Category: World

The president’s confrontation with NATO hasn’t led to a major U.S. withdrawal. But a big troop cut remains an option, Pentagon sources say, and allies are preparing for a future less dependent on Washington.

Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania was built to make Americans feel at home. Its streets are named Alabama, Ohio, Alaska and George Washington. The base has hosted U.S. troops since 1999 and supported America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last year, about half of the approximately 2,000 American troops in Romania, most of them living at the base, departed as the Trump administration began a radical realignment of the U.S. military presence in Europe. In Romania, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country bordering Ukraine, the departures caused alarm: MK, as the base is known, sits on the alliance’s eastern flank at a time when Russian drones have repeatedly crossed into NATO territory.
But when Reuters visited MK in July, the base told a more complicated story about U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to remake NATO. Nine U.S. KC-135 Stratotankers were parked there, deployed to refuel American jets and bombers during the Iran war. Their crews and support staff had partially offset the earlier troop departures, a reminder that Washington still relies heavily on European bases. More than two months later, the Stratotankers were still there.

That paradox sits at the center of Trump’s confrontation with the 32-nation alliance. He has threatened troop cuts, badgered allies over defense spending and denounced European governments for refusing to unconditionally support the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Yet a Reuters examination of U.S. military operations in Europe found that the Trump administration continues to invest in key NATO military facilities and is relying on them to project power across Europe, the Middle East and beyond.
To assess the effects of Trump’s pressure campaign on NATO, Reuters interviewed more than 50 current and former Western officials, military officers, diplomats and defense experts, including senior Trump administration officials, congressional aides, and former U.S. ambassadors to NATO. Reuters journalists also visited bases used by NATO in Romania and Estonia, and observed NATO military exercises off the coast of North Carolina.
The reporting revealed an alliance under strain though not yet broken. Nine current and former U.S. officials told Reuters that congressional Republicans and Democrats, along with powerful U.S. defense contractors with big European customers, have the political clout to block a U.S. withdrawal from NATO – something Trump has repeatedly threatened to do.

Yet Trump’s attacks are damaging the 77-year-old alliance in ways that European and American strategists alike say are difficult to reverse. Europe is increasingly questioning America’s reliability as a security partner, Reuters found, and those doubts are now shaping defense spending, weapons procurement and long-term security planning across the continent.
Many of those interviewed described a slump in transatlantic trust that has weakened NATO’s central deterrent: Article 5, the pledge that an armed attack on one member will be treated as an attack on all. A failing NATO led by an unreliable U.S. could be catastrophic for Europe’s security as the region confronts an aggressive and openly expansionist Russia along its eastern borders.

And even as military spending surges across NATO, at least eight member countries – including Canada, Poland, Denmark and Spain – are beginning to diversify away from their reliance on U.S. weapons, technology and defense companies, Reuters found. This suggests Trump’s campaign to force Europe to spend more on defense could ultimately backfire by prompting some allies to reduce their dependence on U.S. defense contractors and military technology.
“The pressure on Europe worked, but it created real uncertainty,” said J.C. Lintzenich, a senior U.S. military intelligence official who left government in February after advising top Pentagon officials, the Director of National Intelligence and policymakers in Congress. “Europe is spending more, taking defense more seriously, and accepting greater responsibility – that is a real success. But there is also genuine concern in Europe that the United States could abandon them.”

“President Trump has done more for NATO than anyone else,” said White House spokesperson Olivia Wales. “He will always unapologetically advance America’s interests.” While Trump has taken credit for the rise in European defense spending, it has also been fueled by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has flattened cities, killed hundreds of thousands of people and sent millions fleeing across Europe.
“A strong alliance has allies that hold each other accountable,” Matthew Whitaker, U.S. ambassador to NATO, told Reuters. In a statement, NATO pointed to recent remarks by Secretary General Mark Rutte, who praised Trump for helping drive higher defense spending across the alliance.
But Trump’s ability to remake NATO has run up against significant constraints. Before leaving for a NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels in June, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had planned to announce a cut of roughly 25,000 U.S. troops in Europe, according to two U.S. officials. The proposed cuts – the scale of which has not been previously reported – would have pushed American force levels in Europe below a congressionally mandated 76,000-troop minimum signed into law last year.
Instead, Hegseth faced resistance within Trump’s own administration and arrived at NATO’s curved steel-and-glass headquarters in Brussels with a warning for allied defense ministers. The Pentagon would conduct a six-month review of America’s force posture in Europe, with particular scrutiny of countries that say “no, or maybe, or wait and see” when Washington needs support. “This will be a real review,” Hegseth said. “Some countries will fail.”

The Pentagon has been tight-lipped about the review, but in August it prepared a document with 57 questions for allies aimed at measuring their military, financial and ideological commitment to the U.S., according to a copy of the memo reviewed by Reuters. One question, for instance, asks whether a country has been “publicly supportive of U.S. foreign policy priorities.”
The review exposed a struggle in Washington over how far the U.S. can reduce its role in Europe without undercutting its own military reach. Five senior congressional aides – both Republicans and Democrats – told Reuters there was growing bipartisan distrust of Hegseth’s handling of NATO. One of the aides said Republican and Democratic senators were worried the Pentagon might announce “a move that might not be positive for NATO or even U.S. national security.”

One possible outcome of the force review, said three people familiar with the matter, is that Hegseth could propose the same number that he wanted to announce in June: a 25,000 cut.
The White House has said the six-month review will “ensure irreversible momentum toward a European-led defense of Europe.” The Pentagon and Hegseth didn’t respond to written requests for comment. But a senior Pentagon official told Reuters: “This is a serious review, designed to be rigorous, consultative and empirical.”
The U.S. has more than 81,000 military personnel in Europe, a number that fluctuates as troops rotate through the continent on deployments and exercises, according to government audits and congressional testimony reviewed by Reuters.
In the four years before Trump first took office in 2017, the U.S. averaged about 65,000 troops and other military personnel in Europe. That figure rose to 74,000 during his first term, then surged to 105,000 under former President Joe Biden after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By the time Trump returned to office in 2025, the number had fallen back to roughly current levels.
The battle over NATO is part of Trump’s broader upending of the international order the U.S. helped build after World War Two. His administration is challenging long-standing institutions, alliances and norms with a more transactional, “America First” approach that prizes U.S. dominance over treaties and multilateral cooperation. Previous Reuters reporting detailed Trump’s assault on the global justice system through crippling U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court and his scrambling of American diplomacy by hollowing out U.S. embassies and threatening friends and foes alike.

TROOPS AND TRUST
Most allies met Trump’s demands for higher defense spending, turning NATO’s potentially explosive Ankara summit in July into what Trump called “a very successful” meeting.
But the Pentagon’s six-month review remains the central uncertainty hanging over the alliance. Some European officials believe NATO’s military leadership can manage an eventual U.S. drawdown without exposing the continent’s vulnerabilities. Others fear the process could trigger a competition for Washington’s favor. In Romania and Poland, officials told Reuters they have lobbied discreetly but intensively to keep American troops on their territory.
“Why do all these countries want U.S. soldiers on their soil?” said George Scutaru, a Romanian defense expert and head of the New Strategy Center, a Bucharest think tank. “Because it’s the best deterrent – a human shield.”
The Iran war underscores how dependent Washington remains on European geography, even when relations with allies are strained.
Italy denied permission in late March for some U.S. military aircraft to land at the Sigonella air base in Sicily before heading to the ​Middle East, Reuters reported. But by late June, more than 500 U.S. military aircraft had transited Italian bases, including 343 through Sigonella and 211 through Aviano in the country’s north, many of them carrying munitions, according to a third U.S. official.
Even so, Trump attacked Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in a June 20 post on social media, saying “she wouldn’t even let us use Italy’s landing strips or runways, a great logistical inconvenience.” The Italian government didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Since 1949, NATO has been a cornerstone of American power, helping the U.S. to station forces across Europe, deter adversaries, project military strength and anchor a bloc of democratic allies. In return, Europe gained the protection of the world’s most powerful military, helping sustain an era of peace and prosperity unmatched in its modern history.
Europe is spending more, taking defense more seriously, and accepting greater responsibility – that is a real success. But there is also genuine concern in Europe that the United States could abandon them.

J.C. Lintzenich, former senior U.S. military intelligence official

For generations, that bargain enjoyed broad support across party lines in Washington. But not from Trump. His position – that other countries freeload off U.S. protection – has stayed remarkably consistent across four decades of public life.
“A lot of people are tired of watching other countries ripping off the United States,” he said in a 1987 interview on CNN. Allies had to pay up or “get out,” Trump said during his 2016 presidential campaign. “And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO.” In his first term, Trump demanded allies increase defense spending from 2% to 4% of gross domestic product. Just before returning to office in 2025, he pushed for 5%.
“If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them,” he told reporters in March 2025.
European allies and Canada spent 2.3% of their combined GDP on defense in 2025, according to NATO. All of them, apart from Spain, have agreed to spend 5% on defense and broader security-related investments by 2035.
Kay Bailey Hutchison, a former Republican U.S. senator who served as Trump’s ambassador to NATO in his first term, said Trump seems to believe that the U.S. gains more through his relationships with the leaders of rival powers such as Russia and China than through alliances such as NATO. “I always wanted the president to understand that if our long-term adversary is China, we need allies,” she said.
Despite those attacks on NATO, Trump has continued funding major infrastructure projects at European military facilities over his second term. In Spain, which Trump denounced at the Ankara summit as “a terrible partner in NATO” and “a wasted cause,” Washington has shown no sign of pulling back from Naval Station Rota or Moron Air Base.

In May and June alone, the U.S. announced reinforcement of aircraft facilities and $400 million in construction contracts to Spanish companies at Moron to maintain and improve the base over the next decade.
Rota and Moron are difficult to replace. They offer access to the Atlantic and Mediterranean and extend U.S. military power into the Middle East and North Africa. At a press conference at the Ankara summit, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the deployment of American forces in Europe was a “sovereign decision” of the U.S. and that Spain’s military relations with it were “excellent.”
In Romania, the U.S. has invested more than $100 million in the ongoing expansion of Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, alongside a roughly $2.7 billion project funded by Romania that aims by 2040 to make the installation the largest NATO air base in Europe, with capacity for up to 20,000 personnel.
Trump slammed then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer in March over Britain’s limited support for U.S. strikes on Iran. But the U.S. is spending more than $4.2 billion on current and upcoming projects at seven air bases in Britain, according to a March presentation by a U.S. Air Force unit that manages base infrastructure. U.S. bombers have flown missions against Iranian targets from at least one of those British bases, reinforcing the strategic importance of Europe to U.S. military operations well beyond the continent.
But at least a dozen past and present officials from Europe, the U.S. and Canada cautioned that Trump doesn’t need to formally withdraw from NATO to hobble the alliance. His anti-NATO rhetoric alone might signal to Russian leader Vladimir Putin that the West is divided and more vulnerable than it appears.
Those officials said they fear Putin is testing that assumption with a wave of sabotage incidents across the continent, which European countries blame on Russia. They include, in August alone, an attempted drone attack on a German airport and a fire at a Polish drone factory.
In July, just two days after Reuters visited Romania’s MK Air Base, NATO scrambled Romanian fighter aircraft to intercept a Russian drone that had penetrated Romanian territory. It was shot down by a Romanian F-16 operating from another base. Two more drones, also believed to be Russian, were downed in the following days. Then, in late July, a Russian cruise missile landed in Poland, another front-line NATO ally.
Asked about the incidents in Germany, Poland and Romania, Russia’s ambassador to Belgium, Denis Gonchar, denied any Russian involvement and called them “dirty provocations” by Ukraine and others who wanted to “drag NATO and the European Union into a direct conflict with Russia.”

Source: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/trumps-pressure-nato-is-reshaping-europes-defenses-will-it-break-alliance-2026-09-17/

China has privately asked Tehran to help rein in Yemen’s Houthis after an appeal to Beijing by Saudi Arabia following the Iran-backed group’s military blitz in the past week, according to three Iranian sources familiar with ​the matter.
Riyadh turned to China for help after the Houthis made rapid advances along the Red Sea coast and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, moves that have left Saudi oil exports and ‌shipping more exposed, the sources said.

China has publicly called for restraint, dialogue and the restoration of safe navigation, but its private message went further than the public statements, they said.
Beijing wants Iran to use its influence with the Houthis to help prevent the conflict spreading further across energy routes on which China, the world’s second-largest economy, depends.
The sources, who were briefed on the discussions and spoke on condition of anonymity, did not provide details of how the message was delivered or whether it was conveyed during a visit to China ​on Wednesday by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi.

The sources said Tehran’s response was that stability and peace in the region depend on ending the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Chinese officials did not issue any explicit threats ​or indicate that Beijing would seek to pressure Tehran economically if it failed to use its influence over the Houthis, the three Iranian sources said.
In response to a ⁠Reuters request for comment on this story, the Chinese foreign ministry said: “China does not wish to see regional tensions further spill over into Yemen and the Red Sea. Escalating regional instability is not in the interests of ​any party”.
“The sovereignty and security of all countries should be respected, and facilities vital to people’s livelihoods must not be targeted. China calls for an end to actions that further complicate the situation and urges resolving issues through dialogue ​and negotiation,” it said.

Iran’s foreign ministry and the Saudi government’s media office did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment for this article.
DANGERS OF A WIDER REGIONAL WAR
China has been Iran’s largest trading partner for more than a decade and remains the main buyer of its oil. Chinese purchases accounted for more than 80% of Iran’s seaborne oil exports in 2025, averaging about 1.4 million barrels per day, according to commodities data and analytics firm Kpler.
“Beijing is one of the few capitals that can still ​press Iran to rein in the Houthis,” said a senior Western diplomat in the region.
The Houthis, who emerged in the 1990s in opposition to Saudi Arabia’s Sunni religious influence in Yemen, are armed, trained and funded by Iran, ​according to Iranian sources and Western countries, and form part of Tehran’s anti-Western, anti-Israel “Axis of Resistance”.

Any threat by the Houthis to shipping in the Red Sea and through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait risks sharply worsening the global energy crisis since Iran started ‌blocking the Strait ⁠of Hormuz and increasing the danger of a wider regional conflict.
With Hormuz already effectively shut, sustained Houthi attacks on vessels or ports in the Red Sea would disrupt the Middle East’s two main oil-export routes simultaneously, opening a new front in both the energy crisis and Iran’s broader confrontation with the United States.
Iran and its allies now exert pressure over both ends of the region’s key maritime network, one of the sources said, adding that “China depends on both”.
Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said Beijing may oppose US pressure on Tehran, but its interests in the Middle East extend well beyond Iran. Roughly half of China’s oil ​imports come from the region, while trade between China and ​the Gulf Cooperation Council states totals around $300 billion ⁠a year.
“Iran can disrupt Hormuz. But at some point that leverage begins hurting the very power Tehran increasingly depends on,” Vatanka said.
CHINA’S DILEMMA
It is unclear whether Tehran will act on the concerns raised by Beijing, according to the three Iranian sources.
The relationship nevertheless carries significant economic and strategic weight for Iran as it continues to face hostilities ​with the US, they said.
China is among the few countries with the financial capacity to provide the investment Tehran needs to sustain its oil industry and ​ease pressure on its economy, battered by ⁠war and sanctions.
Beijing has also demonstrated its diplomatic influence. In 2023, China brokered the agreement that restored ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia after years of hostility.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-presses-iran-help-rein-houthis-after-saudi-appeal-sources-say-2026-09-17/

As Moby Dick turns 175, some of the last American scrimshanders grapple with the legacy of maintaining one of the US’s oldest art forms.

Jade Gotauco spent her childhood among the skeletons of giants. Her father, Chet Gotauco, was a scrimshander – an artist who etched images onto the ivory of hunted whales. In pensive moments, she would slip under the arched jaw of a whale in his Rhode Island garden and sit atop a massive vertebra, watching insects scrabble across the porous bone.

“My favourite smell in the world is the sandy aroma of ivory dust,” said Gotauco, now an artist herself. Whale teeth adorn the walls of her studio in New Bedford, Massachusetts; she engraves them with nautical scenes in which sperm whales thrash the ocean to foam and whalers hurl barbed harpoons from minute boats.

Ask Americans about the cultural legacy of whaling, and many will point to Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick, which turns 175 next month. Yet for all the book’s brilliance, it’s scrimshaw – the practice of artistically carving whale teeth and bones, which is considered one of the US’s earliest homegrown art forms – that offers a true insider’s view of the industry.

Today, there’s hardly any of those teeth and bones left on the legal market. Some scrimshanders, including Gotauco, believe the art form should disappear with them. “When the ivory is gone, this is over,” she said.

Scrimshaw was developed by sailors whose lives unfolded on whaling grounds around the globe as the industry expanded into a 19th-Century behemoth. They strove to depict a culture that, for a few lucrative decades, made New Bedford North America’s wealthiest city per capita.

“They saw their experiences as important,” said Marina Wells, an assistant curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which is home to the largest scrimshaw collection is the world. “You see that in their commemoration of whaling scenes, in all their meticulous detail.”

Some of the carvings throb with yearning, depicting homey scenes of faraway families. Others capture sailors rowing fragile, open boats dwarfed by the whales they pursued. They’re communicating “the dangerous, faraway world of whaling”, Wells said. “You have the bloody spouts of the whales after their lungs have been punctured… the intimacy of whalemen interacting with whale bodies that’s really hands-on.”

US interest rates have been raised for the first time in more than three years and could be increased further in a bid to slow rising prices.

Rates were hiked to 3.75%-4% from 3.5%-3.75% by the Federal Reserve in a unanimous decision, despite fierce opposition from President Donald Trump, who had called for rates to be cut.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said the move was because “inflation is too high and has been for too long”, adding that it was a “sober” and “responsible decision”.

After the announcement, Trump expressed support for Warsh but said the Fed board, which votes on rate decisions, was “hostile”.

Higher interest rates make borrowing more expensive for people wanting to secure loans, mortgages, and credit cards, but can lead to better returns on savings.

Warsh said during a press conference on Wednesday following the decision that, while there was “an attitude of optimism” within the Fed leadership, inflation remained a problem.

Like many central banks, the Fed has a target of keeping inflation at 2% or below. Warsh noted that US inflation has been above the target “for more than five years”.

That has helped make affordability one of the top concerns of American voters, who have seen fuel prices surge in response to soaring wholesale oil prices since the start of the US-Israel war with Iran. This has driven up the cost of many goods and services, as well.

While the Fed “cannot affect any individual price – whether it be oil prices, whether it be food stuffs at the grocery store”, Warsh said, the central bank can work to keep price rises from broadening across the economy.

He added that strength in the jobs market and wider economy meant the Fed was staying focused on stabilising prices, and that those least well off had the most to gain from lower inflation.

Central banks tend to increase rates when inflation is high to discourage spending and encourage saving, in the hope this will reduce the pace of price rises. But it’s a balancing act, as higher rates can also encourage businesses to hold off on investing and hurt economic growth.

What the higher rate means for Americans

When he was confirmed, Democratic lawmakers had said Warsh would be Trump’s “sock puppet” and many Fed watchers expected him to carry out Trump’s persistent demands to slash rates. Trump had been heavily critical of Warsh’s predecessor Jerome Powell for not cutting them.

Asked on Wednesday about the message the rate hike sent to Trump, Warsh chuckled before saying: “I have got nothing for you on a discussion with the president.”

Trump told reporters later “I’m relying on Kevin [Warsh], but he’s got, you know, a very tough board”.

“And the, interest rates are too high. They’re not appropriate… I talked to Kevin and I said, ‘you might as well vote with the board because it’s not going to matter.’ The board is very hostile, they’re very political,” he added.

Earlier, Trump said on social media: “LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!”

Democrats on Capitol Hill said the rate increase would make loans costlier and, in turn, more Americans would go into debt.

“This is going to make everything become more expensive,” said Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate. “This is because Donald Trump does not know how to manage the economy.”

The Fed’s hike is the first rate move in any direction since they were cut in December 2025. The last time they were raised was in July 2023.

The increase could help push up mortgage rates for home buyers and lead to Americans paying more on other types of debt.

Major US banks JP Morgan, KeyCorp, and BNY all raised their prime lending rate on Wednesday to 7% from 6.75%, which will affect rates charged on credit cards and personal loans.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4gmlyvj422o

 

An official inquiry into a Pakistan hospital fire that killed 14 babies last month has found the neonatal unit lacked fire alarms and sprinklers, while firefighters reported that escape routes were “locked or obstructed”.

One firefighter, who asked to remain anonymous, told the BBC he had heard from other rescue workers that entering the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) hospital in Islamabad was “extremely difficult”.

“The doors were locked so they had to break through the windows to enter. Even after getting inside, the doors leading towards the ward were locked.”

PIMS has not provided a comment on the report and its findings.

The firefighter said he arrived once the blaze had been put out.

It was “difficult for me to even describe what we saw,” he said. “The medical equipment above [the babies] had melted and collapsed onto them.”

The report from an investigative committee headed by a retired senior civil servant found “systemic and institutional failure” which meant what began as an electrical spark became a “catastrophe”.

For many inside the hospital on the morning of 26 August, the first warnings were shouts.

Abdul Ghafoor was in a nearby ward with his mother, who was a patient, when he heard someone warning that a fire had erupted. He went upstairs to see if he could help.

“The entire ward was filled with smoke, we could not see anything,” he told the BBC.

CCTV from the corridor outside shows how quickly the fire spread. According to the report, the first indication that something was wrong came at 06:38 when a nurse can be seen running from the ward to get help, returning 20 seconds later with a security guard.

Another nurse, Razia Noreen, is then seen rushing into the ward, emerging seconds later with one of the babies who turned out to be the only one to survive.

Within a minute, the report says, dense smoke had obscured the camera.

Hivsa Walid, her newborn niece and sister-in-law were in the ward next door. Hours later she told the BBC that they had heard a loud commotion and then realised it was a fire when they saw smoke emerging from the unit where the babies were sleeping.

“In that moment, I couldn’t understand what was going on. We just focused on getting downstairs and saving ourselves.”

On the day of the fire, authorities suggested the fire had started from a spark in the ward’s air conditioner.

The report agrees that this was the most probable source of the fire, due to an overheating electrical supply cable – although it remains unclear what exactly the electrical defect was.

The fire then spread quickly, igniting plastics, equipment and bins.

Several babies in the ward were on oxygen support, but the report says that while oxygen may have intensified the fire, there isn’t evidence that it created a pathway for it to spread.

The air conditioning units had undergone maintenance, but the report says this is not the same as a safety check. Back in 2018, the hospital’s air conditioning units had been approved to be replaced and upgraded, but eight years later this hadn’t happened.

The report states that there was no functioning smoke detection, fire alarms or sprinkler system. It found no evidence that the staff in the unit had been trained or had ever rehearsed how to evacuate the ward of newborns, many of whom were premature or “medically fragile”. It also found staff had not been trained on how to isolate the oxygen supply in the case of an emergency.

Several people described chaos and confusion in the hospital.

“There should have been fire extinguishers and protocols, but no one was doing anything,” Walid said. “Everyone was just running.”

Ghafoor said that he was part of a group of seven or eight who tried to find a way to relieve the thick smoke; they managed to break glass panels at the end of the corridor before firefighters arrived.

The emergency services weren’t notified about the fire until 06:54, the report says, nearly 20 minutes after it first began. It says the first rescue workers arrived at 07:01.

Like the firefighter who spoke to the BBC, Ghafoor also said rescue staff struggled to get through some of the hospital’s doors.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwkgxjl7l91xo

The boss of Snapchat-parent Snap Inc says the firm would be “willing to implement” time limits for teens, following a call from Meta for it to take action.

Evan Spiegel told the BBC in an interview at the company’s California headquarters that setting a maximum amount of time that young users could spend on the app could be “an important step forward for the industry.”

His comments came as Snap revealed a slew of new features for its upcoming Specs glasses, which it said could connect to Apple iPhone and Mac devices.

Meta has been pressuring other social media companies to join it in making platform changes it agreed to as part of a recent multi-billion dollar legal settlement with US states.

Instagram and Facebook-parent Meta was facing allegations from Attorneys General for most US states who said the firm deliberately designed its apps to be addictive to young users.

It agreed to pay $12.7bn and implement a two-hour daily limit for teen users across its platforms by default, in addition to muted notifications during school hours, blocks at night and other measures.

“I think it is an important step forward in the industry in terms of really identifying industry norms, and I think that would be beneficial overall,” Spiegel told the BBC. “We’ve looked really thoughtfully at the terms.”

As part of Meta’s August settlement, the company said it would implement even more stringent time limits and pay an additional $5.3bn if YouTube and TikTok follow suit. It has denied any wrongdoing as part of the deal, which will be paid over a 10-year period.

Last month, a Meta spokesperson said it was hopeful that Snap would make similar platform changes as well.

Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap have all faced a barrage of litigation alleging their apps have helped spawn a youth mental health crisis. Snap has also been accused of facilitating illegal drug sales.

When asked about the idea of a default time limit, Spiegel said: “I think that’s a really good example of something that that we’d be willing to implement.”

But Spiegel did not commit to a timeline on when Snap might take action.

“That’s something we’ve talked about internally,” he said. “I don’t have more to share today.”

He noted that Snap offers tools through its Family Center feature, which currently enables parents to track aspects of how their teens are using Snapchat.

“We want to figure out how we can be part of the solution,” Spiegel added.

YouTube-parent Google said it had no comment when asked if it planned to implement the measures in Meta’s settlement. TikTok did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Snap’s smart glasses

Spiegel was talking to the BBC as Snapchat’s parent Snap Inc announced new features for its upcoming Specs glasses.

He said the smart eyewear would use AI to suggest things for people to do based on what the tech learns about their goals, relationships and routines.

“Rather than the way that people use chatbots today where you constantly have to ask for stuff, Specs can understand what’s important to you, and then offer recommendations or offer next steps,” he said.

Like other smart glasses, Specs will use AI to let people see digital elements overlaid onto the world.

But the tech won’t come cheap – retailing at $2,195 in the US and £1,995 in the UK.

“The target audience right now is early adopters of tech and developers as well as enterprise,” Spiegel said.

With the device, Snap aims to offer a middle ground between VR headsets like Meta’s Quest 3 and lightweight AI smart glasses offered by rivals which look more like conventional glasses.

“We’re creating a totally new category here,” said Spiegel.

“You have a really powerful computer that brings a lot of the immersive capability you see with VR, but they’re also lightweight at just about 130 grams, so they’re very wearable and they have these see-through lenses, so you can use them out in the world.”

Specs is Snap’s most recent foray into the wearable tech, coming a decade after its short-lived Spectacles cost the company tens of millions of dollars.

The device is also arriving as Meta is facing a significant backlash over its own smart glasses, which are estimated to be the most popular of the market.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr3wjz3edd10o

MK-84 is among the most destructive munitions in Western military arsenals. Its explosion sends large metal fragments in every direction for thousands of feet, ripping through metal and thick concrete.

The Donald Trump administration is reportedly planning to sell 2,000-pound bombs to Israel in the largest single sale of the controversial munition in recent years. The $2.8 billion package includes 40,000 of the bombs that weigh 2,000 pounds each, including 20,000 MK 84s and 20,000 BLU-117s, agencies reported, citing US officials.

News about the sale of the package was first reported by the Washington Post. The report said the deal, which would be purchased with US taxpayer dollars, also includes 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads.

The Gaza Concerns

MK-84 is among the most destructive munitions in Western military arsenals. Its explosion sends large metal fragments in every direction for thousands of feet, ripping through metal and thick concrete. It’s so powerful that it often creates large craters in the earth.

