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1. Institute for the Study of War:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accurately stated that the Kremlin's objective in Ukraine is to politically control all of Ukraine rather than to seize select Ukrainian territories such as Donetsk Oblast. Lavrov claimed in a televised interview on August 19 that the Kremlin has "never talked about the need to seize any territories" from Ukraine and that Russia's goal was not to seize Crimea, Donbas, or other areas of Ukraine. The claim seems bizarre in the context of Russia's repeated demands that Ukraine and the West recognize Russia's annexation of Ukrainian territory, including territory Russian forces do not control. It reflects the deeper Russian aims in Ukraine, however, quite accurately. Lavrov reiterated that Russia's war objectives concern "protecting" the people in Ukraine from the Ukrainian government, which the Kremlin falsely portrays as illegitimate and oppressive. Lavrov's description of the Kremlin's aim to "protect" Ukrainians from their own government reflects the fact that the Kremlin seeks to remove the democratically elected Ukrainian government and replace it with a pro-Russian government that would allow the Kremlin to control Ukraine without needing to fight for physical control over territory or annex it. Lavrov notably made demands during the interview that reject Ukraine's sovereignty including that Ukraine repeal laws regarding language and religion that are the proper concern only of the government of a sovereign state. Lavrov stated explicitly "there can be no talk of any long-term [peace] agreements" with Ukraine "without respect" for Russia's security and the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine, as "these are the reasons that must be urgently eliminated in the context of a settlement." (Source: understandingwar.com)
2. President Trump signaled on Tuesday that the U.S. is prepared to use air power to support a European security force in Ukraine but ruled out deploying American ground troops. Planning of the multination force to be sent to Ukraine if a peace settlement is reached accelerated yesterday, a day after Trump discussed the idea at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders. After Trump’s summit with his Russian counterpart in Alaska, the president tasked Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to develop options for NATO-like security guarantees for that force, according to a Western official. (Source: wsj.com)
3. If Russian President Vladimir Putin agrees to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, as urged by President Trump, he will come face-to-face with a man he has spent 3½ years excoriating as an illegitimate leader and puppet. Negotiating directly with Zelensky would run sharply counter to the narrative Putin has carefully constructed and sold to Russians in an effort to justify his 2022 invasion of Ukraine: that the war is part of a broader conflict with the West in which Zelensky and his country are mere pawns. Trump’s call for a meeting puts Putin in a bind. If he declines, he risks angering the U.S. president, who has already threatened him with more sanctions. But sitting down with Zelensky could damage him politically with the Russian elite and the broader public. (Source: wsj.com)
4. The Moscow Times:
Talks between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska sparked unease among Russia’s most outspoken pro-war bloggers, many of whom fear that the Kremlin could agree to end hostilies without achieving its stated goals in Ukraine.
A sprawling ecosystem of pro-war Telegram channels has emerged since the full-scale invasion. While loyal to Putin and the war effort, they have rarely spared criticism for the Defense Ministry or even the government.
These commentators, many of whom have direct links to the front lines and audiences in the millions, now worry that a territorial swap or premature ceasefire could not only undermine Russia’s battlefield gains — but also put the bloggers themselves in an increasingly vulnerable position.
The choice of Alaska as the location for the talks drew particular scorn.
“It’s hard to imagine a greater humiliation,” wrote pro-Russian blogger Alexei Larkin. “Not in neutral territory, but in the U.S. — and not even in Washington, but in the backwoods, where the rednecks and bears live. A place that was once ours that we sold off for pennies and still feel insecure about.” (Source: moscowtimes.com)
5. Federal prosecutors have charged a 22-year-old Oregon man with operating a vast network of hacked devices that has been blamed for knocking Elon Musk’s X social-media site offline earlier this year. The network, known as Rapper Bot, was operated by Ethan Foltz of Eugene, Ore., the prosecutors said Tuesday. Foltz couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Foltz faces a maximum of 10 years in prison on a charge of abetting computer intrusions, the Justice Department said in a news release. Rapper Bot was made up of tens of thousands of hacked devices and was capable of flooding victims’ websites with enough junk internet traffic to knock them offline, an attack known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS. In February, the networking company Nokia measured a Rapper Bot attack against a gaming platform at 6.5 trillion bits per second, well above the several hundred million bits a second of the average high-speed internet connection. (Source: wsj.com)
6. The Economist:
(AI) has worsened cybersecurity threats in two main ways. First, hackers have turned to large language models (LLMs) to extend the scope of malware. Generating deepfakes, fraudulent emails and social-engineering assaults that manipulate human behavior is now far easier and quicker. XanthoroxAI, an AI model designed by cybercriminals, can be used to create deepfakes, alongside other nefarious activities, for as little as $150 a month. Hackers can launch sweeping phishing attacks by asking an LLM to gather huge quantities of information from the internet and social media to fake personalized emails. And for spearphishing—hitting a specific target with a highly personalized attack—they can even generate fake voice and video calls from colleagues to convince an employee to download and run dodgy software.
