Flagship

Trump ‘low-keying it’ on Iran

US President Donald Trump said he is waiting for Iran to buckle under economic pressure from the war rather than pressing for a deal, despite his own inflation concerns back home. “We are low-keying it,” Trump said in an interview with Axios. “We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” Iran has been waging its own economic campaign by dictating terms for reopening the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments, its best leverage as Trump heads into the midterm elections seeking an end to the war and lower gas prices. “The US is running out of munitions, it’s running out of options, and fundamentally, it’s running out of patience,” a security analyst told CNN.

Mecca defense pact may grow

Türkiye said a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan could be expanded to include Egypt. Several countries want to join the trilateral agreement signed in Mecca on Friday, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told the state-run Anadolu Agency, saying only technical matters stood in the way of them signing up. The so-called Mecca pact, which was formed against the backdrop of the war in Iran, commits members to jointly retaliate against attacks on any of them in the style of NATO’s Article 5. Egypt would bring one of the region’s largest militaries. Pakistan’s involvement also signals ambitions beyond the Middle East: Islamabad’s foreign minister said the accord is open to any regional state willing to uphold its principles.

US intelligence targets Cuba

The US is increasing its intelligence presence in Cuba, in an apparent bid to force regime change on the island. The CIA has designated Havana a “priority 1” target alongside China, Iran, and Russia, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Cuba “an influence and espionage superpower.” Washington has stepped up pressure on the island this year: An oil embargo has pushed Cuba’s energy system to the brink of collapse, and basic goods are in short supply. The White House is looking to boost its information flow as it considers an operation comparable to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, El Paìs reported, although US military resources are already under considerable strain because of the war in Iran.

Record private-sector loan defaults

Defaults on private-credit loans hit their highest level in at least five years, a major stress test for the growing industry. Direct lending from private funds has become one of Wall Street’s favorite moves, and the high-interest loans offer hefty returns; the private market is worth about $2 trillion, up hugely from a decade ago. But a Wall Street Journal analysis found that investor returns and loan health are down. Most defaults are in healthcare, but there are concerns this could spread to software, which makes up 20% of lending. Some worry a downturn in the US economy could pile pressure on the highly leveraged sector; “losses could jump sharply if growth abates,” the Journal warned.

Hottest summer on record in Europe

This year’s summer in Western Europe has so far been the hottest on record, with repeated heatwaves and near-constant drought. A climate monitor said the average temperature was 21.62°C (71°F) across the region, beating 2022’s record. Low river levels have hit transportation, irrigation, and energy production in several countries. Britain has seen more days above 30°C (86°F) than in any previous year, with most of August still to come. The dry, hot conditions have caused thousands of deaths, while wildfires have turned dangerous relics into present dangers: “Europe is full of buried explosives” left over from World Wars I and II, The Conversation noted, and prolonged fires have started to set some off.

Typhoon Dolphin hits China

China evacuated more than 1 million people from the east of the country, including the financial hub Shanghai, as a major storm made landfall. Typhoon Dolphin, the strongest storm to hit China this year, brought torrential rain and flooding as well as 94 mph winds. Higher sea levels due to climate change have increased Shanghai’s vulnerability to storms, although the city has impressive defenses. The economic impacts of extreme weather events worldwide have increased over recent years, mainly because of the growth of valuable real estate in vulnerable areas. But the number of deaths has fallen thanks to improved forecasting, early-warning systems, and building codes.

Wave of African IPOs

Africa is seeing a new wave of IPOs and mergers, beginning with the listing of Aliko Dangote’s oil refinery. The Dangote debut, expected to raise $5 billion, “has got everyone very excited,” an analyst told Semafor, saying it showed the continent’s growing ability to finance large industrial businesses after years of sluggish activity. If demand is strong, it could broaden the capital pool for other African companies: Other potential IPOs are emerging across the continent’s tech and telecom industries. The M&A market has also picked up, including Diageo’s $2.3 billion sale of its East African beer business to Japan’s Asahi, and South Africa lender Nedbank’s $855 million offer for a controlling stake in Kenya’s NCBA Group.

AI finds record software flaws

AI tools are exposing record numbers of flaws in widely used software. Oracle patched 1,449 problems in July, against 309 last July; Google went from 11 to 433; Microsoft’s rose nearly fivefold. A US database logged 45,207 flaws this year, close to 2025’s total, itself a record. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, said none of the bugs found in the open-source operating system’s latest release look “particularly scary” by themselves, but the scale is unprecedented. This is “the new normal,” he wrote. Despite concerns that AI would find spurious problems to win bug-hunting bounties, the flaws are mainly being found by in-house teams. Tech giants can absorb these numbers; smaller organizations may not be able to.

AI cracks math quandaries

OpenAI announced its latest model family, Astra, by revealing that it had solved 10 major problems that have foxed mathematicians for at least a decade. The results, laid out in a 249-page manuscript, include a formula for how tightly you can pack spheres in high-dimensional spaces, and a counterexample to the conjecture that any countable group can be approximated by shuffling a finite set, like playing cards. Astra used tokens worth about $2,000 to come up with all 10 solutions, making it cheaper than human mathematicians; the new model also formalized its results so they can be checked automatically too, obviating the need for humans to trust the system’s reasoning.

