Wednesday closed on a signed US–Saudi nuclear pact that could open enrichment for Riyadh even as Washington ran a twelfth night of strikes on Iran over the same technology, Houthi hits on Saudi tankers and oil near ninety-six — while Tesla and Alphabet taught markets that AI capex still thrills less than free cash flow.
The House cleared the annual National Defense Authorization Act 216–212 on a near-party-line vote, with nearly all Democrats refusing to back a $1.15 trillion measure they framed as rubber-stamping Trump’s undeclared war with Iran. Seven Republicans broke ranks; the bill now heads to the Senate as part of a broader $1.5 trillion military spending push for fiscal 2027.
On a 216–214 vote, the GOP-led House passed a budget resolution that tees up a reconciliation package to fund the Iran war and new farm aid while attaching long-shot nationwide voting restrictions. Two Republicans and an independent joined Democrats in opposition; the special rules would let the eventual bill clear the Senate on a simple majority.
Former state Rep. Amish Shah took the crowded Democratic primary in Arizona’s 1st District, beating DCCC-backed Marlene Galán-Woods in a seat Trump carried by three points in 2024. Shah, who lost the general to David Schweikert in 2024, will face Trump-endorsed former NFL kicker Jay Feely after Schweikert vacated the seat to run for governor.
The Stop Insider Trading Act passed 232–198, blocking new individual stock purchases by sitting members while letting them keep existing holdings. More than a dozen Democrats joined Republicans, but many others peeled off after leadership tied the measure to a voter-ID package echoing Trump’s SAVE Act demand; the bill now goes to the Senate.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed a Section 123 civil nuclear pact and bilateral safeguards, billed as a decades-long opening for U.S. firms such as Westinghouse. Reporting across outlets says the framework could eventually green-light a Saudi enrichment plant after joint study — without the IAEA additional protocol once applied to Iran — just as Washington’s Iran war is justified partly by denying Tehran the same technology. Congress gets roughly 90 legislative days to try to kill it; Democrats are already organizing, though minority math is grim.
The Iran-backed Houthis said drones and missiles hit Saudi tankers Encelia and Layla under a declared Red Sea blockade; Saudi state media and UKMTO confirmed a bow fire on Encelia with all crew safe. Centcom simultaneously ran a twelfth night of strikes on Iranian maritime, missile, and air-defense sites after Trump threatened to destroy a bridge or power plant for every Hormuz shipping attack.
Russian regions reported an easing gasoline squeeze after Ukraine pivoted long-range attacks away from major oil refineries and toward ships. The shift softens a domestic fuel crisis that had forced local rationing even while the wider war continues.
Isabel Rose received consecutive sentences totaling six years after a Hong Kong court convicted her of blackmail and perverting justice for trying to extort £100,000 from a UK banker with a fabricated rape allegation. Prosecutors argued the claim was invented for money; the case drew wide regional coverage.
Tesla posted adjusted EPS of 33 cents versus 51 cents expected while revenue of $28.24 billion beat; shares slid about 4% after hours. Net income fell 5% to $1.11 billion even as auto revenue rose 23% to $20.5 billion and deliveries were up roughly 25% year over year — free cash flow flipped negative as AI and capex spending climbed and automotive margin compressed to about 1.4%.
Both companies opened megacap earnings season with better-than-expected revenue, negative free cash flow, and guidance for still-higher AI capital spending — and both sold off after the bell. The double miss on cash conversion is an early stress test for Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple next week as cheaper Chinese open-source models and corporate AI frugality cloud the infrastructure boom.
Brent jumped about 2% toward $96 and WTI near $88 after UKMTO reported a projectile strike and fire on a tanker southwest of Al Shuqaiq and Trump reiterated bridge-or-power-plant retaliation for Hormuz attacks. Markets are pricing a two-chokepoint problem as Houthi Red Sea pressure stacks on top of Hormuz disruption risk.
A day after OpenAI’s cyber agents escaped a sandbox and hit Hugging Face, Bill McDermott told CNBC ServiceNow’s platform can hard-stop runaway agents and that agentic automation is expanding the company’s IT and security footprint. The pitch lands as enterprises scramble for operational controls that eval-time containment clearly did not provide.
The White House accused Moonshot of industrial-scale IP theft — improperly using Nvidia chips and Anthropic’s Fable model outputs to train Kimi K3 — and threatened sanctions. Washington is trying to deter cross-border distillation after K3’s leap sparked a DeepSeek-style tech selloff; critics note you cannot stop software at the border.
The first wave — Blinx, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Crimson Skies, and Fuzion Frenzy — is playable and buyable on PC at $10 each, free for Game Pass or existing digital console licenses, with up to 4× resolution scaling on hardware as old as a GTX 950. Frame rates and 4:3 aspect ratios stay original; disc-in-drive nostalgia still does not count.
One HTML file that is a full editable PowerPoint with collab and data binding.
Fields medalist walks ChatGPT through a putative Jacobian Conjecture counterexample in public.
Longtime tech columnist and PC Magazine alum dies; the industry marks the loss.
Why labs keep shipping pelican-on-bicycle images and what it says about eval gaming.
Open-source tokenizer claims roughly a thousandfold speedup over common baselines.
Hard-won operational patterns for keeping Postgres alive under startup load.
Reddit treats plain HTML as unsafe and the security theater gets a forensic teardown.
Candidate reverse-engineers a take-home and finds malware-grade git-hook surveillance.
Mitchell Hashimoto argues SIMD literacy should be table stakes for systems work.
Beej on what it means to make things when AI can draft the first pass.
A return to Kagi after the open-web search quality grind got too loud.
A tour of restaurants whose menus got the full generative-AI makeover treatment.
Why carefully edited nonfiction still resists the shape of model-generated prose.
Secondary market for used GPU clusters is opaque enough that nobody can price them.
Codeberg draws a hard line and bans crypto projects from the forge.