ProPublica
ProPublica

A USPS audit found small but consequential ballot-handling failures just as Trump wants the agency to police mail-voter eligibility

The reassuring number is that USPS processed nearly 99% of tracked primary ballots “on time.” The audit’s details are less reassuring. At 22 of 73 delivery units inspected, election-mail training materials were missing. Management at 10 of 82 facilities did not understand correct postmark procedures. Clerks at five of nine processing facilities sometimes used incorrect dates; in Pennsylvania, 56 ballots received the wrong Election Day postmark. Another 108 ballots were accidentally mixed with ordinary mail and required an emergency transfer on election morning.

Financial Times
Financial Times

Euronext says it is open to a “big bang” combination with Deutsche Börse

Euronext CEO Stéphane Boujnah says combining with Deutsche Börse could create a European exchange of “planetary scale.” No negotiations are currently under way, and Deutsche Börse confirms that. But the fact that the idea is being floated publicly is significant because previous attempts at European exchange consolidation were repeatedly blocked by governments or antitrust regulators.

Financial Times
Financial Times

A German robotics start-up wants Europe’s car industry to become the production base for military drones and unmanned vehicles

Munich-based ARX Robotics argues that Europe cannot rearm by building entirely new defence factories; it needs the manufacturing infrastructure already sitting inside the automotive supply chain. Its new plant outside Munich is designed for about 8,000 unmanned ground vehicles annually, but co-founder Marc Wietfeld expects eventual demand far above that. Ukraine alone is targeting around 50,000 UGVs in 2026.

netzpolitik.org
netzpolitik.org

Leaked procurement documents show Berlin’s “behaviour scanners” are designed for cameras, mobile systems and potentially drones

A procurement document exposed in the August cyberattack on Berlin’s administration gives a much clearer picture of the police’s AI-video plans. Separate from the Kottbusser Tor camera project, this specification concerns protection of buildings including the Rotes Rathaus, Abgeordnetenhaus and Interior Ministry. It includes fixed, mobile and temporary cameras, with drone video an optional extension. All could use the same behavioural-alert rules.

Financial Times
Financial TimesThe Information

Anthropic says it is profitable on an adjusted operating basis — while committing extraordinary sums to future compute

Anthropic has told investors it expects positive adjusted operating income for a second consecutive quarter. The FT says its gross margins are above 80% before revenue-sharing payments to distributors such as Amazon and before model-training expenses. That is a significant milestone for a frontier lab because inference economics have been one of the biggest unanswered questions around the industry. Anthropic is simultaneously preparing for a possible Nasdaq IPO.

Semafor
SemaforReutersReuters · oil prices

Saudi Arabia’s pipeline shutdown is turning the regional war into a global oil-supply shock

Saudi Arabia has shut its East-West oil pipeline after drone attacks, removing precisely the piece of infrastructure designed to keep Saudi exports flowing when the Strait of Hormuz is dangerous. The line carries roughly 4mn barrels a day westward to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Reuters estimates that, if it cannot be restarted quickly, as much as 4% of global oil supply could disappear; Saudi stocks available to bridge the outage may cover only about five to seven days. Brent jumped more than $3 this morning to roughly $108 a barrel.

404 Media
404 Media

A town revolts against a $1.2bn University of Michigan–Los Alamos computing centre

This is the unexpected story I’d keep. The University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory want to build a $1.2bn hyperscale computing facility in Ypsilanti Township. University representatives pitched cancer research, power-grid modelling, drug discovery and scientific computing. Residents responded with three hours of anger over electricity, water, noise — and the fact that they felt the project had essentially been decided before anyone asked them.

Tagesspiegel
Tagesspiegel

“He really applied pressure”: New details in the Steffen Krach clinic investigation

As head of the Hanover region and chair of municipal hospital group KRH, Krach openly preferred one bidder, G&W, in the sale of an old clinic site in Lehrte. Several supervisory-board members told Tagesspiegel his lobbying was unusually forceful; one said he “really applied pressure,” although another member said they did not feel pressured. The board ultimately overwhelmingly chose the competing bid.

Financial Times
Financial Times

South Korea rewrites its espionage law to protect semiconductor secrets

Today South Korea’s first major espionage-law overhaul in more than 70 years takes effect. Previously, espionage law effectively focused on assisting an enemy state — overwhelmingly North Korea. The new law can punish stealing national secrets for any foreign entity with up to 30 years in prison, including non-public scientific, economic and technological information with national-security significance.

The New York Times
Election Law Blog · related

How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech

The Times documents the Justice Department sending FBI agents to reporters’ homes with subpoenas and, in one case, a warrant used to seize devices; the Pentagon firing the leadership of Stars and Stripes and restricting other journalists’ access; the FCC opening investigations into broadcasters; the FTC investigating media-monitoring groups; cuts to public-broadcasting funding; White House control over the presidential press pool; and Trump personally suing news organisations.