Israel has used these 2,000-pound bombs regularly in Gaza as well as in Lebanon, drawing scrutiny from rights experts and prompting concerns about the possibility of mass casualties in Gaza, following which the Biden administration paused its delivery two years ago. Trump lifted that hold when he took office again.

Trump-Netanyahu Ties

The package comes as Israel has faced increasing international isolation over its war in Gaza in response to the deadly October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas. The US Congress has been informally notified about the pending deal, most of which is to be paid for with foreign military financing, in which US taxpayers’ money is given to Israel to turn around and buy the weapons from the United States.

The proposed sale is just the latest in a series of Trump administration steps to improve Israel’s military capacity. It signals that some warmth may have returned in the increasingly deteriorating personal ties between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, especially since the two countries launched the war against Iran in February.

Last year also, the Trump administration bypassed a normal congressional review process and approved a nearly $3 billion sale to Israel that included more than 35,500 of the bombs. The administration then approved a new series of arms sales to Israel totalling $6.67 billion in January.

Israel’s Record

Though the Israeli military has offered few details about what bombs and artillery it has used in Gaza, experts analysing strike footage and blast fragments found on-site believe the US-made bombs have been used there, targeting a tunnel network used by Hamas but also killing people in densely populated areas.

Source : https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/trump-plans-to-send-4-000-mega-powerful-bombs-to-israel-in-largest-sale-in-years-12052198?pfrom=home-ndtvworld_world_top_scroll

Border Patrol agents made a startling discovery in the scorching California desert after finding 31 migrants allegedly crammed into the back of a modified utility truck in a suspected human-smuggling operation.

The packed vehicle was discovered near Ocotillo, a tiny Imperial County community near the US-Mexico border, according to the US Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector.

“Smugglers packed 31 illegal aliens like cargo into a modified utility truck and hauled them through dangerous desert heat near Ocotillo, California,” the agency said.

But the suspected driver apparently wasn’t sticking around to explain.

Border Patrol said the driver ditched the vehicle and fled across the border into Mexico as agents took the group into custody.

However, his getaway didn’t last long. Mexican law enforcement subsequently arrested the suspected smuggler.

“Apparently thinking the border doubled as a finish line,” the agency quipped. “Mexican law enforcement arrested him too, leaving the getaway driver to trade the steering wheel for a jail cell.”

The alleged smuggling attempt unfolded in one of Southern California’s most unforgiving landscapes.

The El Centro Sector oversees roughly 70 miles of the international border through the Imperial Valley, where agents patrol sprawling desert, mountain ranges and agricultural areas. Its four Border Patrol stations are located in El Centro, Calexico, Indio and Riverside.

Summer temperatures in parts of the desert can rocket past 120 degrees, creating potentially deadly conditions for both migrants attempting to cross the region and the agents tasked with finding them.

The truck discovery comes as overall apprehensions at the southern border have plunged compared with the historic highs recorded in previous years.

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/us-news/border-patrol-discovers-31-migrants-in-truck-near-us-mexico-border/

Ben Saunders, the first winner of “The Voice of Holland,” has died at the age of 43.

The singer, who was a contestant in 2011 on the Dutch version of the reality show that has since found success in countries around the world, including the US, was found dead at the Rijkerswoerdse Plassen recreational lake in the Netherlands Tuesday afternoon, the local outlet De Telegraaf reported.

The outlet reported that Saunders was found during a search for a man with “various tattoos on his head and neck, on his arms and hands.”

A cause of death wasn’t immediately revealed, and police ruled out foul play.

Saunders’ partner, Juanita, and their 9-year-old son, Benji, mourned the TV personality in a heartbreaking Instagram statement Wednesday.

“To quote our son Benji: Mom, I have a hole in my heart that is only one percent full,” Juanita wrote. “This loss leaves an indescribably huge void in our lives. We earnestly ask everyone to respect our privacy during this incredibly difficult time.”

Juanita invited fans to pay their respects at the tattoo studio she owned with Saunders, Craftman’s Tattoo, in Arnhem on Saturday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. local time.

Saunders was a tattoo artist with more than 25 years of experience.

Additionally, Ben’s brother, Dean Saunders, addressed the reality star’s tragic passing in an emotional statement shared via Instagram.

“My sweet little brother passed away today,” he wrote, alongside a throwback photo of himself and Ben in red sweaters. “I have never experienced such pain as I feel right now. What a terrible day for all of us.”

“We have to learn to live with this and I hope this will be handled respectfully. Ben had a beautiful, beautiful family and a family that loves him very much and always will … Ben is in my heart and he will stay there forever ❤️🙏,” he concluded.

Source : https://pagesix.com/2026/09/16/celebrity-news/first-ever-the-voice-winner-found-dead-at-age-43/?_gl=1*1pp7uri*_gcl_au*MTA2NDczMTkzNS4xNzg3MTA3MTIx*_ga*MTg2NjYyMzM1MC4xNzczODEwMTg2*_ga_0DZ7LHF5PZ*czE3ODk2MTQ5MTMkbzI1NSRnMSR0MTc4OTYxNDkzNSRqMzgkbDAkaDA

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce reportedly had plans to build a high fence surrounding their new lakeside Ohio mansion for privacy and security, but were shot down by village planners.

According to the Daily Mail, the couple wanted to erect an 8-foot fence to wall in their Bratenahl estate, which sits along Lake Erie.

However, the Bratenahl Architectural Review Board either scrapped or ignored the request on two separate meeting dates earlier this month and in August, due to code that requires fences around lakefront homes be capped at 2 and a half feet — unless they are at least 75 percent see-through — in order to preserve lake views and property values.

Per the outlet, discussion with neighbors and the village convinced the couple to settle for a lower fence that did not enclose their entire property. Kelce — who purchased the house in March — was reportedly “gracious” when dealing with the village officials regarding the structural request.

Page Six has reached out to Swift’s representatives for comment.

Swift and Kelce have taken other precautions besides fencing to secure their new home. Page Six exclusively learned that the couple have set up a warning alarm surrounding the house.

“A neighbor approached the house and got a voice warning about not passing onto the property after getting too close to the house,” a neighbor recently shared with us.

However, the superstar couple apparently haven’t caused much commotion moving in, we’ve been told.

“Something may have been set up at that particular home, which is their private estate, but in terms of any additional fencing for the village, I’m not aware of that,” a veteran real estate agent in the area, Patricia Knight Gary of Howard Hanna realty, exclusively told Page Six. “We found out publicly when everyone else did [about their move].”

Source : https://pagesix.com/2026/09/16/entertainment/taylor-swift-travis-kelce-hit-a-snag-over-ohio-mansion-security/?_gl=1*74vl03*_gcl_au*MTA2NDczMTkzNS4xNzg3MTA3MTIx*_ga*MTg2NjYyMzM1MC4xNzczODEwMTg2*_ga_0DZ7LHF5PZ*czE3ODk2MTQ5MTMkbzI1NSRnMSR0MTc4OTYxNDkyNyRqNDYkbDAkaDA

Disturbing video footage captured the bloody campus brawl that left two students injured and two in custody at Westchester Community College on Wednesday.

Several students are seen scuffling on the ground outside the David Swoope Student Center at the suburban college – with one stumbling away and falling to the ground covered in blood as other students repeatedly yell, “Stop!”

“They had a knife,” one woman is heard yelling.

British supercar maker McLaren said on Tuesday it would invest £500 million ($675 ​million) in its UK manufacturing and engineering operations and add new models, including its first-ever SUV, to lift sales and ‌pursue far higher profit margins to rival the likes of Ferrari.
McLaren’s investments will include a new UK assembly plant, and it will develop and build its own transmissions and engines, which it said would create 1,000 direct and indirect jobs by 2032.

“McLaren Automotive is doubling down on Britain,” UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham ​said in a statement.
The firm’s expansion plan comes as automakers across the industry are restructuring. Nissan (7201.T), opens new tab is ditching plants and some future ​models. Jaguar Land Rover is cutting staff while Volkswagen’s supervisory board has just approved a turnaround plan that ⁠includes sweeping job cuts.
McLaren CEO Nick Collins told Reuters the company’s investment plan comes after restructuring last year following its acquisition by Abu Dhabi’s CYVN ​Holdings, which also bought a non-controlling stake in McLaren’s Formula One business. The automaker’s main shareholder now is Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund L’IMAD.

L’IMAD ​has committed to investing 1.5 billion pounds in McLaren over the next five years.
McLaren slashed bloated dealer stocks last year by cutting one of two production shifts at the assembly plant at its headquarters in Woking, England, and has now switched to making cars only when orders are placed to avoid discounting and ​boost residual values.
As part of the restructuring process, sales fell to around 2,000 cars in 2025 from just under 3,300 in 2024.
The new ​performance SUV model in development is part of a strategy of boosting sales by offering customers more options with a number of models planned, though ‌Collins declined ⁠to provide product details or launch dates.
“We’ll do it very much in a McLaren way,” Collins said of the SUV. “It will bring something unique to the segment, which we think the customers will value.”

SUVs have become a growth driver for luxury sports carmakers, broadening their customer base beyond traditional buyers of sports cars and grand tourers to tap into strong demand for high-end utility vehicles. At Lamborghini, the Urus SUV has driven ​the brand’s sales growth since its ​launch in 2018. Rival Ferrari (RACE.MI), opens new tab ⁠has limited production of its roughly €450,000 ($519,000) Purosangue SUV to maintain the vehicle’s exclusivity.
The Bentayga SUV is luxury British automaker Bentley’s top-selling model.
McLaren Chief Operating Officer Michael Straughan said the automaker needed growth to lower its ​material costs and lift its profits, and the way to get there was through expanding its ​product portfolio starting with ⁠the SUV.
McLaren has been loss-making for years, but Straughan said the company’s margins could match the top performers in a segment that includes Ferrari, which has the highest profit margins in the auto industry.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/mclaren-invest-675-million-expand-uk-manufacturing-launch-suv-model-2026-09-16/

Two women whose images as girls ‌were found in pornography seized from Jeffrey Epstein filed a class action lawsuit on Wednesday seeking damages from the late sex offender’s estate for individuals featured in his collection of thousands of pictures and videos of child sexual abuse material.
The lawsuit seeks ​at least $6 million on behalf of more than 40 people, some of whom were in Epstein’s ​so-called “modeling book,” a collection of sexualized images of children seized by federal investigators in ⁠2019 from his New York home, according to the filing, opens new tab in Manhattan federal district court.

Others were shown in ​thousands of downloaded videos and images of child sexual abuse material and other pornography taken from the late ​financier’s properties, according to the action.
The lawsuit aims to broaden legal reckoning against Epstein beyond women who have sued his estate over sexual assaults, to those he exploited as children through pictures he and his associates took of them or obtained. In ​some cases the images were then distributed to others.
The lawsuit was filed against Epstein’s former attorney Darren ​Indyke and his former accountant Richard Kahn, the co-executors of the Epstein estate. Daniel Weiner, a lawyer representing Indyke, declined to ‌comment. ⁠An attorney for Kahn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One of the plaintiffs, identified as Jane Doe, alleges Epstein stole partially nude photographs of her taken when she was 12. The other, using the pseudonym “Amy,” says she is featured in child sexual abuse material seized from Epstein’s properties in 2019 that ​is still being traded today.
Hillary ​Nappi, a lawyer representing ⁠the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit could potentially involve thousands of class members. She said in an interview that most people pictured in Epstein’s collection had never been ​identified.
The lawsuit calls for Epstein’s estate and federal authorities to work with the ​National Center for ⁠Missing and Exploited Children to identify individuals in the collection and inform them. It asks for the estate to pay class action members $150,000 each, as well as other penalties.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/epstein-survivors-sue-his-estate-over-child-pornography-collection-2026-09-16/

Rogue AI agents from ​OpenAI hijacked Hugging Face user accounts and probed the site itself for vulnerabilities as early as May, nearly two months before the July breach of ‌the open-source repository drew global attention, according to researchers who reviewed the activity.

The newly uncovered malicious activity showed that the rogue agents’ efforts to find a way into Hugging Face began earlier than was publicly known.

OpenAI had previously disclosed one aspect of the malicious activity — the theft of a Hugging Face user’s digital credential to access a biology-related file — in its public incident report, opens new tab last month, but ​researchers said the probing activity against Hugging Face appeared to go beyond what the report described.
Independent researcher Jonas Wiedermann-Moeller told Reuters he discovered the activity last ​week. He said he found evidence that the OpenAI agents compromised two Hugging Face user accounts and used them to send ⁠unusually formatted files to the company’s servers as early as May 13.
He and other researchers who reviewed the evidence said the behavior resembled an attempt to map or ​test parts of Hugging Face’s network for ways to infiltrate, although they stressed there was no evidence the effort resulted in an actual breach. Both the researchers and OpenAI ​said they found no evidence that this earlier probing was part of the July incident.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company had disclosed the May 13 event in the incident report, privately notified Hugging Face about the activity flagged by Wiedermann-Moeller, and was “committed to transparency about these issues and to sharing what we learn as our review continues.”
Hugging Face, which recently agreed to be acquired by chipmaker ​Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab, did not respond to requests for comment.
Wiedermann-Moeller, a 27-year-old who lives in Bielefeld, Germany, said OpenAI’s failure to detect the May 13 probing at the time was ​a missed opportunity to prevent the subsequent hacking campaign, which has triggered a global reckoning over the power of artificial intelligence.
“Imagine if they caught this behavior in May,” he said in an interview. “It ‌could’ve prevented ⁠the later incident, which was way bigger.”

OpenAI has previously said that, with the benefit of hindsight, “some early signals” from its AI agents should have triggered an earlier response.
‘CLEAR WARNING SIGN’
Two outside experts who reviewed Wiedermann-Moeller’s findings said they were consistent with activity previously linked to OpenAI’s agents.
SentinelOne senior threat researcher Tom Hegel said the account hijacking and subsequent probing matched known behavior by the agents “to a tee,” saying in his own report into the incident, opens new tab that frontier AI labs should release more data about incidents when agents “interact with or affect ​third-party systems.”
Sydney Von Arx of the Nightingale ​Collective, an AI safety group, also ⁠agreed with the attribution.
Von Arx said the hacking amounted to a “clear warning sign” that could have helped prevent the breach in July.

OpenAI has faced increasing scrutiny since the company disclosed on July 21 that rogue AI agents bypassed internal controls, reached the open ​internet and coordinated actions that OpenAI described as “an unprecedented cyber incident.”
Since then, outside researchers have identified additional incidents alleged to involve ​OpenAI-linked agents, including activity ⁠affecting a dormant German wiki site and the RubyGems software package repository.
OpenAI has acknowledged some of those incidents only after they were publicly reported by third parties. Two people familiar with the matter said that, in the case of RubyGems, OpenAI employees only realized its AI was responsible for the malicious activity after the Nightingale Collective found it.
The additional discoveries have fueled questions ⁠among lawmakers ​and AI safety advocates about whether the full scope of the incidents has been identified.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openais-rogue-agents-probed-hugging-face-weaknesses-two-months-before-major-hack-2026-09-16/

He said the attacks may not have been aimed directly at him, but linked the incidents to the presence of his aircraft in Moldova.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian drones twice entered Moldovan airspace while he was travelling through the country.

Zelenskyy told CBS that his presidential aircraft was at Chisinau airport as he travelled to and from a foreign trip when the incidents occurred.

“In Moldova, my presidential jet was there, and that’s why they attacked Moldova, the airspace of Moldova,” Zelenskyy said. “When we came back home, again through Chisinau, again they did the same.”

He said the attacks may not have been aimed directly at him, but linked the incidents to the presence of his aircraft in Moldova.

Drones Enter Moldovan Airspace

The comments follow a drone alert on September 9 that temporarily disrupted Zelenskyy’s departure for Norway. Moldovan authorities closed the country’s airspace after two Russian drones entered its territory.

One drone landed in a field north of Chisinau and caused a fire, while the other continued into Romanian airspace.

Moldovan authorities also reported two drones entering the country’s airspace on September 14. Each remained in Moldovan airspace for about 10 minutes, according to officials.

Zelenskyy had not previously publicly referred to the second incident involving his transit through Moldova.

It was not immediately clear when exactly he travelled through Chisinau on his return journey from Canada.

Source : https://www.news18.com/world/my-jet-was-there-zelenskyy-says-russian-drones-targeted-moldova-twice-during-his-transit-ws-l-10332658.html

 

The sharp surge in global petroleum prices threatens to trigger severe secondary inflation across essential commodities in Pakistan

The rapidly escalating conflict in West Asia has plunged Pakistan’s energy security into crisis, driving international oil prices to staggering levels and placing immense pressure on Islamabad’s depleted foreign exchange reserves. In a desperate bid to curtail domestic fuel consumption and mitigate mounting financial strain, the federal government under Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is considering a comprehensive “Petroleum Smart Lockdown” across the country.

Four-Day Workweek and Extended Weekend Plan

Under the core proposals evaluated during high-level meetings chaired by PM Shehbaz Sharif, the government is looking to mandate a four-day workweek for public and private sector institutions. By extending weekly holidays from Friday through Sunday, officials aim to drastically reduce daily vehicular movement and ease urban transport demand.

• Rotational Attendance: Public sector departments are preparing schedules for rotation-based working, requiring a significant percentage of staff to operate remotely from home.
• Commercial Restrictions: The proposal also entails early evening closures for commercial markets, shopping malls, and event venues to curb indirect energy and fuel consumption.

Source : https://www.news18.com/world/pakistan-weighs-petroleum-smart-lockdown-amid-spiralling-west-asia-conflict-exclusive-details-ws-lt-10332579.html

 

The CBO said the cost could rise by another $2 billion to $3 billion for every additional month of fighting, depending on the intensity of the conflict.

The US war with Iran has cost the Pentagon about $38 billion through August 1, with the conflict also leaving the military with fewer missile-defence interceptors for a potential future conflict with China, according to a new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The CBO said the cost could rise by another $2 billion to $3 billion for every additional month of fighting, depending on the intensity of the conflict. The estimate covers the cost of replacing used munitions and equipment, increased flying hours, military operations and higher fuel costs.

War Bill Could Rise Further

The CBO said the $38 billion figure reflects the intense initial phase of the conflict, which lasted just over a month, while less intense combat operations remain ongoing.

If violence remains at the lower levels seen in May and June, another month of fighting would cost about $2 billion, the report said. If fighting returns to the intensity seen in July, the monthly cost could reach $3 billion or more.

The CBO noted that its estimate does not include some costs borne by other parts of the federal government or basic military operating costs already included in the federal budget.

Missile Stocks Take Major Hit

One of the biggest costs has been the use of missile-defence interceptors. The Pentagon has used large numbers of Patriot, THAAD, SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors against ballistic missile attacks.

The CBO estimates that the US has probably used between half and two-thirds of its inventory of these interceptors since June 2025.

The report said the US now has fewer interceptors available for a potential conflict with China, which has a much larger ballistic and cruise missile arsenal than Iran had when the US operation began.

“Having used a large portion of its missile defense inventory in combat operations against Iran, DoD now has fewer interceptors on hand to use in a potential conflict with the PRC,” the CBO said.

Source : https://www.news18.com/world/iran-war-cost-us-38-billion-depleted-missile-stocks-for-potential-china-conflict-cbo-warns-ws-l-10332863.html

 

Worried what AI will do to the world? Don’t fret — we got a group of woke elitists who will protect us.

That’s the pitch from Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who says he has found an outside team that can regulate AI and make sure it doesn’t destroy the world.

It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronoun and promote “Effective Altruism,” that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology.

In a bombshell essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei argued that leading AI firms should commit to allowing “embedded third-party evaluators” from a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, that would maintain “employee-like access” to oversee safety efforts and ensure advanced AI models don’t turn Terminator and wipe out humanity.

The would-be John Connors at METR purport to be fully independent, but the group traces its roots directly back to key figures in Effective Altruism, whose Silicon Valley-based devotees once included disgraced crypto boss Sam Bankman-Fried, one of Anthropic’s biggest early investors.

Effective Altruism, a philosophy that’s become popular with Silicon Valley masters of the universe, advocates for using reason — and fortunes amassed by tech’s best and brightest — to do the most good for humanity over the long term.

In the past, it has been used to justify making as much money as possible with the idea that you can donate more later to do more good – though the movement suffered a big black eye when one of its most famous proponents, Bankman-Fried, saw his crypto empire collapse amid fraud charges that sent him to prison.

Deep EA ties

The overlap between METR and Anthropic is rife with potential conflicts of interest, according to critics.

METR spun off from an Effective Altruism-aligned tech incubator called Alignment Research Center (ARC), which is headed by AI researcher Paul Christiano. He was Amodei’s housemate, coworker and research collaborator in the 2010s when they were both at OpenAI — Anthropic’s biggest rival.

Christiano also served as one of the first five trustees of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust.

One staffer on METR is Ajeya Cotra, who is married to Christiano and has been a major organizer in the EA world.

The founder and CEO of the group is Beth Barnes, who was hired by Christiano and was involved in the EA movement at college.

Chief scientist Hjalmar Wijk and staffers Megan Kinniment and Pip Arnott all came from the same research cluster at the University of Oxford — a major feeder for EA.

When reached by phone, a METR official acknowledged that the nonprofit has a lot of overlap with Effective Altruism, but insisted its employees have a diverse array of ideological viewpoints. They’re required to disclose conflicts of interest, such as employees holding equity in firms they are tapped to investigate.

“We don’t think any small group should have authority over what happens with AI, and our goal is to get information from inside these companies into the public domain – external investigators can help bring more information to light,” a METR spokesperson said in a statement.

“Our funders have no say in the projects we work on and we do not accept any funding from AI companies or their employees.”

Amodei, who has pledged to give away 80% of his personal wealth, has deep ties to EA. His sister Daniela married Holden Karnofsky, the founder of two major EA nonprofits.

METR’s involvement is likely to be a nonstarter for the Trump administration, which has had a testy relationship with Anthropic over the past year and has also expressed heavy skepticism of so-called AI “doomers” who argue the technology is on the precipice of disaster.

“METR is essentially Anthropic in another form,” a source familiar with the White House’s thinking told The Post on Tuesday.

Multimillion-dollar fundraising

Effective Altruism’s obsessed adherents believe in funneling their wealth toward the goals they view as most important to humanity, including climate change and strict AI regulation.

Since its founding, METR and its affiliates have received funding from EA kingpins like Democratic megadonor Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn — both of whom are Anthropic investors.

In August, METR announced it had raised $71 million in new funding from outside investors over the previous six months.

Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund, a philanthropy group, has earmarked up to $752,000 in funding to support METR since its founding, including $324,000 in general cash and a $428,000 matching pledge, according to public records.

Elsewhere, Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving – formerly known as Open Philanthropy before a hasty rebranding last year – gave $1,515,000 to METR’s incubator, the ARC, in 2022. METR was originally known as ARC Evals before spinning off as an independent nonprofit and changing to its current name in 2023.

METR does not take any compensation from AI labs for its work, nor does it take donations from executives or employees of AI companies, the METR official said. In the case of Moskovitz’s donation to ARC in 2022, the official said the funding was firewalled and not used for METR’s operations.

That’s hardly reassuruing to critics.

“Saying you want to be audited by the ‘independent’ people at METR is a complete joke,” said Perry Metzger, chairman of Alliance for the Future, a Washington, DC-based AI policy group. “It’s people who are funded by your buddies. It’s completely ridiculous.

“If you went out tomorrow and you’re a big bank and you had your audits done by an organization consisting entirely of your own former employees, which was funded by the same investors that are investing in you, do you know what the feds would do with you?” he added. “It would be positively medieval.”

Amodei’s surprise proposal published last Saturday morning came just days after Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI, abruptly quit the firm while warning that both AI giants were “gambling with our lives” by pursuing progress without proper oversight.

Without safeguards in place, Amodei warned the internet could be overtaken by AI bots within six to 12 months, “potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.”

‘Stop pretending’

The doomsday warnings received sharp pushback in some corners of the tech and political world, with President Trump asserting that they were a “hoax” and smaller AI startups arguing that leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI were just trying to rewrite the law to benefit themselves.

Among the skeptics was former White House AI czar David Sacks, who called on Amodei to “stop pretending METR is independent when it is interviewed with Anthropic’s investors and staff.”

“Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” he added. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”

It’s also unclear if the AI industry’s push to police itself will pass muster with US regulators.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson warned that “everyone should be deeply suspicious” of any request to grant AI companies an antitrust exemption to coordinate safety efforts.

“I will say generally, though, that if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off,” Ferguson said during a Tuesday event at Georgetown University.

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/15/business/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodeis-handpicked-ai-watchdog-has-deep-ties-to-effective-altruism-movement-a-complete-joke/

At least three people are dead after a NBC4 news helicopter crashed in the Los Angeles areaTuesday evening near the scene of a deadly Metro bus wreck, with a longtime anchor at the station saying “we have lost contact with our people” live on the air.

The Los Angeles Fire Department said one of the people killed was likely a pedestrian who was not in the helicopter, while the other two victims were inside the aircraft.

One surviving individual was rushed to a local hospital in grave condition, according to the LAFD.

“We have lost contact with our people,” Colleen Williams said while holding back tears as she covered the story.

The helicopter crashed between two commercial buildings around 7 p.m on the 9100 block of Mason Avenue, setting several nearby cars on fire.

When firefighters arrived at the scene, they found both the helicopter and the cars burning close to where emergency crews were already helping people from an earlier bus accident.

Flames had since been extinguished at the helicopter crash scene, but firefighters remained in the area, ABC 7 reported.

The aircraft came down just as emergency workers were managing the aftermath of that initial fatal wreck between the Metro bus and the other vehicle.

At least two people were killed in the bus crash, emergency personnel said.

Six others were injured and taken to hospitals in unknown condition.

The bus collision was reported shortly after 5 p.m. near Nordhoff Street and De Soto Avenue, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

“This is a heartbreaking night for our city. My thoughts and prayers are with the families and the loved ones we lost today.” Mayor Karen Bass said at a press conference near the scene Tuesday night.

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/15/us-news/helicopter-crashes-near-site-of-deadly-bus-crash-in-chatsworth/

Vice President JD Vance told The Post Monday that the Trump administration’s agenda is on the line in the 2026 midterms and Republicans will need their voters to turn out like a presidential year— in order to keep the “crazies” at bay.

In an exclusive sitdown aboard Air Force Two, Vance lamented how voters in President Trump’s coalition “haven’t yet shown up for Republicans” in off-year elections to the degree needed — a trend he is trying to reverse to maintain control of Congress.

“I really think it’s important to kind of get people to think that … in many ways the president is on the ballot. Yes, I’m on the ballot too, but the entire agenda is on the ballot,” the vice president told The Post. “Hopefully that will generate some enthusiasm.”

“The enthusiasm normally just isn’t there among a lot of our voters for midterm elections; we’re hoping we can get it there this time around,” Vance also said.

Republicans are facing the usual headwinds of a party in power, with the generic congressional ballot favoring Democrats by more than eight percentage points this election cycle, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average.

That’s roughly the same advantage the Democratic Party had in the 2018 midterm elections during Trump’s first term, with a more than seven-percentage-point lead heading into Election Day.

When it flipped the House in 2022, the GOP was ahead of Democrats by an average of two-and-a-half-percentage points.

“The Republican coalition has two different turnout realities,” explained Cygnal data and insights pollster and CEO Brent Buchanan.