Second, AI is being used to make the malware itself more menacing. A piece of software disguised as a PDF document, for instance, could contain embedded code that works with ai to infiltrate a network. Attacks on Ukraine’s security and defence systems in July made use of such an approach. When the malware reached a dead end, it was able to request the help of an LLM in the cloud to generate new code so as to break through the systems’ defenses. It is unclear how much damage was done, but this was the first attack of its kind, notes Mr Simonovich.
For businesses, the growing threat is scary—and potentially costly. Last year AI was involved in one in six data breaches, according to IBM. It also drove two in five phishing scams targeting business emails. Deloitte, a consultancy, reckons that generative AI could enable fraud to the tune of $40 billion by 2027, up from $12 billion in 2023. (Source: economist.com)
7. Ken Rogoff:
With long-term interest rates up sharply, public debt nearing its post–World War II peak, foreign investors becoming more skittish, and politicians showing little appetite for reining in fresh borrowing, the possibility of a once-in-a-century U.S. debt crisis no longer seems far-fetched. Debt and financial crisis tend to occur precisely when a country’s fiscal situation is already precarious, its interest rates are high, its political situation is paralyzed, and a shock catches policymakers on the back foot. The United States already checks the first three boxes; all that is missing is the shock. Even if the country avoids an outright debt crisis, a sharp erosion of confidence in its creditworthiness would have profound consequences. (Sources: rogoff.scholars.harvard.edu, foreignaffairs.com)
Newsflash: the US stock market is very concentrated. The performance of the equal-weight version of the S&P 500 — which effectively measures the average stock by weighting each constituent as 0.2% of the index regardless of their size — compared to the cap-weighted index has dropped to its weakest in 22 years…
Previous extremes of concentration came with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, and then with the market crises of 2008 and 2020. This is as tight as the market has become in good times since the internet was taking off. The similarities, with a new technology promising huge gains in profits and revenues, are obvious. For the internet then, read artificial intelligence now.
But the dominance of the very biggest stocks is new, and hints at at least one critical difference from the dot-com era. This is how the biggest 10 stocks’ weighting in the S&P 500 has changed at five-yearly intervals going back to 2000. It’s usual for a few winners to win big at any one time. That’s the nature of capitalism. It’s unheard of for 2% of the index’s companies to account for virtually 40% of its value:
9. Carlyle Compass:
More than 40 months after the Fed first hiked rates, the cost of financing a home purchase remains 250 basis points above the average rate paid on the outstanding stock of U.S. mortgages. In real estate terms, existing owners apply a 4.1% “cap rate” to the imputed rent of their property while prospective buyers face 6.58% financing costs. The resulting bid-ask spread explains the collapse in home sales volumes. For-sale inventories have risen, but remain quite low relative to the total housing stock. In many cases, households’ most valuable asset is a 30-year liability with a rate fixed at 2.75%. (Source: carlyle.com)
10. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is betting the crypto industry will become a crucial buyer of Treasuries in coming years as Washington seeks to shore up demand for a deluge of new US government debt. Bessent has signaled to Wall Street that he expects stablecoins, digital tokens that are backed by high-quality securities such as Treasuries, to become an important source of demand for US government bonds, said people familiar with the discussions. He has sought information from leading stablecoin issuers including Tether and Circle, and these discussions informed the Treasury department’s plans in the coming quarters to increase sales of short-term bills, these people said. (Source: ft.com)
11. Mr. Bessent indicated the US is satisfied with the current tariff set up with China, a signal the Trump administration is looking to maintain calm with its economic rival before a trade truce expires in November. When asked in a Fox News interview when progress in negotiations would be seen and if the US needed a trade agreement because of how tariffs were going, Bessent said that “we’re very happy” with the situation with China. “I think right now the status quo is working pretty well,” he said. (Source: bloomberg.com)
12. The United States is deploying three Aegis guided-missile destroyers to the waters off Venezuela as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to combat threats from Latin American drug cartels, according to a U.S. official briefed on the planning. The USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham and the USS Sampson are expected to arrive soon, said the official, who was not authorized to comment and spoke Tuesday on the condition of anonymity. A Defense Department official confirmed that the military assets have been assigned to the region in support of counter narcotics efforts. The official, who was not authorized to comment about military planning, said the vessels would be deployed “over the course of several months.” The deployment of U.S. destroyers and personnel comes as Trump has pushed for using the U.S. military to thwart cartels he blames for the flow of fentanyl and other illicit drugs into American communities and for perpetuating violence in some U.S. cities. (Source: apnews.com)
13. After nine months of relatively peaceful protests, Serbia's streets are beginning to resemble a state of war, with the offices of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) vandalized. Clashes between demonstrators and police with batons, tear gas, smoke bombs and flares, repeat night after night across the country. Neda Vrebac, from the citizens' assemblies in Novi Sad, has been on the streets for months. She says people are furious and that the violence on the streets is merely a reaction to the regime's violence. "We went unarmed against bayonets," Vrebac told DW. "I feel, personally, as do other citizens who regularly attend protests, very upset, insecure, and unsafe, and that is a consequence of living under fascism, with all its manifestations." (Source: dw.com)
14. MIT Technology Review:
Think of Gloo as something like Salesforce but for churches: a behavioral analytics platform, powered by church-generated insights, psychographic information, and third-party consumer data. The company prefers to refer to itself as “a technology platform for the faith ecosystem.” Either way, this information is integrated into its “State of Your Church” dashboard—an interface for the modern pulpit. The result is a kind of digital clairvoyance: a crystal ball for knowing whom to check on, whom to comfort, and when to act.
