war on Iran.

Sports

Three of American football's young quarterbacks were hurt in two days. Every man who replaced them had been signed months earlier. →

Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels and Jaxson Dart all left games inside 48 hours. Nobody can buy a quarterback in September, so each club played the spare it had already paid for.

Gaming

Bungie deleted years of Destiny 2 in 2020. It now says it will build it all again and hand it back. →

Bungie said on 21 September that it will restore the Destiny 2 campaigns, planets and raids it removed six years ago. It gave no date, because the game was rebuilt around the gap and the old content no longer fits it.

Biotech & Longevity

A man with ALS was given a drug written for his mutation alone. A year later he is still working as a doctor. →

The drug took three years to make and targets a gene fault carried by fewer than one in a hundred people who inherit ALS. In the same week, two ALS drugs aimed at everyone with the disease failed.

Mind & Body

An injection given twice a year now stops HIV, and the town in Uganda that helped prove it has already run out →

Lenacapavir protects for six months from one jab, and 120 poorer countries are due cheap copies from 2027. Across today's edition the drugs and vaccines work; what keeps failing is the money and the delivery behind them.

Finance News

Twelve US states sued to stop the $110bn Warner Bros deal. On Monday all twelve settled, and Paramount kept every channel it owns →

The states wanted Paramount to sell assets. They took promises instead - 30 films a year, a board over CNN and CBS news, money for film workers - and most of those promises expire within five years.

Climate & Energy

Turkey published its plan for the November climate summit, as a report found the world has built less than half the clean power it promised for 2030 →

Turkey's COP31 president set out ten themes and a 35% electricity target at the UN in New York, while a report his presidency co-wrote put the world's renewable build at 5.15 of the 11.2 terawatts its own 2030 pledge needs.

World News

Xi comes to Washington to ask the US to stop arming Taiwan, and points at a promise from 1982 →

China's leader arrives on Wednesday for the first Chinese state visit to the United States in ten years. Three people briefed on the talks say he will ask Trump to end arms sales to Taiwan, quoting a sentence the US wrote in 1982, and will offer help pressing Iran in return.

Space

SpaceX plans to retire the only capsule NASA can fly crews on. The agency is going back to Boeing. →

SpaceX has told NASA it means to stop flying Crew Dragon by 2030. NASA is now in talks with Boeing about ten or more Starliner flights, and will help pay to fix the capsule and certify it on a new rocket.

Information Technology

Texas stopped issuing every permit a data centre needs. California told data centres to publish what they use. →

On the same Monday, one US state shut both its doors on new data centres and another forced them to declare their power, water and land. In the markets, two companies that sell power to AI could not find buyers for their shares.

Personal Money

The US finalised its car loan tax break today. Drivers can deduct up to $10,000 of interest, but only if the lender reports it. →

The US Treasury and its tax office published the final rules for the car loan interest deduction on 21 September 2026, fourteen months after the law that created it. The same rules put a new duty on lenders: report $600 or more of interest a year, or face a penalty.

Food & Farming

China has bought more than half the soybeans it promised. The rest of America's farm sales wait on one last 10% tax. →

China's state traders have booked about 13 million tonnes of American soybeans this season, against a pledge of 25 million a year. The bigger prize, $17 billion of corn, sorghum and other farm goods, needs a 10% tax dropped, and the two presidents meet on 24 September.

Gaming

Europe's draft child-safety law covers online games, and its wording reaches a single-player game you bought on Steam →

The European Commission wants game shops to check a buyer's age before a download. The draft's own definition of an online game leaves out only games sold on a disc with no online part at all.

Biotech & Longevity

A health service in England will now pay for a breast cancer drug it refused for years. The drug's price did not change. →

The NHS in England has started paying for Enhertu, which it had turned down on cost, after raising the most it will pay for one extra year of good health from 30,000 pounds to 35,000. EU advisers backed the same drug for an earlier stage of the disease.

Sports

Savers' retirement money helped buy baseball's Dodgers and basketball's Lakers, a lawsuit says →

Mark Walter owns two of the biggest clubs in American sport. A class action filed this week says the insurance companies he owns put 42 per cent of their customers' money into businesses he controls, while telling regulators the figure was 3 per cent.

Cybersecurity

One extortion gang broke into another gang's website and defaced it. It says it took the code, the logs and the keys. →

ShinyHunters says it got full access to the site cl0p uses to publish stolen company files, after a year-long row over who found an Oracle flaw first. Reporters confirmed the defacement but not the rest.

Mind & Body

Antivenom has worked for a hundred years, and in the Amazon what decided who lived was how far away it was kept →

Snake venom kills up to 138,000 people a year and the treatment is old, cheap and on the WHO's list of essential medicines. In four Indigenous districts of the Brazilian Amazon it was moved out of city hospitals and into village health units, and the share of patients treated within six hours went from two in five to three in four.

Finance News

Japan raised rates to a 31-year high and the yen fell anyway. Its officials began the checks that come before buying yen. →

Two of the Bank of Japan's nine rate-setters voted against Friday's rise, the yen dropped more than 2% over the week, and officials started ringing banks for quotes.

Climate & Energy

A Japanese power company bent the earthquake data for two reactors. Its president and chairman are going. →

Chubu Electric admitted it gave Japan's nuclear regulator manipulated earthquake figures for two Hamaoka reactors, dropped an eleven-year restart bid, and lost its two most senior people. Across the day, several big energy decisions sat unmade while the money went into moving them.

Space

Companies are making medicine in orbit. No regulator has written down how to approve it. →

Drug companies are already building an artificial retina and printing human tissue on the space station. It is due to be switched off by 2030, and no medicines regulator anywhere has set out how to approve anything made up there.

World News

Ukraine fires more than 1,000 drones at Russia on the last day of its wartime election →

The biggest attack on Moscow of the war hit the city's oil refinery as Russia closed a three-day parliamentary vote with no anti-war party on the ballot. Russian drones killed a mother, her two three-year-olds and a girl in the Kyiv region the same night.

Information Technology

China is holding back humanoid robot share sales after Unitree fell 55%. Toyota says it will need 400,000 robots. →

China's securities regulator has quietly slowed approvals for humanoid robot companies that want to list, and is asking whether their sales to local-government ventures are real demand. In the same week Toyota put a number on the machines it wants, and Agility showed a humanoid that sits on the floor when a person walks near.