Taylor Tailored

Southeast Asia Under Smoke A vast smoke haze generated by fires across Indonesia has spread into Malaysia and the Philippines, turning a domestic wildfire emergency into a regional air-pollution crisis. Parts of Borneo have recorded unhealthy to hazardous air while smoke has reached areas of the Philippines hundreds of kilometres from the main fire zones. The ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centr...

Civilian Cost of the Iran War A missile reportedly fired during a new wave of US attacks on Iran tore through a house where a wedding was being celebrated in the southern coastal town of Kuhestak, leaving four people dead and dozens wounded. Iranian authorities say two women and two children were among those killed, while images and video released after the attack showed extensive damage to the re...

The AI Empire Expands Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion in the largest acquisition in the chipmaker’s history, pushing the company far beyond the processors that turned it into the defining corporate winner of the artificial-intelligence boom. The deal gives Nvidia control of one of the most important platforms used by developers to discover, share, test and deploy AI models. The si...

The Doors Close Between Germany and Russia Russia is moving to shut Germany’s Goethe-Institut cultural centres in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, opening another front in the rapidly worsening confrontation between Europe’s largest economy and the Kremlin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the closures would follow Germany’s decision to end the operation of the Russian House cul...

The Doors Close Between Germany and Russia Russia is moving to shut Germany’s Goethe-Institut cultural centres in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, opening another front in the rapidly worsening confrontation between Europe’s largest economy and the Kremlin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the closures would follow Germany’s decision to end the operation of the Russian House cul...

The Price of the AI Revolution Artificial intelligence may seem a long way removed from the monthly mortgage payment leaving a British household’s bank account. But the extraordinary amount of money now being poured into data centres, computer chips, power generation and AI infrastructure could become another force keeping global interest rates higher than borrowers became accustomed to before the...

Caught Between Two Superpowers Pacific island nations are trying to turn one of the world’s fiercest geopolitical rivalries into something far more useful: money for survival. As the United States, China and their allies compete for influence across the Pacific, island leaders are increasingly pressing the major powers to prove their commitment not through speeches or military posturing, but throu...

When Machines Start Buying for Us For almost three decades, online shopping has followed roughly the same ritual. Search for something, open several websites, compare prices, read reviews, choose a seller, enter payment details and wait for a parcel. Artificial intelligence is beginning to dismantle that entire process. The emerging model is not simply AI helping people shop. It is AI increasingly...

When the Algorithm Goes Shopping A quiet revolution is starting to change how Britons shop online. John Lewis says searches reaching its products through artificial-intelligence agents have risen from just 0.3% a year ago to 2.5% today — an increase of more than eightfold. The number is still small compared with conventional online shopping, but the speed of the rise matters far more than its curr...

Tesla’s Self-Driving Push Takes Huge Step Forward France has begun testing Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Supervised system on public roads, removing another barrier between Elon Musk’s company and what could become one of the most important autonomous-driving approvals in Europe. Two Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD have been supplied for the French assessment. The results are expected during Septembe...

The Greenland Standoff Enters a New Phase Denmark has sent conscript soldiers to Greenland for the first time in recent history, marking another significant expansion of Copenhagen’s military presence on the vast Arctic island after months of extraordinary pressure from Donald Trump over its future. The young troops are not merely visiting: Danish Defence says they are carrying out operational dut...

The Classrooms Where AI Went Dark New York City is pulling generative artificial intelligence out of the hands of nearly 600,000 younger public-school students in one of the most aggressive attempts yet to redraw the boundary between children and AI. Beginning in the 2026–27 school year, student-facing generative AI will be barred from 2-K through eighth grade while the city spends a year examinin...

Israel’s Next Target Could Cross Iran’s Red Line Iran has reportedly warned the United States that a full-scale Israeli assault on a strategic mountain ridge in southern Lebanon would trigger a major Iranian retaliation, creating another potential flashpoint in a Middle East conflict already stretching across several countries. The warning centres on Ali al-Taher, a heavily contested Hezbollah-hel...

Finland Turns Giant Underground Shelter Into Wartime Refuge as Russia Fears Reshape Europe Deep inside rock beneath the Finnish city of Kuopio, thousands of civilians, students, volunteers and officials are rehearsing a scenario Europe once hoped belonged to history. Electricity and water are disrupted, cyberattacks have hit critical infrastructure and missiles could be coming from neighbouring Ru...

The Feminist Revolutionary Who Helped Change Americ Gloria Steinem, the journalist, author and activist who became one of the defining faces of the American women’s movement, has died aged 92. Steinem died peacefully at her home in New York City on Wednesday, September 2, surrounded by loved ones, according to the announcement of her death. Her death closes an extraordinary life that stretched fro...

Iran Attacks Kuwait With Missiles and Drones as Middle East War Explodes AgainKuwait scrambles air defences against Iranian strikes as Tehran targets US bases across the Gulf following renewed American bombardment

The Ukraine Endgame? Vladimir Putin has delivered one of his clearest recent signals that the war in Ukraine could still end through negotiation, saying there remains a chance for Russia and Ukraine to reach a peace agreement as Donald Trump keeps Washington’s channels to Moscow open. The Russian president said on Thursday that Russia and Ukraine ultimately need to reach an agreement themselves, w...

The Jury That Cannot Agree The Lindsay Clancy murder trial has reached its most precarious point yet. After five days and roughly 29½ hours of deliberations, the jury has twice told Judge William Sullivan that it cannot reach a unanimous decision over whether Clancy was criminally responsible when she killed her three children. The 12 jurors — nine women and three men — are due to return for a six...

The Court Case That Could Reshape Artificial Intelligence The Trump administration has thrown the weight of the United States government behind OpenAI in one of the most important copyright battles of the artificial intelligence era, arguing that training large language models on copyrighted text can qualify as fair use. The intervention pushes a dispute that began as a fight between technology co...

The iPhone Tracking Fight Apple is facing a £2 billion legal challenge in Britain over one of the iPhone’s most celebrated privacy features, with app developers accusing the technology giant of using rules designed to restrict tracking in a way that unfairly strengthened Apple’s own position. The collective claim has been filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal and is being led by Ann Pope, a for...

Crisis at Europe’s African Frontier More than 70,000 migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish territory of Ceuta during an extraordinary two-day surge that overwhelmed one of Europe’s most politically sensitive borders. Spanish authorities later put the figure at roughly 72,000, while the president of Ceuta said around 100 people died during the chaotic crossing. The scale matters because Ce...

The Road Ends for Tiger Woods Tiger Woods has been stripped of his driving privileges for five years after reaching a plea agreement over the Florida rollover crash that led to his arrest earlier this year. The 50-year-old golf legend avoided jail and the original driving-under-the-influence charge was dropped, but the punishment leaves one of sport's most famous figures unable to legally driv...

The Gold Leaving North America The Netherlands has shifted 86 tonnes of its national gold reserves away from the United States and Canada as its central bank strengthens preparations for what it calls severe crises. De Nederlandsche Bank says growing geopolitical unrest has made the ability to access and trade its gold quickly increasingly important. The operation, carried out between March and Au...

Germany’s Under Attack Germany is investigating two deliberate attacks on its electricity infrastructure after explosive devices were discovered at one substation and another incident forced five major power-station units offline. The attacks happened in different parts of the country within roughly 24 hours, immediately turning what might once have looked like isolated vandalism into a national s...

The Threat Has Moved Beyond Science Fiction The world's most powerful artificial intelligence companies are entering a new kind of arms race: not simply to build smarter models, but to stop those models being turned into tools for biological harm. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind are tightening safeguards as AI becomes increasingly capable of reasoning about genetics, laboratory science,...