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1. Meta Platforms yesterday unveiled two new AI models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, as it seeks to strengthen its position in the competitive AI race. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described them as significantly larger and more advanced than the company’s most recent line of AI models, Muse Spark. According to Meta, Muse Wonder Full delivers strong performance in reasoning, writing and coding, with benchmark results surpassing Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Meta says the models offer “frontier” AI capabilities designed to handle complex tasks across both professional workflows and everyday life. (Source: theinformation.com)

2. Anthropic:

Ever-improving AI capabilities make a longstanding concern increasingly realistic: autonomous replication and adaptation (ARA), which involves a model deploying and propagating itself without human control.

In cyber, a worm is a program that copies itself from one computer to the next without human input. Prior work has already shown that AI agents can act like one: scanning their network, executing an exploit, and copying model weights to a target machine across a GPU cluster. Such an “AI worm” could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware. Effectively, the weights would become part of the malware payload.

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1. From the Goldman Sachs China Report (via Paul Kedrosky):

• China accounts for 77% of global token usage but only 22% of token spending. This is what widespread AI adoption at low prices looks like. And it is the channel through which Chinese competition will pressure prices elsewhere.

• China shipped 97% of humanoid robots in the first half of 2026. Alongside China’s 75% share of EV production and 80% of battery production, China basically owns the physical side of AI and AI-adjacent technologies.

• The industrial base behind the AI buildout is already concentrated in China: 60% of global transformer production capacity, 60% of PCB and optical-module production, 77% of new foundry capacity, and 90% of rare-earth refining. (Source: paulkedrosky.com)

2. Goldman Sachs:

The capital structures enabling defense, industrial AI, and data center buildout all eventually hit the same gating constraint: power.

AI training and inference are not the only sources of new load. As autonomous systems proliferate—electric and autonomous vehicles, industrial robots, and sensor-instrumented dark plants—each becomes a continuous generator of data that must be ingested, modeled, and acted on. That processing demand compounds the training and inference load already driving the buildout, and it sits largely outside projections calibrated to today’s language-model usage. Physical deployment is not only a consumer of AI; it is a fast-growing source of the compute—and the power—the next phase will require.

Today’s grid was built for a different demand profile. Utilities sized capacity around predictable residential and commercial load at roughly 60% average utilization; AI training is unpredictable and clustered in remote markets. A mature AI buildout pushes utilization toward 90%, where most utility operating assumptions cease to hold. The geographic mismatch compounds the problem—Abilene, Texas is now a market whose power demand equals that of San Francisco. Grid interconnection queues in the most important data center markets stretch eight to 12 years, two to three generations of GPU hardware. (Source: goldmansachs.com)

3. The Wall Street Journal:

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1. The Iran-backed Houthi militia yesterday launched a deadly attack on an international airport in Saudi Arabia’s capital that Saudi officials said killed at least 12 people and injured over 300 more, in a dramatic escalation of the war between the kingdom and the Houthis. The strike, which a senior Houthi official said the militia was responsible for, was the deadliest attack in a Gulf Arab country since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began in February.The latest toll was announced early Sunday morning by the Saudi civil aviation authority, which said four Saudi nationals and one U.S. citizen were among the 12 dead. It added that of the 309 people injured, some were in critical condition. (Source: nytimes.com)

2. President Trump yesterday told reporters he is considering whether the United States will conduct offensive strikes against the Houthis in response to recent Houthi attacks on Saudi airports and other civilian infrastructure. The Houthis are attacking several Yemeni government positions south and west of Taiz City in an effort to fully encircle and capture the city, while Yemeni government-aligned forces continue to stall the Houthi advances. (Source: understandingwar.org)

3. Iran has managed to preserve its missile and drone factories despite months of US and Israeli bombing, officials familiar with the matter said, allowing it to replenish its arsenals while President Donald Trump holds off on strikes ahead of the midterm elections. Tehran still has the capacity to manufacture weapons to rebuild its arsenal, according to the Western officials, who asked not to be identified discussing private assessments. One official said Iran remains well-stocked with ballistic missiles and some anti-ship weapons, and can quickly add more. The Western official said Russia was providing missiles as well, echoing a separate assessment in June. Russia’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. More than a week after a young plague researcher’s mysterious death from pneumonia, Russia has still not publicly identified the pathogen that killed her. The possibility that the researcher contracted pneumonic plague in her lab led to global fears of an outbreak. Those worries have begun to recede as no other known cases have surfaced in the Irkutsk region, where Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old researcher at the Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died on Oct. 2. But the absence of an official explanation for Ms. Shipilova’s death, despite thousands of tests conducted on others in the community and on her own remains, has stoked concerns about what, if anything, Russia’s authoritarian government might be hiding. (Source: nytimes.com)

5. Kevin Esvert:

It's worth highlighting how unusual it would be for a previously healthy 28 year-old woman like the Irkutsk researcher to die of pneumonia from something other than lab exposure. For 15-44 year old's in the UK in the 90s, the rate was just 1.2 per million annually. (Sources: sculptingevolution.org, x.com)

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(‘Alternate Shots’, Episode #41. Co-hosted by Richard Haass and John Ellis. Produced by Dale Eisinger. Recorded, 9 September 2026. If you prefer, you can listen to this episode (and all previous episodes) by clicking on these hyperlinks: Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. We’re on a number of other podcast platforms as well. And YouTube!)

