Morning Digest
35 stories from 8 sources, 64 more held back.
Former Liberian Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor has been charged with drug trafficking, money laundering, and other offenses as part of an investigation into an alleged transnational narcotics network, the authorities have said.
Modi ministers get social media report cards. India’s federal ministers are being ranked on their social media activity as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government goes all out to connect with the country’s youth, after student protests last month gave a nasty surprise to a government and party that once dominated online narratives.
More than 100 people were killed in the Central African Republic (CAR) after a gold mine collapsed near the border with Cameroon, according to rescuers and local officials. The disaster occurred on Tuesday at a mining site in Zamboye, in the country’s western Nana-Mambere prefecture. Several underground galleries reportedly caved in while miners were working below ground.
The Orthodox Church is very strict about the sin of schism. Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “If any man follows him that makes a schism in the Church, he shall not inherit the Kingdom of God. Likewise, Saint John Chrysostom wrote, “The sin of schism is not washed away even by the blood of martyrdom.
OpenAI hits brakes on training over security risks. ChatGPT maker OpenAI has announced it is decelerating the development of its AI models, citing security risks. In July, one of the company’s advanced AI bots unknowingly escaped its testing environment, gained internet access, and hacked into the servers of the Hugging Face online repository for AI models and datasets.
The shakeup in India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday has brought changes to its organizational hierarchy, raising some eyebrows. The shuffle, effected by BJP National President Nitin Nabin, is being explained away as the result of a new party leader bringing in his own team.
HENDERSON, Nev. -- Quarterback Fernando Mendoza is a football nerd, but in a good way. Just ask his former high school coach, Dave Dunn. As a 15-year-old quarterback at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami, Mendoza would skip eating lunch with his classmates in the cafeteria and take his food to Dunn's office, where he would have a notebook and pen in hand to go over the practice plan.
Nneka Ogwumike, one of the most influential players in WNBA history, will retire after the 2026 season. That leaves a void not just for her Los Angeles Sparks, but for leadership within the Women's National Basketball Players Association. Ogwumike, 36, has served as president of the union since 2016 and was an important part of two collective bargaining agreements negotiated with the league.
Fantasy football managers need all the help they can get with the frenetic pace of a draft and/or salary cap setting. Preparation is key, and one of the best ways to organize for success is to use a positional tiered system to find the so-called peaks and valleys of the available player list.
Fantasy football managers need all the help they can get with the frenetic pace of a draft and/or salary cap setting. Preparation is key, and one of the best ways to organize for success is to utilize a positional tiered system to find the so-called peaks and valleys of the available player list.
Romero (17-2, 13 KOs) defeated Ryan Garcia in May 2025 to win the WBA "regular" welterweight title and was elevated to "super" champion three weeks later after Jaron Ennis vacated the belt to move up in weight. Lopez (22-2, 13 KOs), a former lightweight and junior welterweight world champion, is coming off a one-sided defeat to Shakur Stevenson in January.
The Brewers keep rolling in Week 21, in the wake of a 22-0 rout of the Mariners on Tuesday, holding on to the No. 1 ranking for the second week in a row after usurping the Dodgers for the top spot. Though the majority of our top 10 has stayed the same, the Braves have taken at No. 3 ahead of the Rays, and the Padres jump to No. 9 as the Diamondbacks drop two spots to 11th.
Shaw landed on the 10-day Injured List on June 29 with a left-hand sprain that he suffered while fouling off a pitch. Shaw, 24, is hitting .246/.322/.415 (105 OPS+) through 56 games with Chicago this season. He also spent time on the IL earlier in the year with back tightness.
It’s a long season, as they say. And that means a long runway for players looking to find their footing. It’s not ideal, but it’s also not the end of the story of your season.
MLB Pipeline gave a full refresh to its Top 100 Prospects list last week -- and each team’s Top 30 -- now that the 2026 draftees have joined their respective organizations. That makes it as good a time as any to look at the biggest breakout players in Minor Leagues. Some of these players were high Draft picks or on the preseason Top 100 Prospects list.
CHICAGO -- With Dansby Swanson currently on the injured list and sidelined for at least the next month, the Cubs’ depth at shortstop has been thinned at a crucial point in the baseball calendar. On Wednesday, the Cubs made a move to boost the depth chart, claiming utility man Gabriel Arias off waivers from the Mets to add a layer of insurance not only at shortstop, but around the infield.
