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International News Bulletin — August 13, 2026
Politics Putin visits the disputed Kuril Islands for the first time – Vladimir Putin toured a fish-processing plant, a hospital and a school on Iturup on Thursday and met the regional governor, Russian state media reported, a day after a stop on Sakhalin where the navy was holding drills. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called […]
International News Bulletin — August 12, 2026
Politics Iraq calls the September 30 coalition deadline final – Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi told the US Central Command chief, General Brad Cooper, on Wednesday that September 30 would be “the fixed and final date for ending the military mission” of the US-led coalition, and that “October 1 will mark a new day in the […]
International News Bulletin — August 10, 2026
Politics Iran sets conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz – Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said the waterway would stay closed until the United States “corrects its behaviour”, with its secretary Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr listing the lifting of the naval blockade of Iranian ports, the withdrawal of American forces from the area, an end […]
International News Bulletin — August 9, 2026
Politics Netanyahu rejects the US-backed 15-point plan for Gaza – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting on Sunday that “Israel rejects the 15-point document” and that no withdrawal would take place until Hamas is genuinely disarmed, adding that he wanted “real disarmament, not fictitious disarmament”. The framework, announced by United States President Donald […]
Weekly AI Review — August 9, 2026
🚀 Model & Product Releases Alibaba ships Qwen3.8-Max and promises open weights – Alibaba released the 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model on August 3, with 95 billion parameters active per token and a one-million-token context window. Listed API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output, against $5 and $30 for GPT-5.6 Sol. […]
International News Bulletin — August 8, 2026
Politics Iran calls a Hormuz arrangement with Oman close but conditional – Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Saturday that an agreement with Oman on shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz was “very close”, while making a full reopening of the waterway dependent on Washington honouring commitments given in a June memorandum of understanding. […]
Scientific Breakthroughs of the Week — August 8, 2026
🧬 Life Sciences & Medicine Neuroimaging model trained on routine hospital scans beats a general model at triage – A foundation model called NeuroVFM learned to read brain scans from uncurated clinical archives rather than curated research sets. It was trained by self-supervision on 5.24 million MRI and CT volumes from 567,000 studies gathered over […]
Weekly Financial News — August 7, 2026
🌍 Dominant theme of the week The trading week of 3 to 7 August 2026 was dominated by the US labour market, in a regime where investors feared a rate rise rather than a cut. The July employment report, released on Friday 7 August, showed a net loss of 23,000 jobs against a consensus of […]
International News Bulletin — August 7, 2026
Politics Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan sign joint defence pact – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a trilateral defence agreement in Mecca on Friday under which an armed attack on any one of the three states is to be treated as an […]
International News Bulletin — August 6, 2026
Politics Trump vows to hunt down leakers over munitions reports – President Donald Trump said on Thursday that people who disclosed details of American weapons stockpiles after the war with Iran were “being hunted down” and that “long-term jail sentences will be sought”, insisting the United States holds “massive amounts” of munitions. CNN reported on […]