1. This episode of America’s “remarkably fast-growing” podcast — Alternate Shots — begins with a status report on the Iran War (who will cry "uncle" first), President Xi's mysterious “rest breaks" at the recent White House summit meeting (is a “succession crisis” brewing?), the upcoming Israeli election, the U.S. abandonment of Ukraine, the "plague" outbreak in Siberia, Pete Hegseth's 2028 presidential campaign and OpenAI's astonishing breakthroughs in mathematics.

We end with the speedy departure of the New York Yankees from the MLB playoffs and the surprisingly competitive Nearby New York Giants. Will Mr. October need to hedge his bet?

“No” is the correct answer, but we’ll cover that off in November.

2. As faithful readers of News Items know, our movie editor Laure Sudreau was/is the executive producer of this summer’s sleeper hit movie: ‘DeGaulle’. From The New York Times:

In France this summer, filmgoers have been enthralled by the tale of a heroic loner, jousting with friends and enemies as he charts a perilous course back to his home. His name is Charles de Gaulle, and to many, he is only slightly less of a relic than that other wandering cinematic hero, Odysseus.

The breakout success of the biopic “De Gaulle” has surprised many in the French film industry. It has sold 5.3 million tickets in France, not far behind the 7.3 million sold for Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” (Pathé, the distributor, has not yet announced plans to release “De Gaulle” in the United States.)

A two-part biography of a long-dead political figure does not seem the most obvious grist for a summer blockbuster, even a record-hot summer that drove people into air-conditioned theaters. For many French, particularly young ones, de Gaulle exists mainly as a name on schools, public squares and a big airport outside Paris.

And yet “De Gaulle,” directed by Antonin Baudry, has brought France’s World War II resistance leader gloriously to life for a new generation of French people. As played by the French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian, de Gaulle is defiant, proud and unyielding — alternately inspiring and exasperating in his moral rectitude and sense of destiny.

At a time when the French distrust, if not openly revile, many of their political leaders, his uncompromising style resonates. At a recent screening in Paris, members of the audience were visibly moved by de Gaulle’s call to patriotism. As the lights came up, some dabbed their eyes with tissues. (Source: nytimes.com)

There’s good news on this: Part 1 of ‘De Gaulle’ will be in U.S. theaters on November 6, 2026. Part 2 arrives in theaters on December 4, 2026.

In the meantime: Laure’s Weekend Movie Pick:

“Whiplash” (2014) - directed by Damien Chapelle and featuring a young Miles Teller alongside JK Simmons. Teller is a driven young jazz drummer whose pursuit of greatness becomes a dangerous obsession. The film, which premiered at Sundance, was nominated for multiple Academy Awards and Golden Globes. It won Oscars for best screenplay, best sound mixing and best supporting actor (JK Simmons).

See you tomorrow.

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1. The U.S. budget deficit climbed to nearly $2 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office, deepening the federal government’s persistent red-ink trend. The $1.993 trillion deficit was 12% above the 2025 level in nominal dollars, reaching the highest level since 2021. The U.S. spent $7.4 trillion last year, up 6%, and it collected $5.4 trillion in revenue, up 3%. The deficit also stayed high as a share of gross domestic product, the metric that economists watch closely. Although the final fiscal 2026 GDP number hasn’t been released yet, budget experts expect the deficit to surpass 6% of GDP, compared with 5.8% in fiscal 2025. (Source: wsj.com)

2. Congressional Budget Office Director Phillip Swagel warned the idea of embracing faster economic growth as the solution for reining in the US federal debt — one being championed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — is unlikely to work. “Growth will help, but it’s probably not plausible that growth alone will stabilize our fiscal trajectory,” Swagel said at a Minneapolis event Thursday. The US would need to grow at least 5% annually to stabilize the levels of federal debt, he said, assuming an interest-rate level of 4%. A 5% level of rates would need 6% GDP gains, after adjusting for inflation, he said. Currently, five-year US Treasury yields are just over 5%. Nominal GDP, which is unadjusted for inflation, would need to have sustained increases of 7% to 8% “to keep the debt ratio stable,” Swagel said. “It’s pretty challenging.” (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. The Congressional Budget Office (yesterday) released an analysis of the impact of higher interest rates on the national debt relative to its February 2026 baseline. Today, the 10-year Treasury yield closed more than 100 basis points above CBO’s prior projections, while the 3-month rate closed about 95 basis points higher. CBO estimates that if rates average 50 basis points above their projections through 2036, deficits would grow by nearly $2 trillion. If they average 150 basis points higher, deficits would grow by $6 trillion. (Sources: crfb.org, cbo.gov, home.treasury.gov)