CHICAGO -- The crowd inside Wrigley Field roared as the baseball that left Alex Bregman’s bat in the seventh inning on Wednesday afternoon carried high over left field. It seemed destined for the bleachers, but this was one of those days when the wind can transform the old ballpark into a hitter’s nightmare.
CHICAGO -- Cade Townsend had been to Wrigley Field a handful of times when he was a kid. He remembers coming to games with his family a decade ago -- getting a chance to see the 2016 champions in person -- and has photos of himself wearing Cubs gear in the stands at the Friendly Confines. “And now I’m sitting in the dugout,” Townsend said on Wednesday morning.
I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task:. Put https://smolmachines.com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox.
My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable core, and allow users to safely extend it in many directions by having LLMs fill in the missing pieces.
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of “How AI is changing software development”. We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: “very minor edits to remove disfluencies”).
Donald Trump was caught on camera this week holding a “cheat sheet” in the Oval Office, the same kind of note card Republicans once said was proof Joe Biden had dementia. Newly surfaced video shows Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sitting almost completely motionless for hours during a Senate vote session just days before he completely vanished from public view.
U.S. President Donald Trump listens as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a cabinet meeting at Camp David in Thurmont, Maryland, U.S., July 31, 2026.
A new book claims Trump White House staffer Natalie Harp was perhaps the biggest driving force behind the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, which houses the First Lady’s office. New FCC documents show Chairman Brendan Carr has been in constant contact with right-wing media executives and White House officials while refusing to discuss any of it in public.
Today, humanoid robot OEMs are facing one central challenge: How do they bridge the gap between a working prototype and a manufacturable, scalable product? according to Kollmorgen. While software iterates in weeks, motion hardware moves from paper to functional sample in months and to volume production in years. That mismatch—not concept design—is often the real bottleneck.
This week, Unitree Robotics made its debut on Shanghai’s STAR Market, closing its first day 460% higher. The company raised 6.1 billion yuan, around $905 million U.S., with its initial public offering. Unitree said it is the first major legged robotics company to go pubic.
Serve Robotics Inc., a developer of sidewalk delivery robots, this week announced a partnership with Grubhub, a subsidiary of Wonder. Serve will now be offering robotic deliveries on the Grubhub marketplace starting in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, Va.
With pallet pickup cycles as fast as 20 seconds, Pudu Robotics yesterday unveiled the MP2000, an AI-powered autonomous pallet handler built to tackle high-frequency, heavy-payload transport in crowded manufacturing and logistics hubs.
Chicago baseball fans might not love it, but they won’t forget it. With the White Sox beating the Cubs 3-0 Wednesday at Wrigley Field, the best Crosstown season series of ’em all ended in a 3-3 deadlock. Yes, you read that correctly — the best, since interleague play began in the major leagues in 1997.
If you had to choose one word to sum up Clay Holmes’ 2026, what would it be? “He’s been disgusting all season, man,” outfielder Tyrone Taylor said. That’s a compliment, by the way.
The overwhelming majority of the guys to play for the Cubs aren’t Chicago born and bred, so excuse them for not seeing the Crosstown series against the White Sox as the biggest three days of the year.
This site is free thanks to our community of supporters. Voluntary donations from readers like you keep our news accessible for everyone. White Sox hold Cubs to two hits, avoid sweep with shutout win in Crosstown series finale.
Un hombre fue arrestado y acusado de golpear a un aficionado en el juego del Clásico Crosstown del lunes por la noche en Wrigley Field, donde los Cubs vencieron a los White Sox 7-5 en entradas extras.
The project, slated for Generation Park in Houston, is part of Bristol Myers Squibb’s larger plan to invest $40 billion in the United States through 2030 across research and development, technology and domestic manufacturing. The company said it designed the Houston campus to be modular and multimodal, allowing for flexibility as demand shifts to certain medicines over others.
Many regions across the world have physical premiums over the global benchmark price of aluminum. Despite its name, the Midwest Premium functions as the nationwide premium for aluminum in the U.S. market. Premiums are broadly viewed as surcharges to account for factors including regional transportation costs and tariffs.
