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News

Russian firm KS Logistika has asked President Vladimir Putin to place five of Nestlé's Russian units under "temporary management."

Iran's foreign ministry says there is no 60-day deadline in its Islamabad understanding with the US and that it will not set policy under time pressure, distancing Tehran from the Western reading of a mid-June memorandum due to lapse on August 17.

Anyone who wants to contest presidency is free to do so, he adds.

Turkey wants to hand Ukraine a stockpile of American cluster bombs that has been sitting in its depots since the 1980s. Moscow has asked Washington and Ankara to explain themselves.

Kazakh utility points finger at hydropower failure in Kyrgyzstan. Claims made by Kyrgyz officials about Kazakh power line disruption denied by Kazakhstan.

Tech

Albania's plans to use an artificial intelligence avatar to help combat corruption are facing fresh scrutiny after prosecutors opened an investigation into the government agency that developed the system.

Ukraine has spent a month setting fire to Wildberries warehouses. Last week it went after the checkout instead.

Anthropic is in acquisition talks for Israeli artificial intelligence startup Decart AI at a valuation of approximately $6bn, joining a heated race against SpaceX, Nvidia, and Amazon.

Sony Group will invest JPY465bn in the venture, while Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract semiconductor maker, will invest JPY282bn.

A day after, the politician's office launched a new account.

Opinion

The PR surge which heralded that the “tide is turning” in the Ukrainian conflict is ending up in a debacle. Ukraine can inflict tangible damage on the Russian economy but Russia can take it and give it back in spades.

Attempt to steer economy toward sustainable growth running into increasingly difficult terrain with economic policy facing sharp trade-off between fighting stubborn inflation and fixing external imbalances.

America's retreat from research funding and openness to skilled immigration has handed Europe an unexpected strategic advantage. If Brussels can remove visa barriers and back scientists, it has a rare chance to narrow the innovation gap.

Capital Economics says Thailand's Anutin Charnvirakul government is squandering a rare post-election reform mandate, leaning instead on a poorly targeted 175bn baht subsidy scheme, centralised power and rising industrial protectionism.

West knows of these concerns, says Hakan Fidan.

Data

The plastic that fuelled a decade of Filipino spending is starting to bite, just as the cost of money turns against the country's borrowers.

Russia's foreign trade surplus grew 14% to $73.4bn in the first half of 2026, with Asia now taking three quarters of everything the country buys and sells abroad.

Authorities have introduced a series of measures aimed at restricting housing-market speculation and limiting the growth of household borrowing. But demand for homes has remained firm.

Baghdad sold around 42mn barrels in July, made up of about 35mn from southern ports and 7mn from Turkey's Ceyhan terminal on the Mediterranean.

Even in the country most alarmed by it, defence is a top national concern for fewer than one person in three, a Statista survey of 32 countries has found.

Features

Russia has begun tearing into Ukraine's power grid weeks earlier than last winter, hitting substations and fuel depots as Kyiv braces for the blow meant to plunge it into the dark.

Europe's gas tanks are emptier than at any point on record for the time of year, and the cargoes that should be filling them are sailing to Asia instead.

Ukraine could run out of room to store 8mn-11mn tonnes of its own grain by November, with the ports shut and the new crop still coming in.

The US military strategy has run into a dead end. Alternating strikes and ceasefires have done nothing to shift Iran's stated resolve, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has given Tehran the leverage to press its terms.

The situation was already severe in July 2025, as high production costs, ageing plants and a surge in global capacity led by China were forcing European producers to shut facilities or reconsider their presence on the continent.

Blogs

At the ancient Egyptian obelisk outside the Blue Mosque, looking along what was once the Hippodrome of Constantinople, I found myself thinking about a tent.

Ukraine's power generation capacity has fallen from 60GW before the war to 12GW today, and a renewed Russian bombing campaign this winter could push the shortfall toward 10GW, even as European gas storage sits near a 15-year low.

Dubious rise to the top is questioned. Watchdog says remarks “incompatible with foreign policy vision”.

Tourist visas denied based on highly subjective assessments of financial means and intentions to use “return” section of plane ticket.

The stochastic war continues to escalate into a brutal tit-for-tat missile war with both sides continuously rolling out new and improved weapons that could eventually lead to a direct clash between Nato and Russia.

bneGREEN

Croatian firefighters continued battling wildfires on the Adriatic coast at the weekend, with authorities saying conditions had improved somewhat on the Pelješac peninsula while assessing damage from a separate blaze near Omiš.

Extreme heat has killed more than 25,000 people across Europe this year, according to data compiled from government agencies and research institutions in Germany, Spain, France, the UK, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The planet has just endured its joint-hottest month in 176 years of record-keeping, as searing July heat handed North America, Africa and Asia their warmest month ever.

The Danube has dropped to a record low of 31 cm in Budapest, idling nuclear reactors in Romania and Hungary as a fierce drought parches central Europe.

The Caspian Sea has fallen to its lowest level in about 200 years and is still declining, a Tehran official said, blaming higher temperatures, evaporation, weaker inflows and lower rainfall for a drop of up to 20 centimetres a year.

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Nato General Secretary Mark Rutte warned that the West needs to prepare of the possibility that Chinese President Xi Jinping will ....

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