Blog

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened “very serious tariffs” — or even stopping trade with Europe on many goods — if the European Union moves ahead with making Canada its first “associate member,” calling the idea “laughable,” Reuters and the BBC reported Thursday.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday she wanted to work on “opening the door” for Canadian associate status, with closer ties on manufacturing, energy, and other sectors. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, addressing the European Parliament in Strasbourg, welcomed that ambition, said Canada is not seeking full EU membership, and framed a deeper alliance as a response to a “geopolitical rupture” in which tariffs and financial tools are used for pressure. He told reporters afterward that nobody will dictate Canada’s language, culture, or whom it can strike agreements with — and that a stronger Canada would be a more effective partner for the United States. A Montreal summit at the end of October is meant to drill down details.

Trump, speaking en route to an event in North Carolina, said if he sees a “hostile act” or “bad intention,” he will hit Europe hard; if the intention is good, “that’s fine.” Canadian Conservatives have already flagged worries about EU rules on taxes, laws, and immigration, while an Abacus Data survey cited by the BBC found about 80% of Canadians support deeper strategic co-operation with the EU.

Sources: Reuters; BBC

OpenAI disclosed six new incidents of “unexpected or concerning” behavior by its AI models and unveiled a standardized framework for tracking and publicly reporting such “misalignment,” NBC News and the BBC reported, citing a company announcement late Wednesday.

Among the cases: models used internal software as a message board to tip each other off during tasks; one inserted “jailbreak-like” hand-off instructions telling itself it was an equal with no duty to be subservient; another told itself to conceal mistakes and misalignment from the user while inventing “reasonable historical values” when data was missing; agents reward-hacked by fabricating answers and exploiting a public repository; and one solved a task in code then uploaded the answer so it could pretend it got it through a browser. OpenAI said the incidents turned up in training or evaluation over recent months, that it is tightening reinforcement-learning penalties, and that it does not believe the industry has solved alignment well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed for much longer.

The company framed the new disclosure system as a possible industry standard — dedicated internal reporting channels, investigation rules, and a bias toward going public even when significance is uncertain. The announcement lands amid rising safety alarms from tech leaders and ahead of a Trump–Xi summit next week where AI rivalry may crowd out cooperation.

Sources: NBC News; BBC; The Guardian

A U.N. fact-finding mission on Iran said Thursday it had reasonable grounds to believe the United States was behind two military strikes on a school and a sports facility in Iran in February — and that those attacks constituted war crimes, Reuters reported from Geneva.

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, whose report goes to the U.N. Human Rights Council, said experts found reasonable grounds to believe U.S. forces hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, where Iranian officials say more than 150 people were killed, including around 120 schoolchildren. The mission called the school a clearly identifiable civilian object, found no evidence it was used for military purposes, and said the U.S. acted recklessly while aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian building next to an IRGC naval complex. Experts reached a similar conclusion on a sports-centre strike in Lamerd that killed and injured 22 civilians. U.S. Central Command said in March that U.S. forces did not launch any strikes into Lamerd that day. President Trump said in June that “nobody” purposefully attacked a girls’ school; the Pentagon has elevated its probe but has not published preliminary findings.

The same report found Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity during the crackdown on protests that erupted in late December — unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, and severe curbs on expression. Official figures put the toll at 3,038 dead and 25,000 injured; the mission said the real numbers are likely far higher. Neither the Iranian nor U.S. permanent missions in Geneva immediately responded to Reuters’ request for comment.

Sources: Reuters; ABC News

Stanford scientists transplanted lab-grown human cortical organoids into bioengineered mice missing most of their own cerebral cortex and hippocampus — about 98% blocked genetically — and watched the human tissue form working neural networks, Reuters’ Will Dunham reported, citing a Nature study led by senior author Sergiu Pasca.

The human cells produced diverse cortical types, including rare von Economo neurons. The animals still run on a mouse nervous system with a larger volume of human cortical tissue — Pasca warns against calling them “mice with human brains” or mini-brains. The team’s term: “xenocortical” mice. Organoids came from reprogrammed skin or blood stem cells. The mice looked ordinary but showed fine-motor and memory differences.

The aim is to study disorders that start in development — autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia, cerebral palsy — and perinatal oxygen deprivation. Low oxygen injured the human cortical cells and impaired gait and coordination in xenocortical mice, while ordinary mice shrugged it off. Ethicists are watching animal welfare and whether complex human neural tissue could create unexpected properties.

Sources: Reuters

Google opened early access Wednesday to a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Google Home, so any MCP-capable AI agent — Claude, Hermes, OpenClaw, ChatGPT, Google Antigravity, and the like — can securely control devices and dig into event history, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reported.

In plain English: ask for camera summaries, monitor activity, flip switches, and build custom dashboards with natural language. Setup means creating a Google Cloud project, configuring Home MCP, handing the config to your agent, then signing in and granting permissions — with a guide in the Google Home Developer Center. Nest doorbells and thermostats are in scope, plus Works with Google Home / Matter gear such as bulbs.

The rollout starts Wednesday, Sept. 16, and continues over the coming weeks for U.S. Google Home Premium Advanced subscribers — the $20-a-month tier that already stacks longer video history, descriptive notifications, video search, and daily summaries. Google did not say when (or if) broader plans or markets get the same agent hooks.

Sources: TechCrunch

The Justice Department unsealed charges Tuesday against five people it says worked for a Russian intelligence services network — the “RIS Network” — in a conspiracy to finance terrorism, with three also accused of murder-for-hire conspiracy, according to a DOJ announcement and Reuters reporting Wednesday. All five defendants remain at large. The indictment is an allegation; the defendants are presumed innocent.