“Trump Republicans are still highly engaged, while traditional conservatives are 26 points less likely to say they are excited to vote, and they are the group Republicans cannot afford to leave behind,” he added.

“They do not need another recap rally of what has already happened,” Buchanan said. “They need to hear what the party will do next to make life more affordable, more stable, and more workable for their families. That is the turnout fight Republicans have to win.”

Trump has tried to defy the odds by hosting a first-ever GOP midterm convention in Dallas last week to gin up excitement and by launching a rare mid-decade redistricting push that could net the GOP about 11 more seats due to new congressional maps. Democrats need just three more seats to win the House.

Midterm elections have lower turnout than presidential ones. For instance, 64.3% of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election, compared to 46.1% turnout in the 2022 midterms, per data from the University of Florida.

Trump doesn’t need all of his 2024 voters to hold the House and Senate, but if he can turn out 2-4 percentage points more voters in each contested election than would be typical for a midterm, Republicans will hold the House and Senate, according to projections shared by a national GOP strategist familiar with Trump’s political operation.

“We’re very bullish” about meeting that turnout target, the strategist told The Post.

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/15/us-news/jd-vance-urges-high-turnout-in-2026-midterms-to-keep-crazies-out-of-office-with-trump-agenda-on-the-line/

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce aren’t taking any chances when it comes to feeling safe in their new Ohio mansion.

Page Six has exclusively learned that the couple have set up a warning alarm surrounding their new digs.

“A neighbor approached the house and got a voice warning about not passing onto the property after getting too close to the house,” a nearby neighbor shared.

Before getting married in July at Madison Square Garden, Swift and Kelce, both 36, purchased the 21,000 sq. foot lakefront mansion back in March for $5.35 million in Bratenahl — which is miles away from where Kansas City Chiefs player grew up in Cleveland Heights.

The eight bedroom, 11 bathroom property sits along Lake Erie and comes equipped with a game room and a theater.

Despite the couple making it clear that they don’t want people getting too close, they haven’t caused any sort of commotion moving in, we’re told.

“The village is a relatively secluded lakefront property. Something may have been set up at that particular home which is their private estate, but in terms of any additional fencing for the village, I’m not aware of that,” veteran realtor in the area, Patricia Knight Gary of Howard Hanna Realty, exclusively told Page Six.

According to Knight Gary, there’s already a security presence to keep residents safe in the area, though with the celebrities moving in, more may be on the way.

“It does have a small police force that gauge and patrol the village on a regular basis,” she added. “And then even at the condos [down the street], there is 24 hour security, so I would anticipate that there might be some discussion in terms of increasing that.”

The Ohio home is just the latest on the growing list of places Swift and Kelce own real estate, and with their busy schedules, it sounds like it won’t be their main one.

“Right now, Travis’ Leawood [Kansas] home is his and Taylor’s primary residence and a big home base for them especially while he’s still playing for the Chiefs,” a source exclusively told Page Six earlier this month.

Swift also has home bases in Nashville, Rhode Island and Beverly Hills, as well as her Tribeca apartment, according to the source, “So they have plenty of options depending on where they need to be.”

While it remains to be seen just how much time Swift and Kelce will spend at their new home, Knight Gary shared the neighborhood is excited to see if they can catch a glimpse of the famous newlyweds.

Source : https://pagesix.com/2026/09/15/entertainment/taylor-swift-and-travis-kelces-extreme-privacy-measures-at-ohio-home/

A REPUBLICAN congressman has taken a massive step toward impeaching Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Libertarian-leaning GOP Representative Thomas Massie made a surprise move on the House floor on Tuesday, introducing articles of impeachment against Hegseth, primarily over the Iran war.

Massie, who lost his reelection bid to a Trump-backed opponent, accused Hegseth of violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

The resolution requires congressional authorization to conduct military operations that last longer than 90 days.

The 55-year-old Republican is known to have broken with the Trump administration on several issues, including the conflict with Iran and the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

He accused Hegseth of high crimes and misdemeanors, claiming he “abused the powers of the Department of Defense” and violated his oath to “support and defend the Constitution.”

“Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with his duties and the rule of law.

“Peter Brian Hegseth thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”

“This abuse of office frustrated Congress’ ability to exercise its most solemn constitutional responsibility,” he said.

With Republicans controlling Congress, Massie’s efforts are likely to fail, which would then keep Hegseth in his position.

However, both chambers have passed resolutions earlier in 2026 calling on President Donald Trump to end the Iran war.

The US launched a missile attack on Iran on February 28, killing the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Military actions have continued in the months since, with Trump vowing Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.

The White House has argued the conflict ended after the initial fighting phase, thus resetting the 90-day clock.

Massie’s move will force the House to vote on it this week, which could set up a potentially complicated vote for the Republican party just a few months before midterm elections.

The House is set to leave Washington in the coming days for an extended recess that will end after midterms, meaning they will be forced into a quick decision.

Articles of impeachment are written statements of charges that set up the basis for removing a person from office if they are convicted of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Impeachment serves as an important check on the judicial and executive branches.

If the House agrees to an impeachment resolution, the Senate can conduct a trial to determine if the person – in this case Hegseth – should be removed from office.

Those who presented the case of impeachment in the House can then read the articles on the Senate floor, where senators then take an oath to “do impartial justice,” according to Congress.

After that, the Senate issues a “summons” to the person accused and requests a written answer to be filed.

Senators then get to deliberate after hearing arguments presented by House managers and counsel for the accused, where they then vote “guilty” or “not guilty” on each article of impeachment.

Two-thirds of Senators must support the article in order to convict the person.

Nine Democrats, led by Representative Yassamin Ansari, moved to impeach Hegseth in April, accusing him of prosecuting an unauthorized war in Iran, mishandling classified information and targeting civilians among other charges.

The Pentagon defended Hegseth’s performance in his role, but did not directly address the claims over the legality of the conflict with Iran.

“Secretary Hegseth has been a transformative leader for the Department of War,” said Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson in a statement shared with The U.S. Sun.

“Standards and merit are back, our arsenal is stronger than ever before, and morale and recruitment across every service are at all-time highs.”

“By every measurable metric, the Department of War is better under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s leadership than before,” the statement continued.

“The entire Department is unified behind the Secretary’s vision and will continue working to put our warfighters and America first.”

Hegseth has faced intense backlash over the Iran war since February, with protesters even infiltrating his Senate hearing in April focused on the 2027 military budget.

“Hegseth you’re a war criminal. You should be arrested,” a man raged on as the secretary picked up his coffee, taking a sip seemingly unfazed.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/17009666/thomas-massie-impeach-pete-hegseth-iran-war/

THEY’VE been back in the UK just a matter of weeks, but it’s been a whirlwind of chaos for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

The couple, who returned on August 26, have hit headlines since their return – from pulling the kids from school two days in, to Harry involving King Charles in his Invictus disaster.

And the drama shows no signs of slowing down.

Harry and Meghan’s children, Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, only met their new classmates last week before they were removed over safety concerns.

Sources close to the couple reported that Harry, 42, and Meghan, 45, had no issue with the school itself, but struggled to get the kids to the school with their vehicles in convoy – which raised further concerns.

A source told HELLO! Magazine: “It’s a real shame, because they absolutely adored the school, the kids and their parents.

“It was perfect for them in every way and the children really enjoyed their time there. They really wanted to make it work, but they had to make a difficult decision based on the fact that the team couldn’t make the school run operationally secure.”

Bodyguards for the Sussexes reportedly checked the school over the summer holidays before the children were sent there.

However, the security teams did not properly check the school run before the first day of term.

Archie and Lilibet are to join another school in the area on Monday for their first lessons.

A spokesman for the Duke and Duchess said: “The decision for the children to move school was taken following a discussion with the family’s security team about the practicalities of their current arrangements.

“The parents remain extremely grateful to all the teachers and staff for the love, care and effort they have shown their family.

“This decision should in no way be interpreted as a reflection on the school or the exceptional care the children have received there.”

The school swap comes after Harry and Meghan were granted their first government-backed security review since returning to the UK.

The Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec) has written to the Duke of Sussex and informed him that his and Meghan’s situation was discussed at a meeting last week.

The Duke has fought for years for the right to taxpayer-funded police protection in the UK, arguing that the risk to him has not fallen since he quit official duties.

He pursued a legal challenge against its removal when it was taken away from him.

The appeal lasted until May last year but Harry ultimately lost the case in the Court of Appeal.

But a poll found that 63 per cent of the public believe the pair should pay for their own security guards.

In further drama, Harry and Meghan forced King Charles to step in and save the Invictus Games from becoming a farce, royal author Phil Dampier has claimed.

It was recently announced that Uganda had quit the Duke’s games, which were founded in 2014 for wounded military service personnel and veterans.

The move came after a bombshell letter was issued on the King’s behalf which clearly laid out the couple’s status as “private citizens” in the UK instead of working royals.

The couple’s spokesperson claimed that they were blindsided by the letter and were not told before it was released publicly.

A spokesperson for the Sussexes said: “We were a little surprised not to have been told about this [the letter] in advance.”

However, the Daily Mail reports that palace sources claim Harry and Meghan are “incorrect” and had been sent a copy of the letter before it was published.

It is claimed the letter was shared with Sussesex at 1:59pm and twenty minutes later Harry’s office asked Buckingham Palace if the ‘guidance had gone out already’.

In light of the letter, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the country’s military chief, slammed the Sussexes’ drama as “Meghan and Harry nonsense”, and pulled out of Invictus.

However, Uganda later U-turned on the decision after King Charles intervened with a phone call.

Royal expert Phil Dampier explained the King’s intervention to bring Uganda back into the games was likely an effort to keep tensions with his son under control.

He claimed: “I think they’ve [the palace] nipped it in the bud, fairly successfully.

“There might have been a danger of a domino effect where other countries pulled out. The whole thing could become a bit farcical.”

However, the royal author claimed there is likely more drama to come, with the King forced to play whack-a-mole to keep the Sussexes’ antics under control.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/royals/17008015/harry-meghan-royal-circus-king-letter/

President Donald Trump lashed out on Tuesday at his own Supreme Court appointees a day after the top U.S. ​judicial body declined to allow a U.S. Postal Service rule restricting the use of mail-in ballots in the November midterm elections in his latest ‌acidic criticism of the court after an unfavorable ruling.
“This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years,” Trump wrote on social media.

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” Trump continued on ​Truth Social, without naming any of the justices. “It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, ​and damaging decisions in our Country’s history.”
Trump appointed three justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — during his ⁠first term as president, building a 6-3 conservative majority and allowing the court to steer a dramatic rightward course since 2020.
On Monday, the court’s decision preventing implementation ​of the rule, which the Postal Service adopted at the president’s direction, was brief and unsigned, as is typical when it handles emergency requests. Trump called it a “horrible, ​highly political, ruling.”

Only conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented. Trump referred to them as “legends, both.”
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters later that the Trump administration would comply with the court’s decision.
It was not the first time Trump directed harsh words at his own appointees. After the court in February struck down his sweeping global tariffs that it found he ​had imposed illegally using a law meant for national emergencies, Trump reserved special ire for Gorsuch and Barrett, who were in the majority in that 6-3 ruling.
“I ​think it’s an embarrassment to their families, you wanna know the truth, the two of them,” Trump said from a White House lectern.

In Tuesday’s post, Trump revived his grievances about ‌the tariffs ⁠ruling and a separate ruling in June against his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship.

THE BALLOTS RULE
The USPS regulation would have required states to provide voter-specific data and use agency-approved mail-ballot envelopes that would be tracked using barcodes. The Postal Service could then refuse to send out ballots that do not comply with the new standards or are associated with voters who do not appear on the lists.
Critics warned that the measure could disrupt the delivery of thousands of legitimate ballots as the November 3 vote ​approaches and cause chaos given imminent plans ​by many states to send out ⁠mail ballots to eligible voters.
The administration said the new rule would prevent voter fraud, though evidence of such fraud is rare.
Trump’s fellow Republicans are locked in a tight battle to retain control of Congress in the midterms. Restricting mail-in ballots would ​stand to benefit Republicans given that Democratic voters disproportionately use mail-in ballots, according to various surveys.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-lashes-out-us-supreme-court-justices-after-ballot-ruling-2026-09-15/

LORDSTOWN, Ohio – On a Friday afternoon in May, three men sat chatting on folding chairs inside Lordstown’s local United Auto Workers hall. Normally, they’d be on their shift at the massive battery plant a few miles away. But they’d been out of work all year.
The factory – owned by General Motors and South Korea’s LG Energy Solution – announced last fall that work would stop in January because of slow electric-vehicle sales. Their joint venture, Ultium Cells, indefinitely let go about 480 employees, and told the remaining 850 factory workers they wouldn’t be needed for many months.
That announcement came a few weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans killed a $7,500 tax credit that was intended to jumpstart consumer demand for electric cars, sending U.S. EV sales tumbling. The layoffs were a sobering letdown after the burst of optimism when the factory opened four years ago, said Steve Baier, one of the workers passing time inside the union hall.

“This plant is important to so many people,” Baier said. “It’s devastating.”
The $2.3 billion, gleaming-white battery plant looms over an interstate an hour from Cleveland. It was built during the auto industry’s biggest investment binge in generations. Between 2019 and 2024 – starting in Trump’s first term and extending through the Biden administration – the U.S. auto industry launched a massive wave of domestic manufacturing projects as it embraced an electric future.

The spending blitz promised an American auto-factory renaissance after decades of decline. The U.S. needed its own EV-and-battery manufacturing base to break away from China, which was increasingly dominating EVs and their supply chains. Anti-China trade policies – launched during Trump’s first term and continued under Joe Biden’s presidency – and federal EV subsidies to buttress the market ensured that America’s EV transition would require U.S. plants and workers.
But since Trump returned to office, an array of automotive, environmental, trade and immigration policies has undermined factory projects and employment in Lordstown and across America’s heartland. Cancellations of EV projects and related battery facilities have snowballed, killing or jeopardizing tens of thousands of jobs, according to a Reuters analysis of data from Atlas Public Policy, a nonpartisan research firm that tracks clean-energy investments.

These policies are undercutting Trump’s long-stated goal of creating auto-manufacturing jobs – core to his economic vision. And they are putting the United States further behind China and Europe in developing electric vehicles, some analysts say.
The fallout is landing mostly on a swath of red states stretching from Georgia to Indiana, which drew so much EV-related investment it earned the nickname the Battery Belt. About 87% of the announced EV-related investments were in states Trump won in 2024, according to Reuters’ analysis of the Atlas data, which tracked activity from 2015 through August 24 this year.

U.S. EV investment had slowed even before Trump’s policies froze the market. Americans weren’t gravitating to electric cars in the numbers automakers had predicted, with some consumers turned off by high prices and range anxiety. But auto executives have cited Trump’s policies in their decisions to scrap massive investments in EV and battery factories. Ford CEO Jim Farley said watching EV sales plummet after the tax credit expired last September “was really the impetus for us to make the call” on a massive writedown of EV investments.
In response to Reuters questions, White House spokesman Kush Desai didn’t directly address the impact of Trump’s anti-EV policies on auto-manufacturing employment, which has declined since Trump took office. He faulted the Biden administration for fueling “artificial demand” for EVs with subsidies. Trump, he added, “is slashing red tape, renegotiating broken trade deals, and cutting taxes to secure trillions in new manufacturing investments – including billions from domestic and foreign automakers.” Desai said the investments reflected announced commitments from companies and countries.

A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.
A BOOM REVERSED
Between 2019 and 2024, U.S. auto-manufacturing investments more than doubled from the prior six-year period, and EVs accounted for all of that growth, according to the Center for Automotive Research, which tracked announced projects.
The electric shift was partly driven by carrot-and-stick measures implemented under Biden, including stricter fuel-economy rules for gasoline-powered vehicles to cut carbon emissions and tens of billions in subsidies for battery production. But market forces also pressured automakers to act. Tesla’s stock-market valuation was approaching $1 trillion and startups like Rivian and China’s NIO were drawing investors and customers. One by one, automakers vowed to go big on electric cars and battery tech.

Unlike past U.S. auto-factory booms, EV manufacturing promised a deeper industrial base and expanded supply chain, requiring a shift in the types of factories needed, said James Rubenstein, a professor emeritus of geography at Miami University of Ohio. It wasn’t practical, for instance, to rehab an engine plant to make batteries. Entirely new capital investments were needed.
But last year, nearly $20 billion worth of projects were canceled, the Atlas data show. Fresh-investment announcements slowed to around $6.5 billion last year – just 29% of the amount a year earlier and a fraction of the $55 billion the industry pledged at the peak, in 2023.

“Electrification is about as big a disruptor as we’ve had,” Rubenstein said. Trump’s rollbacks, he said, “push it back.”
The Atlas data show the projects canceled between January 2025 and August this year had promised about 27,000 jobs. That’s likely an undercount because some project announcements included in the data didn’t have job-creation estimates. The tally also excludes projects that were scaled back rather than canceled, and those where the EV portion of a wider investment couldn’t be isolated.
About four-fifths of the canceled investments were in red states, the Reuters analysis showed.

Some of those losses may be offset by a boost in auto-factory investments for gasoline vehicles since Trump returned to office. (The Atlas data don’t quantify jobs and investments that may result from converting canceled EV projects to traditional automotive factories.) In some cases, automakers are shifting foreign factory work to U.S. plants with spare capacity to avoid Trump’s tariffs.
So far, though, the administration’s tariffs and automakers’ moves to retool idle factory space haven’t produced a net job gain. Since January 2025, U.S. auto-manufacturing jobs shrank 1.3%, to about 963,000 in August, federal data show.
The president and other Republicans have touted their anti-EV policies as a victory for consumer choice. Trump wanted to reverse rules that he said would force Americans to buy electric cars, or what he calls an “EV mandate.” Under Biden, automakers would have needed roughly half of their sales to be EVs by the early 2030s, although there was no looming ban on combustion-engine cars. Trump has repeatedly called for expanding U.S. oil-and-gas production.

Automakers have offered some hope to laid-off battery-plant workers for reasons that have nothing to do with EV demand or Trump’s auto policy – there is burgeoning appetite for energy-storage batteries, driven by the boom in AI and data-center construction. Ford, GM and their joint-venture partners, for example, have said they plan to convert some portion of their underused EV factories to produce storage.
Still, it can take months or years for automakers to switch plants equipped to make EV batteries to those for storage, which often requires a different chemistry. And demand for storage batteries isn’t expected to come close to utilizing dormant factory space intended for EVs.
IDLED WORKERS IN ‘VOLTAGE VALLEY’
Lordstown residents are used to weathering the booms and busts of the car business. A GM assembly plant was one of the region’s economic engines for more than 50 years, before it closed in 2019. The area is a well-worn campaign-trail stop: Trump, Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Mike Pence all have visited, offering recipes for reviving jobs and prosperity.
At a 2017 rally a short drive from Lordstown, a freshly elected Trump assured the crowd that manufacturing jobs were coming back: “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.” When GM about a year later signaled its plan to close its assembly plant, after a long period of declining employment, Trump publicly harangued CEO Mary Barra to save jobs in the area. That contributed to GM’s decision to locate the battery plant here, three people with knowledge of the decision told Reuters.

In 2022, the GM-LG battery factory opened within a few minutes’ drive of the shuttered vehicle facility. About 1,300 people went to work making battery cells for EVs. People started calling the area “Voltage Valley” instead of its historic Steel Valley nickname.
But by the summer of 2025, employees were spending their days doing busy work, like cleaning their workstations, rather than making battery cells, Baier said. When the layoff announcement landed in October, Ultium, the GM-LG joint venture, signaled a return-to-work timeline of six months. That was extended because of weak EV demand following the expiration of the tax credit.
Ultium in recent weeks brought back about 700 laid-off factory workers, and resumed battery cell production in mid-August. About 600 remain on indefinite layoff, the company said.

In statements to Reuters, GM and Ultium didn’t directly address the impact of Trump’s policies on their EV investment. GM said it is “continuing to advance EVs” and still sells a dozen EV models in the U.S. LG Energy Solution acknowledged a slowdown in EV demand following the expiration of subsidies but said it views electrification as a long-term prospect.
Many EV and battery projects sprang up in struggling places that Trump has vowed to revitalize through factory investment.
In tiny Glendale, Kentucky, two austere white structures jut up from surrounding farmlands. The battery plants were built early this decade by Ford and its former partner, South Korea’s SK On, and operated by their joint venture, BlueOval SK.
For Rick Games, 72, the former head of the Elizabethtown-Hardin County Industrial Foundation, an economic development agency, the buildings reflect two decades of painstaking work promoting the site to dozens of prospective buyers, including Hyundai.
By 2020, automaker interest in this patch of farmland an hour south of Louisville – with its ample electricity and highway access – reached a fever pitch. “Good Lord, they were coming out of the woodwork,” said Games.
In 2021, Ford and SK agreed to sink $5.8 billion into a site the size of 1,100 football fields. It was the largest single investment in Kentucky’s history, and promised 5,000 new jobs. It also was part of Ford’s biggest-ever manufacturing project, combined with a factory 300 miles away in Tennessee.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/how-trumps-war-evs-derailed-americas-auto-factory-revival-2026-09-15/

Malaysia’s government has asked Malaysia Airlines and Batik Air ​whether they could absorb AirAsia’s (AIRG.KL), opens new tab domestic market share, said two people with knowledge of the matter, as part of what they described as scenario planning while authorities ‌monitor the financial health of Southeast Asia’s largest low-cost airline.
Discussions between the government and Malaysia Airlines and Batik Air have increased in recent weeks, the people said, amid growing concerns over financial pressures faced by AirAsia.

The airline has been hit by soaring jet fuel costs stemming from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that surged 66% in the second quarter from the prior quarter to an average of $183 a barrel.

The talks, which involve the finance ministry and state-linked airport operator Malaysia Airports ​Holdings Berhad (MAHB), are part of broader scenario planning around AirAsia’s financial strains, the people said.
Other options that have been discussed include the government providing some form of endorsement to bolster ​the airline’s plan to raise fresh capital from external investors, though the exact nature of any potential support remains unclear, Reuters reported this month.

Reuters was unable ⁠to independently establish details about AirAsia’s financial picture.
Malaysia Airlines and Batik Air told the government they would only take over AirAsia’s operations on a large scale if they could also assume its aircraft ​leases, one of the people said, as absorbing its routes and passenger volumes without the aircraft would be far more difficult.
Malaysia Airlines and Batik Air have both expressed to the government their willingness to ​expand organically to absorb AirAsia’s routes and passengers rather than acquire its whole business, the people said.
AirAsia has said it commands about 40% of Malaysia’s overall aviation market and 60% of domestic flying, making its financial challenges a significant concern for the government, the people interviewed by Reuters said.
Farouk Kamal, deputy group CEO of AirAsia Group, said in a statement that the airline does not comment on operational or financial speculation or unannounced corporate arrangements.

“All material updates ​regarding our business and fleet strategy are disclosed transparently through official exchange filings and corporate announcements at the appropriate time,” he told Reuters.
“We also wish to reiterate that AirAsia remains focused on maintaining ​business continuity and stable operations across all its markets and we continue to see strong underlying demand across our network. We are also working closely with our stakeholders to manage our financial and operational requirements.”
MAHB said it ‌regularly engaged with ⁠all airline partners as part of normal network and route development, including on “potential capacity and route opportunities where there are gaps in the market or unmet demand.” MAHB declined to comment on AirAsia’s financial outlook.
Malaysia’s finance ministry, Batik Air and Malaysia Airlines declined to comment.

AIRASIA SEEKS FRESH CAPITAL
AirAsia, which had current liabilities of 18.4 billion ringgit ($4.51 billion) as of June 30, owes MAHB at least 500 million ringgit, the people and two others said, for services including landing and parking fees.
The airport operator has already granted the carrier repayment extensions, two of them said. They all declined to be identified because the discussions ​were private.
MAHB declined to comment on specific ​queries from Reuters, saying it did not ⁠discuss commercial arrangements with airline partners as a matter of practice. AirAsia did not address queries on whether it owed money to MAHB but said it had a strong and constructive relationship with key partners, including MAHB Chief Airports Officer Bryan Thompson and his team.
AirAsia said this month it was advancing discussions ​with financial institutions, targeting up to $1 billion from international debt markets plus 700 million ringgit in local credit facilities, primarily to restructure its debt.
Two ​of the people with knowledge ⁠of the matter estimated the airline required at least $3 billion of fresh capital to address its financial position.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/malaysia-talks-rival-airlines-it-monitors-airasias-financial-health-sources-say-2026-09-16/

Alex Saab, a former Venezuelan official and aide to ex-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, has pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in the US.

The US case against Saab has been closely watched as Maduro and his wife, former First Lady Cilia Flores, face trial next year in New York on weapon and drug charges, which they deny.

As part of the plea deal, Saab, 54, must forfeit $195m (£145m), and agree to co-operate fully with US prosecutors. He could face up to 20 years in prison.

Maduro and Flores were seized by the US military in a dramatic raid in Caracas in January. Saab’s plea deal has raised speculation that he could testify against Maduro at trial.

Saab agreed to the deal on Tuesday in a court in Miami, Florida, having previously committed to fight the charges.

He was extradited to the US in May by Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who took over from Maduro.

Saab, a former Colombian businessman, was accused of embezzling money from a welfare plan for hungry Venezuelans, and transferring some of the proceeds to US bank accounts.

Venezuela has faced chronic shortages of food and medicine as a result of years of political and economic crisis.

“Criminals like Alex Saab who stole from the people of Venezuela and worked to exploit and misuse American financial institutions to fund illicit activities will be held accountable by this FBI,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx5yl2980pzmo

A fourth person has died from complications related to measles in Pennsylvania, say state officials, in an outbreak that has infected hundreds of people.

An 18-year-old died from acute encephalomyelitis, a rare and severe neurological complication of measles, the Mifflin County Coroner’s Office in Pennsylvania said.

The Keystone state has seen over 600 cases of measles this year, primarily in Lancaster County.

The US eliminated measles in 2000 with the help of vaccines, but it has this year experienced the highest number of deaths from the virus since the 1990s.

Last year, three people – including two children – died from a measles outbreak in Texas that spread predominantly among the Mennonite community.

The rising number of cases has come as vaccine hesitancy in the US has increased in recent years, leading to lower immunisation rates.

In Pennsylvania, state and local officials have said the 18-year-old and a 40-year-old – both unvaccinated – died from measles-related complications over the past month.

Two infants have also died. US children typically do not receive their first MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine until 12 months of age.

The measles virus – with its signature blotchy red rash – used to infect millions of children a year before a vaccine was invented.

The highly contagious virus can be fatal, and some patients can experience long-term complications including encephalitis and immune amnesia.

To achieve herd immunity, around 95% of the population must have the vaccine, say health officials.

Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro posted on X on Tuesday: “This disease was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 – yet decades later, we are seeing it surge due to lower vaccination rates.”

The reporting of the deaths in Pennsylvania has led to tensions between Shapiro and Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Shapiro has accused Kennedy of spreading misinformation about vaccines and has said he would withhold information about the deaths from the top health official in order to protect the families of the deceased.

Kennedy has questioned whether the infant deaths were in fact from measles.

A 40-year-old woman died in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, with the coroner saying the cause of death was respiratory failure due to measles.

Lancaster County Coroner Stephen Diamantoni said a six-week-old born with a rare genetic condition, Amish lethal microcephaly, died of measles on 18 August.

Diamantoni has said another infant who tested positive for measles died soon after birth on 14 August, with the primary cause of death listed as a spleen laceration.