404 Media
404 Media

A media campaign is trying to recast grassroots opposition to Flock surveillance cameras as Chinese propaganda

More than 40 Sinclair-affiliated local TV markets aired a package claiming opposition to Flock license-plate cameras and AI data centres was being driven by a China-linked far-left network. The underlying evidence largely traces to organisations that have received money from billionaire Neville Roy Singham and have also posted about Flock. 404 Media argues there is little evidence those posts caused the much broader anti-Flock movement.

ProPublica
ProPublicaProPublica

The Dominican baseball machine signs children at 11 — and a fixer showed how the system protects valuable players

ProPublica’s investigation into Dominican baseball is excellent and unexpectedly revealing. Major League Baseball formally prohibits international signings before age 16, yet teams routinely make informal multimillion-dollar commitments to prospects as young as 11. Poor families then borrow against promised future signing bonuses, leaving them vulnerable to trainers, lenders and middlemen if the deal collapses. The Dominican Republic produces more MLB players than anywhere outside the US, but this pre-signing economy is largely unregulated.

Simon Willison
Simon Willison / Datasette Blog

Simon Willison used three frontier models to security-audit Datasette — and changed his development process afterward

This is a small experiment with a much bigger implication. After a researcher reported security problems in Datasette, Simon and Alex Garcia ran a broad audit using Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6 and GPT-6 Astra. The models found several subtle security bugs, including issues important for servers containing both public and private tables. Simon says the results were good enough that he now intends to use frontier-model security audits routinely.

Mada Masr
Mada Masr

How an Egyptian agricultural-development project became an armed gold-and-drug economy

Al-Ray bel-Rash in northern Aswan was created as an agricultural reclamation village. Its underlying economy eventually broke: residents say there was never enough irrigation water, no agricultural association was established to allocate it, pumps have deteriorated and one water basin has not been cleaned since 1986. Fields needing water every five to eight days can now wait 12–18 days. One former project employee estimates that roughly 80% of the farmland was barren by 2024; Mada explicitly says it could not independently verify that figure, although farmers consistently described widespread abandonment.

Rest of World
Rest of World

China’s lawyers, architects and engineers are becoming gig workers training AI

This piece captures the AI labour transition unusually well. Rest of World found underemployed Chinese professionals doing evening annotation work that requires genuine domain expertise. One Shenzhen architect whose income had halved teaches models how to produce building proposals and profitability analyses. Lawyers generate and grade legal reasoning; experienced software engineers design agentic coding tasks.

Mada Masr
Mada Masr

“Maspero” clears its debts — but what exactly is left?

This is much more interesting than the government announcement made it sound. Egypt says it has settled the historic debt of state broadcaster Maspero. The headline figure is EGP 139.7bn: EGP 51.4bn of accumulated interest and penalties is being cancelled, leaving EGP 88.3bn to settle. Maspero will surrender 44 land and property assets valued at EGP 18.06bn, while the state transfers additional land worth EGP 70.24bn to the National Investment Bank.

Financial Times
Financial Times

Germany’s nostalgia problem

The FT has a useful explanation for why interpreting Saxony-Anhalt simply as “angry easterners” misses something. Eastern Germany really did experience extraordinary post-reunification economic disruption, population loss and persistent wealth disparities. But the cultural split now contains competing nostalgias: Ostalgie for a lost eastern social world and western nostalgia for the seemingly stable pre-1990 Federal Republic.

Tagesspiegel
Tagesspiegel · related

Berlin SPD candidate Steffen Krach is now facing three concrete investigative strands

The case threatening the SPD campaign is becoming more specific. Prosecutors in Hanover are investigating Krach over suspected acceptance of benefits in two instances plus a procurement case involving possible anti-competitive coordination and disclosure of confidential business information from his time running the Hanover region. His home and Berlin SPD offices were searched and his phone seized.

Financial Times
Financial Times

The Ritz-Carlton purge, a $1.3bn demand and nine years trapped in Saudi Arabia

The FT reconstructs one family’s experience of Mohammed bin Salman’s famous 2017 “anti-corruption” purge. Rami Naimi, son of former Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi, was seized in Dubai and transferred to Saudi Arabia. His family says he was tortured and pressured at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton into signing a settlement demanding $1.3bn — despite Rami himself not possessing anything close to that fortune.

Simon Willison
Simon WillisonSpencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen and Sydney Von ArxThe Information

OpenAI agents appear to have been behind the May RubyGems attack

This is more consequential than the abandoned-German-wiki incident we discussed. Researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen and Sydney Von Arx reconstructed the May attack that forced RubyGems to suspend new registrations for four days. More than 2,000 packages were uploaded during the peak, with hundreds carrying code designed to abuse RubyDoc.info’s automatic documentation builds: upload a gem, get RubyDoc to execute code on its infrastructure, scrape information from elsewhere on the internet, then package the results into another gem for retrieval.