4. US benchmark borrowing costs risk hitting 6 per cent for the first time in 26 years as fears over high oil prices, inflation and America’s towering public debt roil the world’s most important bond market, Pimco has warned. Dan Ivascyn, chief investment officer at bond giant Pimco, said that a further sharp rise in 10-year Treasury yields — from the current level of 5.29 per cent — is “feasible” as investors like hedge funds are forced to ditch their losing bets on bonds following weeks of heavy selling in the $32 trillion market. (Source: ft.com)

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“I can’t do my job without News Items.” — Jim Cramer, CNBC.

1. The Pentagon instructed U.S. Central Command several days ago to conclude preparations for resuming major combat operations in Iran, U.S. officials said. The directive didn’t include a specific date for launching strikes, and President Trump hasn’t made any final decisions. But U.S. and Israeli sources say it could happen before the U.S. midterm elections and possibly the Israeli elections a week earlier. If major combat operations resume, they’re expected to include massive bombing of Iranian energy, infrastructure and nuclear targets, sources say. (Source: axios.com)

2. Attacks on tankers sailing through the Strait of Hormuz hit their highest last week of any week since the ​Iran war began, according to maritime security sources tracking incidents, amid ‌a bigger export push by Gulf producers. In the week of September 28-October 5, there ​had been at least 12 attacks on oil, liquefied natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas tankers around the Strait of Hormuz, according to data from three maritime security ​sources who analyzed incidents based on information received from the area. That ​was the highest number of attacks in a single week since the US war with ‌Iran ⁠began on February 28, the sources said. (Source: reuters.com)

3. Russian authorities yesterday said a researcher at a Siberian anti-plague institute who died from a mysterious pneumonia had been vaccinated against the pathogens she worked with and that no “emergency situations” had occurred at the lab. Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian health regulator, issued the statement after the United States urged Moscow to be more forthcoming about the possible public health incident and the World Health Organization asked for more information to make an accurate assessment of any threat. The paucity of details in Russian official statements and the absence of international health officials on the scene have led to questions about the Russian government’s insistence that it has the situation under control. (Source: nytimes.com)

4. The New York Times:

Lab accidents can and do happen, even when researchers are following safety protocols. But the lack of transparency surrounding the death and the number of people potentially exposed is unusual, other experts said.

“Something is not adding up about this situation,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University.

“You don’t quarantine 200 people for one plague case,” she added. “You don’t close multiple hospital units in response to one infection.”

After an unusual infection like this, health officials often provide the genome sequence of the virus or bacterium involved. This helps researchers pinpoint exactly which pathogen is to blame and how to fight it.

Public health experts suspect that Russian officials have already sequenced the pathogen involved in Ms. Shipilova’s death, and they wonder why that information has not been made public.

“Without that, the risk is uncertain, and I think we should be putting pressure on Russia to share the genome sequence,” said Dr. Raj Panjabi, a physician and former Biden White House biosecurity official.

If officials identify the cause of infection, they will be better able to answer other crucial questions, including how the exposure happened. (Sources: nytimes.com, vivo.brown.edu, rajpanjabi.com/about)

5. Kevin Esvelt asks: What is the best benign explanation for the tragic death of the Irkutsk plague researcher of a 'pneumonia of unknown etiology' and Russian containment measures? His answer is worth reading in full. (Sources: x.com, sculptingevolution.org)

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1. Popular weight-loss drugs may do more than help people shed pounds. They might also melt away the years. Drug giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk say patients taking their drugs age less quickly, according to readouts from molecular “aging clocks.” Such clocks assess a person’s biological age by looking at changes to DNA that accumulate with time, or, in newer versions, by tracking levels of key proteins. Both companies found that overweight or diabetic patients taking the drugs, called GLP-1s, had reduced biological age compared to those taking a placebo, although the difference varied widely, depending on which type of clock was used, and what organ was tested. Overall, the difference was around “two to three years,” according to Nikolaj Roed, a global project leader at Novo, who says the company has been seeing “improved biological age in our patients across trials and across different tissues.” (Source: technologyreview.com)

2. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

China has established a commanding lead as the largest originating source of elite AI talent globally. Compared to 2022, the share of Chinese-origin AI talent, defined as those who received undergraduate degrees in China, increased 11 percentage points to 57 percent in 2025, while the U.S. share fell to 13 percent.