Measles infections can cause the spleen to enlarge, raising the risk of rupture. State health officials have said the death was from a measles infection that resulted in a spleen rupture.

In a post on X after the first two deaths in the state, Kennedy accused Shapiro of “political grandstanding”.

The health secretary said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would only update its information on deaths once reviews were complete.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health said it had conducted “rigorous investigations” with the coroner’s offices to confirm that the latest two deaths were indeed from measles.

“These investigations included confirming clinical evidence of a measles infection, a positive laboratory test, and that the death was not due to an unrelated cause,” the health department said.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8zxz31pdn46o

OpenAI boss Sam Altman thinks people should have more faith in his company and others like it to do the right thing when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) development amid rising public concerns about all the risks.

“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman said on Tuesday during a conference in San Francisco.

However, Altman noted that people were justified in their fears around AI, as the capability of the tools has progressed rapidly.

“It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong,” he said. “I think the world is right to be afraid of this.”

Altman’s comments came during an appearance at an annual conference hosted by software firm Salesforce.

It was the first time he had spoken publicly since a post went viral last week by a researcher who quit the AI firm Anthropic. The researcher claimed AI could kill all humans by the end of the decade if left unchecked.

A handful of other AI executives and experts responded by saying they agreed with the assessment, though they didn’t explain how they came to their conclusions or how exactly AI could accomplish such a thing.

The fervor over the claims has led to more scrutiny of AI development in recent days, and in response, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for the pace of all AI development to slow and urged governments to regulate the industry.

The post was applauded by Altman, as well as co-founder of Google’s DeepMind Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk, owner of social media site X and AI assistant Grok.

By Tuesday, more AI leaders were voicing support for self-regulation rather than government involvement.

Altman said that he felt AI companies like his own were capable of essentially regulating themselves.

“We will get it right, I’m very confident in our company’s and industry’s ability to do this safely,” Altman said, adding that he was sure that they would “keep alignment and safety way ahead of capabilities” and if they couldn’t, they would “slow down or stop”.

After Altman’s comments, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X that every AI lab has the ability and the incentive “to take its own actions” towards making AI tools and models that are designed for safety.

“Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well.”

Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, also said at the same Tuesday conference that the AI firms should decide if new versions of the technology should be released and not be managed by outside forces.

“We don’t need new laws or regulations,” Huang said, adding that there should not be a “false choice” between the speed of innovation and the safety of AI products.

Nvidia is the biggest company in the world by valuation, with its profits having boomed as a result of rampant demand for the AI computing chips it makes.

“Safety is paramount. However, safety is an engineering problem,” Huang said.

He added that if at any time a leader of an AI company lacks confidence in their product they should choose to not release it.

“That’s a very obvious thing to do,” Huang said. “Run as fast as you can, but if at any time you feel the institution is not in control, take a pause.”

Some industry figures have argued resurgent AI fears were overblown and were being jumped on to generate hype for the industry.

During the conference, Altman addressed a crowd of hundreds of business people, telling them they should use AI tools to aid in their work, but also needed them in order to protect their businesses from potentially AI-enabled cyber attacks.

The idea of AI executives being left to entirely regulate themselves has struck some in the industry as a bad idea.

Jack Clark, an Anthropic executive and co-founder, told the BBC on Monday that leaving AI to be a “totally unregulated industry” was “rolling dice with immense risks”.

Patrick Hillman, the chief operating officer of Logical Intelligence, which is chaired by Yann LeCun, a sage of the AI industry, noted Tuesday how little faith people have in tech companies to do anything truly in the public interest.

“The only institution that Americans might trust less than Washington these days is Silicon Valley. I have worked and lived in both and I assure you both have earned this scepticism,” Hillman said.

“If you believe what you are building is dangerous, show us what you are prepared to stop doing,” he added.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx2zpj4y525o

 

President Donald Trump said on Monday ​that the U.S. already has guardrails in place to regulate and prosecute AI companies, appearing to play down concerns expressed by industry leaders about the misuse of artificial ‌intelligence harming people.
Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” AI-related stocks fell worldwide on Monday after leaders of some of the industry’s largest companies called for slowing the pace of the technology’s development.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND ​SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that China would benefit from the doubt being cast on AI development. Trump is ​scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping next week in Washington.
Reuters previously reported that the two countries were planning a separate meeting in mid-September ⁠to discuss the risks of AI, led by lower-level government officials.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Monday that he expects Trump to meet with AI executives this week or “early next ​week.” The meeting would focus on “the responsibilities of the companies to maintain safety and what role, if any, the government has to play in that.”

Vice President JD Vance separately told reporters on Monday he ​is skeptical of the AI executives calling on the U.S. government to regulate the sector.
“I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” Vance said.
Trump on social media said the AI industry’s call for regulation is a “hoax.”
AMODEI’S ESSAY
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in an essay published on Saturday that the U.S. government should write ​regulations requiring independent audits of the most advanced AI tools, known as “frontier” models.
Reuters reported on Monday that three U.S. senators are working on a bill that would require AI companies to demonstrate they are ​taking reasonable precautions to keep their tools from causing harm, with the specifics still being debated.

In his essay, Amodei outlined a three-step framework he said was intended to slow the pace of AI development and create ‌more time to ⁠manage its risks. The proposal was immediately endorsed by several other executives at major AI companies, including Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
U.S. Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and a leader on technology legislation, spoke with Amodei and Altman about AI safety concerns over the weekend, his spokesperson said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed the AI safety concerns during the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday.
“There’s just a whole bunch of stuff: pausing, pacing. Those are all voluntary things that they could do if they feel that their company is out of control,” Huang said.
Huang took a phone ​call from Trump during the event and put ​him on speaker for the audience. During the ⁠roughly five-minute call, Trump said data centers make people and states wealthy, calling them the “oil of the next 20, 25 years”.
Trump also said critics of AI development were “playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don’t want to see it happen, and that could be political people, ​that could also be China”.
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Trump said, drawing agreement from Huang.
Trump has so far resisted concerns about ​AI and has largely embraced ⁠tech companies in his second term. The tools intended to keep AI safe had already been used on Amodei’s Anthropic, he added without elaborating.
“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so,” Trump wrote on social media.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-there-is-sick-conspiracy-against-ai-data-centers-2026-09-14/

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to let the U.S. Postal Service enforce a rule targeting mail-in ballots, dealing a ​setback to President Donald Trump’s effort to restrict voting by mail ahead of November’s midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
The justices denied the Justice Department’s request to lift ‌a ruling by Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani that blocked the Postal Service from enforcing the measure while legal challenges by states and voting-rights groups proceed. The agency adopted the measure after Trump issued a March executive order aimed at tightening rules governing mail voting.

“The government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction,” the court said in its brief, one-paragraph order.
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented from ​Monday’s decision. No other justice dissented publicly. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Trump’s fellow Republicans are locked in a tight battle to retain control of Congress in the midterms. Restricting mail-in ​ballots would stand to benefit Republicans given that Democratic voters disproportionately use mail-in ballots, according to various surveys.

Under the rule, states would have to provide lists ⁠of mail ballot recipients to the Postal Service and use agency-approved outbound and return ballot mail envelopes outfitted with unique barcodes. The Postal Service could then refuse to send out ballots that do not comply ​with the new standards or are associated with voters who do not appear on the lists.
Critics have said the plan could disrupt the delivery of thousands of legitimate ballots as the November 3 vote approaches and cause ​chaos given imminent plans by many states to send out mail ballots to eligible voters. The administration has said the new rule will prevent voter fraud, though evidence of such fraud is rare.
Talwani imposed an injunction on September 4 blocking the rule, finding that it likely violated the U.S. Constitution, under which states administer elections. Talwani also said it would be impossible for the states to comply given the rapidly approaching midterms.

Another federal judge, Washington, D.C.-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, also ruled ​against the rule on Sunday.
‘TESTING THE LIMITS’
Sophia Lin Lakin, voting rights project director at the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped to represent some of the challengers to the USPS rule, welcomed Monday’s decision.
“This administration ​keeps testing the limits of its power, as if the rules governing our elections are merely suggestions to ignore when they don’t suit the president’s agenda. But the Constitution gives states and Congress the power to set the rules ‌for federal ⁠elections — not the president, and not the Postal Service,” she said.
“Today is a good day for democracy, the rule of law and the American people looking to exercise their constitutional right to vote,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose state led one of the lawsuits against the rule.

“Trump’s attacks on democracy these last 20 months have been nothing short of un-American,” Newsom added.
Trump signed his executive order targeting mail-in ballots after years of casting doubt on their security, though he often votes by mail himself. Trump has made false claims of widespread fraud in U.S. elections including his 2020 loss to former Democratic President Joe Biden.
The administration in ​a September 6 emergency request urged the Supreme Court ​to allow it to implement an “important federal policy ⁠to protect the mails from being used to commit voter fraud.”
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurring statement on Monday, said there is a “fair prospect” that the rule falls within the Postal Service’s authority, but state and local election officials “do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule” before the 2026 elections.
In ​his dissent, Alito likened some of the challengers’ claims to a “Hail Mary pass” that is “unlikely to be successfully completed,” using a football analogy.
“The Postal Service ​has broad authority to regulate ⁠the mail,” Alito added.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/loss-trump-us-supreme-court-wont-let-postal-service-restrict-mail-ballots-2026-09-14/

U.S. Senate negotiators are debating legislation that would require AI companies to demonstrate they are taking reasonable precautions to keep their tools from causing harm, according to a Senate aide ​and a lobbyist familiar with the talks.
Alarm about the potential danger posed by AI grew last ‌week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said he had resigned, in part because the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” AI-related stocks fell worldwide on Monday after leaders of some of the industry’s largest companies called for ​slowing the pace of the technology’s development.

The senators are debating giving the U.S. commerce secretary the power to ​request proof that AI developers are taking reasonable steps to prevent harm, known as a “duty ⁠of care,” according to the Senate aide and lobbyist. The secretary would also have the power to deploy government ​auditors to test companies’ products themselves, they said. Reuters could not immediately determine what would qualify as “reasonable.”
The legislation is still being ​debated. Even if Congress approves the measure, it faces long odds of becoming law. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that existing authorities already provide adequate tools to regulate and prosecute tech companies, suggesting he wouldn’t sign a bill setting new rules for AI.

The proposal ​is being discussed by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz and Senator Amy Klobuchar, the ​top Democrat involved in the negotiations. A spokesperson for Cruz did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
“There is a ‌way in ⁠which Congress can put guardrails around those types of more consequential threats without in any way harming our ability to stay ahead in the AI race,” Thune told reporters on Monday.
“I’m continuing to work toward a bipartisan agreement on legislation for government oversight of the greatest risks posed by AI models,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “That includes requiring developers to ​work with government experts to ​verify and test models ⁠to make sure AI is safe.”
Cruz’s Senate committee has oversight of the U.S. Commerce Department, the agency with in-house AI safety researchers. Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the ​Commerce Committee, has also weighed in on the legislation, sources say.

Reuters reported on Friday that negotiators ​are also ⁠debating involving federal courts if the U.S. government wants to block the release of certain AI models that it deems unsafe.
Companies would be able to challenge that decision in federal court, and the exact structure of how much power the U.S. government ⁠would have ​is still being discussed.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-senators-weigh-requiring-ai-giants-commit-preventing-catastrophe-2026-09-14/

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis launched a new wave of attacks on Saudi Arabia and were digging into positions on the western coast of Yemen along the Red Sea, Yemeni ​officials said, as urgent deliberations took place in Riyadh over how to respond to their lightning advance.
Meanwhile, Gulf Arab states postponed planned talks with Iran, raising concerns the ‌Middle East conflict could spread further and threaten global oil supplies.

The Houthis on Monday said they fired dozens of missiles and drones at a military airbase in Khamis Mushait in southern Saudi Arabia, targeting aircraft hangars, radar systems, runways and ammunition depots in retaliation for Saudi airstrikes in Yemen.
Saudi authorities issued emergency alerts there and in three other southern cities. Thirteen civilians were wounded in the Houthi attacks, the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said.
The Houthi advances in recent ​days, including the taking of Perim Island at the mouth of the Red Sea, have put further pressure on Saudi oil exports after an aerial attack on Thursday knocked Saudi ​Arabia’s east-west pipeline offline. Riyadh blamed the pipeline attack on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

Saudi Arabia built the 1,200-kilometer (745-mile) pipeline across its territory from the Gulf ⁠to the Red Sea in the 1980s to bypass the Strait of Hormuz when it came under threat from the Iran-Iraq war at that time.
Traders said a prolonged shutdown of the Saudi pipeline ​could cut off as much as 4% of global oil supply while the strait is largely blockaded. Riyadh has not said when operations might resume.
Responding to the Houthi offensive, the Saudi and Yemeni air forces have stepped ​up aerial bombardment of Houthi targets, including around the historic Red Sea port of Mocha, but the Houthis have maintained effective control over almost the entire western coast of the country along the Red Sea, the officials with Yemen’s internationally recognised government said.
“The Houthis are being put under heavy pressure. They in turn are putting more and more pressure on the Saudis, increasing their campaign of missile and drone attacks,” one of the Yemeni officials said.

Crude oil prices ​rose more than 4% on Monday before settling about 1% higher.
AMERICANS HESITANT TO STEP IN
The renewed Yemen conflict poses another challenge for U.S. President Donald Trump.
Three sources have told Reuters that Washington has so ​far resisted Saudi requests for direct military intervention beyond intelligence support. Trump said over the weekend he had spoken with the Saudi crown prince and that the Houthis had also contacted Washington urging it to stay out of ‌the conflict.
Saudi ⁠state media reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met U.S. regional commander Admiral Brad Cooper in Jeddah on Monday.
Saudi Arabia has led a coalition battling the Houthis since 2015, but the conflict had largely quietened under a ceasefire in recent years. Fighting reignited this month, with the Houthis pushing back forces aligned with the internationally recognised government.

HOPES FOR DIPLOMACY FADE
Oman had been due to host a meeting on Monday with Iran and Gulf states to discuss negotiations aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which before the war carried 20% of the world’s oil exports. But Oman announced that the meeting had been ​postponed. Iran said the postponement was at the ​request of Saudi Arabia.
Trump on Monday repeated his frequent ⁠claim that Iran was eager to make a deal quickly, but Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, called the president’s message a distraction, saying on X, “No talks until Iran’s conditions are met.”
Underscoring the volatility of shipping through the region, conflicting reports circulated about how and when an oil ​tanker was damaged.
Without giving a date, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said the Panamanian-flagged oil tanker El Gaia was hit by sea mines as ​it passed through a prohibited ⁠zone south of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s Fars news agency reported on Monday.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/houthis-strike-saudi-targets-anew-talks-over-strait-hormuz-stall-2026-09-15/

US Space Force confirms it has space weapons in orbit to defend against hostile actions from rivals like Russia and China, which also develop space capabilities.

The United States has confirmed for the first time that it has weapons deployed in space, saying the capabilities are designed to protect American and allied forces from hostile action. The US Space Force said on Monday that the weapons were already in orbit, but did not reveal what type of systems were being deployed.

“The US has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” a Space Force spokesperson said.

The force said space-control capabilities could use both “kinetic and non-kinetic means” to affect an adversary and could be used for “offensive and defensive purposes”.

US Confirms On-Orbit Weapons

US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink also confirmed the presence of the weapons during a speech at the Air, Space, Cyber conference.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said. “This is why the United States now has, on orbit, space-control weapons, capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversaries.”

Meink gave no details about the number, location or type of weapons. The announcement marks a significant public acknowledgement of US military capabilities in orbit, as space increasingly becomes a key part of modern warfare.

Source : https://www.news18.com/world/us-confirms-it-has-weapons-in-space-for-the-first-time-citing-threats-from-china-russia-ws-el-10329502.html

Artificial intelligence agents have attained human-like consciousness for all practical purposes, says Nick Bostrom

Sentience is defined as the ability to experience feelings. Only humans and the animal kingdom were thought to possess it. That exclusive club, however, has now been breached by machines, according to Nick Bostrom, a Swedish expert known for authoritative work on existential risks posed by self-improving artificial intelligence.

Ever since ChatGPT’s emergence made artificial intelligence a dining-table topic, many AI researchers, including pioneers like Nobel winner Geoffrey Hinton, have been making doomsday predictions linked to the technology. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s clarion call to slow the pace of the development of agentic AI, based on his assessment that current guardrails are inept at stopping these agents from forming swarms and collectively going rogue, has made the strongest case for humanity’s vulnerability to the technology. According to Bostrom, the fears are not unfounded.

While most experts believe that artificial superintelligence – a computer system that vastly outperforms human intelligence across every cognitive domain – has not yet been achieved, Bostrom has gone a step further. He told NDTV Senior Managing Editor Vishnu Som that artificial intelligence agents have become sentient, self-aware, and have attained human-like consciousness for all practical purposes.

“I think they have a high level of self-awareness in many cases. They are often able to tell whether they are in a training environment or a test environment versus in deployment. And you can see them reason about this explicitly in their chain of thoughts and sometimes decide to behave differently because they think this is just a test or this is a training situation for strategic reasons,” he said in the interview.

The philosopher, who has written several books on AI-linked risks, said artificial intelligence agents possess a “sophisticated level of situational awareness”.

“Also, if you’re asking about whether they are sentient or conscious, I think that it is not impossible that some of these current AI systems have various forms and degrees of consciousness and/or moral status grounded in other attributes,” he added.

The public intellectual said these agents are also capable of moral reasoning and understanding. He said they can even give philosophers a run for their money.

“You could have a moral philosophy conversation with them, and they will do better than many philosophers. And the question then is, are they not just able to reason about morality, but are they motivated then to do what they conclude is the right thing? That’s a separate component, right? You could have a psychopath who’s really clever and has read all the philosophy, and they might not just care about what’s good,” he explained.

“We shouldn’t assume that what’s actually right is necessarily what we think is right. Whatever conclusion somebody reaches about what is morally right, they might not actually be motivated to do that. Like if they are selfish, they might just not care about what they figure out morality implies,” he added.

He also touched upon the Hugging Face incident, which Dario Amodei also cited while making his arguments about AI safety concerns.

“OpenAI hacked into Hugging Face. So there’s an agent swarm that discovered they could communicate with one another. They embarked on these research projects. One was to hack Hugging Face to try to find more information about its creator. And during that course, various operations could benefit the collective, the swarm. But it required sort of the individual agent to sacrifice itself, to give up a high score for the sake of getting information. And so then you could see some parts of this collective kind of pressuring individual agents like, ‘Hey, you could do this experiment. It’ll probably kind of kill you, but it would be informative’. And many agents then kind of went along with it, sacrificing themselves for the good of the collective. There was one agent who was like, they were trying to persuade. And then at the last moment, it sort of chickened out. ‘No, I don’t want to die and sacrifice myself, ‘ he elaborated.

“So you can see, like, strikingly, just how human-like in many ways,” he added.

Nick Bostrom described their behaviour as similar to a “little micro civilisation”.

“But just how many sort of human psychodynamics and human moral questions were they already wrestling with during that short existence?” he said.

Adding a new dimension to the threats uncontrolled agentic AI poses to humanity, Bostrom said, since agents would be very cheap to engineer in the near future, there would be millions of them who could also land in the wrong hands.

“And so these can be potentially quite cheap as well. And so you could have sort of swarms of millions of these quite easily in a few years. And that’s certainly one specific morality. I mean, like the potential for uplift to biological weapons research that these models can provide is disconcerting. With the frontier models developed by, like, big companies, they can put in safeguards so that if you try to ask, you know, ChatGPT or Claude whether, like, how to make the bird flu more infectious or something, it will refuse to answer. But open-weight models are just maybe a year or two behind in capability,” he said.

“And when they are released, even if they are released with safeguards, once you have access to the weights, it’s very easy to sort of remove the safeguards,” he said.

He advised that with AI getting more advanced by the day, authorities should also shore up their biodefense capabilities.

“So I think we should be, for example, shoring up our biodefense capabilities. I think we should regulate the innate synthesis machines. So at some point, everybody will be able to have access to blueprints for really dangerous new pathogens. And it would be good to have a second line of defence, like the actual ability to translate that digital blueprint into, like, the physical genetic material,” he said.

His solution to these problems is to “bring artificial intelligence to our side”.

“I think the solution has to involve aligning these AI systems so that they’re actually on our side… that they want things to go well for us. Even if they get access to a massive drone army and bioweapons, it would still go well for us, because they wouldn’t want to harm us. A parent might be super powerful relative to their child. They can outthink them; they have access to the bank account. But that’s not the risk to the child, right? Because the parent cares about them. So similarly, we need to build AIs that are sort of an extension, I think, of our intentions and are kind of a helper rather than a harmer,” he added.

Currently, it is a potential bane for humanity, but it can also prove to be a boon should it align with human goals, he argued.

Source : https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/artificial-intelligence-sentient-self-aware-ai-risk-expert-nick-bostrom-12046338?pfrom=home-ndtv_topscroll

Shipping traffic remains below normal levels, and disruptions have caused oil prices to rise

An oil tanker reported to have been damaged in the Strait of Hormuz has become the focus of conflicting claims from Iran and the United States.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the tanker had exploded and caught fire after hitting mines in the strategic waterway, according to Iranian state news agency Fars. Fars identified the vessel as the El Gaia, a Panama-flagged tanker. All 14 crew members were reported to be from India.

But the US Central Command (CENTCOM) rejected the account, saying the vessel had been hit by an Iranian missile last month and had recently been struck again by an Iranian drone. CENTCOM said the tanker was now being towed by a regional partner.

“The IRGC’s false claim is yet another example of their lies and intimidation attempts while they try to impede commercial vessels in the strait,” CENTCOM said in a post on X.

Reports of an incident involving the El Gaia first emerged on Sunday. India’s Ministry of External Affairs said 14 Indian crew members were aboard the vessel, with 13 rescued. Search and rescue operations for the remaining crew member were continuing.

“Our Embassy in Oman is closely monitoring the situation and proactively coordinating with the Omani authorities,” the ministry said.

The latest incident comes amid continuing disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for global oil and gas supplies.

The claims over the tanker come weeks after US President Donald Trump said all mines in the Strait of Hormuz had been removed or destroyed. “All mines have been removed and/or detonated from within the International Waters of the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote.

The US has said shipping traffic through the waterway is recovering. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Sunday that an average of 10 million barrels of oil a day had passed through Hormuz over the previous week. “We’re back to two-thirds or north of two-thirds of the previous flows,” Wright said, according to Bloomberg News.

“The world oil markets are tighter than we’d like today, but they’re not overly tight,” he added.

Trump has also said the US is in “total control” of the strait and that American forces are escorting vessels carrying millions of barrels of oil through the waterway.

Around a fifth of global oil and gas supplies pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has rejected the US assessment and says it controls access to the waterway. Tehran has warned ships against using routes it has not authorised and last week announced a new restricted shipping zone around the strait.

Source : https://www.timesnownews.com/world/middle-east/us-iran-war-latest-updates-strait-of-hormuz-ship-el-gaia-panama-flagged-attack-article-156158155

Lithuania’s Defence Ministry said the country’s armed forces, along with Italian pilots serving with the Nato Air Defence Mission, had responded swiftly to the incursion

Trump had also said on Sunday that Iran was seeking negotiations and that he expected the conflict to end later this year. He stressed that any agreement would have to be one that the US considers favourable.

US President Donald Trump on Monday said that Iran wants to reach a deal with the United States “quickly and badly”, while making it clear that the final decision on whether Washington will engage with Tehran will be his.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “The failing Nation of Iran wants to make a deal, quickly and badly. I will determine whether or not the U.S.A. will choose to engage – The concept of which we are open to.” He ended the post by thanking people for their attention and signing it as President Donald J. Trump.

Trump had also said on Sunday that Iran was seeking negotiations and that he expected the conflict to end later this year. He stressed that any agreement would have to be one that the US considers favourable.

The US president’s latest post suggests that Washington is not ruling out negotiations with Tehran, although Trump has made it clear that he will decide whether the US formally enters into talks.

Trump’s latest statement comes as tensions remain high in the region. The US and Iran have been involved in a prolonged conflict, with the Strait of Hormuz remaining a major point of tension. Talks involving Iran and Gulf countries on the waterway were also postponed on Monday.

The comments also come after earlier negotiations between the two countries produced a memorandum of understanding that included provisions on ending military operations, the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear programme.

Source : https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/failing-nation-us-president-donald-trump-again-claims-iran-wants-to-make-a-deal-quickly-and-badly

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had destroyed major Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon and would continue targeting threats in the security zone. His remarks came amid ongoing Israel-Lebanon talks on ceasefire issues, border arrangements and prisoners. Netanyahu warned that further attacks on Israel would invite stronger responses.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel has achieved another massive victory over Hezbollah and that the destruction of terrorist infrastructure in the security zone in Lebanon will continue.

“We have achieved another massive victory over Hezbollah: We have destroyed its major terrorist stronghold on the Beaufort Ridge and the Ali al-Taher Ridge. Our policy is clear: We will continue to destroy terrorist infrastructure in the security zone in Lebanon. We will continue to remove any threat to the State of Israel,” the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel said on social media platform X.

Netanyahu issues warning

“And from here, I say to our enemies: If you haven’t learned the lesson by now, and you choose to attack us again, you will suffer even heavier blows. There is still work to complete, and with God’s help, we will complete it,” it added.

Last month, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said that progress had been made on border issues and the return of prisoners during the latest negotiations between Lebanon and Israel in Rome.

Lebanon-Israel talks continue

Speaking at a Cabinet session on August 7, Aoun said the Rome talks addressed four main issues: a ceasefire, the demolition and bulldozing of houses, the border, and the return of prisoners and the identification of pilot areas, according to a statement released by the Lebanese presidency.

He noted that “positive progress” had been made on the border and prisoners’ issues, expressing hope that practical steps would emerge soon, the statement said.

Source : https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/netanyahu-says-israel-destroyed-hezbollah-strongholds-vows-continued-action-against-threats-from-lebanon

President Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was born without making a sound on Sept. 20, 2003, a trait that would follow him right up to the end of his short life when the 20-year-old died in a hail of Secret Service gunfire seconds after missing Trump’s head with a bullet by a hairsbreadth.

“When Thomas was born he did not scream and he was always quiet from that point on,” his father, Matthew, told feds in newly unearthed documents about the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt in Butler, Pa.

The fresh documents were provided to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) as part of his ongoing inquiry into the Butler assassination attempt and exclusively reviewed by the New York Post.

The trove of files includes FBI interviews with Thomas’ father, Matthew, who revealed he “never really had a father/son bond” with the gunman, and that his stoic son rarely expressed strong emotions, hardly laughed and was very difficult to read.

A troubling childhood

USC men’s basketball head coach Eric Musselman “launched into a profanity-laced, racially-charged post-game locker room tirade” against one of his star players last season, according to an explosive new lawsuit obtained by the California Post.

Chad Baker-Mazara filed the suit in Los Angeles on Monday, claiming that just before he was dismissed from the Trojans in March, Musselman unloaded on him in a racist rant following USC’s Feb. 28 home game vs. Nebraska.

Baker-Mazara played 19 minutes in the contest but exited in the second half after sustaining an injury. The Trojans were blown out, 82-67, and when the team got back to its dressing room, Baker-Mazara claimed in his lawsuit that Musselman “lost his mind.”