Cambridge scandal rocks academia

The handling of a recent plagiarism scandal handed ammunition to academia’s critics, commentators argued. Sociologist Jason Arday, Cambridge University’s youngest-ever Black professor, resigned last Wednesday after increasingly lurid allegations of copying and apparent dishonesty. Cambridge’s response, repeatedly failing to investigate properly and ignoring evidence from a right-wing source, highlighted “academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics,” Jesse Singal wrote in The New York Times. Meanwhile, Arday’s work has come under greater scrutiny: The scientist Richard Dawkins said that it was “obscurantist… gobbledygook” full of obvious errors, while a science writer noted his upcoming book apparently borrowed its title and a key anecdote from the 2010s sword-and-sandals TV drama Spartacus.

• US President Donald Trump holds a swearing-in ceremony for new Attorney General Todd Blanche.
• TSMC, the world’s top contract chip manufacturer, releases its monthly sales figures.
• Hundreds of kite enthusiasts from 25 countries gather for the Colombo Kite Festival in Sri Lanka.

True believers

“It’s hard to accept that someone truly believes something that we don’t,” says the software developer Pavle Miha. “When we put ourselves in their shoes, it’s still us we’re imagining in their shoes.” People find it hard to imagine that the 9/11 attackers, for instance, believed that they were fighting a holy war, that their cause was righteous, and that they would “gain entry into the kingdom of heaven, and live perpetually in bliss and luxury.” But they did. The same is true of pro-life activists — perhaps some want to control women’s bodies, but the majority believe fetuses are people, and “vegans aren’t virtue signalling, they think animals have human-ish rights.” Cynically assuming everyone is lying about their beliefs often makes you more wrong, not less.

Bear that in mind, Miha says, when thinking about recent AI hacking attacks. “Some claimed it was all planned,” he says. “You can see some commenters try to make sense of this, but there is a stench of confusion to it all. Are they trying to regulate their competitors out of business?” But unless you accept that “the vast majority of AI researchers believe there’s a decent chance, either through misuse or loss of control, AI systems will kill us all,” then none of it will really make sense. “You don’t need Machiavellian machinations to explain calls for regulation: they want AI to be regulated because they want humanity to survive, but they don’t want so much regulation that they’re not winning.”

A plague on both their houses

Donald Trump is deeply unpopular. People thought he had an approval floor of about 40%, but he’s fallen through that and kept falling. “The nation’s disapprobation is richly deserved,” says the economist Noah Smith, listing reasons: The war in Iran, tariffs, corruption, attacks on scientific integrity, and more. But “if you think the GOP will return to being the party of Mitt Romney, John McCain, or Ronald Reagan after Trump is gone, think again.” The Republicans’ base has morphed into “a deeply xenophobic, economically retrograde ideology obsessed with expelling immigrants,” and the top has become a “bizarre Trump cult” with a loyalty test of denying that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

“The Republicans have never been this bad before,” he says. “But in the past, when they got bad, the solution was always pretty simple: Vote for the Democrats.” The US has that option and should take it, he says, but the party is “select[ing] candidates who are so far to the left that they end up frightening and/or offending many voters, and then basically daring people to keep voting for the Republicans.” The choice of which party to vote for “is unambiguous,” Smith says, but “it seems like we have less to hope for from the Dems now than in times past.”

An open and shut case

Jars should be easy to open for anyone, including women, argues the AI researcher Katja Grace on LessWrong. “I understand that gender is complicated and difficult,” she says. “Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages? Maybe the thing I’m saying is just boring and a man is saying a more interesting thing?” But there doesn’t seem to be a complicated, nuanced reason why most jam jars are too tight for women to open. Women have much lower grip strength than men, she notes: “90% of females [generate] less force than 95% of males.” Even female athletes are only about as strong as the 25th percentile of men.

The amount of grip required to open packaging seems consistently to fall in between the maximum women can output and the maximum men can output. “I note that very few are impossible for anyone to open,” she says, “so it seems like some effort somewhere goes into keeping them in the feasible range, and that effort does not seem to care about it being reliably feasible for people like me… I don’t think it’s just a me issue, and in the moment it always feels like a ‘f*ck you, raspberry jam isn’t meant for you’.”

A total solar eclipse. This is an advance recommendation so you have time to buy eclipse glasses and find a good spot. On Aug. 12, this Wednesday, the moon will perfectly obscure the sun across eastern Greenland, western Iceland, and parts of Spain and Portugal. Much of the northern US and most of Canada, plus all of Europe, will experience a partial eclipse. There’ll also be a Perseid meteor shower that evening, so if you’re in the region of totality, there’s a chance you’ll see meteors during a total eclipse, which might be the coolest thing possible. If you’re somewhere else, you can livestream it on NASA’s website.