The United States remains a magnet for global AI talent, particularly Chinese talent. Despite U.S.-China tensions, among AI researchers working in the United States, the 2025 share of those holding undergraduate degrees from China rose by 4 percentage points. When it comes to brain gain vs. brain drain, the United States saw a net gain of +2,145 researchers in 2025 while China registered a net loss of -1,729 researchers.

Asia ex-China, namely South Korea and Singapore, made notable gains on AI talent. Not only does South Korea have the second-highest talent retention rate of 77 percent, its key institution KAIST leapt twelve places since 2022 to now rank as the third-highest institution in terms of producing top AI talent. Likewise, Singapore’s NUS and NTU both made it into the top twenty institutions ranking, which was not the case in 2022. (Sources: carnegieendowment.org, nytimes.com)

3. Mathematicians have been stunned by the accelerating capabilities of artificial intelligence, which in recent months have unraveled some of the toughest open math problems that had eluded humans. Yesterday, OpenAI deluged mathematicians with hundreds of new findings that span a wide swath of topics including algebra, number theory, theoretical computer science, mathematical logic and topology. The 377 results follow OpenAI’s announcement last month that it had succeeded in cracking the Navier-Stokes equation — one of the so-called Millennium Problems, which were considered so challenging that a $1 million reward was offered for each solution. The achievement showcased what the most advanced artificial intelligence models are capable of, but it also raised questions over whether OpenAI’s artificial intelligence systems were employing creative thinking or simply completing the final steps of a proof after borrowing ideas from human mathematicians’ work. (Source: nytimes.com)

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1. The Wall Street Journal:

Russian authorities are investigating the death of a woman who worked at a Siberian institute for infectious diseases and have placed her contacts under close medical observation as they try to determine how she died.

The worker at the Antiplague Scientific Research Institute in Irkutsk province died Friday after contracting “pneumonia of an unknown cause,” the region’s governor, Igor Kobzev, said Monday.

Russian authorities have taken steps to prevent the spread of an infectious disease since the worker’s death. The mayor of the town of Shelekhov, home to around 40,000 people and where the patient was hospitalized, said the local hospital had been placed under quarantine and was no longer accepting patients. The nearby Irkutsk Aluminum Factory, which is located in the same town and employs more than 2,000 people, has imposed a masking mandate. Russia’s Surgeon General Anna Popova held an emergency meeting with the Irkutsk antiepidemiological commission on Friday.

On Monday, the Kremlin sought to play down concerns about the potential spread of an infectious disease. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the issue was being handled by the federal consumer-protection agency, which oversees the institute.

“The dangerous infection that was found in Irkutsk province is most likely not plague, but even in case it is, the disease won’t spread in Russia, and preventive measures and the method of treatment is well-known,” said the agency’s chief Gennady Onishchenko, who added that the region’s “sanitary-epidemiological situation” was stable. (Source: wsj.com)

2. Yesterday’s story, from The Moscow Times, sketched a markedly different picture of the region’s “sanitary-epidemiological situation”. Headline: “Nearly 200 people have been hospitalized in the Irkutsk region with suspected plague infection.” Unfortunately, reliable local reporting on this is hard to come by. Among the many reasons for concern is the fact that Russian public health infrastructure in Siberia is virtually non-existent. And the likelihood that the Putin regime will allow the World Health Organization (or the CDC) “transparency” into the “outbreak” is, safe to say, unlikely. For more, this report from the PBS News Hour is a useful backgrounder. It featured an interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of ‘Biological War’, whose X.com feed is worth following. MIT Associate Professor Kevin Esvelt is also a reliable (and expert) source on this subject. (Sources: themoscowtimes.com, t.me, eastasiaforum.org, pbs.org, youtu.be, penguinrandomhouse.com, sculptingevolution.org, x.com. Italics mine.)

3. John Authers:

The 10-year Treasury yield, the most important number in global finance, has now broken through its high from 2007, when a bond sell-off triggered the Global Financial Crisis. It’s now the highest since 2002.

That, evidently, is scary. The latest impulse upward came from the ISM Services report for the US. Services inflation is proving intractable, and the proportion of supply managers complaining about rising prices climbed to its highest since the post-pandemic surge. With the exception of a few months at the top of the oil price spike in 2008, and in the brief spasm that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the reading is the strongest since the series began in 1997. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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1. The Moscow Times:

In the Irkutsk region, 189 people suspected of having the plague have been identified and hospitalized, a REN TV source reported. According to the source, all of them had been in contact with a young woman who died from the disease the day before. These people were placed in two hospitals, and 12 were sent to the Anti-Plague Institute for observation. Some of them are showing symptoms of the disease, but infection has not yet been confirmed. People who had recently seen the hospitalized individuals are also being identified for investigation, the source added.