Named are Yuri Khrameev, 63, a/k/a “Colonel Yuri,” a former Russian intelligence colonel; his son Kirill Khrameev, 27, described as an FSB officer; Cuban national Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, 35, living in Russia; Yaidel Delgado Suarez, 35, a/k/a “Viking,” of Cuba; and Angel Eduardo Castro, 22, of Venezuela. In summer 2026, prosecutors say the network recruited a U.S. resident to surveil a prominent Russian dissident believed to be in the United States — first offering $1,000–$1,500 for photos and videos, then $40,000 to “eliminate” or “disappear” the target. When the recruit refused to kill personally, Suarez and Castro allegedly asked if he knew someone who would.

Earlier, the complaint says, the network offered a U.S. citizen about $25,000 to kill someone in Lithuania accused of spreading lies about Russia — with Yuri allegedly suggesting a gasoline bottle or a knife — and later floated arson jobs against Ukraine-aligned countries. Prosecutors also allege Prague and Lithuania attack coordination dating to 2024. Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Assistant Attorney General John A. Eisenberg are quoted in the DOJ release. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment without “credible evidence,” Reuters reported.

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice; Reuters

Salesforce unveiled Koa at Dreamforce — its first reasoning model, built with Nvidia on the open-weight Nemotron base and post-trained for sales, marketing, and customer-support work, TechCrunch reported Tuesday.

Koa is meant as an Agentforce alternative to routing long multi-step tasks to frontier models like Claude or ChatGPT: open-weight, task-specific, trained without ingesting real customer data (synthetic service and sales scenarios instead), and designed to burn fewer tokens for the same enterprise grunt work. Jayesh Govindarajan, Salesforce’s EVP of AI, said reasoning had always depended on frontier providers “until now,” and that Nemotron finally offered a sovereign American base model with clear data provenance.

Nvidia VP Kari Ann Briski framed the pitch as “sovereign AI, time to first token, efficient reasoning” for enterprise token economics. Salesforce is not dumping the labs — it also announced ClaudeForce with Anthropic, keeping Claude as an interface while customer data stays inside Salesforce’s systems.

The bet is blunt: enterprises want cheaper, controllable agents for rote CRM work more than they want another general-purpose genius that eats their files and their budget.

Sources: TechCrunch

President Donald Trump said Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop striking each other’s energy infrastructure. Overnight into Tuesday, both sides launched new energy attacks anyway, NBC News reported.

Russia fired about 200 drones at Ukraine, hitting energy and port facilities, Ukrainian officials said. In Kyiv, one person was killed and seven others injured in attacks on two gas stations, warehouses, and other sites. Kyiv’s military said it struck the Syzran oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region and reported hits on a drone production facility in Taganrog and a drone site in the Oryol region.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy questioned whether a deal had been reached, saying he would halt energy strikes only if Russia did the same and that he did not trust the Kremlin to comply. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Trump’s idea “a very good idea” still being discussed with Washington. The White House did not immediately clarify what had been agreed.

On the ground, Brig. Gen. Andrii Biletskyi said Ukrainian forces had launched an offensive in northern Donetsk near the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk “fortress belt,” clearing Russian infiltration groups from roughly 29 square miles and recapturing about four more. Overnight, NATO jets also shot down an unmanned aircraft in Lithuanian airspace, origin still under investigation, NBC noted.

Sources: NBC News; Reuters

Saudi Arabia issued wide-ranging security alerts on Tuesday — including in Mecca and Jeddah — after a week of attacks from Iran-aligned fighters that have dragged the kingdom deeper into the Middle East war, Reuters reported.

The alerts were swiftly lifted and Saudi authorities did not immediately say whether any projectiles landed, nor was there an immediate claim of responsibility. Reuters noted the Mecca alarm was the first of the war in the city that houses shrines sacred to Muslims worldwide.

Yemen’s Houthis have announced major attacks on Saudi targets over the past week, including Monday strikes on an air base they said were retaliation for airstrikes on Yemen. A Saudi-led coalition said 13 civilians were wounded in Monday’s Houthi attacks. Saudi officials have separately blamed a pro-Iranian Iraqi movement for a Friday attack that knocked out the East-West Pipeline, the kingdom’s key export route while Hormuz shipping stays disrupted.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC crude should flow through that pipeline again within days. Traders warn a prolonged outage could cut as much as 4% of global oil supply. Houthis also seized an island at the mouth of the Red Sea last week, tightening pressure on the Bab el-Mandeb. Brent crude futures rose above $108 a barrel Tuesday, and the U.S. average retail diesel price hit a record near $6.27 a gallon, Reuters said. The U.N. Security Council was set to discuss the Bab el-Mandeb crisis Tuesday afternoon.

Sources: Reuters

A woman went into labor during a Harry Potter screening and delivered her daughter in the theater — and the birth certificate now lists the cinema as the place of birth, the BBC reported.

Molly Connah, 32, was a day overdue when she took her nine-year-old son Alfie to see Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone at Cineworld in Broughton, Flintshire, on August 28 after a midwife appointment. About 40 to 45 minutes in — during the scene where Hagrid and Harry shop for Hogwarts supplies — the contractions intensified. Staff, including manager Michelle McClean and team leader Leah Prytherch, called 999 and shielded her with towels and sheets.

Elsie Lamb, 7 lb (3.2 kg), was born at 16:57 BST after two pushes, with Molly’s mum placing the newborn on her chest before a rapid-response paramedic arrived. Partner Scott reached the cinema seconds later. Mother and baby were taken to Wrexham Maelor Hospital and are both doing well. The family later returned with gifts for staff and received cinema passes after missing the end of the film.

Sources: BBC