NEED TO KNOW
IR Hostilities escalate: This week saw a significant escalation in the US-Iran conflict as US Central Command executed strikes destroying five Iranian oil tankers in direct retaliation for Iranian ballistic missile attacks targeting US Navy warships. Tehran responded by launching a barrage of missiles at Al-Azraq Air Base in Jordan and claiming it struck at least ten merchant vessels and tankers attempting to navigate the Strait of Hormuz. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps subsequently declared a broadened off-limits maritime zone, adding parts of the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, and threatened further mass strikes against commercial shipping, while Washington affirmed a policy of destroying additional Iranian tankers for every attack directed at US naval assets.
YE Houthis take control of Bab al-Mandeb Strait: Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis seized the country’s entire Red Sea coast, including the port of Mokha and the strategic Perim island, giving them effective control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a crucial chokepoint connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and providing an alternative route around Hormuz. Reuters reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called President Trump seeking US airstrikes, but Trump refused direct military action. On Friday, Saudi Arabia shut down its East-West oil pipeline, which carries 4% to 5% of global supply, after it was struck by drones launched from Iraq. Oil prices jumped above $100 a barrel. Separately, Anthropic reported that a cell in Houthi-held northern Yemen used its Claude AI to help develop missile guidance software.
US Trump promises $5000 “dividend” if Republicans win midterms: President Trump announced at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas that he would give every adult American a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” (estimated to cost $1.2–1.3 trillion) if Republicans keep control of both the House and Senate in November. Vice President JD Vance later clarified that the payments would likely be more targeted “for the American middle class” and funded by tariff revenues. The pledge comes as August CPI inflation stood at 3.4% year-over-year and US diesel prices hit a record above $6 per gallon for the first time in history, intensifying cost-of-living pressures that are already weighing on Republican prospects in the midterms.
UK Sanctions on West Bank settlements announced: UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband issued a joint statement with the foreign ministers of 11 other countries, including Canada, Denmark, France and Poland, announcing trade restrictions targeting Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Miliband accused the Israeli government of turning a blind eye to "settler terrorists" committing “ethnic cleansing” and announced a national ban on the import of settlement goods. He emphasized that the measures target “illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel,” while also reaffirming the UK’s support for Israel’s security and the two-state solution. Israel responded by closing the British consulate in Jerusalem, removing British representatives from the International Gaza Support Center, terminating British training of Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank, and banning 11 British MPs from entering Israel.
CA Trade war with US escalates: Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion of US goods this week, in response to earlier US tariffs on Canadian products. President Trump responded with new restrictions on Canadian dairy products, most alcoholic beverages and motorcycles, as well as measures excluding Canadian products from some US government contracts. He also threatened to block Bombardier aircraft from the US market unless the company increases production in the US. At the same time, Ottawa is accelerating a closer economic and security partnership with the EU, with the Wall Street Journal reporting today that Prime Minister Carney is exploring whether his country could become an "associate member” of the bloc.
DE Merz reacts to AfD landslide victory: The AfD scored a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6, winning 43.8% of the vote while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU collapsed to 17.2%, its worst result in the state’s history. Merz called the result a profound shock and said Germans were “longing for disruption” and fundamental change. In the wake of the defeat, Merz clashed with AfD leader Alice Weidel in parliament, calling her party a "destructive force" with a migration policy that amounts to "ethnic cleansing" for skilled workers and claiming the AfD harmed the interests of the country by backing Russia.
UK Reform receives record-breaking donations: Reform UK has received a second £36 million donation within two days, from cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne, who matched the record-breaking gift from fellow crypto billionaire Ben Delo announced late on Friday. Harborne, who lives in Thailand and holds Thai citizenship under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit, said his competitive spirit drove the donation and that he expects nothing personal in return. Together the two gifts total £72 million, more than either Labour or the Conservatives spent during last year's election campaign. Reform leader Nigel Farage said the donations would let the party compete on a level playing field in the next general election. Labour responded with an urgent request to its members to donate to the party. The gifts come amid ongoing scrutiny of Reform’s finances, including a police investigation into alleged attempts to circumvent electoral rules on foreign donations.
