September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Jordan stopped 13 missiles fired at Camp Titin after a Sirik wedding house was hit
Jordan's armed forces said they stopped 13 ballistic missiles aimed at Camp Titin on the Aqaba coast after shrapnel from a US strike hit a wedding house in Sirik. The Iranian Red Crescent said four people, one of them a young child, were killed and more than 50 were injured. Centcom said it had struck Revolutionary Guard targets after attempted attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The Guards claimed US personnel were killed at Camp Titin; Jordan reported no deaths, and those claims had no independent confirmation.
Joshua Wong pleaded guilty to foreign collusion at Hong Kong's High Court
Joshua Wong pleaded guilty on Wednesday at Hong Kong's High Court to collusion with foreign forces under the 2020 national security law. Prosecutors said the 29 year old conspired with Nathan Law and others to seek sanctions or blockades on Hong Kong or China from July to November 2020. The offence carries three to ten years, or life if deemed of a grave nature. Wong is already serving four years and eight months from an unofficial primary case due to end in January 2027 before his June 2025 arrest.
Kratsios puts the Carolina Principles to the G20: no new AI regulator
White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios presented the Carolina Principles at the G20 innovation ministerial the United States hosted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on 1 September. The non-binding framework asks governments to avoid creating new AI regulators and to reserve new rules for novel risks. CNET reports Kratsios described a pro-innovation mix of research, commercial pathways and industry-led standards, with any agreements moving to the G20 Leaders Summit in Miami in December. Elon Musk criticised European rules; Mark Zuckerberg pointed to open-weight models.
Matt Clifford becomes Anthropic's managing director for international affairs and keeps the Aria chair
Matt Clifford is becoming Anthropic's managing director for international affairs and will run the company's engagement with governments outside the US from London, among them the UK, Europe, Asia-Pacific and India. Clifford, who drafted the UK government's AI action plan, keeps the chair of Aria, the publicly funded research agency, and of Entrepreneurs First, which he co-founded. Chi Onwurah, who chairs the Commons science committee, called holding both a clear conflict of interest and asked the AI minister to set the boundaries.
Meir and Adenot replace a docking retroreflector and an HD camera in a 6-hour, 49-minute spacewalk
NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot finished a 6-hour, 49-minute spacewalk outside the International Space Station on 1 September. They installed a new retroreflector on Harmony's forward port, replaced a high-definition camera on the truss and swabbed the exterior for microorganisms. Late in the walk Adenot lost movement in her left shoulder; Meir found the glove heater cable harness catching and unzipping the joint cleared it. Electrical jumper cables and Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer radiator prep were only partly done and deferred.
MIT team rules out the neutrino laser: recoil and fermionic nature close the path
Wolfgang Ketterle, Hanzhen Lin and Yu-Kun Lu show in two Physical Review Letters papers that last year's neutrino laser proposal cannot be built. An atom that emits a neutrino recoils at Mach 10 and leaves the condensate at once, and the second paper finds that emitting a fermion leaves an opposing imprint telling the condensate which direction not to send the next neutrino. Joe Formaggio, who put the proposal forward, calls the scrutiny part of the scientific process.
Nagel signals an ECB rate rise on 10 September as inflation runs near 3 per cent against a 2 per cent target
Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel told Le Monde that markets are pricing a more than 95 per cent probability of a rate increase at the European Central Bank's meeting on 10 September. Inflation runs near 3 per cent rather than the 2 per cent target, Nagel said, and the June projections return it to 2 per cent only on higher rates. Euro area inflation reached 3.3 per cent in August. Nagel gave no direction beyond the September meeting and said rising global bond yields complicate the situation.
Nature retracts its global drought paper after the authors found the error in their own code
Nature published a retraction note on 2 September for the paper that appeared online on 4 June 2025 and concluded global drought is accelerating. The authors write that after being notified of errors they found further problems themselves: averages that were not area-weighted, results from an older evaporation model in one figure, a timestepping error in the code computing regional drought areas, and an unexplained masking method. Lead author Solomon Gebrechorkos says the new number will be slightly lower.
Nikkei falls 3 per cent and Kospi 3.6 per cent in Wednesday trade
Tokyo's Nikkei 225 dropped 3 per cent to 64,278.95 on Wednesday and South Korea's Kospi lost 3.6 per cent to 6,588.95 after Wall Street slipped and the bond selloff spread into Asia. SoftBank Group fell 6.3 per cent, Samsung Electronics 3.3 per cent and SK Hynix 3.5 per cent. Aju Press put the Kospi close at 6,562.72, down 4.0 per cent, with foreigners selling a net 1.91 trillion won. Brent crude traded at 95.56 dollars a barrel.
OpenAI draws 30 more Tumbler Ridge suits as plaintiffs point at Chris Lehane
The law firm Edelson PC filed 30 fresh complaints against OpenAI and Sam Altman in a San Francisco federal court. The plaintiffs are teachers, a principal and students who were present during the 10 February 2026 attack on Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, in which eight people were killed. Following seven suits in April, the new filings escalate the allegation from negligence to aiding and abetting and claim that Chris Lehane's global affairs team overruled a recommendation to alert police. OpenAI rejects that account.