August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Hockey sticks are taxed; potash is not on Washington's list
The new duty reaches about 20 billion dollars of Canadian goods and stops at the edge of everything Washington cannot quickly replace. The exclusions show where the leverage runs out.
Most of Europe's 440 billion euros of US tech exposure sits inside funds
Euro area households alone carry around 440 billion euros of exposure to the largest US technology shares, and most of it is held through mutual funds and ETFs. That ownership structure decides how a correction would travel: the saver asks for the money back, and the fund has to find a buyer for the shares.
Rate-hike bets faded, and the 30-year yield still went to 5.324 per cent
The short end says the Federal Reserve stays put, and the dollar agrees. The long end climbed anyway, in Tokyo, Berlin and London as well as Washington. That picture points at the supply of long-dated paper and the compensation investors want to hold it, with crude above 91 dollars supplying the inflation excuse.
Since 1945 there has been no treaty, only a summons
Russia summoned Japan's ambassador on Tuesday over Takaichi's remarks; he left after 25 minutes without a word. Japan had summoned Russia's ambassador days earlier, after Putin's visit to Iturup. The islands were seized in 1945 and no peace treaty followed, and the exchange of protests now carries the whole dispute.
The oldest core of our galaxy was born somewhere else
The ages and chemistry of 39 globular clusters in the inner Milky Way fall into three separate sequences, and one of them belongs to another galaxy. The clusters of a vanished dwarf galaxy now sit within 6 kiloparsecs of our galactic centre.
The rule the user typed is the first thing compaction throws out
Only 17 per cent of session rules survive context compaction, and what closes the gap is a small side module rather than a stronger model. AMD's own numbers point at the same layer: its agents went from 6 per cent to more than 75 per cent of driver issues resolved by sharpening objectives, not by retraining.
The sector kept hiring; the first rung is what closed
Korea lost 285,000 young jobs in four years and 268,000 of them sat in AI-exposed work. In the same sectors, over the same years, 173,000 jobs went to people in their fifties. What thinned was the rung a career starts on, inside sectors that were still taking people on.
Two numbers, and only one of them was tested by running the code
The quantum reproducibility audit puts 24.4 per cent and 26.8 per cent side by side. Only the first was checked by trying to run the code, and that difference decides how much the headline can carry.
Vector's profit came from a price decision, Mercury's from the rain
Vector's net profit came to 240.2 million dollars and Mercury's operating earnings to 1.07 billion dollars. The two results, from either end of New Zealand's electricity system, part company over where the money came from: one from the new distribution prices the regulator set, the other from the water that reached the Waikato catchment.
What does the median recovery rate measure?
NVIDIA's quantization write-up for Nemotron 3.5 Lightning spells out the method in detail. The headline median comes out slightly higher for plain post-training quantization on the shipped checkpoint, and the method's gain collects in a handful of agentic and coding scores.