US OpenAI claims math breakthrough, faces plagiarism allegations: OpenAI claimed this week that an internal AI system had solved the Navier–Stokes problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems carrying a $1 million prize. About 10,000 AI agents worked on the problem simultaneously and reached the solution in 88 hours. The claim triggered accusations from mathematician Tristan Buckmaster that OpenAI had learned about his unpublished work with Anthropic’s Levent Alpöge, which was stored in OpenAI’s Codex model, and then raced them to the result. OpenAI denies using their work, while acknowledging it cannot completely rule out anonymized user data influencing its model. The controversy also involved an alleged attempt to publish with Buckmaster while excluding Alpöge, which Buckmaster said he rejected.
OECD Teenager reading skills at their lowest point since records began: The OECD’s 2025 PISA assessment of 760,000 15-year-olds in 91 countries, showed that student performance across OECD countries has continued to decline, reaching the lowest average since data began to be collected in 2000. Increased screen time and less reading for pleasure are linked to the decline, which has also dragged down science and math performance to record lows. East Asian education systems continued to dominate the top of the rankings, with Singapore recording the highest reading score.
GOOD TO KNOW
AI labs call for a slowdown as OpenAI shelves IPO plans
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, called this week for the AI industry to deliberately pace the development of frontier models, shortly after his company published a threat report detailing increasingly sophisticated malicious uses of Claude and an Anthropic researcher publicly resigned over concerns about the speed and safety of AI development. Amodei’s proposed steps include embedding independent safety evaluators inside leading AI labs, establishing common safety standards among democratic countries, coordinating internationally, and asking governments to temporarily waive antitrust restrictions so AI companies can cooperate on safety. Sam Altman, Elon Musk and other industry figures broadly endorsed the call, with OpenAI agreeing to adopt third-party evaluators.
Altman also announced yesterday that OpenAI will not go public in 2026, calling an IPO at the moment “ill-advised” amid safety concerns. Critics, however, argued these safety-framed moves (including the IPO delay) are less about genuine risk mitigation and more about strategic positioning amid a market that is beginning to sour on AI valuations and hype, with some viewing the coordination push as a way to consolidate power among leading labs and limit open source competition rather than a pure public-interest effort. Others note that the industry is facing additional headwinds other than safety concerns, that may cloud IPO prospects at this time, including model performance plateauing, increasingly expensive compute and growing public opposition to AI data centers.
NICE TO KNOW
FR Eiffel Tower strike after removal of female employees: The Eiffel Tower was temporarily shut down this week by a labor strike after female staff members were replaced by male colleagues and asked to leave their designated workstations so as not to be visible during a visit by a delegation from the Hindu spiritual organization Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS). The monument's operating company, SETE, publicly apologized, acknowledging that accommodating the group's request to limit interactions with women violated French values and gender equality principles.
CH Ukrainian hacker jailed over ransomware attacks: A Ukrainian IT specialist was sentenced in Zurich to 12 years and nine months for developing ransomware used in attacks on companies including Stadler Rail, Meier Tobler and Crealogix in 2020. The court found that he was the lead developer of malware which encrypted victims' data; in Stadler Rail's case, around 500 GB of confidential data was also stolen and the company was threatened with publication unless it paid a ransom. The defendant, who was living in canton Basel and has been in pre-trial detention since October 2021, supplied the malware to unknown operators who carried out the attacks and extortion and some victims paid, with the combined losses estimated at CHF100 million.
US Biden’s $LAPTOP launch goes awry: Hunter Biden launched the $LAPTOP memecoin on the Base blockchain on September 9, with a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens and a structure designed around his infamous laptop controversy. Its tokenomics allocate 30% to founders under a six-month lockup and subsequent vesting, 20% to community airdrops, including a specific allocation for wallets that lost money on Donald Trump’s $TRUMP coin, while up to 30% depends on specified real-world predictions: if a prediction comes true, the associated tokens are burned, while if it fails, they go to charity. $LAPTOP briefly surged dramatically before collapsing by over 95% within hours, leaving many buyers with major losses and prompting accusations of a rug pull, although no evidence has established that Biden or the project founders themselves dumped tokens.
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