Former Liberian Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor has been charged with drug trafficking, money laundering, and other offenses as part of an investigation into an alleged transnational narcotics network, the authorities have said.
Modi ministers get social media report cards. India’s federal ministers are being ranked on their social media activity as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government goes all out to connect with the country’s youth, after student protests last month gave a nasty surprise to a government and party that once dominated online narratives.
More than 100 people were killed in the Central African Republic (CAR) after a gold mine collapsed near the border with Cameroon, according to rescuers and local officials. The disaster occurred on Tuesday at a mining site in Zamboye, in the country’s western Nana-Mambere prefecture. Several underground galleries reportedly caved in while miners were working below ground.
The Orthodox Church is very strict about the sin of schism. Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “If any man follows him that makes a schism in the Church, he shall not inherit the Kingdom of God. Likewise, Saint John Chrysostom wrote, “The sin of schism is not washed away even by the blood of martyrdom.
OpenAI hits brakes on training over security risks. ChatGPT maker OpenAI has announced it is decelerating the development of its AI models, citing security risks. In July, one of the company’s advanced AI bots unknowingly escaped its testing environment, gained internet access, and hacked into the servers of the Hugging Face online repository for AI models and datasets.
The shakeup in India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday has brought changes to its organizational hierarchy, raising some eyebrows. The shuffle, effected by BJP National President Nitin Nabin, is being explained away as the result of a new party leader bringing in his own team.
HENDERSON, Nev. -- Quarterback Fernando Mendoza is a football nerd, but in a good way. Just ask his former high school coach, Dave Dunn. As a 15-year-old quarterback at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami, Mendoza would skip eating lunch with his classmates in the cafeteria and take his food to Dunn's office, where he would have a notebook and pen in hand to go over the practice plan.
Nneka Ogwumike, one of the most influential players in WNBA history, will retire after the 2026 season. That leaves a void not just for her Los Angeles Sparks, but for leadership within the Women's National Basketball Players Association. Ogwumike, 36, has served as president of the union since 2016 and was an important part of two collective bargaining agreements negotiated with the league.
Fantasy football managers need all the help they can get with the frenetic pace of a draft and/or salary cap setting. Preparation is key, and one of the best ways to organize for success is to use a positional tiered system to find the so-called peaks and valleys of the available player list.
Fantasy football managers need all the help they can get with the frenetic pace of a draft and/or salary cap setting. Preparation is key, and one of the best ways to organize for success is to utilize a positional tiered system to find the so-called peaks and valleys of the available player list.
Romero (17-2, 13 KOs) defeated Ryan Garcia in May 2025 to win the WBA "regular" welterweight title and was elevated to "super" champion three weeks later after Jaron Ennis vacated the belt to move up in weight. Lopez (22-2, 13 KOs), a former lightweight and junior welterweight world champion, is coming off a one-sided defeat to Shakur Stevenson in January.
The Brewers keep rolling in Week 21, in the wake of a 22-0 rout of the Mariners on Tuesday, holding on to the No. 1 ranking for the second week in a row after usurping the Dodgers for the top spot. Though the majority of our top 10 has stayed the same, the Braves have taken at No. 3 ahead of the Rays, and the Padres jump to No. 9 as the Diamondbacks drop two spots to 11th.
Donald Trump was caught on camera this week holding a “cheat sheet” in the Oval Office, the same kind of note card Republicans once said was proof Joe Biden had dementia. Newly surfaced video shows Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sitting almost completely motionless for hours during a Senate vote session just days before he completely vanished from public view.
U.S. President Donald Trump listens as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a cabinet meeting at Camp David in Thurmont, Maryland, U.S., July 31, 2026.
A new book claims Trump White House staffer Natalie Harp was perhaps the biggest driving force behind the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, which houses the First Lady’s office. New FCC documents show Chairman Brendan Carr has been in constant contact with right-wing media executives and White House officials while refusing to discuss any of it in public.
Shaw landed on the 10-day Injured List on June 29 with a left-hand sprain that he suffered while fouling off a pitch. Shaw, 24, is hitting .246/.322/.415 (105 OPS+) through 56 games with Chicago this season. He also spent time on the IL earlier in the year with back tightness.
