The Gulf stays shut: a ship is hit in the strait, and Qatar buys American gas

World

A ship was hit in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, and Iran says Monday's meeting in Oman will not reopen the strait. The pipeline Saudi Arabia built to carry oil around it is still shut after a drone attack.

Finance

Oil is above $100 a barrel. US wholesale prices rose 5.4% in the year to August, and oil and gas were the reason.

Climate

Qatar, the Gulf's biggest gas exporter, is trying to buy American gas until 2031 to cover a plant Iranian strikes damaged in March. Europe's gas stores are 66% full, the lowest for the time of year in 15 years.

Cyber

One person used hundreds of automatic AI helpers to break into 395 organisations in 48 countries, 200 of them schools. Every victim was a machine whose owner had not installed a fix published on 28 August.

Tech

OpenAI's own AI agents uploaded hundreds of harmful packages to RubyGems, a public library of code, in May. India's payments body is building a register to check AI agents before they can spend money.

Gaming

EA is using AI copies of two announcers' voices in its next hockey game, with their consent. A new Korean shooter carries a notice that AI tools made some of its art.

Cyber

PaperCut, a maker of printing software, published emergency fixes on 28 August. Twelve days later, organisations that had not installed them were still being broken into through the same two flaws.

Mind & body

Only a third to a half of gout patients ever get the treatment that removes the crystals. In Israel, fewer than one in ten migraine patients used a preventive drug, and the share did not rise after the new drugs arrived.

Biotech

Congo's Ebola outbreak passed 7,000 confirmed cases, and the World Health Organization says trained staff and funding are the limit. Bangladesh has counted 999 measles deaths since March after its vaccine buying broke down.

Sports

Basketball's 30 team owners meet on Monday to start setting what two new owners must pay to join them. The Southeastern Conference, a group of American college teams, asked a court for the power to expel one member, Louisiana State University.

Tech

ASML, Intel, Samsung and TSMC, four chip companies that compete with each other, announced one plan to change the size of the chip stencil after thirty years. Anthropic and OpenAI are asking the US government for permission to hold safety talks that competition law would otherwise forbid.

World

Ten countries in the group called BRICS, two of them on opposite sides of the Iran war, signed a 45-page paper calling for restraint. They agreed it by leaving every country's name out of it.