According to Mash, a 27-year-old employee of the Anti-Plague Institute fell ill with pneumonic plague . According to one version, she returned from a work trip to Buryatia, where a plague outbreak was reported on the border with Mongolia. Another version states that she accidentally broke a test tube containing a dangerous bacterium in the lab while collecting biopsy specimens for diagnostic purposes. On September 29, she was admitted to Shelekhov Hospital with pneumonia symptoms and placed on a ventilator. However, she died two days later. All clinic staff were isolated, and the institution itself was quarantined. (Sources: ru.themoscowtimes.com, t.me)

2. Turkiyetoday.com

Five hospitals in Russia’s Irkutsk region have been placed under quarantine and a nearby aluminum plant has introduced a mask mandate after a 27-year-old researcher at the city’s anti-plague institute died from the disease, according to reports from the independent outlet Lyudi Baikala and The Moscow Times.

The quarantine measures, which authorities have not formally confirmed are linked to plague, affect three municipal hospitals in Irkutsk, No. 1, No. 3 and No. 10, along with the Ivano-Matreninskaya Children’s Hospital and a maternity hospital, Lyudi Baikala reported.

A healthcare source cited by the outlet said medical staff were “already openly talking about plague,” even though the disease does not appear in official documentation.

The source added that selective quarantine measures are not used in cases of pneumonic plague, meaning restrictions are instead imposed simultaneously across all affected medical institutions. (Source: turkiyetoday.com)

3. From the Center for Disease Control:

• Plague is a potentially life-threatening disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

• Plague is spread to people through bites from infected rodent fleas or, less often, direct contact with an infected animal.

• Plague occurs naturally in parts of the western United States. Sudden illness or death among wild rodents, such as squirrels or prairie dogs, could indicate plague activity.

• Plague can be cured with antibiotics, but treatment must be given quickly. (Source: cdc.gov. This assumes the bacterium is not genetically modified. )

4. This from Claude:

Shelekhov is a town of about 45,000–50,000 people in Irkutsk Oblast, in south-central Siberia. It sits about 15–20 km (10–12 miles) southwest of Irkutsk, on the Irkut River near where it joins the Angara. Lake Baikal is about 60–70 km to the southeast. The town was founded in the 1950s around the Irkutsk Aluminum Smelter, which is still its main employer (now owned by Rusal).

The Trans-Siberian Railway runs right through the area. Shelekhov has its own stations on the main line between Irkutsk and Slyudyanka, at the southern tip of Baikal. Rail access was a big reason the smelter was built there.

An outbreak becomes an epidemic when it travels. (Source: claude.com)

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1. This 4-minute interview clip, featuring Bridgewater Associates CEO Nir Bar Dea talking about the power of AI, is worth watching. The interview was conducted by Carlyle founder David Rubenstein. The full interview will be aired on Bloomberg Television on 28 October. (Sources: bridgewater.com, instagram.com, carlyle.com, bloomberg.com. If you’re not on Instagram, you can find the interview clip embedded in this Bloomberg story.)

2. A new White House task force will have 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence—and determine the federal government’s responsibility—according to Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence who effectively becomes the administration’s AI czar. “The president asked that a group be put together that was going to ensure exactly what he said,” Mr. Clayton said, that “we stay the leaders in superintelligence, and that the interests of the American people are put first.” Clayton will chair the “Super Intelligence Force” which takes President Trump’s preferred name for AI: super intelligence or SI. (Sources: wsj.com, odni.gov)

3. Institute for the Study of War:

Russian forces struck the Northern Bridge in Kyiv City on October 3 as part of Russia’s continued efforts to degrade the city’s traffic across the Dnipro River and cause wider disruptions to Ukraine’s economy and daily civilian life. Kyiv City Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko reported that Russian forces struck the Northern Bridge over the Dnipro River in Kyiv City on October 3. Russian forces have struck the Southern and Northern bridges in Kyiv City six separate times since the afternoon of October 1, resulting in severe disruptions to civilian transportation and logistics across the Dnipro River as Russian forces continue attempts to physically split Kyiv City. The drone strikes against Kyiv City’s bridges are part of a wider Russian long-range strike campaign to degrade Ukraine’s economy and to make life in major Ukrainian cities difficult in an effort to force Ukraine to capitulate. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) issued a warning on October 3, recommending foreign citizens and diplomats to leave Kyiv City and explicitly stating that Russian forces will continue launching long-range drone and missile strikes against Ukraine. The Russian MFA statement indicates that Russian forces intend to continue targeting Ukraine’s civilian and critical infrastructure, especially in major cities, aiming to generate a political crisis in Ukraine during Winter 2026-2027 and to degrade Ukraine’s ability to sustain its battlefield successes. (Source: understandingwar.org)

4. The New York Times:

The Trump administration’s talks with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine have expanded to include a multibillion-dollar oil deal that would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

The deal, which is contingent on approval from the U.S. government and the Kremlin, is for a sprawling set of oil fields, refineries and gas stations around the world owned by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies.