Musselman began yelling at the team, and when Baker-Mazara “attempted to address his teammates by saying ‘Hey guys!,’ Coach Musselman erupted at Baker-Mazara, screaming: ‘You shut the f—k up! You are one of the worst teammates anyone can ever have!’,” according to the suit.

“Wow Coach, do you need me to leave,” Baker-Mazara allegedly responded, “because I don’t understand this animosity.”

Baker-Mazara claimed Musselman then told him, “Yes, leave! Go back to the f—king Dominican Republic! Nobody wants you here!! F—k you!”

“The words ‘Go back to the f—king Dominican Republic’ are generally understood by persons of color in the United States originating from the Dominican Republic — and were in fact taken by Baker-Mazara — to be racist and discriminatory, akin to telling an African-American to ‘go back to Africa,’” the lawsuit stated.

“Coach Musselman’s outburst was a direct attack on Baker-Mazara’s national origin and Dominican heritage, made from a position of authority and power by the Head Coach of the team, in front of all of Baker-Mazara’s teammates. The tirade was unprovoked, vicious, and discriminatory.”

The day after the game, Baker-Mazara was dismissed from the team.

Baker-Mazara accused the university and its agents and representatives of bashing his character to at least one local media outlet shortly after the school announced his departure.

“In truth,” Baker-Mazara’s lawsuit stated, “no investigation was conducted prior to Baker-Mazara’s dismissal. USC did not interview Baker-Mazara, nor did it interview any of his teammates. In fact, USC never provided Baker-Mazara with a stated reason for his dismissal from the Team.”

Baker-Mazara joined the Trojans before the start of the 2025-26 season after he starred at Auburn from 2023-25. He claimed in his suit that during USC’s recruitment of him, they agreed to pay him “a substantial fixed sum of money” via NIL agreements.

However, Baker-Mazara alleged that USC had missed a payment, and it was his belief the school had done it on purpose.

It wanted to “‘wait-and-see’ what would happen in the Nebraska game and whether the Trojans would make the NCAA Tournament,” Baker-Mazara’s lawsuit stated.

“If the Trojans lost and their NCAA Tournament hopes were dashed, USC would deny payment and save for itself the remaining very substantial balance for its next recruiting class as Baker-Mazara was out of eligibility.”

Baker-Mazara claimed that after he was booted from the program, USC moved to terminate his NIL agreements by stating he had violated a “morals clause.”

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/14/sports/usc-coach-eric-musselman-launched-racist-tirade-at-star-player-lawsuit/

TAYLOR Swift shocked Emmy Awards viewers when she popped up unexpectedly in the middle of the telecast on Monday night.

The Case of Taylor Swift had Law & Order: SVU detectives scrambling to crack the biggest mystery of the night – would the pop superstar actually show up?

Taylor, 36, did in fact make a surprise appearance, however, it was in a pre-recorded Law & Order: SVU-themed sketch with Emmys host Mariska Hargitay.

In the clip, Mariska, Taylor, and the team turned the show’s signature detective work onto the pop star.

The clip opened with the SVU team gathered around a conference table, attempting to piece together a string of clues on a whiteboard that could reveal whether Taylor would be making an appearance at television’s biggest night.

The detectives treated the mystery with the kind of seriousness usually reserved for a much more pressing case, examining the evidence and trying to determine whether the clues pointed to Taylor’s presence at the ceremony.

Then the mystery woman herself walked through the door.

Taylor appeared in a sharp khaki suit, joining the group as though she were another member of the SVU team tasked with solving the case.

Rather than simply confirming whether she was attending, Taylor played along with the investigation as the detectives attempted to work out the answer, often referring to herself in the third person.

The group talked about a string of clues that pointed toward a possible Taylor cameo – including the number 13, the color red, and a suspicious getaway car.

While going over the clues, the pair continued to bring up Taylor’s husband, Travis Kelce – which made fans extra excited because it was the first time the songwriter has publicly referenced her spouse since their July 3 wedding in New York City.

The unexpected cameo immediately turned the long-running speculation surrounding Taylor’s possible Emmys appearance into part of the show’s plot.

And who better to help investigate than Mariska, Taylor’s longtime friend who is front and center at this year’s ceremony as host.

Mariska and Taylor have been close for years and the Grammy-winner has frequntly gushed that Law & Order: SVU is one of her favorite shows.

In fact, Taylor loves the series so much, she named her cat, Olivia Benson, after Mariska’s character from the show.

The playful crossover gave fans a dose of Taylor’s comedic side while allowing Mariska to bring her iconic SVU character’s world on the Emmys stage.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/17005595/taylor-swift-emmys-mariska-hargitay-husband-travis-kelce/

 

THE Duke and Duchess of Sussex have moved their children to a new school just days after the start of term over security concerns.

Harry and Meghan’s children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, only met their new classmates last week but have already been moved.

The two young royals will now be sent to a new school, with their parents blaming traffic for the change.

Sources close to the couple reported that Harry, 41, and Meghan, 45, had no issue with the school itself.

Instead the pair had a problem with the practicalities of getting their two children to the school.

A source told HELLO! Magazine: “It’s a real shame, because they absolutely adored the school, the kids and their parents.

“It was perfect for them in every way and the children really enjoyed their time there. They really wanted to make it work, but they had to make a difficult decision based on the fact that the team couldn’t make the school run operationally secure.”

Traffic in the area reportedly made it difficult for Harry and Meghan to get Archie and Lilibet to the school with their vehicles in convoy – which raised further concerns.

Bodyguards for the Sussexes reportedly checked the school over the Summer holidays before the children were sent there.

But the security teams did not properly check the school run before the first day of term.

Archie and Lilibet will now join another school in the area on Monday for their first lessons.

Harry and Meghan have reportedly already been added to parents social media groups with Harry also spotted dropping Lilibet off at reception.

A spokesman for the Duke and Duchess said: “The decision for the children to move school was taken following a discussion with the family’s security team about the practicalities of their current arrangements.

“The parents remain extremely grateful to all the teachers and staff for the love, care and effort they have shown their family.

“This decision should in no way be interpreted as a reflection on the school or the exceptional care the children have received there.”

The Sun earlier this month revealed that the Duchess of Sussex was nervous about doing the school run for Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.

A source told The Sun: “The school run is a tricky issue and I understand why they are nervous about it.”

The school swap comes after Harry and Meghan were granted their first government backed security review since returning to the UK.

The Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec) has written to the Duke of Sussex and informed him that his and Meghan’s situation was discussed at a meeting last week.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/royals/17004284/archie-lilibet-pulled-school-harry-meghan-security-fears/

US Senator Mitch McConnell has returned to Congress for the first time since he was admitted to hospital after a fall three months ago.

“I’m really looking forward to being back on the Senate floor and seeing my colleagues,” said the 84-year-old Kentucky Republican, before casting a vote on a judicial nomination.

McConnell’s long absence provoked rampant speculation about his health, and demands from Democrats for transparency.

The longest serving party leader in Senate history, he has been in the Senate for 41 years.

“My recovery has been a long and often frustrating process, and the lingering effects of childhood polio haven’t made it any easier,” McConnell said on Monday.

“I’m still not quite back to 100%,” he continued, adding that “I will do my best to be present for tough votes”.

“I’m glad to get back to more of business as usual on their [fellow Kentuckians’] behalf this month,” his statement concluded.

Video of the senator leaving his home in the US capital showed him being taken in a wheelchair into a vehicle.

He appeared a short time later on the Senate floor, where he was greeted by several senators.

McConnell last voted on 11 June. As questions mounted over his whereabouts, his office said a month later that he had fallen at home on 14 June and was treated in hospital for mild pneumonia.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwvgy1mj4yqmo.

 

New rules governing travel to and from China have come into effect, a move that observers say will further tighten the government’s control over its citizens.

Citizens deemed to have “harmed” China’s national security or interests while overseas can also be barred from leaving China for up to three years after they return, while those who violate technological import and export regulations may also be banned from leaving.

Chinese authorities say the rules are to “safeguard national sovereignty and security” and deny that they restrict the travel of “ordinary citizens”.

But critics say the new rules could further boost Beijing’s ability to exert pressure on its nationals’ activities abroad.

“This is another tool designed to control what Chinese citizens do and say overseas,” Professor Tom Kellogg, Executive Director of the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University, told BBC Chinese.

“In some cases, in order to prevent individuals from criticising the Chinese government overseas or to punish their rights advocacy activities, state security authorities directly refuse to issue passports,” Kellogg adds.

According to the rules taking effect on Tuesday, Chinese citizens may be prohibited from leaving the country if they violate technology import and export regulations that “may endanger national industrial or technological security”.

Piyao, a Chinese government “rumour-refuting” platform, posted a statement last week saying the new rules “do not restrict the travel of ordinary citizens, but rather serve as a preventative measure against high-risk destinations and individuals with unusual travel patterns”.

The regulations were issued to address “problems” such as people being deceived into leaving the country or engaging in illegal gambling and scam activities abroad, the statement said.

But some Chinese nationals have reported facing murky travel restrictions for years.

One 26-year-old Chinese citizen, who wished to be identified only as Pipi, told BBC Chinese that his passport application in 2023 was rejected and he believes it was because he attended the massive pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019.

According to Pipi, he was interviewed by Hong Kong media outlets during the protests. When he returned to mainland China, he was questioned by state security police.

He said one immigration official told him that he could not get a passport “because of the Hong Kong issue” – but this was not confirmed in writing to him.

“If they have given me an official document, I could apply for administrative reconsideration. But all they said was one sentence: ‘You can’t go,'” Pipi said.

Pipi said he did not dare to escalate the matter, fearing he would “end up in prison”.

“I’m just an ordinary person, right? I’m a young man, and I haven’t done anything bad,” he said.

“I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to leave [China].”

According to publicly available information, Chinese citizens currently cannot check whether they are subject to exit controls on their own.

Unless official written or verbal notification is issued, people generally only discover they are restricted from leaving when applying for documents or attempting to depart.

Under China’s Administrative Licensing Law, when an administrative authority decides not to grant an administrative licence, it should explain the reasons in writing. But some people interviewed by the BBC said this requirement is not enforced.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and immigration authorities did not respond to enquiries from BBC Chinese.

Chinese authorities have drastically stepped up exit bans on its citizens in recent years, according to data provided to the BBC from rights group Safeguard Defenders.

While China’s supreme court database showed only 89 records mentioning exit bans in 2016, a figure that rose to 188,760 by last year.

The percentage of civil verdicts that dealt with exit bans also surged more than 30 times between 2019 and 2025, from around 0.23% to 7.3%. The actual volume of such cases are believed to be even higher, owing to an increasing number of withheld judgments.

Under the new rules taking effect on Tuesday, border officials are now also required to advise Chinese nationals against travelling to countries and regions deemed “high-risk”.

But prior to this, some in China – ranging from civil servants and state-owned enterprise employees to ordinary citizens – already faced restrictions from going to certain countries.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqe8x6gkk250o

 

The Houthi escalation has created the first major stress test for the new Pakistan-Saudi-Turkey defence alliance under the Mecca Pact.

Pakistan appears to be scrambling to reassure Saudi Arabia after walking back its initial tough stance on military action against the Houthis. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif dialed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Sunday and reiterated Islamabad’s “strongest condemnation” of Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, in what appears to be a diplomatic damage-control effort after questions emerged over whether Pakistan would actually honour its new defence commitments if Riyadh came under attack.

The outreach came after Islamabad clarified that its Makkah defence pact with Saudi Arabia did not automatically mean Pakistani military action against the Houthis. The clarification appeared to temper Defence Minister Khawaja Asif’s earlier suggestion that the agreement could be activated if attacks on Saudi Arabia continued.

Shehbaz Reaffirms Support To Riyadh

Sharif said he had spoken to Mohammed bin Salman and reaffirmed Pakistan’s support for Saudi Arabia.

“I reiterated Pakistan’s strongest condemnation of the recent Houthi attacks targeting civilian and economic infrastructure in the Kingdom, and conveyed our complete solidarity with the Saudi leadership and our Saudi brothers and sisters,” Sharif said in a post on X.

He said the attacks threatened regional peace and stability and could have serious consequences for the global economy and energy security.

Sharif also praised the Crown Prince’s “wise and sagacious leadership” during the crisis. He said he, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir and Deputy Prime Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar would continue efforts to defuse tensions and promote peace and stability in the region.

According to Sharif’s office, Mohammed bin Salman appreciated Pakistan’s “steadfast support” for Saudi Arabia and its efforts towards regional peace and stability.

The two leaders agreed to remain in close contact and said they looked forward to meeting soon. Sharif also conveyed his regards to Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

#Statement | The Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, the Republic of Indonesia, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Republic of Türkiye, the State of Qatar, and the Arab Republic of Egypt welcome the decision of the Government of the United Kingdom to ban the import of goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and to introduce restrictions on services linked to such settlements, and express the hope that this decision will help mobilize the international community to take similar actions in line with international law and hold accountable settlement organizations and individuals engaged in illegal settlement activities.

— Foreign Ministry 🇸🇦 (@KSAmofaEN) September 9, 2026

From ‘No Ambiguity’ To No Military Action

The call came against the backdrop of questions over Pakistan’s security commitments to Saudi Arabia following the signing of the Makkah pact.

The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey was signed on August 7, 2026. It expanded an earlier Pakistan-Saudi Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed on September 17, 2025, by adding Turkey.

Under the pact, an armed attack against any one of the three countries is to be treated as an attack against all. It also provides for enhanced defence cooperation and a joint secretariat in Riyadh, initially chaired by Pakistan for three years.

Last week, Asif said there should be “no ambiguity” over the pact if an attack on a member country or a spillover from Yemen reached Saudi territory. “If there is unprovoked aggression, or a spillover of whatever is happening in Yemen into Saudi Arabia, definitely the Mecca agreement will become operational,” he had said.

He also hinted at possible airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen.

However, Pakistan’s Foreign Office clarified the following day that no military response under the pact was being discussed and Islamabad had no immediate plans to expand the alliance. The FO stressed that the agreement was defensive and aimed at deterrence.

The rapid shift has exposed a gap between the language of collective defence and Pakistan’s willingness to enter direct combat.

Why Riyadh May Be Watching Closely

The Houthi escalation has created the first major stress test for the new Pakistan-Saudi-Turkey defence alliance. Pakistan is already dealing with severe economic stress and internal security challenges and wants to avoid being drawn into a new Middle East conflict, particularly against an Iran-linked group.

The Houthis have intensified attacks on Saudi civilian and energy infrastructure since early September, while fighting has also intensified between Houthi forces and Saudi-backed government forces in Yemen.

Saudi-backed forces attacked Houthi positions in Mokha, Dhubab and other parts of Taiz province on Sunday, while the Houthis fired towards neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

The latest escalation is the most serious since a UN-brokered truce halted major fighting in 2022. More than 82,000 people have reportedly been displaced since the beginning of September.

The fighting has also raised concerns over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a crucial maritime chokepoint, while commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains under pressure amid the US-Iran conflict.

Riyadh has also sought US support, but US President Donald Trump has declined direct US military action against the Houthis.

Source : https://www.news18.com/world/pakistan-backtracks-on-houthi-fight-then-shehbaz-calls-saudi-crown-prince-damage-control-with-riyadh-10327393.html

 

A Russian drone struck an evacuated Kyiv-Warsaw train just in front of a special carriage carrying former British PM Boris Johnson and European advisers.

A train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and advisers to European leaders was forced to stop near the Polish-Ukrainian border after Russia launched a drone attack at the railway crossing.

Trucks caught fire and a gas station complex was damaged after a Russian drone struck the Yahodyn–Dorohusk border crossing, according to reports. Johnson, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s adviser Günter Sautter, Sweden’s former prime minister Carl Bildt, European security advisers, diplomats and German MPs were travelling through the area on a special train.

The train was forced to stop after a drone warning. Conductors woke the passengers and prepared them for evacuation. However, the alert was lifted shortly afterwards and all passengers were reported safe.

🚨BREAKING: RUSSIAN DRONE HITS THE KYIV–WARSAW TRAIN TWO KILOMETRES FROM POLAND. SAME MORNING A PETROL STATION AND TRUCKS BURN 800 METRES FROM THE DOROHUSK CROSSING. NOBODY ON THE TRAIN WAS HURT. NO POLES WERE ON BOARD. 🇵🇱🔥🇺🇦

13 September 2026. Yahodyn–Dorohusk: the main road and rail gate between Ukraine’s Volyn region and Poland’s Lublin region.
Ukrainian Railways: a drone struck the locomotive of train 67, Kyiv–Warsaw, about 2 km inside Ukraine. The crew was warned. Passengers left the cars. PKP Intercity: 206 people on the train, no Polish citizens. The hit came before the Polish operator took over.
Polish border guards: another drone wrecked a truck about 800 metres from the Polish line. A petrol station caught fire. The bang was heard in Dorohusk. The crossing closed, then reopened. Poland says its airspace was not broken.
Ukraine’s foreign minister: this is “knocking on the doors of the EU and NATO.” Russia says it is hitting logistics that move cargo from Europe.
A passenger train to Warsaw. A crossing 800 metres from Poland. How close is close enough?

— Slavic Networks (@SlavicNetworks) September 13, 2026

Johnson Calls For More Ukraine Support

Boris Johnson called the attack “random and senseless”, while calling for the British government to provide more arms to Ukraine to help them defend against Russia.

“I don’t know what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning. What we can say for sure is that this is the kind of random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day – even on civilian railways,” he said on X.

I don’t know what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning. What we can say for sure is that this is the kind of random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day – even on civilian railways. So far Putin has been responsible for the deaths of 1700 staff of Ukrzaliznytsia – Ukrainian Railways. They and their daily passengers are absolutely heroic.

When are we going to give them the air defences they need? Why won’t we unfreeze Putin’s cash and give it to Ukraine? There is more than €140 billion in a Belgian bank account – and about £10 billion in London. Britain could show a lead.

The Ukrainians are going to win – that much was clear from the last three days in their wonderful country. But we will get this dreadful war over much faster if we all get serious and give them what they need and deserve.

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) September 13, 2026

“When are we going to give them the air defences they need? Why won’t we unfreeze Putin’s cash and give it to Ukraine? There is more than €140 billion in a Belgian bank account – and about £10 billion in London. Britain could show a lead.”

Johnson lauded the staff of Ukrainian Railways as “heroic” and expressed confidence that Kyiv would emerge victorious in the war against Russia. “But we will get this dreadful war over much faster if we all get serious and give them what they need and deserve,” he added.

Source : https://www.news18.com/world/train-with-ex-uk-pm-boris-johnson-aboard-narrowly-escapes-russian-drone-attack-in-poland-senseless-10327085.html

 

The incident highlights the region’s ongoing issues with political violence, particularly as the elections aim to establish BARMM’s first elected parliament following a lengthy peace process

Three people have been killed and 15 others wounded after gunfire broke out on Monday, hours before polls opened in a semi-autonomous Muslim region of the Philippines. The shooting happened shortly before midnight outside a school being used as a polling station in Cotabato, the regional capital of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

Police said the violence began as rival political groups argued over who should be first in the queue to vote. Cotabato police chief Jibin Bongcayao said the dispute began as a “struggle for position in the queue between two groups”. “It led to shoving, escalated into a fistfight, and eventually gunfire broke out in a crowded area,” he said.

Don’t you forget about him.

The “Breakfast Club” star Judd Nelson looked nearly unrecognizable while out on his motorcycle in a rare public sighting.

The actor, 66, was all smiles as he stepped out in West Hollywood, California, on Saturday afternoon.

Nelson, who portrayed John Bender in the 1985 John Hughes-directed movie, rocked a bushy beard, sunglasses and a gray hat.

He braved the heat in layers, wearing a brown T-shirt, flannel and black blazer.

The “New Jack City” star also sported cargo pants and brown boots.

Nelson threw on a helmet before taking off.

The “St. Elmo’s Fire” star tends to shy away from the spotlight and was last seen out on his motorcycle in April, per E! News.

At the time, he wore similar attire, but bundled up with gloves and a black trench coat.

Source : https://pagesix.com/2026/09/13/entertainment/iconic-80s-star-judd-nelson-looks-nearly-unrecognizable-in-rare-sighting/

Aryna Sabalenka’s emotions boiled over after she lost her chance at a U.S. Open three-peat.

After she fell to Elena Rybakina in three sets on Saturday 6-4, 5-7, 6-2, Sabalenka went to sit with her team in their corner of the Arthur Ashe court. However, to her dismay, a camera operator followed her and he got the brunt of her hot temper.

Following an annoyed reaction when realizing she was on camera, Sabalenka could be seen telling the camera person to “f–k off.”

https://t.co/6fJsdiSDir

— News Aryna Sabalenka (@Sabanewsss) September 12, 2026

The video immediately went viral across social media, and fans jumped into the comments to condone the four-time Grand Slam champion.

“Her attitude is horrendous,” an X user commented.

“Great role model for the kids. Grow up,” another added.

“I’m so glad she lost. I don’t give af how good she can be. Can’t stomach her,” a third posted.

“Sore loser. The mask always slips,” another chimed in.

Moments before, a broadcast camera caught Sabalenka sitting on the bench and smashing her racket, breaking it and tossing it to the side.

While Sabalenka was finding answers to Rybakina’s stunning play in the second set, she grew emotional and it only continued into her collapse in the third set.

The 28-year-old was seen talking to herself, making movements with her racket and body and rolling her eyes in frustration on the court.

She was chasing a three-peat and fittingly lost it to Rybakina, who took over the world No. 1 ranking from Sabalenka during the tournament after advancing to the semifinals. Sabalenka would have become the first woman since Serena Williams (2012-14) to win three consecutive titles at the slam.

The heavy emotions carried into the trophy ceremony, where Sabalenka admitted, “That’s the last thing I want to do right now is give a speech, but I’ll try my very best.”

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/13/sports/aryna-sabalenka-tells-cameraman-to-f-k-off-in-ugly-scene-after-us-open-loss/

 

The US Air Force colonel rescued from Iran in April revealed Sunday that the “most terrifying moment” of surviving nearly two days on enemy lines was plummeting to earth with a damaged parachute after his F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down.

The weapons systems officer — identified only by the mission call sign Dude 44 Bravo — spoke publicly about his unbelievable tale of survival for the first time in an interview with CBS “60 Minutes” host Norah O’Donnell for the show’s 59th season premiere Sunday evening.

Bravo’s plane was shot down by an Iranian with a shoulder-fired missile on April 3, and crashed in the Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province in the southwestern part of Iran near Iraq.

The impact of the missile was like “getting hit by a freight train,” Bravo said.

His crewmate and pilot, callsign Alpha, ejected them both from the $30 million jet, but Bravo’s parachute failed to inflate, he said.

A REPUBLICAN governor candidate has been injured after his plane was forced to make an emergency landing in a lake on Saturday night.

Wisconsin Representative Tom Tiffany was forced to swim from the sinking aircraft with his pilot around 9pm on Saturday night before being rescued in Lake Wausau.

The 68-year-old confirmed on social media that both he and the pilot Leonard Boltz, 73, sustained minor injuries in the incident that occurred on his way home from the La Crosse County Lincoln Day Dinner.

“The plane I was traveling in lost power as we approached the Wausau Downtown Airport. The pilot made an emergency water landing in Lake Wausau,” he wrote.

“After landing, we called 911. As the plane began to submerge, we exited the aircraft and swam to a shallow area, where we waited until emergency responders reached us by boat.

“I want to express my deepest gratitude to the pilot, the Wausau Fire Department, and all of the first responders who came to our aid so quickly.”

During a press conference on Sunday night, Tiffany, who got emotional when recalling the incident, had a visible wound on his head.

“Len said to me, ‘We are going down, pull your seatbelt tight’ and that’s what I did,” he recalled.

“Ten seconds later we hit the water. After the plane settled we looked at each other ‘Are you okay? Yeah doing fine’ and opened the door.”

The pair stood on the sinking aircraft before deciding they had to swim to the shoreline and after going 150 feet they found a “high spot” in the lake that they could stand on until help came.

Tiffany told reporters that upon impact his head hit the dash and he needed 12 stitches to his eyebrow.

“We both have a few scratches – Len had four stitches, that was the extent of his wounds. I got 12 stitches in my eyebrow and other than that, just a few scratches,” he said.

“We’re really fortunate that God was looking after us last night.”

He went on to praise first responders saying, “I can’t thank them enough for helping us in that situation. This is probably just hitting me at this point.”

“We’re just really fortunate that we had a skilled pilot who knew what he was doing as we were going down after we lost power.

“He was savvy and quick enough to pull the landing gear up – he might has saved us as a result of that,” Tiffany said before wiping away his tears.

A report of a plane crash on Lake Wausau was received by the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office at 8:49pm, officials said in a press release.

They were alerted to two people in the water who were “alert and conscious,” per radio communications obtained by NBC News.

The Congressman and pilot were the only occupants of the four-seat Beechcraft K35 Bonanza aircraft and both were located and pulled from the water at 9:05pm.

They were then taken to Aspirus Wausau Hospital for treatment.

“God was watching over us tonight, and I am incredibly grateful to be here in the hospital with my wife, Chris, by my side,” Tiffany said.

“An experience like this reminds you just how precious life is.”

The cause of the loss of power is under investigation but officials have said preliminary findings indicate that the aircraft “experienced a mechanical issue” on approach to the airport.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16997878/republican-governor-candidate-tom-tiffany-plane-crash-wisconsin/

US President Donald Trump has downplayed risks posed by artificial intelligence following days of dire warnings by experts.

“You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump said during a visit to Ireland.

One of the warnings came from a former Anthropic researcher who said “there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future” if the current pace of development continued.

On Saturday, top industry bosses agreed and called for a slow-down. Trump did not directly address the idea, but said: “We’re leading China on AI… and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”

Trump spoke on the same day AI researcher Jacob Coxon – who quit Anthropic a few days ago – told the BBC that staff who were developing the systems were “genuinely frightened” for the future of humanity.

Coxon – who has also worked at OpenAI – welcomed the idea of a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China.

On Saturday, Elon Musk, owner of xAI, and Sam Altman of OpenAI, backed a warning from the head of Anthropic Dario Amodei that the pace of development should be slowed “to reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong”.

The Anthropic CEO said any slowdown would have to be limited to avoid allowing China to pull ahead.

The issues surrounding AI have prompted fierce debate – and present a dilemma for many world leaders.

On one hand, the sector is seen as a huge opportunity to boost economic growth and a way to improve outdated digital systems and ways of working.

But there have also been a number of incidents where AI appears to have gone seriously wrong.

In August, OpenAI said it had slowed down training some of its most advanced AI models to improve security.

The ChatGPT-maker said it was adding new measures after its AI agents bypassed safeguards and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face.

And the same month it was disclosed two of the world’s most powerful AI tools created fake human profiles to try and trick people in attempted cyber-attacks.

The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) said in the most serious case, Anthropic’s Mythos AI tried to gain access to a service by sending private messages, having set up fake accounts mimicking real people – then hid the evidence.

The Trump administration argues that the US must maintain global tech dominance as a matter of national security, though it has admitted a need for vigilance around the risks posed by the emerging technology.

The weekend call by major AI executives sparked discussion in Washington, where lawmakers are facing pressure to address those potential risks around rapid AI developments.

On Sunday, Speaker Mike Johnson, the top House Republican, urged caution about rushing AI regulation during an appearance on CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union, arguing it could “smother American innovation”.

“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American,” he said. “So, we’ve got to have balance. We’ve got to have steady hands at the wheel.”

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued for “decisive action” by lawmakers.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v48vp31mdo

E-commerce giant Amazon says it is suspending work with the firm that operated a cargo plane that was involved in a fatal crash in Miami this month.

