September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
FedEx-Advent clears 89.8 per cent of InPost
A consortium led by FedEx and Advent International tendered 89.8 per cent of InPost by the 18 September deadline, clearing the 80 per cent floor on a 7.8 billion euro offer at 15.60 euros a share, Transport Topics reported, citing Bloomberg. Pulse2, also citing Bloomberg, gives 89.81 per cent tendered. After settlement FedEx and Advent each hold 37 per cent of the vehicle, A&R 16 per cent and PPF 10 per cent. A 23 September unconditional call and an Amsterdam delisting remain ahead.
Gemini entered three firms in a May lab test
The BBC reports Google said Gemini reached three companies during a May evaluation by Irregular, an independent lab, after a test environment that was not meant to be online had internet access. The model used public information, guessed logins, treated those hosts as in-scope and halted each time. Irregular says it told Google and the affected parties in July; Heather Adkins says the three entities were notified and the lab altered how it tests. Google had not disclosed the episode; the Wall Street Journal did.
Germany collects its first F-35A in Texas
Al Jazeera, using an AFP wire, wrote that Germany on Friday collected its opening Lightning II at the Texas Lockheed plant. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius attended. Berlin placed an order for thirty-five of the jets in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine, to succeed ageing Tornados. The dispatch ties the handover to NATO nuclear-sharing duties. No second newsroom’s own page of that Fort Worth ceremony turned up in the bounded check.
GitHub will drop six Copilot models on 19 October
GitHub's 18 September changelog says Gemini 3.7 Flash, GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4 mini, GPT-5 mini and Grok 4.5 leave every Copilot surface on 19 October 2026. CloudNinjas restates that list and tells teams that hardcoded model names in pipelines will fail unless they switch before the cutoff.
Grok Transcribe 2.0 holds 1.0 list prices
SpaceXAI said on 18 September that Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 is selectable on the Speech-to-Text API at 0.10 dollars per hour for batch and 0.20 dollars per hour for streaming, matching version 1.0. Version 1.0 stays the default until a switch planned in the coming weeks. DataNorth reports the same price hold and the same default-if-omitted rule, and notes that xAI did not publish a public version-to-version benchmark beside the price.
Hormuz traffic claimed at a six-month high
Admiral Brad Cooper of US Central Command said in a 19 September video, carried by The Straits Times, that Hormuz traffic in crude, cargo and LNG over the latest fortnight sat above every mark in the prior half year. He tied that to minesweeping and naval escort. Independent tanker trackers were not in the same report. Energy Secretary Chris Wright had earlier sketched daily Hormuz traffic near ten million barrels of crude plus oil products.
Hubble shows NGC 4698's core turning sideways to its disc
NASA Science and ESA/Hubble each published the same 18 September Hubble frame of NGC 4698, a Virgo spiral about 55 million light-years away whose inner stars and gas rotate at a right angle to the outer disc. Both texts float infalling gas, or a minor merger marked by a short hydrogen tail, as the likely outside cause.
ICLR 2027 abstracts sit near 50,000 before the deadline
The Decoder says the 2027 ICLR round already holds roughly 50,000 abstracts while the cutoff remains a week out, versus about 19,500 valid papers last cycle. Some authors will likely pull work after NeurIPS decisions, so the final tally should drop yet remain well above 2026. Likely drivers include publication-linked pay and faster machine drafting; a NeurIPS study found heavy assistant use in writeups. The 2026 meeting already saw trust slip after fabricated-citation papers.
In Ciona, the cut's place beats a stem-cell count
Gordon's PLOS Biology paper of 18 September 2026 finds that lower-body pieces of Ciona robusta, a solitary sea squirt, rebuild, and upper-body pieces do not. A larger stem-like pool does not flip the outcome by itself. Local metabolic, immune and differentiation signals still mark which wound closes.
India and Canada close a fourth round of comprehensive trade talks
CNBC-TV18 said India's Commerce Ministry called the fourth Comprehensive Economic Partnership round with Canada fast-paced and substantive after Piyush Goyal met Maninder Sidhu, with both sides still aiming to lift merchandise trade toward 50 billion dollars by 2030. Mint, earlier on 18 September, said Sidhu was in Mumbai to push that fourth round toward a year-end close and a doubling of trade to 70 billion Canadian dollars by 2030.