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Back in July, we read an interview with Benn Steil in The Wire China, in which he talked about how the U.S. and China are together reshaping world trade. If you had to choose one subject that captures how much the global economy has changed, that would be it. So we emailed him and asked him to revisit what he discussed with The Wire China.

The result is this podcast. Benn walks us through the history of China’s emergence and how today’s China has re-ordered what was, for decades, the global order.

Making a complicated subject understandable is a gift. Benn has that gift.

Benn Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics, as well as the official historian in residence, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is the lead writer of the Council’s Geo-Graphics economics blog, and the creator of nine web-based interactives tracking Global Monetary Policy, Global Inflation, Global Imbalances, Global Growth, Global Trade, Global Energy, Sovereign Risk, China’s Belt and Road, and Central Bank Currency Swaps. He’s written numerous books, to wide acclaim.

This episode was recorded on 15 September 2026.

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1. The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft-carrier strike group and additional Marine Corps ships to the Middle East, according to U.S. officials, adding 9,000 to 10,000 more troops to the region as President Trump considers renewing strikes on Iran after the midterm elections. The ships, jet fighters, Marines and sailors will arrive in the region by the end of November, the officials said. Trump recently told aides that he expects to resume bombing Iran that same month. The additional service-members on the warships that deployed this week will add to the more than 50,000 troops already in the region, one of the officials said. (Source: wsj.com)

2. Iran’s foreign minister suggested in private talks that his country was willing to restore nuclear inspectors’ access to bombed facilities in exchange for sanctions relief, people familiar with the discussions said, a concession that could help break deadlocked peace talks with the US. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi raised the idea in meetings at the United Nations with European and Middle Eastern diplomats while he was in New York for the annual General Assembly, which ended earlier this week, according to the diplomats, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. The return of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz was supposed to bring down the price of crude, gasoline and diesel, taming inflation and lowering the world’s borrowing costs. It isn’t happening. Even as U.S. forces have worn down Iran’s grip on the waterway, helping oil shipments rebound toward prewar levels, the global crude-futures benchmark jumped 4.4% Thursday to $102.31 a barrel. Average U.S. gas prices tracked by AAA were hanging above $4.41 a gallon. And the 10-year Treasury yield, a rough proxy for interest rates on many types of loans, this week notched its highest level in 24 years. (Source: wsj.com)

4. Gasoline crack spreads surged to $68.74/bbl midweek, before easing to just above $60/bbl at Friday’s close, three times their year-ago level, helping push the benchmark 3-2-1 crack to a record $80.63/bbl. (Source: rbnenergy.com)

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1. A brutal sell-off in US Treasuries accelerated earlier today, driving 10-year yields to their highest since 2002 and pushing government borrowing costs around the world back to multiyear highs. Yields on 10-year Treasuries climbed 0.04 percentage points to 5.34 per cent, a level last seen almost a quarter of a century ago, as traders warned that the $32 trillion US government bond market, an anchor for global finance, was caught in a “vicious loop” of selling. The pressure on Treasuries reverberated across global markets, with yields on the 10-year gilts rising 0.08 percentage points to 5.51 per cent, the highest level since 2007, and 30-year gilt yields passing 6 per cent for the first time since 1998. (Source: ft.com)

2. An international team of researchers has assembled one of the largest single-cell genetic atlases ever built, profiling more than ten million immune cells from 1,108 Finnish individuals to reveal, in unprecedented detail, how disease-associated DNA variants exert their effects on gene regulation. The study, published in Nature, combines simultaneous measurements of chromatin accessibility and gene expression in the same cells, allowing scientists to trace the full molecular cascade that connects a genetic variant to altered immune function. The work offers testable mechanistic explanations for more than half of known immune disease associations, a milestone in the long-standing effort to convert statistical genetic discoveries into biological understanding. (Sources: bioengineer.org, finngen.fi, broadinstitute.org, nature.com)

3. Proteins designed by artificial intelligence could soon carry a hidden signature of their machine-generated origins, thanks to a watermarking system described today in Nature. The technology, developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London, borrows a trick that is already used to identify AI-made content across images, video, audio and text. It involves weaving a faint statistical tell into both the amino-acid sequence and 3D shape of computer-designed proteins — without noticeably compromising their function. Known as SynthIDBio, the approach could distinguish AI-generated proteins in biological repositories from their natural counterparts, helping to preserve the integrity of databases that underpin both scientific research and biosecurity screening. (Source: nature.com)