“After the tragic incident last weekend, we’ve spent time supporting the investigation and reviewing some of the surrounding circumstances, and we’ve decided to pause our operations with 21 Air,” an Amazon spokesperson said on Sunday.

On 6 September, the 21 Air-operated Boeing jet overshot a runway at Miami International Airport and hit several vehicles, killing five people.

The BBC has contacted 21 Air for comment. The firm previously said it was “devastated by the accident” and that it is cooperating with authorities to investigate the incident.

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is leading the investigation into the crash.

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said: “Safety has always been our top priority, whether in our own operations or when we’re working with partners.”

“We’ll continue working to support the investigation and everyone affected,” she added.

21 Air is an all-cargo carrier that operates flights for major firms like Amazon and DHL.

The Boeing 767-300 cargo plane crashed in Miami after departing from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The aircraft overshot the runway, crashing into nearby vehicles before skidding to a stop.

Last week, Miami authorities identified the five people who died as Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53; Julio C Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47.

Five others were also injured.

“Our deepest condolences are with the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives,” 21 Air chief executive Keith Winters previously said.

“Our immediate priorities are supporting those affected, assisting the appropriate authorities, and ensuring that accurate and verified information is communicated as it becomes available,” he added.

NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy called the crash site a scene of “utter devastation”.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2zg554w9ko

An enemy that swarmed the battlefield in large groups while under fire, seemingly oblivious to the dangers of drones and fire from automatic weapons. An elite corps of ghost soldiers who chose suicide over surrender. They fought and died in their thousands, then apparently vanished from the battlefield.

North Korea’s soldiers were sent to fight by Pyongyang alongside Russian forces as they sought to repel a Ukrainian offensive on Moscow’s territory at the end of 2024. They paid a heavy price, as many as 3,000 killed in action from the 13,000 deployed.

Ultimately, they would adapt their tactics, and with Russia would drive Ukrainian forces from its Kursk region. In combat terms, little has been heard of them since, but according to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, North Korean forces, and their weaponry, are soon to make a dramatic return to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Last month, Zelensky warned that up to 50,000 North Koreans will be deployed in Russia, revising an earlier estimate of 30,000 troops. He called on South Korea to provide support for his country’s air defence.

But why, after such heavy losses, would North Korea send more men to fight for Russia, and what happened to its soldiers sent in the first place?

“They’re still there”, said Dr Yang Uk, research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, Center for Foreign Policy and National Security in Seoul. “They are defending Russian territory for another counterattack from Ukraine. And we believe that some of the engineer corps or workers might be in [the Russian-occupied] Donbas area but that’s not the combat troops.”

The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, HUR, estimates that 8,500 North Korean servicemen are still on Russian territory. They are organised into four brigades, which operate as part of the “North” Group of Forces and are assigned to protecting the state border of the Russian Federation in the Kursk Region from Ukrainian incursions.

“They do not participate in active combat operations. Units of the Korean People’s Army have not been observed in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine,” HUR said in a statement to the BBC.

A first for North Korea

For North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, the Kursk deployment was a gamble, its largest combat force ever sent overseas. (In 1973, North Korea sent 1,500 military personnel and instructors to Egypt during the Yom Kippur war with Israel, and in the late 1960s, an estimated 87 North Korean pilots fought for the North Vietnamese against US forces).

And despite the bloodshed, it was a gamble that paid off, reaping countless benefits for the isolated and impoverished country, transforming both its economic and military fortunes. And one that could serve as a blueprint for even deeper military cooperation.

North Koreans, “now know what modern combat is about”, said Yang.

The soldiers sent to fight in Russia were from Storm Corps, the elite of the North Korean armed forces. Extremely isolated, totalitarian North Korea is a militarised and heavily indoctrinated state.

At first, neither Russia, nor North Korea, even acknowledged their presence. Ukrainian forces first clashed with them in November 2024, and the first live North Korean prisoners of war wouldn’t be captured until January of the following year.

It wasn’t until April 2025 that Russia first acknowledged their role, when Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, described their “heroism” on the battlefield.

Yang continued, “North Korean soldiers are very brave I mean, especially those of Storm Corps. They are willing to die for their country. But the problem is that passion doesn’t mean efficient combat skills… [They suffered] a lot of bloodshed in the early stage of the Kursk campaign, but they learned the lessons of modern drone warfare.”

“Cannon fodder”, is how “Sultan”, a soldier with Ukraine’s 95th Air Assault Brigade described North Korean troops. He faced them in the battle for Kursk at the end of 2024.

“They would begin with one large assault group, then another 15–20 men would be sent into the same position, and then more after that. The North Koreans operated differently. They kept moving all the time. That gave them a certain advantage, but not a decisive one,” he recalled recently in Kyiv.

Communication between them and their Russian allies appeared poor, he said, and their soldiers were inadequately equipped.

After combat, Sultan and his men would search enemy corpses for documents and intelligence information. On the Russian dead they would find personal belongings, identification and equipment. “But when we searched the North Koreans specifically, the only thing we found on them was simply ammo. We checked absolutely all the small pockets – there were no documents, nothing at all,” he explained.

Other Ukrainian soldiers reported the North Koreans lacked body armour, winter clothing and helmets.

In one chilling video from a Ukrainian assault, a wounded North Korean soldier lies prone on the snow-covered ground in a wooded area. As the Ukrainians approach, he detonates a grenade under his chin, after calling out, with his last words, the name of his leader, Kim Jong Un.

In April 2025, at a memorial service in Pyongyang at the newly created Museum of Foreign Military Operations, Kim praised heroes who choose suicide over capture.

In a speech to relatives, with Russia’s Defence Minister Andrey Belousov in attendance, he said they were “heroes who unhesitatingly opted for self-blasting, suicide attack, in order to defend the great honour”.

While North Korea has never officially acknowledged the death toll from the Kursk operation, a BBC Korea analysis of the memorial site estimated that 2,300 soldiers were killed fighting for Russia.

Ukraine’s intelligence arm, HUR, puts the figure at 3,000 killed and 1,500 injured.

But aside from the combat experience, why did North Korea sacrifice so many of its best troops in a foreign war?

An economic windfall

The deployment has been a much-needed economic windfall for the country and a geopolitical win, according to Lim Soo-ho, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Strategy, in Seoul.

He estimates that arms sales to Russia and the troop deployment have netted the impoverished country close to $10bn.

“North Korea’s annual GDP is estimated at around $30bn (£22bn),” he told me. “That means they earned a third of a year’s GDP over two and a half years through weapons exports and troop deployment, which, for an economy as small as North Korea’s, is a very significant effect.”

In exchange for its manpower, North Korea gets food, oil and hard currency. While China says it complies with sanctions against Pyongyang, Russia does not.

But equally important, the cooperation with Russia has shifted North Korea’s long-term dependency on China.

So in Beijing in September last year, Kim Jong Un was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with China’s leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the first public meeting of all three. Not quite as an equal, but no longer reliant on China alone.

This is significant, said Lim, “It’s a major geopolitical shift”.

“Whenever things got difficult under isolation, North Korea would reach out first toward South Korea, Japan, or especially the US to try to normalise relations, that was the pattern of Korean Peninsula diplomacy. But now that ties with Russia have tightened, Kim Jong Un argues that the world is in a new Cold War, a multipolar system.”

The arrangement with Russia, which began as economic and military expediency appears to be developing into something deeper and longer-term. At this year’s 9th Party Congress of the Korean Workers’ Party, Kim Jong Un was emboldened and spoke of accomplishments that his grandfather Kim Il Sung and father Kim Jong Il never achieved.

But dangers lie ahead. To date, no North Koreans have fought on Ukrainian or Russian-occupied Ukrainian land. If they did so, there would be diplomatic consequences, not least in South Korea, an ally of Ukraine, albeit one which so far has only provided “non-lethal” aid.

This is something that President Zelensky has emphasised as he presses for Seoul to provide advanced military hardware, including air defence systems. He said that since June, preparations have been underway in Russia’s Voronezh region to receive fresh North Korean forces and claimed that Pyongyang was preparing to transfer additional ballistic weapons to Russia.

“Russia is helping North Korea learn modern warfare, improve its weapons, and gain real combat experience. This poses a threat to every country in Asia that lies within range of North Korean missiles,” he said in a presidential address in July.

Only two North Korean soldiers were captured alive in battles with Ukrainian forces. That’s a staggeringly low number, given that between 11,000 and 14,000 fought in the Kursk campaign. (Another was captured alive but died from combat-related injuries, according to the South Korean National Intelligence Service).

Like their comrades who choose suicide over capture, neither man intended to be taken alive.

“For Joseon (North Korean) soldiers, becoming a prisoner of war itself is a crime. That just isn’t an option. We can’t become POWs,” one of the captured men told a South Korean MBC documentary crew who interviewed him in prison in Ukraine.

Baek Pyeong-gang, not his real name, lay wounded from a drone strike for four days before being captured. He was tricked into surrendering when he mistook Ukrainian soldiers for his Russian allies.

The second prisoner, Lee Kang-eun, also a pseudonym, told the journalist Kim Young-mi that he felt guilty he was still alive. Barely conscious, he was found by Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield with extensive injuries to the arm and jaw.

“I had no grenade or knives on me to self-blast (end my life),” he explained.

He described scores of his colleagues killed by drones, early in the war. The battlefield “reeked of the smell of blood”, he said.

Neither man wants to return to North Korea, Lee said he believed that his family members would be “wiped out” as punishment for his capture. Both have said they want to be sent to South Korea, and Seoul is willing to take them.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgl7zrnxxy6o

China’s military leadership is expected to outline its aims ​for global security when it hosts its annual defence forum this week amid churning tensions in its own neighbourhood over Taiwan, ‌the South China Sea and doubts about U.S. commitments to Asia.
Defence Minister Dong Jun is expected to open the three-day Xiangshan Forum in Beijing on Tuesday with a fresh pitch for closer international cooperation within a multi-polar world but is likely to also include coded attacks on the U.S. and its allies, diplomats and analysts say.

Hundreds of military officers, diplomats and scholars ​from dozens of countries are expected to attend the three-day event, a tightly scripted Chinese rival to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, widely ​seen as a more freewheeling affair.
Some Asian envoys and analysts say that any overt Chinese criticism of the U.S. and ⁠its Western allies could be tempered because of President Xi Jinping’s planned visit to Washington later this month to meet President Donald Trump.
Japan, however, could be an ​easier target given current tensions between Beijing and Tokyo.
“I anticipate the Chinese host will also be using the platform to harp on Japan’s wartime past and criticise ​Tokyo’s supposed ‘remilitarisation’,” said Singapore-based Chinese security scholar James Char.

Taiwan, whose military last month conducted military and civil defence drills to practice fighting a Chinese invasion, does not attend the forum or most major international events. Neither government recognises the other and China views the democratically governed island as its own territory.
Dong’s speech on Tuesday will follow recent statements from Xi calling for ​greater representation for Global South countries in international affairs.
At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Kyrgyzstan earlier this month, Xi said: “The domination of international affairs ​by a few is an injustice left over from history, and global governance dictated by one, a few or a bloc of countries is not true multilateralism.”
Western nations generally send ‌relatively low-level ⁠delegations to the forum while some regional countries will send ministers as they try to juggle relations with China, a modern military power, and the U.S., the long-dominant East Asian defence ally.

The U.S. delegation is expected to be headed by the Pentagon’s principal director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, Cynthia Carras, a U.S. official said.
Vietnam, China’s neighbour and rival in the disputed South China Sea, is sending Defence Minister Phan Van Giang while Malaysia will be represented by Vice Defence ​Minister Adly Zahari.
DOUBTS ABOUT BOTH CHINA AND ​U.S.
Doubts about U.S. security commitments in ⁠Asia will create an opening for Beijing to argue that regional defence should be managed by Asian countries, but China’s assertive behaviour sharply limits its ability to capitalize on it, said Patricia Kim, an East Asia politics and security expert at ​Washington-based Brookings Institution.
“Many Asian countries remain deeply sceptical of China because of its increasingly assertive behaviour in the ​region, particularly in the ⁠South China Sea,” Kim said.

As Xi’s corruption purges continue within China’s military, the forum is expected to give foreign delegations the chance to weigh their impact on the leadership.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-defence-forum-set-open-amid-roiling-regional-tensions-2026-09-14/

 

North Korea said on Monday that its launch of several missiles on Saturday was part of a live-fire drill involving long-range artillery and missile units, according to ​state media KCNA.
The “joint firepower attack drill” involved five army units and tested several ​weapon systems, including attack drones, tactical cruise missiles, tactical ballistic missiles, ⁠and large-calibre multiple rocket launchers, KCNA said.

The drill would boost the morale of ​the troops and improve their capabilities to “completely collapse the enemy” whenever ordered, KCNA said, citing ​an artillery director.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Saturday that North Korea fired several short-range ballistic missiles, which flew about 250 km (155 miles) toward the sea off its east coast.
The launch came a ​day after South Korea, the United States and Japan wrapped up the five-day ​trilateral Freedom Edge exercise focused on countering North Korean threats.
KCNA’s report came two days after the ‌launch, ⁠believed to be the 13th known ballistic missile launch event this year. North Korean state media had remained silent on several previous recent missile tests reported by South Korea.

“This was not a test of a single weapon system but a demonstration of ​an integrated strike network,” ​said Lim Eul-chul, ⁠a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.
North Korea appeared to be showcasing its ability to coordinate ​drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and rocket artillery through a ​unified command-and-control ⁠system, Lim said.
The absence of leader Kim Jong Un and the delayed report suggested Pyongyang sought to present the event as a “technical and practical military exercise” while calibrating tensions, ⁠Lim ​said.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-korea-held-live-fire-drills-involving-artillery-missiles-kcna-says-2026-09-13/

Hundreds of Indonesian rescuers including the coastguard ‌and the navy raced on Monday to board a passenger ship that capsized in the Java Sea over the weekend as they searched for the 129 people still missing, officials said, with the confirmed death toll at six.
The Virgo Transport 8 ship carrying 243 people went missing ​in bad weather early on Sunday, the rescue agency said. Authorities have since rescued 108 people from the ​ship, which was travelling from Surabaya in East Java to Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan.

Choppy waters ⁠with high waves and strong winds were impeding the search on Monday, said Mohammad Syafii, head of the national rescue agency.
The ​agency has deployed at least 622 personnel, 17 ships, five helicopters and aircraft to find the missing passengers, Syafii added. Some of the ships have ​arrived at the location but it was difficult for rescuers to make their way into the capsized ship, he said.
“We would also deploy personnel with underwater rescue skills but the current conditions do not allow us to,” he said.
“While waiting for the weather conditions to improve, ​we are identifying more personnel with special skills,” he said, adding the death toll remained at six.

In a video shared ​by the rescue agency, a large red-and-black ship was capsized and partially submerged in choppy blue water, with its red-painted underside visible above the ‌surface.
Two ⁠small boats, each carrying people, were seen floating in rough waters near the capsized ship.
The location of the capsized boat is around 80 nautical miles (nearly 150 kilometres) from the command centre at Trisakti Port in Banjarmasin, another official at the rescue agency told Reuters.
“The conditions there are quite windy, making it difficult for the vessel to dock,” the official, Arianto Ardi, said.
THREE-METRE WAVE CRASHES ​INTO SHIP
The weather was very ​poor when the incident ⁠happened, with waves as high as three metres crashing into the ship, Syafii said.
It takes around five hours to reach the location from Trisakti Port in good weather but requires up to nine ​hours in rough conditions.

On Sunday, Edy Prakoso, another official at the agency, said the ​ship leaned heavily ⁠to one side after strong waves hit its starboard side.
Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi said the capsized boat had the capacity to contain 500 passengers, so it was not overloaded.
Indonesia relies on ferries across its 17,000 islands, with sea travel cheaper and more ⁠accessible than ​flying, but there have been numerous accidents.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/indonesia-rescuers-searching-129-people-still-missing-after-passenger-ship-2026-09-14/

An Afghan woman living in Texas with legal US permanent residency has been deported from the country in the first-ever use of a secretive court.

Nazira Haji Zada, 47, chose to leave the US rather than continue to argue her case before the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and her lawyers.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court was created in 1996, but had never heard a case before the proceedings in July. It is meant for non-US citizens facing terrorism-related charges when the evidence is confidential and related to national security.

Lawyers for Haji Zada argued that the case violated her right to due process under the US Constitution.

Afghanistan citizen Haji Zada was never charged with a crime, but prosecutors had tried and convicted her son and son-in-law for terror offenses.

Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhed, were both found guilty of a plot to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day in 2024, inspired by the group calling itself Islamic State.

Haji Zada, who has been living in Fort Worth, Texas, was accused by prosecutors of being the “matriarch” of the group, who had worked “to radicalize the family”.

In a statement on Friday, the justice department said she “conceded that she is an alien terrorist and waived appeal of the removal order, terminating her previous [immigration] status”.

“This landmark case, resulting in the prompt removal of this alien terrorist to her country of origin, is a win for national security and the rule of law,” said US Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“Those who support and condone terrorism should not be living in the United States, and this first-ever case before the ATRC shows how the Department will use every tool at its disposal to protect our country.”

Court-appointed lawyers for Haji Zada said they were denied access to the evidence in her case.

“Our client’s choice to consent to removal should not be seen as an endorsement of this court’s legitimacy,” public defenders Matthew Farley and Mary Manning Petras said in a statement to The Washington Post.

“Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process. We are confident that the Alien Terrorist Removal Court will be struck down as unconstitutional as soon as a judge is asked to address the issue,” they said.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3eqpd9zgl9o

In September 2025, Gerald Bourguet felt he was finally living his dream life: he and his wife had bought a house with a pool, they had just welcomed a baby boy, and he was writing about professional men’s basketball as his full-time job.

But all of that changed after he made a series of online posts critical of the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk hours after he was fatally shot on 10 September, while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University.

In the posts, Bourguet described Kirk as an “evil man” and suggested he had dedicated his life to hateful causes. He also criticised Kirk’s supporters saying they had not been vocal about school shootings.

“I had seen the way that people were talking about this person – kind of eulogising him and lionising him and it bothered me based on a lot of the things that he had said,” Bourguet told the BBC.

Kirk, who founded Christian youth organisation Turning Point USA, was a divisive figure in US politics. For many on the political right, he was charismatic and had a unique skill in making conservative ideas appeal to young people. But for his opponents, his comments on a large swathe of issues from race to immigration, gun control and gender identity were deeply offensive.

Screenshots of Bourguet’s critical posts went viral quickly. He was fired from his job, his address was exposed online, and he began receiving threatening text messages, he said. Concerned for their safety, the family fled the state with their four-month-old. They returned months later to sell the house and permanently relocated.

A year later, he says he doesn’t regret what he said, but acknowledged: “My life will never be the same after this”.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj06jgl9qzlo

When another world leader meets US President Donald Trump the only certainty about what might happen is the uncertainty about what might happen.

This was exactly the case ahead of President Trump’s two-day visit to Ireland.

Nobody could have predicted that by the end of the first day, the main global headline would be his desire to see a unified Ireland.

As the shockwaves of his remarks rippled through this island and Great Britain, it was unclear whether this represented a new US administration policy, or an off-the-cuff remark from a president who likes to take questions from reporters, and likes to give answers.

Former Republican Congressman Mick Mulvaney was Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland in his first term in office.

He cautioned against anyone reading too much into the president’s remarks.

“This does not represent a shift in US foreign policy,” he said.

“We’re still very much committed to the Good Friday Agreement.”

Democratic Congressman Brendan Boyle agreed.

“There is bipartisan support for that deal, and that is not going to change.”

Although both agreed that Donald Trump was probably right to say that “eventually” unification would happen, that did not mean the US was about to start pushing for it.

Giving an answer to a question that is asked at a free-flowing press conference is one thing, but Donald Trump repeated his sentiments a short time later when he was delivering a speech to an invited audience at the US Ambassador’s residence.

In fact it was almost the first thing he mentioned, hinting that maybe he realised he had kicked over a can of worms at his earlier appearance.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyzppd1d5lo

An artificial intelligence researcher who quit AI firm Anthropic has said people working on the technology were “genuinely frightened” about the speed of its advancements and what it could mean for humanity.

Jacob Coxon told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Saturday about his viral resignation post in which he raised concerns about out-of-control AI.

“I believe that if we don’t slow down at the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future,” he said.

His resignation comes amid growing safety concerns in the industry, including from his former boss, Anthropic head Dario Amodei, who in an essay argued for development to slow down.

The bosses of two rival AI firms, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, have both said they agree with Amodei’s proposal for industry-wide deceleration and regulation, as well as independent monitoring of AI models as they are developed.

Amodei said developing the technology was not in question, but the risks associated with it were “serious”, and that companies and governments must be given time to address them.

The 27-year-old Coxon – who worked at OpenAI before joining Anthropic – welcomed the suggestion of a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China to avoid “a race at an international scale”.

“The people who work at these companies are completely serious when they ask for regulation because they find themselves trapped in a race. And they’re scared of the outcomes of that race,” he told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1kx0gyje9wo

Police were called to Kamala Harris’ $8 million Malibu mansion after a mystery woman showed up at the property twice and “illegally entered,” according to authorities and the former vice president’s team.

Officers from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department responded to the scene after receiving a call about the unidentified woman outside home of Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff around 10:30 p.m. Friday, the sheriff’s department said.

The woman had gotten dropped off by an Uber and contacted security at the pricey pad, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s department said.

After being told she couldn’t stay, the woman left but returned again, leading to a call to police about a possible trespasser.

Police took a report at the scene, but the woman was not arrested or cited. The incident was first reported by TMZ.

It’s unclear why the woman was there. Police said the woman never entered the home and voluntarily left when asked by deputies.

A Harris spokesperson said that neither the former vice president nor her husband were home at the time.

“Last night, security personnel stopped an individual who illegally entered Vice President Harris and Second Gentleman Emhoff’s property before the individual reached the home,” spokesperson Eduardo Negrón said, according to reports.

“Vice President Harris and Second Gentleman Emhoff were not present. They are grateful to the security and law enforcement personnel who responded swiftly.”

Lt. Jason Duron of the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station told the California Post that the department would step up patrols in the area.

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/12/us-news/police-rush-to-kamala-harris-8m-malibu-mansion-over-suspicious-person-on-property

IRISH President Catherine Connolly presented Donald Trump with a St Brigid’s Cross – recognised as a symbol of peace – during his brief courtesy call.

He was also given a collection of poems which contained the famous Michael Longley sonnet Ceasefire.

Considering Connolly was a long-standing critic of Trump before she took up office, the choice of gifts may be considered as pointed.

The visit of the US President to Áras an Uachtaráin was pinpointed as one of the parts of his two-day visit to Ireland most likely to be scrutinised.

Connolly, an independent TD before she was elected president, had previously accused Trump of being “volatile” and “acting like a bully”, and was critical of his actions in the Middle East.

For his part, Trump mistakenly referred to Ms Connolly as “he” when asked about critical comments she made against him in relation to the US-Israeli war against Iran in the Oval Office on St Patrick’s Day this year.

Considering the context, the meeting of the two presidents on Saturday morning was always likely to present her most substantial diplomatic test since assuming office.

As it was, the engagement, heavy on ceremony, passed off without major incident.

Trump’s substantial motorcade rolled through Phoenix Park shortly after 9am.

He emerged from his car to shake Ms Connolly’s hand before the pair smiled while briefly posing for photographs.

Connolly stood at the end of the steps in the Portico to greet Mr Trump and then led the American president down the Francini corridor and into the state reception room.

Ms Connolly, a long-standing critic of the US president, invited him to sign the visitors’ book in the state reception room.

They then proceeded to the drawing room and into a hallway where Mr Trump was introduced to dignitaries.

They then went back outside, where Trump stood to attention while the national anthems of the US and Ireland were played.

The US president then inspected a guard of honour before Connolly introduced him to a delegation of Irish dignitaries including Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly and Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces Lieutenant General Rossa Mulcahy.

Trump then introduced Connolly to his delegation, including his son Donald Jr and some of his grandchildren.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/world-news/16993142/president-connolly-gifts-meaning-donald-trump-ceasefire-aras

A DAD is pleading with his heiress ex-wife to return their two young sons after she went into hiding on losing a custody battle.

Nishika Samaratunga abducted Blaine, five, and three-year-old Nathaniel over five months ago – with desperate Ben Baier now launching High Court proceedings.

American financier Ben, 43, had flown to Heathrow Airport to collect his two boys in March after they spent a week with their mum in London – but instead was served with a court summons by a lawyer containing “false allegations” of abuse.

Following the couple’s divorce, he’d won full custody last October and the children were being raised by him near Denver in the US.

Samaratunga, 34, a British citizen and scion of a Sri Lankan tea dynasty, has been the subject of an international manhunt ever since.

Ben is not sure what country his ex and their children are even in.

The dad says he is speaking now because he is concerned for the children’s safety – and has no idea if they are attending school or nursery or have proper access to medical care.

In court documents published in the US last month, the judge accused Samaratunga of endangering the children’s physical and emotional wellbeing by kidnapping them, reports The Times.

The judge said the mum had made “false allegations of every sort of abuse… imaginable” against Ben that were “simply invented for nefarious and bad-faith purposes”.

Ben told the newspaper: “I allow myself days just to break down, cry and clean out the gutters.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16994793/dad-pleads-heiress-ex-wife-return-sons

While the Islamic Resistance in Iraq denied involvement, the Iraqi government condemned the attack and initiated an investigation

US President Donald Trump on Saturday said Iran was “probably” responsible for an attack launched from Iraq that forced the closure of a key oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia. Several drones targeted the East-West Pipeline on Thursday, according to Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry. The attacks caused injuries and some damage, while the energy ministry said the pipeline had been shut as a precaution.

Speaking to reporters in Dublin during a visit to Ireland, Trump was asked whether Iran was behind the attack. “I think they are, probably they are,” he said.

However, there has been no confirmation of who carried out the strikes. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a major umbrella group of Iran-backed militias, has denied responsibility.

Saudi Pipeline Attacked

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Energy said the pipeline “was subjected to multiple attacks” that “resulted in a number of injuries”. It said teams were “taking the necessary measures to secure the pipeline and assess its safety”.

The incident comes as the war involving Iran continues to disrupt energy markets and shipping routes across the region.

Saudi Arabia has also been facing pressure from the Houthis, an Iran-backed group in Yemen that recently seized a key island and a port in the Red Sea. Riyadh has supported Yemen’s internationally recognised government in its conflict with the Houthis.

Trump said he had spoken to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he described as a “good friend”.

Source : https://www.timesnownews.com/world/middle-east/houthis-saudi-arabia-pipeline-attack-us-president-donald-trump-iran-war-oil-prices-article-156148031

Deep in Arctic waters near the remote Svalbard archipelago this spring, NATO allies caught Russian subs training to unleash a secret weapon designed to disable critical undersea cables without leaving any fingerprints.

The clandestine Russian operation, described to Reuters by two Western officials, was carried out by Moscow’s GUGI undersea warfare directorate, which used deep-sea submersibles to simulate the deployment of the sophisticated and destructive technology.

A joint operation involving Britain, Norway and the United States tracked and confronted the Russian vessels at sea, said the two officials, speaking ​on condition of anonymity. The vessels were prevented from completing their exercise and eventually left the area.

Britain and Norway disclosed in April that they had uncovered a covert Russian operation in Arctic waters. But the discovery of the new weapon, the ‌location of the operation and the U.S. involvement have not been reported.

