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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

A large international study published today in Nature Medicine says an investigational liquid biopsy called PANXEON can flag early pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma from a blood draw — a disease usually found only after it has spread, Medical Xpress reported, citing City of Hope researchers.

In a prospective multicenter study of 1,785 people with and without pancreatic cancer across four countries, a microRNA signature plus the established marker CA19-9 produced a composite score. Combined with CA19-9, the assay showed 86.8% sensitivity for stage I–II disease in the testing cohort, with false-positive rates of about 3.2% in low-risk controls and 15.6% in high-risk controls. The signature alone reached an AUROC of 88.6% and 83.8% sensitivity for early-stage disease, with little cross-reactivity to other gastrointestinal cancers.

PANXEON also detected high-grade dysplasia — often treated as “stage 0” — in about 64% of tested high-risk cyst cases, suggesting a possible way to triage which cysts need closer watch. Authors stress the test would complement imaging, not replace it, and that larger prospective trials are still required. The work is registered as ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06388967.

Sources: Medical Xpress; Nature Medicine

The six-month-old U.S. war against Iran has cost about $38 billion so far, and Congress’s nonpartisan budget office says the tab is still climbing by roughly $2 billion to $3 billion a month, The Guardian, ABC News, and CBS News reported, citing a Congressional Budget Office assessment released Tuesday.

Munitions have been the single largest driver. The Guardian’s readout of the CBO findings put about $21.7 billion toward replacing weapons expended so far, including roughly $13.1 billion for missile-defense interceptors alone. The office also priced damage to American aircraft and equipment — including a destroyed THAAD radar — and warned that depleted interceptor stocks could take about five years to rebuild, leaving less ready for another major conflict.

Energy shocks tied to the Strait of Hormuz and related disruptions have pushed fuel costs higher. Outlets citing the report said the conflict is expected to add roughly half a percentage point to inflation early next year through energy and shipping knock-ons. The analysis comes as lawmakers have not enacted full supplemental funding to cover the war’s costs.

Sources: The Guardian; ABC News; CBS News

Chatham County police near Savannah, Georgia, are searching for a man caught on backyard surveillance swimming in a stranger’s pool, hopping into the hot tub, and becoming “infatuated” with a rubber duck — then pedaling off with six luxury beach towels, Fox News and Vice reported, citing the department.

Police said the trespass ran between about 2:15 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. on September 1 at a home in the 9000 block of Whitefield Avenue. Video shows the man swimming, then spending more than 10 minutes in the hot tub “intensely interacting” with the toy duck before leaving on a bicycle.

As he fled, surveillance captured six beach towels valued at about $200 each — roughly $1,200 total — in the bike’s basket, police said. Officers released photos and asked the public to call with tips if they recognize the suspect.

No injuries were reported. The case is being treated as trespassing and theft; police have not announced an arrest as of the reports published September 15.

Sources: Fox News; Vice

The OpenAI Foundation said Tuesday it is launching Data for Public Health — a grant push to build “high-quality scientific datasets” so medical AI has more real biology to learn from, MIT Technology Review reported.

In the first round, the foundation said it would give $40 million to a University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill program collecting data on novel cancer vaccines, and will also support OpenAdmet, which runs competitions where researchers try to predict drug effects. A separate $500,000 grant goes to 1Day Sooner to pursue analyst Ruxandra Teslo’s idea of buying “biotech’s lost archive” — regulatory filings and safety data from failed biotech companies that usually stay locked as trade secrets.

“Everyone is recognizing that data is the biggest bottleneck in successfully applying AI to biology,” former Altos Labs computation VP Morgan Levine told the outlet. The foundation said remaining breakthroughs in preventing and curing disease will come from pairing new models with more observations of the world — more data.

OpenAI’s nonprofit parent holds a large equity stake in the for-profit lab and has ramped grantmaking this year, including a prior $100 million gift for hepatitis C access. Foundation executive Jacob Trefethen said the charity operates separately from the product company and hopes to give away $1 billion by year-end.

Sources: MIT Technology Review