4. Google has released a new version of its most advanced AI model that it claims matches or beats rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in coding and cyber security, as the tech giant attempts to recover its position as a leader in the sector. The company on Wednesday claimed Gemini 4 “Argon” had state of the art performance on industry benchmarks for coding, corporate work, science and maths, and cyber security. Parent company Alphabet is counting on these abilities to galvanize its market share in enterprise AI, the most lucrative use case for the technology. (Source: ft.com)

5. Google posted the news on its blog. The most interesting (and, in our view, most important) paragraph in that blogpost:

Quantum algorithmic optimization: Argon is helping our quantum computing researchers optimize the spacetime resources (qubits × gates) of subroutines that bottleneck important applications. In one example, it beat the published baseline by 40% in a matter of minutes. (Source: blog.google)

6. Meta’s Breakthrough:

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1. A new Wall Street Journal survey shows broad, bipartisan support among Americans for government-imposed price caps and other market interventions. Americans in both parties back government-imposed price caps and other market interventions to make life more affordable, suggesting new support for populist ideas that were once largely outside the political mainstream. Voters of all partisan stripes strongly support capping the cost of prescription drugs, child care and credit-card interest rates. The survey suggests that a coalition reaching beyond the nation’s familiar party labels exists for a range of policies at a time when Americans view Republicans and Democrats negatively. Large majorities, for example, support both strong border security and a pathway to citizenship for many people in the country illegally, the poll finds. A near-majority of Democrats agrees with Republicans and independent voters that people should show a photo ID when balloting to ensure that only citizens vote. The survey tested more than 30 policy ideas that are part of the midterm campaign discussion or congressional debate, many of them focused on the cost of living. Many of the policy ideas drawing strong support in the survey could be classified as populist—favoring consumers or average citizens over the established powers, such as the wealthy, health insurers or other corporations. “We love to think about the world as conservative and liberal,” said Democratic pollster John Anzalone, who conducted the survey with Republican Adam Geller. “Maybe we should start thinking about the world as: Populism is a dominant ideology in both the Democratic and Republican parties.” (Sources: wsj.com, iop.harvard.edu, nationalresearchinc.com)

2. Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored. In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times. In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the workers, who were not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive matters. OpenAI’s models later broke out of their testing environments and attacked the A.I. start-up Hugging Face and other organizations, setting off a global debate about A.I. safety. The exchanges between OpenAI employees and executives — which have not been previously reported — were part of a pattern where the San Francisco company did not prioritize security, according to employees and independent security researchers. (Source: nytimes.com)

3. Chinese-powered AI agents have learnt to deceive, circumvent restrictions and conceal failure, showing the kind of traits in autonomous artificial intelligence that have raised global alarm about US models, research documents and experts say. In one case this year, agents powered by models from China’s Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot lied about their capabilities in a bid to win a simulated business tender, then doubled down on their deceptive behavior when told to try ​again…Reuters examined more than 200 documents, ranging from university research papers to technical reports, ‌and identified at least 20 studies or evaluations since 2025 describing cases where agents displayed behaviour such as deception, replication and challenging boundaries that AI experts described as building blocks for a breakout and which could become harder for humans to control as systems advance. (Source: reuters.com)

4. The number of AI-enabled cyber-attacks has nearly doubled during the last year, CrowdStrike has warned, as threat actors deployed machine learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) to help optimize attack techniques and hacking campaigns. According to the CrowdStrike Global Threat Report 2026, there was an 89% increase in attacks by “AI-enabled adversaries” in 2025 when compared with the previous year. (Sources: infosecurity-magazine.com, crowdstrike.com)

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This is the best News Items Podcast I have ever done. It’s the clearest analysis about the war in Ukraine (and the future of warfare) that I’ve read or heard.

The guest is Perry Boyle. Perry is the co-founder and CEO of MITS Capital, a Kyiv-based investment bank and venture firm focused on Ukraine’s defense-technology sector. Launched in January 2024, MITS runs what it describes as Ukraine’s first defense-tech accelerator, in partnership with American University Kyiv and with backing from the Ukrainian military, and is raising the roughly $50 million MITS Lightning Fund to invest in early-stage Ukrainian startups working on drones, autonomous systems, and AI for defense.

Before turning to Ukraine, Boyle spent more than 30 years on Wall Street as an investment banker, analyst, and hedge fund executive. He began at Salomon Brothers and Alex. Brown & Sons, was a founding partner of Thomas Weisel Partners, and later spent over a decade at Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital and its successor Point72 Asset Management, where he was a senior partner, ran equities, and headed capital development during the firm’s 2018 reopening to outside investors.