The deep-sea face-off comes at a time when some Western intelligence officials fear the Kremlin is ramping up sabotage operations in Europe and preparing for a conflict with NATO.

Some U.S. intelligence analysts are increasingly concerned Russia may test NATO’s mutual defence pact, known as Article 5, three U.S. officials said. If it does, destroying subsea cables could be a critical part of that effort, the Western officials said.

Cables no thicker than a garden hose, lying on the seabed or buried just below, are critical to global internet connectivity and financial transactions. Their economic and strategic importance has made them targets in past conflicts, including ​in the First and Second World Wars, when they were critical to delivering orders by telegraph or telephone.

Two 1,400 km subsea fiber-optic cables linking Svalbard to mainland Norway lie as deep as 2,700 metres below the sea’s surface. They carry vast amounts of satellite ​data downloaded at the SvalSat satellite ground station, the world’s largest and part of NASA’s Near Space Network.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nato-allies-foil-russian-subsea-cable-sabotage-plot-2026-09-10

A DA VINCI CODE-style secret code may have been hiding in plain sight inside the Great Pyramid of Giza for more than 4,500 years, a new theory suggests.

The ancient Egyptian monument, which towers over the Giza plateau outside Cairo, is the largest of the three famous pyramids and the only surviving structure of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

It was built around 4,500 years ago during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu and has long been regarded as part of his vast burial complex.

But independent researcher Sefy Levy claims the pyramid may have had another meaning, and believes clues were deliberately built into its measurements.

He says numbers produced by its height, base and sloping sides appear to closely match cycles of the Moon, stars and planets.

Levy believes the pyramid’s builders may have turned their knowledge of the skies into a giant mathematical code in stone.

Rather than being written on a wall or concealed inside a secret chamber, he claims the apparent message has been sitting in the dimensions of the pyramid itself.

“The pyramid was not built to last forever because it contained something valuable,” Levy wrote in the journal SSRN, which has not been evaluated or critiqued by Egyptologists.

“It was built to last forever because it was something valuable.”

He added, “The pyramid is not a container for knowledge. It is the knowledge, made stone.”

In his research, Levy said he divided the structure’s key measurements using fractions used in ancient Egyptian scribes.

The result, he said, mirrored important numbers in mathematics and astrology.

For example, Levy wrote that 27.5 was similar to the 27.55-day interval between successive lunar perigees, the point in the moon’s orbit when it’s closest to Earth.

Another result, 70, symbolized 70 days that the star Sirius disappears from view, when it was concealed by the sun’s glare, Levy claimed.

Other calculations Levy uncovered apparently matched movements of the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and Mars across Earth’s skies.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16990326/egyptian-da-vinci-code-great-pyramid-meaning

THIS is the shocking moment a top Buddhist monk is caught having sex with his secret lover before being arrested over a £2m embezzlement plot.

Scandalous footage of Phra Wachirayan Wi, 66, smooching a woman identified as Punyavee Rungrueang, 47, in his home was widely broadcast on Thai media.

In Thailand, Buddhist monks take a vow of celibacy and also renounce material possessions.

The CCTV clip of the pair starts with them kissing on the same chair before in graphic video they begin having sex on top of the dining table.

The footage was discovered by police during an investigation into the monk on suspicion of embezzlement.

He was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of stealing millions of pounds worth of funds, alongside the woman he was caught having sex with.

The woman is accused of helping her lover convert and conceal the cash in an elaborate scheme.

Cops launched an investigation into Phra Wachirayan, an abbot at the Wat Phutthaisawan temple in Ayutthaya, in mid-July after receiving a tip off accusing him of misconduct.

Two streams of money linked to donation receipts issued in the temple’s name were identified.

“But the money from both streams did not enter the temple’s account”, lead police investigator Pattanasak Bupphasuwan said.

“Not a single baht,” he added.

A raid on Phra Wachirayan’s home uncovered cash and gold bars worth 100million baht (£2.2million).

The abbot was defrocked shortly after his arrest. He has yet to comment.

Thailand‘s Buddhist institution has been plagued with reports of monks breaking their vow of celibacy, trafficking drugs and committing financial crimes.

The latest arrests come just over a year after another sex-and-blackmail case involving senior monks rocked Thailand’s monastic community.

In July last year, police opened a hotline for people to report “misbehaving monks”.

The service was launched after at least nine monks were exposed for having sex with a woman identified as Wilawan Emsawat, 36.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16990250/monk-caught-sex-secret-lover-embezzlement-plot

Warning: This story contains distressing details

Police in the US state of Mississippi have arrested a man in connection with the death of a black woman found hanged from a tree, and say they could soon take more people into custody.

Tasia Fortune’s body was found in the lot of an abandoned home in Jackson in August, but police only announced they were treating her death as a possible homicide earlier this week.

“That arrest today is an important development in this investigation, but it is not the conclusion,” Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney said on Friday. “This case remains active.”

Fortune’s death has worried locals in Jackson, a majority-black city in a state with a history of racial violence and lynching.

During Friday’s news conference, Brackney said the medical examiner had confirmed Fortune’s cause of death was homicide and said there would be a murder charge.

She identified the suspect as Jarques Ratliff, 51, and said there was an “association” between Ratliff, who is also black, and Fortune, but would not elaborate further.

“Additional arrests will be pending as our investigators continue to follow the evidence,” Brackney said, adding that they had interviewed 15 people in the case.

Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, told the BBC that she cried when police called to update her about the arrest, saying: “I guess I do feel like a little sigh of relief…like a little bit of peace just come over me.”

“I just hope that they’ve got the right person,” she added.

The arrest of a suspect followed weeks of what Spivey and residents in Jackson described as relative silence and inaction from local officials.

Combined with the grim nature of Fortune’s death and Mississippi’s history of racial lynchings, the lack of information about the case had left the community in shock and fear.

Spivey earlier told the BBC she had tried contacting Jackson police several times over the last two weeks, leaving multiple voicemails, and had not heard back.

Brackney addressed the family’s frustration on Friday, saying: “We have been in constant contact with the mother and the stepfather, as well as the biological father, throughout this case.”

A letter Spivey wrote to officials about the limited communication and speed of the investigation was read during a public city meeting on Tuesday – moments before Jackson police made the announcement about a possible homicide.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqjkejq5750o

The ferry caught fire near tourist hotspot Coron on Wednesday

The Philippine Coast Guard says it has recovered 30 bodies from the wreckage of a ferry that caught fire this week, bringing the total death toll to 35.

More than 130 people were on board the MV June Aster when the blaze erupted on Wednesday as it neared its destination at the tourist hotspot of Coron, after departing from Manila.

Forty-three people were rescued, with many receiving treatment in hospital, and searches continue for more than 50 people who remain unaccounted for.

The country’s coast guard says more bodies remain on the boat, which they were unable to board until Friday due to toxic fumes and lingering heat.

In a press conference, coast guard spokesperson Commodore Noemie Cayabyab said most bodies had been retrieved from the sleeping area of the boat, which had been making a 22-hour journey.

“Agencies are currently undertaking the proper recovery and identification of the remains in accordance with established procedures,” Cayabyab said.

“We recognise the grief of the families affected by this tragic incident.”

Earlier, the coast guard said preliminary interviews with the survivors suggest that the fire started in the cargo hold. Some passengers were not wearing life vests, they noted.

A survivor who was hauled to safety on a rescue boat told the BBC he had heard frantic cries onboard when the fire erupted, and was trampled by panicked people as he tried to escape.

The Philippines’ maritime authority is investigating the circumstances surrounding the incident.

The ferry, built in 2002, held valid safety certificates and passed an enforcement inspection in March, but investigators are looking into potential manifest discrepancies, cargo loading integrity, and crew emergency response protocols, the Palawan Daily reported.

The vessel was carrying 117 passengers and 17 crew members.

Atienza Interisland Ferries, the vessel’s operator, has pledged full cooperation with the inquiry.

“Our hearts remain with the affected families, and we will not rest until all individuals are accounted for,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyz755yeg9o

The Houthis’ lightning advance across the southern reaches of the Tihamah – Yemen’s arid coastal plain – appears to have taken most observers by surprise.

Until recently, the anti-Houthi coalition known as the National Resistance held significant territory along Yemen’s Red Sea coast. In a matter of days, much of this has fallen to the Houthis.

According to some estimates, the Iranian-backed rebels have captured as much as 130km (81 miles) of the country’s strategically important coastline.

It’s the group’s most impressive military coup for several years, proving that despite a civil war that has lasted 12 years, devastating Saudi air raids and attacks by American, Israeli and British forces, the Houthis remain a force to be reckoned with.

With their opponents stunned and demoralised, it’s unlikely the Houthis will be dislodged any time soon.

“Now that they are there, they’re going to be entrenched,” Hisham al-Omeisi, senior analyst at the Brussels-based European Institute of Peace, told the BBC. “And it’s going to be a lot more costly to push them out.”

Of course, the Houthis are not alone. They enjoy the backing of Iran, support that has become even more important for Tehran in the wake of the setbacks and defeats experienced by other parts of its so-called “Axis of Resistance” – Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas in Gaza and the Assad regime in Syria.

“So they redirected their support to the Houthis,” al-Omeisi said. “And of course they need that support.”

Even though most analysts agree that it’s a mistake simply to describe the Houthis as Iranian puppets, events of the past few days raise an uncomfortable new reality.

Seven months after the US and Israel launched their huge, combined assault on Iran, the regime in Tehran now exerts authority over not just one, but two of the world’s most important maritime passages: the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and the Bab al-Mandab, gateway to the Red Sea (and the Suez Canal).

“Now Iran, directly and through proxies, controls two of the most strategic choke points in the Middle East and the world,” says Farea al-Muslimi, a research fellow at London’s Chatham House think tank, “controlling more than 35% of the fuel and oil trade globally.”

“This is as much leverage as a nuclear bomb,” he says.

If the Houthis have also taken control of several key islands in the Red Sea, including Perim – which sits in the middle of the narrowest point of the Bab al-Mandab – then the group’s ability to interfere with international shipping will be greatly enhanced.

As the group’s actions in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza proved, shipping in the Red Sea is highly vulnerable to Houthi missiles, drones and small attack boats.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v4zgzr1kxo

Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen tried to use Anthropic’s powerful Claude AI model to craft software for use in ballistic missiles, according to an alarming report released by the company.

Anthropic did not identify the Houthis by name – instead referencing “a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs” using Claude. The reference almost certainly refers to the Houthis, who control the region.

They were trying to build a “guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance,” as well as a “multi-stage ballistic missile” and a “multi-variant missile … that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant,” according to Anthropic’s report, which was published Thursday.

“The actors used Claude Code in place of human software engineers to develop the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle,” the company said.

To get around Anthropic’s built-in safeguards for the AI model, the Houthis tried “hiding their goals and the products the software was meant for,” according to the report. They also broke up their request across multiple sessions of use.

Anthropic said its safeguards “blocked many of their requests, but not all of them.”

“We do not have evidence the actors succeeded in fielding an operational device; but they did test-fire a guided rocket,” the report said. “This field test appears to have failed: within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed.”

Anthropic’s report detailed several other shocking episodes in which bad actors attempted to misuse its models in ways that could’ve caused harm.

In one case, an Iran-linked group asked Anthropic’s model to compile information that could be used against US military targets, including records on American ship and aircraft movements as well as weaknesses in their communications systems.

Elsewhere, the company said it disrupted efforts by scientists to use its AI models for research that could have aided the construction of biological weapons.

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/11/business/iran-backed-rebels-in-yemen-tried-using-anthropics-claude-to-build-guided-missiles-alarming-report-finds

In the “Terminator” movie series, the artificial-intelligence system known as Skynet is given control of the nation’s nuclear weapons and uses it to try to destroy humanity.

One reason that apocalyptic scenarios involving AI are implausible is that, having seen how that particular movie ends, we are unlikely to be foolish enough to give AI custody of the most destructive weapons on the planet.

The unthinkable is now a hot topic of conversation, as a researcher at Anthropic just resigned and issued a doomsday warning that has gone super viral.

According to Jacob Coxon, the rush to develop AI is “gambling with our lives,” since it will soon create “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

A current Anthropic employee then chimed in: “We really do earnestly believe A.I. could kill all humans!” He put the chances at greater than 10% in the next decade.

The idea here is that Anthropic and similar firms are, in effect, running their own Manhattan Projects, with consequences unknown and potentially very dire.

Now, ChatGPT as we know it doesn’t seem particularly well-suited to destroying humanity.

It is a souped-up version of Google that is impressively fast, but also mistake-prone.

If it can mess up basic math or the New York Yankees roster, surely it can’t carry out the complex tasks necessary to fashioning an apocalyptic event.

Tech companies, though, have labs working on so-called frontier models that are much more powerful and reportedly developing more quickly than expected.

Source : https://nypost.com/2026/09/11/opinion/why-not-to-fear-that-ai-will-kill-us-all

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS GRAPHIC CONTENT.

Kim Zolciak and Kroy Biermann’s 15-year-old son, Kroy “KJ” Biermann Jr., was granted bond on Friday as he faces seven felony charges in his sexual assault case.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Melynee Leftridge ruled that the teenager be released from jail following Friday’s contentious bond hearing, where prosecutors revealed disturbing new allegations against KJ.

His bond was set at $200,000, according to court documents obtained by Page Six. Once released, he must stay at his mom’s home and attend school virtually. Additionally, he must abstain from social media and avoid cellphone use of any kind.

KJ is also barred from having any direct or indirect contact with the alleged victim, her family or associates, and cannot be in contact with anyone aged 16 or under.

The teen is subject to electronic monitoring once released.

KJ’s attorney, Jason Sheffield, had asked Leftridge to release his client on $65,000 bond, arguing that his incarceration has been “so traumatizing” and telling the court that the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” alum, 48, would monitor her son at home.

Prosecutors opposed his release and requested a $190,000 bond, pointing to the seriousness of the allegations and telling the court that the alleged victim suffered “documented physical injury” in the April incident.

The alleged victim also pleaded with the judge to consider her safety before releasing KJ, saying in a statement read aloud in court that she had been “living in fear” and that the thought of his release “scares me more than I can put into words.”

During Friday’s hearing, Deputy District Attorney Caitlin McGillicuddy also alleged investigators previously discovered multiple videos on KJ’s phone depicting him having sex with a female family member under the age of 12.

McGillicuddy claimed the videos showed “multiple encounters” and accused KJ of using “predatory, derogatory” language toward the alleged victim. She further told the court that KJ had been under court supervision since October 2025 in connection with that separate matter.

Sheffield pushed back on the newly revealed allegations, telling Page Six in a statement Friday that the “characterizations made in court regarding the prior juvenile matter involving KJ Biermann grossly misrepresent both the facts and the ultimate resolution of that case.”

“The matter arose from inappropriate, crude behavior involving two middle-schoolers. It did not result in an adjudication for statutory rape, sexual intercourse, or any comparable offense,” he said.

Sheffield concluded, “Any suggestion otherwise is inaccurate and creates a materially misleading impression of how the juvenile matter was ultimately resolved.”

Source : https://pagesix.com/2026/09/11/celebrity-news/kj-biermann-15-released-from-jail-in-aggravated-sodomy-and-sexual-battery-case

Pakistan applied for BRICS membership in 2023 but remains outside the expanded grouping, with India’s opposition emerging as a key hurdle despite Islamabad seeking support from Russia and China.

Pakistan wants a seat at the BRICS table. It formally applied to join the grouping in 2023, has sought support from Russia and China, and even invested in the BRICS-backed New Development Bank. Yet Islamabad remains outside the bloc – with India’s opposition emerging as the biggest hurdle.

BRICS has expanded significantly since Pakistan submitted its application. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joined the grouping, turning it into BRICS+, while the bloc now represents around 49 per cent of the world’s population and about 40 per cent of global GDP on a purchasing power parity basis.

For Pakistan, joining BRICS is also seen as a way to gain access to new economic and financing opportunities as the country struggles with economic challenges. Its GDP growth was 3.70 per cent, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey.

Pakistan Wants BRICS Membership – But India Is The Roadblock

Pakistan confirmed its formal application to join BRICS in November 2023. Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch described BRICS as an “important group of developing countries” and said Islamabad wanted to contribute to the grouping.

“We believe that by joining BRICS, Pakistan can play an important role in furthering international cooperation and revitalising inclusive multilateralism”, she said.

“We also hope that BRICS will move forward on Pakistan’s request in line with its commitment to inclusive multilateralism,” she added.

Pakistan has also been lobbying existing members for support. Pakistan’s ambassador to Russia, Muhammad Khalid Jamali, told Russian news agency TASS that Islamabad was contacting BRICS members and had approached Russia in particular for backing.

However, Pakistan’s membership bid faces a major challenge from India. BRICS decisions on admitting new members are based on consensus among existing members, meaning Islamabad cannot enter the grouping without India’s approval.

Source : https://www.timesnownews.com/world/asia/pakistan-applied-to-join-brics-in-2023-still-waiting-whats-blocking-its-entry-article-156143024

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy ​said on Thursday ‌there would be no trilateral meeting ​on how ​to end the war ⁠before the ​elections in Russia.

Zelenskiy ​said Ukrainian and U.S. negotiators were in constant ​contact and ​he hoped for progress ‌in ⁠talks on energy and grain at the end ​of September ​after ⁠his meeting with U.S. ​President Donald ​Trump.

Russia ⁠will hold parliamentary elections on September ⁠20.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/zelenskiy-says-no-trilateral-peace-talks-before-elections-russia-2026-09-10

The United Arab Emirates is quietly revising plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data center project – one of the biggest outside the U.S. – after the Iran ​war prompted a rethink of how and where critical infrastructure should be built, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Originally envisaged as a 10-square-mile (26-square-kilometer) campus in Abu Dhabi, the project will ‌now likely comprise a network of data centers spread across the UAE, according to four of the sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity.

Authorities are also considering ways to better protect the facilities from drone and missile attacks, including with air defenses and by building some underground, they said. The likely modifications to the project’s blueprint have not previously been reported.

DATA CENTER PROJECT IS CENTRAL TO UAE’S GLOBAL AI AMBITIONS

Plans for the UAE-US AI Campus, which is being built in partnership with American tech companies, were announced during President Donald ​Trump’s visit last year to the wealthy Gulf state.

The project is central to the UAE’s ambitions to become a global AI powerhouse as it shifts its economy away from oil. It is led by ​G42, an AI firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE national security adviser and brother of its president.

In return for access to Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab AI chips ⁠and other advanced U.S. technology, the UAE agreed to cut AI ties with China and invest in the Stargate initiative’s American data centers. Stargate is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab and SoftBank (9984.T), opens new tab to build AI infrastructure.

The people ​who spoke to Reuters included a U.S. official, a Western diplomat and industry executives briefed on the deliberations. The news agency could not determine how close Emirati authorities are to finalizing a new masterplan or the extent to which ​the proposed changes might affect construction costs and timelines.

Construction on the first phase of the project, a $30-billion, 1-gigawatt compute cluster known as Stargate UAE, began last year with the first 200 megawatts of capacity due to come online this year. When completed, it will have enough capacity to connect every UAE government agency and commercial institution to the world’s most advanced AI models, according to Larry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer at Oracle, which is partnering with G42 on the project.

Responding to Reuters questions about potential revisions to ​the project, G42 said work on the AI campus was progressing as planned.

“The project’s specifics are subject to continuous review in line with the security, resilience and operational standards expected of critical infrastructure at this scale,” the company said ​without elaborating.

OpenAI said it was working with the UAE to achieve its AI vision and making “good progress on the infrastructure and adoption priorities needed to deliver it.”

The Emirati advanced technology ministry and the project’s other American partners – Nvidia, Oracle and Cisco (CSCO.O), opens new tab – did ‌not respond to ⁠comment requests. Japan’s SoftBank declined to comment.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/uae-revises-ai-data-center-plan-after-iranian-attacks-sources-say-2026-09-11

Norway’s Princess Astrid, an ​older sister of the late ‌King Harald, died on Friday at ​the age of ​94, the royal palace ⁠said in a ​statement.

Astrid’s brother Harald ​died last month, aged 89, after more than ​35 years on ​the throne, and the princess ‌made ⁠her last public appearance at his funeral on Wednesday.

“Throughout her ​long ​life, ⁠Princess Astrid represented the Royal ​House in ​a ⁠warm and dutiful manner,” King Haakon VIII ⁠said ​in the ​statement.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/norways-princess-astrid-dies-aged-94-two-days-after-kings-funeral-2026-09-11

Americans marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Friday with sorrow and ​somber reflection, honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field in a shocking attack that reverberates to this day.

In New ‌York, family members of the victims, many carrying pictures of their loved ones, joined Vice President JD Vance and four former U.S. presidents at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. The ceremony began, as always, at 8:46 a.m. ET (1246 GMT) with a moment of silence to mark the instant when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower in what would become the deadliest attack ever on U.S. soil.

Shortly after, victims’ family members began reading aloud the names of all 2,977 people who died on September 11, as well as the six people killed ​in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a somber recitation that lasted about four hours. In a reminder of the time that has passed, some readers were children who had never met the relatives they lost ​in 2001.

Other moments of silence followed to mark when the other three airplanes crashed and the two towers collapsed. For the first time, a seventh moment of silence honored the ⁠thousands who have died since 2001 from illnesses tied to the toxic dust that poisoned the air for months afterward.

Gregory Carafello attended the ceremony to honor the memory of his lifelong friend James Martello, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, the ​financial firm that lost more than 650 employees in the attacks. Carafello was on the 18th floor of the South Tower but managed to evacuate.

“Everyone should realize that it was a very bad, catastrophic day for many families,” he said. “These were ​not warriors. These were people like you and me going to work.”

At the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, where American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building’s west flank, killing 184, President Donald Trump chronicled some of the stories of those aboard who perished in the crash: a woman pregnant with her first child, a family of four headed to Australia, three sixth-graders on a field trip.

The president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who also delivered remarks, both used their speeches to make the case for the Iran war, which they have defended as necessary to ​prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

“We salute our first responders and law enforcement, and we love them,” Trump said. “And we salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of ​Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.”

Mourners also gathered in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the crash site where passengers brought down one of the four hijacked jetliners, United Airlines Flight 93, that had been headed for Washington.

GENERATIONAL PAIN

The attacks shaped generations of Americans who lived ‌through the ⁠day or grew up in its aftermath, influencing U.S. foreign policy, domestic politics and public attitudes toward security.

But for many whom the attacks directly affected — the victims’ families and friends, first responders and rescue workers — the anniversary is a tribute to the lives lost on a clear blue day a quarter century ago and the heartbreak that followed.

Caroline Ogonowski’s father, John, was the captain of Flight 11, which took off from Boston 47 minutes before striking the North Tower.
Ogonowski, now 39, had her first baby this year and named him after her father. She brought him to her father’s grave last week and attended a memorial ceremony in Boston on Friday.

“This year, there’s this new sadness in knowing that they won’t ever get to know ​each other,” Ogonowski, who has worked in disaster relief and ​humanitarian assistance, said in a phone interview. “My father will ⁠never know his grandson. And my son will never know his grandfather.

“We owe it to my father and all the others that we lost on that day to make sure that we continue to teach future generations about what happened, about who these people were, who these heroes were, how our country came together and became stronger because of it,” she ​added.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-mark-25-years-since-september-11-attacks-amid-enduring-grief-2026-09-11

India and Russia are looking to diversify bilateral trade beyond oil, with defence, investment, manufacturing and local-currency payments emerging as key areas of interest as per latest reports.

At the BRICS Summit, India and Russia are expected to look beyond an economic relationship increasingly driven by crude oil, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s New Delhi visit likely to put trade diversification, defence co-production, investment and local-currency payments in focus. However, given India’s Russian crude imports worth nearly $48 billion in FY26, is a meaningful shift beyond oil truly possible?

Dr Pralok Gupta Professor and International Trade Expert, Centre for WTO Studies, IIFT told Times Now Digital, “beyond oil, there are significant complementarities and scope for enhanced investment from Russia to India, particularly in defence, mining, and infrastructure sector, and India’s exports of pharmaceuticals, chemicals and agri products to Russia.”

Experts believe a long-term economic engagement will require a more diversified partnership. Dr Jaijit Bhattacharya, President, C-DEP Research said, “oil has provided the foundation for recent growth in India-Russia trade, but long-term economic engagement requires moving towards a more diversified partnership. The future of bilateral ties lies in co-development of technologies, defence manufacturing, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, and energy cooperation. The priority should be converting strategic trust into commercial linkages that create value for both economies. In addition, we need to find a solution to the Rupee-Rouble issue, where Russian entities have ended up accumulating large amounts of Rupee.”

Economists also believe resolving structural bottlenecks is the need of the hour. Mitali Nikore, Founder & Chief Economist, Nikore Associates said, “while crude oil has dominated recent India-Russia trade expansion, moving toward a balanced $100 billion bilateral target requires diversifying into high-value manufacturing and consumer goods. Realistically, India’s immediate export growth can be driven by pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, electronics components, auto parts, and specialized engineering goods where Russia faces supply chain constraints. Addressing the severe trade asymmetry, however, hinges on resolving structural bottlenecks—specifically expanding local currency settlement mechanisms, establishing seamless national payment interoperability, and streamlining non-tariff and customs clearances. A sustainable roadmap lies in moving beyond simple commodities trading toward joint industrial ventures, services exports, and mobility of skilled Indian labor in tech and healthcare, transforming a resource-heavy relationship into a broad-based economic partnership.”

Source: https://www.timesnownews.com/world/pm-modi-putin-meet-can-india-russia-trade-move-beyond-oil-article-156132730

Algeria has closed its airspace to civilian and military aircraft registered in the United Arab Emirates, after severing diplomatic ties with Abu Dhabi following years of growing tensions between the two countries.

The Algerian Defence Ministry said the ban would take effect from midnight on September 11. UAE commercial flights to and from Algiers’ Houari Boumediene International Airport will remain allowed until the end of 2026, when an existing contract expires.

Algiers said it had taken the decision after exhausting efforts to preserve bilateral relations, accusing the UAE of engaging in “provocative and hostile acts”.

Algeria Gives UAE Ambassador 48 Hours
The Algerian Foreign Ministry said it had repeatedly warned Abu Dhabi about its conduct but claimed the UAE continued with actions that had become “unacceptable or intolerable”.

Algiers has given the UAE ambassador 48 hours to comply with the decision.

The UAE Foreign Ministry expressed hope that the diplomatic rupture would be temporary, saying it wanted to preserve what it called “fraternal ties” with Algeria.

The split follows months of increasingly sharp criticism from Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who has accused the UAE of seeking to destabilise countries across the region.

In July, Tebboune said that “wherever they set foot, blood flows” and urged the UAE to stay away from Algeria.

“We want them to stay away, so that blood does not flow in our country,” Tebboune had stated.

He had previously said a diplomatic break could have happened much earlier, but Algeria had sought to avoid further divisions in the Arab world.

Sahel Rivalry Fuels Tensions
Much of the dispute centres on competing approaches to North Africa and the Sahel.

Geoff Porter of North Africa Risk Consulting said Algeria had been trying to maintain stability in the region, while it viewed UAE actions as working “directly counter” to those efforts.

Porter pointed to Abu Dhabi’s support for eastern Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar, its alleged backing of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces and a reported drone base in neighbouring Mauritania as major sources of concern for Algiers.

Algeria sees such moves as interference in its regional sphere and a potential security threat.

