September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Kauai and Niihau move under a tropical storm warning as Lowell approaches
A tropical storm watch for Kauai and Niihau was upgraded to a warning as Hurricane Lowell approached. The centre was forecast to pass west of the islands late Monday, but Kauai could receive 15–25 centimetres of rain, with isolated totals up to 36 centimetres. Officials urged residents to finish preparations before conditions worsened because flooding, landslides, storm surge and strong winds remained possible.
Linux 7.3-rc2 arrives with an unusually heavy load of fixes
The second release candidate for Linux 7.3 contains an unusually large set of fixes for a normally quiet point in the cycle. Filesystems, networking and drivers feature alongside scheduling changes for hybrid processors and Nouveau Blackwell display fixes. Linus Torvalds singles out no individual contribution; his AI remark is a joke accompanying uncertainty about the unusually large size.
LME copper hits a record $14,533 a tonne
Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange rose to $14,533 a tonne, surpassing January's previous high. Tight inventories outside the United States, metal flows toward the US and expectations of broader tariffs on refined-metal imports supported the near-term move, while aging mines and demand from data centers, grids and renewable energy underpin the longer advance.
Macut takes Serbia's parliament-dissolution proposal to an extraordinary session
Serbian Prime Minister Đuro Macut is expected to propose dissolving parliament at an extraordinary cabinet session. Both reports trace the planned move to the pro-government outlet Informer, while The Straits Times also cites a Tanjug report attributed to a government official. Parliamentary elections were not due until December 2027, but President Aleksandar Vučić has pointed to October 18 or 25 for a snap vote.
Magnitude 3.2 Compton earthquake was measured on an urban fault
A magnitude 3.2 earthquake near Compton overnight on September 6 was measured over the Newport-Inglewood fault zone. The Los Angeles Times and NBC Los Angeles reported shaking across multiple counties. Initial reports listed no significant damage or injuries. This small tremor offers no basis for inferring when a larger earthquake might occur or how likely one is.
Netanyahu's Area B instruction calls for unauthorised outposts to be cleared
A Reuters report published by Al-Monitor and reporting by Ynet separately say Benjamin Netanyahu instructed authorities to clear unauthorised settler outposts in the West Bank. Ynet says 15 to 20 of about 100 unauthorised outposts are in Areas A and B. The immediate focus appears to be Area B, and no implementation date has been announced.
NEURA and SECO join forces to make robot computing hardware in Europe
NEURA Robotics and SECO announced a partnership to develop and manufacture electronic compute modules for NEURA robots, including the 4NE1 humanoid. Qualcomm Dragonwing processors will serve the robots’ distributed computing architecture. The companies plan to scale series production in Europe, develop automation for semiconductor and electronics factories, and establish a robot training hub in Italy.
OpenAI reaches its automated research intern milestone
OpenAI says its internal measurements have reached the automated research intern milestone. Three publishers tie the mid-August ratio of 3.1 agent-workdays to that same announcement, but the figure measures agent runtime rather than completed research output. Human intervention in more than half of successful four-to-eight-hour tasks shows that the company's intern definition still preserves human direction.
OpenAI's chief scientist urges slowdowns until shared safety bars exist
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki says no laboratory has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling safely at maximum speed. Three separate publications report the voluntary-slowdown, shared-safety-bar and independent-audit proposals from his September 6 essay An Alien Mind as the same event. Declining confidence in chain-of-thought monitoring sits at the centre of the argument.
Qwen-Drive 1.0 cuts road veering, while its explanations can miss the manoeuvre
Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen-Drive 1.0, a model with 4 billion parameters that combines traffic-scene understanding and vehicle-motion planning in one framework. Reinforcement learning cut its simulated road-veering rate from 24 percent to 12 percent. However, the reason it gives does not always match the manoeuvre it plans, and scenarios requiring different reactions can still be confused. Code, weights and demo data are available under Apache 2.0.