Gloo ingests every one of the digital breadcrumbs a congregant leaves—how often you attend church, how much money you donate, which church groups you sign up for, which keywords you use in your online prayer requests—and then layers on third-party data (census demographics, consumer habits, even indicators for credit and health risks). Behind the scenes, it scores and segments people and groups—flagging who is most at risk of drifting, primed for donation appeals, or in need of pastoral care. On that basis, it auto-triggers tailored outreach via text, email, or in-app chat. All the results stream into the single dashboard, which lets pastors spot trends, test messaging, and forecast giving and attendance. Essentially, the system treats spiritual engagement like a marketing funnel.
Since its launch in 2013, Gloo has steadily increased its footprint, and it has started to become the connective tissue for the country’s fragmented religious landscape. According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, the US is home to around 370,000 distinct congregations. As of early 2025, according to figures provided by the company, Gloo held contracts with more than 100,000 churches and ministry leaders.
In 2024, the company secured a $110 million strategic investment, backed by “mission-aligned” investors ranging from a child-development NGO to a denominational finance group. That cemented its evolution from basic church services vendor to faith-tech juggernaut. (Sources: gloo.com, technologyreview.com)
15. The Information:
Publishers that have struck deals to license their content to AI firms for training large language models are now discussing internally—and in at least one case, with AI firms—whether they can get paid based on how often AI businesses use their content in answers to consumer questions. That would be a drastic change from the flat-fee terms firms like OpenAI have agreed to in licensing deals with publishers so far, potentially jacking up what AI firms would have to pay.
It’s not clear what OpenAI’s attitude would be, and the company didn’t have a comment. AI search firm Perplexity is, however, developing a new model for paying publishers, which will be partly based on usage, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, in a sign that at least some AI firms are open to the idea. Perplexity, which already pays publishers a cut of the small amounts of ad revenue its search engine generates, expects to release its new model in the next few weeks, the person said. (Source: theinformation.com)
16. Once seen as holding a “golden ticket,” computer coders in the U.S. are facing the toughest job market in years, with Chinese computer science students and related professionals hit especially hard. As of Feb. 20, the unemployment rate for computer engineering and computer science graduates climbed to 7.5% and 6.1%, among the highest of all majors, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (Source: caixinglobal.com)
Quick Links: We live in a weaponized world economy. Apollo’s financial origami is smart — and scary. What it’s really like to support a big family on a modest income in America. Xiaomi Corp. intends to sell its first electric vehicle in Europe by 2027. Inside Pakistan’s strikingly successful Washington charm offensive. Russia’s harvest for 2025 is shaping up to be the worst in over 17 years. Drought depletes Turkey's Tekirdag reservoirs, forcing emergency water curbs.
Political Links: More than half a dozen states are potential targets for mid-decade tweaks to congressional boundaries. Elon Musk is quietly pumping the brakes on his plans to start a political party. President Trump’s approval rating is 15 percentage points underwater. Trump administration to screen immigrants for ‘anti-American’ views. Can a former Trump adviser fend off science cuts? Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown raises $3.6 million in 24 hours for Senate campaign. China-India talks: Narendra Modi praises ‘stable, predictable, constructive ties’.
Science/Technology Links: Chinese automakers have rolled out chargers that can mostly recharge a car’s battery in about five minutes. U.S. technology lags far behind. National pediatrics group splits with RFK Jr. on Covid vaccinations. Reuters video: World's first "Synthetic Biological Intelligence" runs on living human cells. Breathing low-oxygen air slows Parkinson’s progression in mice. Bill Gates funds $1 milion AI Alzheimer’s prize. Silicon Valley is losing touch with the rest of America.
War: China has embarked on a rapid and sustained increase in the size and capability of its nuclear forces. In Japan and South Korea there is deepening concern over the reliability of long-time American security guarantees. That concern is spurring Japan to think about the unthinkable: nuclear arms. Russia is far from battlefield supremacy. For Putin endless negotiations are simply another part of his war plans. The IISS report on the scale of Russian sabotage operations against Europe’s critical infrastructure is chilling. Mikhail Komin on why the Arctic is Putin’s next front. Inside Syria’s battle to dismantle Assad’s narco-state. Israel's ministry is set to start the call-up of around 60,000 reserve soldiers for a stepped up offensive in Gaza against Hamas.