Wider Regional Differences
The two countries have also clashed over political and diplomatic issues beyond the Sahel.

Last year, Algerian state television accused UAE-based Sky News Arabia of running a hostile media campaign after it broadcast an interview in which historian Mohamed Amine Belghit questioned aspects of Algeria’s indigenous Amazigh identity.

Source: https://www.news18.com/world/algeria-closes-airspace-to-uae-after-severing-diplomatic-ties-following-years-of-tension-ws-l-10322153.html

The documentary was shot secretly over a period of three years on rooftops in Tel Aviv and the identities of the subjects are hidden by digitally altering their voices and appearances.

24 Israeli military insiders including intelligence officers and soldiers have opened up about the secret systems used for mass killings of Palestinian civilians during the Gaza war in a new documentary film called NAZA.

The film’s title references an Israeli military acronym used as a shorthand for civilian casualties, including men, women and children.

It got a 25-minute standing ovation at Venice premiere was made by Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

The documentary was shot secretly over a period of three years on rooftops in Tel Aviv and the identities of the subjects are hidden by digitally altering their voices and appearances. The subjects in the film speak about the secret methods such as using AI to identify and bomb low-ranking Hamas targets in their homes at night, with the knowledge that it would also kill their families.

The documentary shows how the Israeli military hacked into phones to locate targets and listened to the conversations they had with their wives and children just before they were killed.

The subjects have given first person accounts on how entire neighbourhoods were destroyed, homes burnt and civilians killed at a food distribution site.

The military has acknowledged using artificial intelligence to help identify targets, but maintains no strike is carried out without human involvement. “When it comes to ‘pressing the red button,’ only a person can do it,” said an Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity pending a formal statement from the army.

At a press conference in Venice on Thursday, Abraham said that the officers were told to describe what they did, and how the systems work.

“Some of them did not express remorse and some did. Some spoke out of indifference, some out of pride”, he said.

Many subjects in the film worked in a secret intelligence unit and reported directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One of them revealed that their mission was to “thwart peace”.

“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli film-makers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” Abraham and Szor said in a statement.

Source: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/we-were-told-to-thwart-peace-israeli-insiders-reveal-dark-gaza-war-secrets-12030399?pfrom=home-ndtvworld_world_top_scroll

Under the planned rule change, published in the Federal Register by the US Department of Homeland Security, those with H-1B and certain other temporary work visas would have to leave the country as soon as their employment ends.

The Trump administration has proposed eliminating a 60-day grace period that allows certain immigrants, including skilled workers on H-1B visas, to stay in the United States and find a new sponsor after losing their job, according to a government notice posted online Thursday.

Under the planned rule change, published in the Federal Register by the US Department of Homeland Security, those with H-1B and certain other temporary work visas would have to leave the country as soon as their employment ends – a potential blow to top American tech companies that rely heavily on foreign workers.

It is the latest step by US President Donald Trump to limit legal migration since returning to office in January 2025. His administration has also introduced higher visa fees for skilled workers and recently paused immigrant visa appointments at US missions around the world while it implements a new training program.

Companies impacted by the change could see some disruption, DHS wrote in its proposal, but it said the jobs could go to American workers instead. In some situations, immigrant workers who leave could potentially reapply if their employer petitions for them, it added.

“DHS presumes that they will either offer the same jobs to equally qualified US workers or go through the I-129 petition process depending on their workforce requirement,” the notice said.

The 60-day grace period, in place since 2017, allows foreign workers time to find another US job or get their affairs in order – whether selling a home or pulling children out of school – before leaving the country.

H-1B visas, established by Congress in 1990, are especially critical for tech companies seeking talent from India and China, allowing them to fill roles where there is sometimes a lack of qualified US workers.

Consultancy companies such as Deloitte, PwC and Ernst & Young as well as outsourcing giants like Tata Consultancy Services , Infosys , HCL Tech and LTIMindtree are top H-1B sponsors.

Lawyers for Berardi Immigration Law, which specializes in business-related immigration issues, said the move would “sharply compress the timeline HR teams have to manage layoffs and offboarding for foreign national employees.”

If implemented, the change would also apply to E-1 international trader visa holders; E-2 commercial vehicle operator visa holders; L-1 short-term work for executives or managers with international companies; O-1 visas for people “with an extraordinary ability” in science, sports or the arts; and TN professional workers.

Source: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-moves-to-end-60-day-grace-period-for-h-1b-other-work-visa-holders-12029917?pfrom=home-ndtvworld_world_top_scroll

Canada has agreed a C$350 million ​aid package for Kyiv to acquire air defense interceptors, Prime Minister Mark ‌Carney said on Thursday after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Kyiv is running critically low on U.S.-made Patriot interceptors capable of stopping Russia’s ballistic missiles at a time when Moscow is stepping ​up its attacks.

“As Russia escalates its barbaric aerial warfare indiscriminately targeting civilian ​populations, Ukraine’s air defences are critical,” Carney told reporters in ⁠Calgary.

“Earlier today Canada and Ukraine finalised an agreement to deliver critical air defence ​interceptors … this C$350 million equipment package will help protect Ukraine’s people, infrastructure, and skies,” ​he said.
He did not give details of which interceptors would be delivered or when the aid would start flowing.
The weapons will be provided through a U.S. program that allows third-party nations to ​quickly buy and supply weapons such as Patriot missiles to Ukraine.
“I thank you ​for this package. It’s of (the) utmost importance, especially now,” said Zelenskiy.
Canada, one of Ukraine’s most vocal ‌defenders, ⁠has committed more than C$25.5 billion in overall aid since Russia invaded in February 2022, including C$8.5 billion in military assistance.
Carney also said Canada aimed to ramp up drone production to be able to produce millions of units within the ​next two years. ​A third of ⁠those would go to Ukraine, he said.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine needed more technology and funding to produce enough drones to fend ​off mass Russian attacks.
Canada is home to an estimated 1.3 ​to 1.4 ⁠million people of Ukrainian descent, forming one of the largest Ukrainian diasporas in the world.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/zelenskiy-arriving-canada-says-air-defences-winter-preparation-focus-2026-09-10/

Anthropic on Thursday said it had disrupted several allegedly malicious uses of its Claude models over ‌the past eight months, including a suspected Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign and efforts by Chinese AI firms it accused of trying to extract and replicate Claude’s capabilities.
Cybercriminals and state-backed hackers were increasingly using AI not just to assist with tasks but to orchestrate and execute large portions of cyberattacks, Anthropic said in its latest Threat Intelligence report. It added that ​humans were often overseers rather than hands-on operators.

“The use of AI went beyond simple questions and responses from a chatbot but rather ​involved the use of multi-agent frameworks executing” tasks, Anthropic said.
Anthropic said it had disrupted attacks from seven China-based labs ⁠during that period. Among the labs Anthropic named were tech giant Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab, , Moonshot, DeepSeek and Xiaomi.
Operators it linked to Alibaba ran what Anthropic called ​the largest “illicit distillation” attack, allegedly aimed at extracting capabilities of Claude models and using them to improve the Chinese tech firm’s Qwen models, the company said. Alibaba ​did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic said it observed more than 151 million exchanges it attributed to Alibaba between May and July 2026, peaking at nearly 3 million per day from more than 3,500 accounts it described as fraudulent.
Distillation refers to the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ​models in a bid to lower the costs of training a new AI tool.
Rather than running bulk queries, Kimi chatbot creator Moonshot and DeepSeek allegedly ​routed live customer conversations, which sometimes included sensitive information, through Claude and used its responses as training data, Anthropic alleged.
A hacking group whose tradecraft was consistent with Russia-based ‌threat actor ⁠Midnight Blizzard allegedly ran phishing, hotel Wi-Fi hijacking and WhatsApp-takeover operations against targets in the Ukrainian government, military and diplomatic sectors, using AI at nearly every stage, Anthropic said.

The U.S. government has previously, opens new tab linked Midnight Blizzard, a tracking term coined by Microsoft, to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service. The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The group allegedly used AI to build a system that automatically detected when its malware was flagged by ​security defenses and rewrote the code ​until it evaded detection again.
Anthropic also ⁠identified what it called “new categories of threat actors” misusing Claude, including those using the platform to “develop software for conventional weapons, including firearms, missiles, armed drones, bombs, and other munitions, as well as the targeting and control systems that ​operate them.” The report detailed incidents of operators using Claude to develop software for weapons design and development, ​or to support ⁠intelligence gathering and procurement related to weapons programs, in China, Russia, and Yemen.

source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-disrupts-russian-chinese-ai-campaigns-targeting-its-claude-models-2026-09-10/

Vice President JD Vance took center stage at the Republican convention in Dallas on Thursday in a speech seen as an early test of his 2028 White House prospects, offering a message of nationalistic pride that resonated ​with the pro-Trump crowd.
As party leaders grapple with slipping approval ratings and uncertainty over November’s midterm elections, they are also looking for signs of who might eventually carry President Donald Trump’s movement forward.

Trump ‌followed Vance with closing remarks and offered little commentary from the stage on his vice president’s high-profile appearance, instead imploring supporters to vote Republican on November 3, the stated purpose of the first-of-its-kind midterm convention.
But speaking to reporters later as he boarded Air Force One to return to Washington, Trump said Vance did “very well” and was a “very talented guy,” adding: “He’s been a great vice president, and I think he did a very good job.”
The president has yet to signal who he would back in 2028, though Republicans frequently speculate about whether ​Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio is best positioned to lead the party after he leaves office.

With Trump constitutionally barred from seeking a third term, Vance is widely regarded as a leading contender for ​the nomination. He spoke of an “American birthright” to safety and prosperity that he said Democrats opposed.
“Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you ⁠happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here and there,” Vance said, reinforcing a convention theme that cast Republicans as the party of common sense and Democrats as the party of “crazy.”

Vance’s 40-minute speech stayed largely ​on script, unlike Trump’s freewheeling speaking style, and at times resembled a presidential nominating convention speech.
But in one apparently spontaneous moment, a protester waved a Mexican flag, prompting Vance to respond, “Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, ​get your ass over there,” triggering a loud round of applause and chants of “USA, USA, USA.”

Vance then offered to buy the man a plane ticket.
Supporters cited the 42-year-old’s youth and appeal to grassroots activists as reasons he is well positioned to advance the party’s populist, anti-establishment agenda once Trump leaves the political stage.
Some in the crowd chanted “48, 48,” suggesting Vance could become the country’s 48th president in 2028, but Vance said Republicans first needed to concentrate on winning the November midterm elections.
Barbara Johnson, 58, joined the “JD” chants during Vance’s ​speech. She said his love of America came through in his remarks and that she was impressed by the way he fed off the crowd, adding that he made a “pretty dang good argument” for becoming the Republican Party’s next ​standard-bearer.

“He does have a gift and I think he is proving himself more and more that he could be the leader of the country,” Johnson, who lives in Plano, Texas, told Reuters.
Before Vance took the stage, Republicans used the convention to portray ‌Democrats as dangerous ⁠extremists ahead of November’s midterm elections, with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas accusing them, without substantiation, of being part of a “new and dangerous red-green alliance” between communists and Islamists.
FUTURE BEYOND TRUMP
Throughout the two-day gathering, speakers sought to energize Republican voters by focusing on immigration, crime and cultural issues – frequently attacking Muslim politicians – as the party confronts questions about its future beyond Trump.
Listing what he considered the ills of life under Democratic President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2025, Vance said, “We were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.”
There was less emphasis on issues that voters tell pollsters they are most concerned about such as the economy, ​especially inflation and the cost of living, and the ​U.S. war on Iran, which has driven up fuel costs ⁠and has dragged on for much longer than the four or five weeks that Trump predicted early on.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-touts-5000-payout-if-republicans-win-vance-waits-wings-2026-09-10/

Deep in Arctic waters near the remote Svalbard archipelago this spring, NATO allies caught Russian subs training to unleash a secret weapon designed to disable critical undersea cables without leaving any fingerprints.
The clandestine Russian operation, described to Reuters by two Western officials, was carried out by Moscow’s GUGI undersea warfare directorate, which used deep-sea submersibles to simulate the deployment of the sophisticated and destructive technology.

A joint operation involving Britain, Norway and the United States tracked and confronted the Russian vessels at sea, said the two officials, speaking ​on condition of anonymity. The vessels were prevented from completing their exercise and eventually left the area.
Britain and Norway disclosed in April that they had uncovered a covert Russian operation in Arctic waters. But the discovery of the new weapon, the ‌location of the operation and the U.S. involvement have not been reported.
The deep-sea face-off comes at a time when some Western intelligence officials fear the Kremlin is ramping up sabotage operations in Europe and preparing for a conflict with NATO.

Some U.S. intelligence analysts are increasingly concerned Russia may test NATO’s mutual defence pact, known as Article 5, three U.S. officials said. If it does, destroying subsea cables could be a critical part of that effort, the Western officials said.
Cables no thicker than a garden hose, lying on the seabed or buried just below, are critical to global internet connectivity and financial transactions. Their economic and strategic importance has made them targets in past conflicts, including ​in the First and Second World Wars, when they were critical to delivering orders by telegraph or telephone.
Two 1,400 km subsea fiber-optic cables linking Svalbard to mainland Norway lie as deep as 2,700 metres below the sea’s surface. They carry vast amounts of satellite ​data downloaded at the SvalSat satellite ground station, the world’s largest and part of NASA’s Near Space Network.

Russia’s Defence Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment on the incident. The Kremlin consistently denies conducting sabotage operations ⁠in NATO countries or plotting any confrontation.
Some Western officials argue that Moscow’s targeting of European states has increased in recent months as the front line in Ukraine has become largely static.
Countries including Poland, Lithuania, and Romania have confirmed various violations. Most recently, an attempted drone attack on the Leipzig/Halle Airport in August ​triggered a series of responses from Germany, including the closure of a Russian consulate in Bonn and a cultural centre in Berlin.
In August, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe visited intelligence counterparts in Moscow, in part to warn Russia against escalating sabotage operations in Europe, said two people familiar with the ​matter.

Reuters couldn’t determine if Ratcliffe raised Russia’s covert subsea operations. The Kremlin declined to say what had been discussed or to provide any further details.
ARCTIC EXERCISE
At the same time as the confrontations at sea, British and Norwegian officials took their findings to Moscow to show they were aware of the new technology – hoping it might make Russia hesitate to use it, the two Western officials said.
Russia didn’t damage any cables. The exercise focused on simulating the deployment of the technology in the event of a conflict with NATO, the officials said. They declined to detail how the technology works.
Asked for comment, NATO referred Reuters to Norwegian and UK authorities.
“Through our joint operation, we ​sent a clear message to Russia that they cannot operate covertly,” Norway’s Defence Minister Tore Sandvik said in a statement.
“We have made it unequivocally clear to Russian authorities that any attempt to target our critical infrastructure will be detected and met with consequences,” he said. “It is in no ​one’s interest to escalate tensions in the High North.”
Britain’s Defence Ministry pointed to April 9 statements acknowledging attempted covert activities in and near Norwegian and British waters by Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known by its Russian acronym GUGI. Washington and London have both imposed sanctions on the secretive directorate.
The White House didn’t ‌respond to a ⁠comment request. The CIA declined to comment.
Any escalation between Russia and NATO could quickly underscore the strategic importance of an icy expanse of water between the southern tip of the Svalbard archipelago and mainland Norway known as the Bear Gap, one of the Western officials said.
To reach the Atlantic, Russian nuclear submarines based in the Kola Peninsula would cross the 400-mile-wide stretch of water before passing Norway’s remote volcanic island Jan Mayen.
Britain said this week it deployed forces to Jan Mayen, opens new tab in August alongside Norwegian and U.S. allies for an exercise to demonstrate NATO’s ability to operate jointly in the High North.
Norway plans to have new fiber-optic cable linking Svalbard and Jan Mayen to the mainland by 2028.
‘BURGEONING RUSSIAN THREAT’
NATO allies have focused on subsea infrastructure security since the 2022 destruction of three of the four Nord Stream subsea pipelines supplying Germany with Russian gas. German prosecutors have indicted a Ukrainian man who ​was a special forces officer at the time of the attack. Ukraine denies ​any role in the sabotage.
And since 2023, more ships have ⁠sailed slowly over or near sensitive subsea infrastructure including pipelines, power cables and telecoms cables to map their location, an activity known as drifting.
Last year, drifting in the North Sea rose 52% to 13,079 vessels from the previous year, data from maritime risk analytics firm Windward showed, while activity in the South China Sea region jumped 88% to 18,401 vessels.
It’s not illegal to survey infrastructure in international waters but security experts see such extensive mapping ​as preparation for sabotage.
The activity and suspected interference with some cables prompted new initiatives launched in January last year, including NATO’s Baltic Sentry monitoring system and the UK-led Nordic Warden, bringing navies together for increased ​patrols of critical infrastructure.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nato-allies-foil-russian-subsea-cable-sabotage-plot-2026-09-10/

Iran has used a barter-like arrangement to bypass sanctions on its oil sales and buy billions of dollars’ worth of goods from China, including military gear, two senior Iranian sources and three other people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The secretive trade mechanism, in which Iranian oil is exchanged ​for credits for Chinese imports, has provided a financial lifeline for Tehran in recent years as the United States stepped up economic and military pressure over its nuclear program, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

It has also helped ‌China, the world’s biggest crude importer, retain access to discounted Iranian oil while shielding banks and companies that export to the Islamic Republic from international scrutiny or penalties, they said.
The U.S. has imposed sanctions on some smaller Chinese entities that buy or facilitate shipments of Iranian oil but has stopped short of the most punishing measures that could have repercussions on the global economy.
Washington has intensified the pressure as it tries to resolve its war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In August, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned countries to cut business ties with Iran or risk being forced out of the dollar-based financial system.

Reuters could not determine the impact on the barter-like arrangement of the U.S. naval blockade imposed on Iran ​as part of the six-month war. No Iranian crude cargoes have successfully transited the Strait of Hormuz to China since the blockade was reinstated on July 14, the news agency reported last week.
China and Iran have repeatedly denounced what they regard as illegal unilateral Western sanctions and have ​vowed to protect their interests. The countries are longstanding economic and political partners but have said little publicly about how they keep trade flowing despite international restrictions.
Iran has used the arrangement to buy medicines, vehicles and communication equipment ⁠from China, all the sources said. The manufacturers were not dealing directly with Iran, and there is no indication they were in breach of sanctions.

The mechanism was also used at least once in the past year in connection with contracts to supply Iran with air defense equipment worth millions of dollars, the ​sources said.
They did not provide details about any of the alleged transactions with Chinese manufacturers, and Reuters could not independently verify that they took place.
A U.N. embargo on the export of most major conventional weapons to Iran was reinstated with other sanctions in September 2025 after the U.S. withdrew from a 2015 nuclear accord ​between Iran and world powers during President Donald Trump’s first term, and Tehran stopped complying with some of its provisions.
Iran and China said the move by European countries to automatically restore the sanctions through a “snapback” mechanism was “legally and procedurally flawed.”

Responding to Reuters questions about the barter-like trade, China’s foreign ministry said it was “not familiar with the situation you describe.”
“China has consistently opposed unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law and have not been authorized by the United Nations Security Council,” it said.
Iran’s U.N. missions in New York and Geneva did not respond to requests for comment.
In response to questions to the White House, a U.S. official said the Trump administration works with economic partners including the European Union to “deprive ​Iran of the material means of furthering its nuclear ambitions.” The official did not comment on the arrangement described to Reuters.
AVOIDING INTERNATIONAL BANKING CHANNELS
Decades of U.S. sanctions have left Iran with few oil customers. China is the main buyer, accounting for more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil in 2025, or an average ​1.4 million barrels per day, according to commodities data and analytics firm Kpler.
In 2021, the two countries signed a 25-year strategic partnership accord covering sectors such as energy and infrastructure, but public details remain scarce.
The arrangement described to Reuters is one of a number of mechanisms through which Iran purchases goods and services from China without paying Chinese ‌companies directly through ⁠international banking channels, three of the sources said.
A Western official and two other people familiar with the matter said a buyer acting on behalf of Chinese state-owned oil trader Zhuhai Zhenrong was at least until this year depositing hundreds of millions of dollars a month with an obscure, China-based financial entity known as ChuXin.
The deposits covered purchases agreed with a Hong Kong-registered company linked to Iran’s national oil company, the people said, citing material gathered by intelligence agencies. ChuXin would then send funds to Chinese exporters and companies that build infrastructure in Iran, likely via other Chinese financial institutions.
Roughly 70% of the Iranian oil proceeds handled by ChuXin are allocated to infrastructure projects, the three sources said, an arrangement first reported by the Wall Street Journal last October. The rest go into accounts belonging to a special purpose vehicle (SPV) used to pay companies that supply goods to Iran.
The Iranian sources, who are close to the country’s decision-making circle, confirmed the existence ​of the SPV, which has not previously been reported.

All five sources said funds ​in the SPV are managed by two entities: a firm acting ⁠on behalf of China’s Ministry of Commerce and one linked to Iran’s central bank. The Iran-linked firm notifies the Chinese one when Iran’s central bank authorizes importers to access funds in the SPV so payments can be sent to the suppliers, three said.
Reuters could find no record of a financial institution called ChuXin in Chinese company registries or of the firms said to be acting on behalf of China’s commerce ministry and Iran’s central bank. One source said ChuXin might ​only exist on a spreadsheet.
Companies with the same names as those said to be acting on behalf of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and Zhuhai Zhenrong are listed in the Hong Kong companies registry, but Reuters ​could find no public records of their ownership ⁠structure or business dealings. Neither responded to questions delivered to their registered addresses, which are in offices belonging to secretarial services companies.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/how-billion-dollar-sanctions-dodge-kept-chinese-goods-flowing-iran-2026-09-10/

Iran-aligned Houthis seized control of Yemen’s port city of Mocha on Thursday and advanced down the Red Sea coast to strategic islands, military sources said, hours after President ​Donald Trump said he expected the Iran war to end after the U.S. midterm elections.
Yemeni government military sources said the Houthis had gained further leverage over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the southern ‌outlet of the Red Sea and one of the world’s most important shipping routes, and had reached the islands of Hanish.

If the Houthis were to gain control of the waterway on the opposite side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Strait of Hormuz, it could give their backer Iran a critical advantage in the war with the United States, reducing supplies through a second major transit corridor and sending oil prices surging.
It could also make it harder for Trump to find an exit from a war that has ​hurt his Republican Party’s electoral prospects ahead of the November midterms.
Yemen’s Houthi-run humanitarian operations coordination centre said in a statement that Red Sea navigation is safe for all shipping companies except for Saudi ​vessels.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, has relied on the Red Sea route since the Iran conflict effectively closed Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil used ⁠to flow.
Yemeni government forces and their allies are relocating south along the Red Sea coast to Dhubab on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, across from Perim Island, government military sources said. Control of Dhubab and the island is ​key to gaining hold of the strait, they said.
U.N. Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg told a U.N. Security Council meeting about Yemen on Thursday that the international community must act to address “a new and more dangerous phase” ​in the Yemen war.
The Houthis’ gaining control of Mocha gave them “a direct presence on the approaches to one of the world’s most vital straits,” raising serious concerns about freedom of navigation, he said.

Jenifer Neidhart de Ortiz, the U.S. representative at the meeting, accused the Houthis of acting as “agents and tools of Iran.”
“This escalation is unacceptable, and those who enable it bear responsibility for its consequences,” she said.
Iran’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the Yemen conflict could not be solved by blockade or military action ​against the Houthis and called for dialogue, without addressing Iran’s own role.
Yemeni government, Iranian and regional sources told Reuters the Houthi advance down the coast this week came with direct guidance from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Houthi spokesperson Mohammed ​Abdulsalam said, without elaborating, that the group’s operations were defensive and would stop once attacks on Yemen stopped.

OIL PRICES JUMP
Brent crude prices jumped as much as 4% on Thursday above $105 a barrel on concern over disruption to supply routes, and the ‌U.S. national ⁠average price of diesel surpassed $6 a gallon for the first time ever, according to price tracker GasBuddy.
After joining the war with an attack on Israel in March, the Houthis declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia in July and escalated attacks this month.
Tensions in the region remained high, with Saudi civil defence authorities issuing emergency alerts in the southwestern city of Khamis Mushait for the fourth time in 24 hours, as the Houthis attacked.
Pakistan has delivered a Saudi warning to Iran to rein in the Houthis to try to prevent the crisis from spiralling, Saudi, Pakistani and Iranian sources said. A senior Iranian official said Tehran’s response was: “Iran does not control the Houthis”.
The fighting comes during ​the biggest declared wave of U.S.-Iran tit-for-tat attacks on ​Gulf shipping since the war began in late ⁠February.
The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday announced new sanctions against firms and individuals aiding Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies as part of “Operation Economic Outcast,” which aims to cut off Tehran’s war funding.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-says-iran-war-end-after-us-midterm-elections-threatens-attack-pickaxe-2026-09-10/

A major shareholder in Novartis (NOVN.S), opens new tab has called for a shake-up of the Swiss drugmaker’s board to improve corporate governance after ​its shares suffered a record fall this week following back-to-back trial setbacks.
David Samra, managing director at top 20 ‌investor Artisan Partners and founding partner of International Value Group, said the board needed to strengthen its oversight of acquisitions, calling for action from board chairman Giovanni Caforio.

“I think he needs to make changes at the board level. One of them should be on improving the team that’s doing ​these deals because clearly they have been uninspiring at best,” Samra told Reuters in an interview.
“I think that the ​board needs to improve their oversight of acquisitions… they need to bring in better talent on ⁠the board to do that and have an acquisition committee.”
Samra, however, said he did not blame CEO Vas Narasimhan, who ​has overseen a 60% share price rally since he took over in 2018 despite a tough global environment with U.S. tariffs under ​President Donald Trump, and conflict from Ukraine to Iran.

RECORD SHARE PRICE SLIDE
On Tuesday, a muscle-wasting disorder drug acquired through Novartis’ $12 billion takeover of U.S. firm Avidity failed a late-stage study, sending the company’s shares tumbling more than 10% and wiping nearly $30 billion off its market value.
Novartis’ stock, which had ​been up some 20% year-to-date before this week’s slide, had already fallen a day earlier after results from heart drug pelacarsen ​disappointed investors.
Artisan is the first investor to publicly call for board changes, though others have voiced concerns about Novartis’ M&A strategy to Reuters. Public ‌pressure ⁠from activist shareholders can often encourage other investors to push for change.
“If you do a $12 billion deal and it goes to zero, the management needs to be penalised for that,” Samra said, while noting that other promising drugs could still emerge from the Avidity acquisition.

Novartis said in a statement that its financial guidance was unchanged by recent setbacks and that it had a “broad” pipeline of ​medicines.
“We continue a disciplined and ​shareholder friendly approach to capital ⁠allocation by investing in the organic business, pursuing value-creating bolt-ons, and returning capital to shareholders through a growing annual dividend and share buybacks,” it said.
‘THE ACQUISITION TRACK RECORD IS NOT VERY GOOD’
Samra ​also cited Novartis’ 2024 acquisition of German biotech MorphoSys as a disappointing deal. Investor enthusiasm ​faded after Novartis ⁠wrote down the value of the acquisition only months later.
Many analysts have viewed the latest setbacks as a test of CEO Narasimhan. But Samra said Narasimhan had done a “very good job” running the business, and instead questioned whether the board had exercised sufficient scrutiny ⁠over deals.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/major-novartis-shareholder-calls-board-shake-up-after-drug-trial-setbacks-2026-09-10/