It’s a long season, as they say. And that means a long runway for players looking to find their footing. It’s not ideal, but it’s also not the end of the story of your season.
MLB Pipeline gave a full refresh to its Top 100 Prospects list last week -- and each team’s Top 30 -- now that the 2026 draftees have joined their respective organizations. That makes it as good a time as any to look at the biggest breakout players in Minor Leagues. Some of these players were high Draft picks or on the preseason Top 100 Prospects list.
CHICAGO -- With Dansby Swanson currently on the injured list and sidelined for at least the next month, the Cubs’ depth at shortstop has been thinned at a crucial point in the baseball calendar. On Wednesday, the Cubs made a move to boost the depth chart, claiming utility man Gabriel Arias off waivers from the Mets to add a layer of insurance not only at shortstop, but around the infield.
CHICAGO -- The crowd inside Wrigley Field roared as the baseball that left Alex Bregman’s bat in the seventh inning on Wednesday afternoon carried high over left field. It seemed destined for the bleachers, but this was one of those days when the wind can transform the old ballpark into a hitter’s nightmare.
CHICAGO -- Cade Townsend had been to Wrigley Field a handful of times when he was a kid. He remembers coming to games with his family a decade ago -- getting a chance to see the 2016 champions in person -- and has photos of himself wearing Cubs gear in the stands at the Friendly Confines. “And now I’m sitting in the dugout,” Townsend said on Wednesday morning.
Chicago baseball fans might not love it, but they won’t forget it. With the White Sox beating the Cubs 3-0 Wednesday at Wrigley Field, the best Crosstown season series of ’em all ended in a 3-3 deadlock. Yes, you read that correctly — the best, since interleague play began in the major leagues in 1997.
If you had to choose one word to sum up Clay Holmes’ 2026, what would it be? “He’s been disgusting all season, man,” outfielder Tyrone Taylor said. That’s a compliment, by the way.
The overwhelming majority of the guys to play for the Cubs aren’t Chicago born and bred, so excuse them for not seeing the Crosstown series against the White Sox as the biggest three days of the year.
This site is free thanks to our community of supporters. Voluntary donations from readers like you keep our news accessible for everyone. White Sox hold Cubs to two hits, avoid sweep with shutout win in Crosstown series finale.
Un hombre fue arrestado y acusado de golpear a un aficionado en el juego del Clásico Crosstown del lunes por la noche en Wrigley Field, donde los Cubs vencieron a los White Sox 7-5 en entradas extras.
Today, humanoid robot OEMs are facing one central challenge: How do they bridge the gap between a working prototype and a manufacturable, scalable product? according to Kollmorgen. While software iterates in weeks, motion hardware moves from paper to functional sample in months and to volume production in years. That mismatch—not concept design—is often the real bottleneck.
This week, Unitree Robotics made its debut on Shanghai’s STAR Market, closing its first day 460% higher. The company raised 6.1 billion yuan, around $905 million U.S., with its initial public offering. Unitree said it is the first major legged robotics company to go pubic.
Serve Robotics Inc., a developer of sidewalk delivery robots, this week announced a partnership with Grubhub, a subsidiary of Wonder. Serve will now be offering robotic deliveries on the Grubhub marketplace starting in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, Va.
With pallet pickup cycles as fast as 20 seconds, Pudu Robotics yesterday unveiled the MP2000, an AI-powered autonomous pallet handler built to tackle high-frequency, heavy-payload transport in crowded manufacturing and logistics hubs.
I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task:. Put https://smolmachines.com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox.
My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable core, and allow users to safely extend it in many directions by having LLMs fill in the missing pieces.
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of “How AI is changing software development”. We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: “very minor edits to remove disfluencies”).
The project, slated for Generation Park in Houston, is part of Bristol Myers Squibb’s larger plan to invest $40 billion in the United States through 2030 across research and development, technology and domestic manufacturing. The company said it designed the Houston campus to be modular and multimodal, allowing for flexibility as demand shifts to certain medicines over others.
Many regions across the world have physical premiums over the global benchmark price of aluminum. Despite its name, the Midwest Premium functions as the nationwide premium for aluminum in the U.S. market. Premiums are broadly viewed as surcharges to account for factors including regional transportation costs and tariffs.