August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
The mechanism opened in Jakarta has a name and no text
China's foreign and defence ministers held the first session of a new dialogue mechanism in Jakarta. What emerged was a list of headings and the description of a milestone; no text accepted by both sides, no timetable and no monitoring body was announced. What holds Indonesia's position is less this channel with Beijing than the options it keeps elsewhere.
The RBI's window closes first, the bonds mature later
Indian banks raised 12 billion dollars offshore to catch an RBI swap that shuts on 31 August. The money was cheap because the hedge was free; the question is what the borrowing looks like once the hedge is gone.
The saturation curve was bent by the distance between the sensor and the storm
A Nature paper traces decades of apparent saturation in the geomagnetic response to regression to the mean, and the correction it applies is only as good as the error model behind it.
Two 8-kilowatt satellites in 2027, and 88,000 on the FCC's desk
Starcloud's 250 million dollars buys factory space and a place in the launch queue. The dated, unit-bearing part of the plan is two compute satellites of 8 kilowatts each on 2027 rideshare flights; the rest waits on a rocket that has yet to fly twice and a chip that has yet to be built.
What can a Liberian legislator audit in an agreement made by diplomatic notes?
Liberia agreed to receive up to 1,200 people deported from the US and explained the decision through its own history. The terms that would make the choice auditable at home — legal status, screening criteria, who pays — are the ones Monrovia has not published.
What does a speech model learn from a test it has already seen?
A study of 11 open speech models found that 6 of them typed the benchmark's mistake instead of the word in the audio. For anyone leaning on captions or dictation, that is a gap between the number on the leaderboard and the sentence on the screen.
13 are missing off Tunisia as 5 are arrested on the Ceuta route
A capsizing off Tunisia and trafficking arrests in Ceuta exposed the danger of sea routes, while a British ruling raised the bar for returning trafficking victims.
A 50 per cent border tariff took effect while a fuel tax was postponed
Washington began applying 50 per cent tariffs to about 20 billion dollars of Canadian goods. Ireland meanwhile halted September and October fuel-tax increases amid price pressure.
Agentforce still books no revenue, LinkedIn hits the brakes on AI posts, Apple trims teams
Salesforce partners still see no bookings from Agentforce. LinkedIn's AI-content complaint button drew more than a million clicks, and Apple cut more than 200 jobs across Vision Pro and Siri.
Arctic freeze-thaw transitions reshape soil, riverbeds and floating ice
New work maps the Arctic soil's zero curtain, measures rapid erosion in thawing riverbeds and tracks a major Petermann Glacier break with radar.