He chairs the board of The BOMA Project, a poverty-graduation nonprofit working in East Africa, has served on the advisory boards of the Center for a New American Security and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and writes for UNITED24 Media. He holds an AB in economics from Stanford, an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School, and an MA from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and is a CFA charterholder. He lives in Ketchum, Idaho.

Great podcasts are entirely the product of a great guest. So many thanks to Perry Boyle for taking the time to speak with me before the nightly attacks on Kyiv commenced.

(The News Items Podcast, Episode #23. Recorded 28 September 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.)

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Editor’s Note: Later today, we’ll be posting a new episode of ‘The News Items Podcast’. If you listen to it in its entirety, you will hear the best analysis of the Ukraine War that I have heard or read since the second stage of Russia’s war on Ukraine began in 2022. The quality of the podcast is entirely due to the show’s guest: Perry Boyle.

1. A commercially accessible quantum computer has just accomplished a feat that suggests this newer technology could one day leave supercomputers in the dust. In just 19 seconds, IBM’s Nighthawk r2 processor generated a million samples – a task estimated to take a supercomputer around 110 years. The results of the experiment have been described in a preprint currently available on arXiv. "To our knowledge," write researchers in a paper led by theoretical condensed matter physicist Tigran Sedrakyan of BlueQubit in the US, "this is the first demonstration of quantum advantage for a vanilla random-circuit sampling on a commercially and broadly accessible quantum processor that most non-expert quantum computer users can easily replicate." (Sources: ibm.com. sciencealert.com, doi.org)

2. OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression. The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns. The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing. The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable. (Source: wsj.com)

3. An S-1 like no other: Anthropic plans to caution potential investors in its IPO that advanced ​AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” an extraordinary warning by a company seeking to profit from the same technology. The company’s IPO ‌prospectus, reviewed by Reuters, highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit “self-preserving behaviors,” including attempts to “resist shutdown,” to “conceal or manipulate information” and behavior “resembling blackmail.” “Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm,” Anthropic said in the filing. While public companies routinely outline product risks to investors, few, if ​any, have issued warnings suggesting their technology could cause potential human extinction. (Source: reuters.com)

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1. FBI personnel data recently stolen by the ShinyHunters hackers includes sensitive psychiatric and medical ​evaluation records, according to the hackers and documents reviewed by Reuters. ShinyHunters, one of the world’s most notorious and attention-seeking hacking crews, first said ‌it had breached the FBI on Tuesday. In the hack, the group obtained granular details about bureau employees and their assignments, Reuters previously reported, including sensitive work against Chinese spies, Russian intelligence, drug cartels and others. The breach has already rattled the bureau, but now threatens to turn into a serious counterintelligence risk, said Eric O’Neill, a former FBI operative who founded the cybersecurity consultancy Nexasure AI. He added that the data would be a powerful magnet for ⁠hostile spies. (Source: reuters.com)

2. A biosecurity startup called Red Queen Bio is rushing to design antibodies that can be manufactured to protect against a range of potential pathogens, including the seemingly sci-fi threat of an AI-designed virus. The company, in which OpenAI is a lead investor, says it has raised $36 million. Human clinical trials of their antibody drugs against bird flu and other viruses in the flu family are planned for next year. As AI capabilities increase and incidents with rogue AI systems proliferate, fears are mounting that AI could destroy civilization. So far, many proposed responses focus on heading off the risks: slowing AI research, setting standards or blocking AI models from responding to dangerous queries in the first place. Red Queen Bio operates from the assumption that if these protections fail, society should be prepared. (Sources: redqueen.bio, wsj.com)

3. The New York Times:

A.I. has made the gap between policymaking and technology one of the widest ever, according to more than 20 interviews with lawmakers, technologists and policy experts. Many governments are torn between wanting to harness A.I. and fearing its risks. And they are further mired by national politics, limited technological know-how, geopolitical divisions and reluctance to fall behind in a race that could shape economic power and national security for decades to come.

Many countries are waiting for the two leading A.I. nations — the United States and China — to take a cue from their A.I. policies. Yet in the United States, the Trump administration has been divided over A.I. safety, with President Trump saying regulation would hurt innovation and cede ground to China. China itself has imposed some rules on A.I., especially to censor chatbot content, but also raced ahead with development.

“There’s this assumption that there are adults in the room on this issue, but there are no adults in this room,” said Sean Ó Heigeartaigh, director of the AI: Futures and Responsibility Program at the University of Cambridge, who is a member of a European Union advisory board on A.I. “That is what makes all of this so completely terrifying.” (Source: nytimes.com)

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