Morning Digest
35 stories from 9 sources, 149 more held back.
Germany’s governing CDU/CSU bloc has fallen to its lowest level of support in almost five years, trailing the opposition AfD by eight points, according to an INSA poll published by Bild. Approval ratings for Merz’s coalition, comprising the Christian Democratic CDU/CSU bloc and the Social Democratic Party, have declined steadily since it took office in May 2025.
Local police are investigating a shooting at Charles Young Park that killed one person and injured four others in Lexington, Kentucky, on Saturday evening. A 4-year-old, a 14-year-old and two adults were taken to hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening, local police chief Lawrence Weathers said. The person who was killed was not immediately identified.
Luigi Mangione has admitted to fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and pleaded guilty to two federal stalking charges. The 28-year-old entered the plea before US District Judge Margaret Garnett in Manhattan on Friday, according to the Department of Justice. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole, with sentencing scheduled for December 18.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Saturday called on Pyongyang to engage in dialogue to formally end the Korean War, which has remained unresolved for more than 70 years. The two countries have technically continued to be at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
All season long, baseball fans can watch Minor League Baseball games for free on the Bally Sports Live app or at BallySports.com. Fans may also purchase an MLB+ subscription, which includes access to MiLB games live and on demand, live MLB audio for all 30 teams, MLB Network, and MLB Big Inning.
Joshua Báez had an MLB debut for the ages on Saturday, when the Cardinals rookie became the first player ever to launch three homers in his first big league game. He'll get a chance to show what he can do for an encore today as St. Louis goes for a series win against the rival Cubs at 3:15 p.m.
You know what they say: A division isn’t won in April. Sure, sometimes the team atop the standings in April does end up capturing the division crown, but a lot can change over the course of a baseball season -- and even over the course of the final two months.
CHICAGO -- Cubs starter Matthew Boyd watched plenty of video of Joshua Báez before the Cardinals rookie stepped into the batter’s box at Wrigley Field on Saturday afternoon. Boyd studied his strengths and weak spots, coming up with a game plan for facing the highly touted slugger. Boyd will now be studying up on what just happened.
Islam Makhachev now holds the record for the longest winning streak in UFC history at 17, which automatically bumps him up among the greatest of all time. The onetime lightweight king defended his welterweight belt for the first time at UFC 330 on Saturday, defeating Ian Machado Garry handily.
Pallister was swimming under world-record pace for much of the race and touched in 8 minutes, 6.10 seconds to erase Ledecky's championship record from 2018. Ledecky took silver in 8:07.26. Ledecky is the four-time Olympic champion in her signature event.
Makhachev (29-1) extended his win streak to 17 with a unanimous decision over Ian Machado Garry (17-2) inside Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia. The five-round bout was competitive throughout, but Makhachev's tenacious wrestling and a stunning head kick knockdown in the second round proved to be the difference.
Shields (19-0, 4 KOs), ESPN's No. 1 pound-for-pound women's boxer and the current undisputed women's heavyweight champion, dropped down three weight classes to fight at middleweight for the first time since 2023, when she was the 160-pound division's undisputed champion. Still, she looked as sharp as ever in outclassing and overpowering Scott to regain her titles.
Matt Shaw, slotted as the Cubs super-utility man this season, may be nearing a return from a sprained left hand that’s sidelined him since June 28. “I think we’re basically at a point where we’re considering a rehab assignment very soon, manager Craig Counsell said before Saturday’s 8-4 loss to St. Louis. At Triple-A Iowa maybe this week?
Cubs ace left-hander Matthew Boyd came into Saturday’s game against St. Louis on a roll. Cardinals left fielder Joshua Báez, making his major-league debut, slammed the brakes on it in – in historic fashion. Báez homered in his first three at-bats in the “bigs,” becoming the first player to ever do so.
Before leading a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch of the Cubs game, Mr. T practiced in the press box with starstruck journalists and staffers. He wanted to nail the “root, root, root” cadence and put extra emphasis on the line, “I don’t care if I never get back!”
“No one performs an experiment once and considers the work done. They repeat it with different variables, correcting what they thought they knew, adding what they’ve learned.”
Ellison whines about the “needless costs” of the empire he’s buying, Melania tops the Epstein subpoena list, and Ivanka can’t buy her way into Miami’s most exclusive club. David Ellison, the MAGA billionaire buying Warner Bros., is having a temper tantrum about the “needless costs” of the antitrust suit standing between him and CNN.
Donald Trump is now telling families of sailors trapped on an aircraft carrier with reportedly horrid conditions that their deployment hasn’t gone on “nearly long enough. He also bragged to a crowd that “beautiful young girls” can’t stop fawning over him at the White House.
Hunter Biden recently joined Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson, where the second son of the 46th president of the United States sounded off on President Donald Trump’s corruption, the fight over holding Trump officials accountable under a future Democratic administration, the future of the Democratic Party, his views on the war in Gaza and his own recovery from addiction, among other topics.
His administration is destroying one of the paper trails investigators need to follow secret money…. U.S. President Donald Trump walks to speak with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Michigan, U.S., July 27, 2026. Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious…
I built this today (with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with the --cors option and OpenRouter, and both work fine.
Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) in the entire Pacific Ocean. He showed up in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco 14 years ago.
I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has 1,856 tags - likely too many to feed to an LLM in one go and say "which of these tags match the following content". Doug Turnbull has a neat solution.
Fixes a crashing bug in sqlite-utils 4.2. I'd introduced code that looks like this:. from typing_extensions import Self.
At recent major tech events, humanoid robots were everywhere. Some of them walked, navigated, and manipulated objects with a level of dexterity that would have seemed unrealistic just a few years ago. And yet, despite all of this progress, I find myself consistently underwhelmed when I try to communicate with them at Treble.
Marc Kermisch is the chief technology and AI officer at Protolabs. He leads the Maple Plain, Minn.-based company‘s global technology organization, overseeing its software product development, digital manufacturing platform evolution, and enterprise-wide artificial intelligence and research & development strategies.
Neros Inc. this week announced it raised $250 million in a Series C round. This brought the drone defense contractor to a $2.5 billion valuation. “This newest round of funding accelerates Neros into a multi-capability drone manufacturer,” stated Soren Monroe-Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Neros.
On June 24, Agility Robotics Inc., a leading humanoid robotics and physical AI company, announced it had entered into a definitive business combination agreement with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company or SPAC. The deal values Agility at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity valuation.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Objects constructed by robots are ubiquitous. If you’ve used a car, household appliance, or smartphone today, you’ve used an object constructed at least in part by robots. The more products that manufacturers want to produce (and consumers want to consume) at lower costs, the more industrial robots will be needed.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “Covered List,” originally published in 2021, identifies communications equipment and services that it says pose a threat to national security.
Trump’s proclamation also orders Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to establish an onshoring incentive program for entities investing in manufacturing drones and their components. China’s drone market, projected to reach a $15.6 billion value in 2025, has the largest global presence and the “deepest component supply chain,” according to research firm Drone Intelligence.
Ford and Changan Automobile launched the Changan-Ford JV in 2012. The JV produces both Ford and Lincoln brand vehicles for the China market. The JV factory in Hangzhou, which opened in 2015, currently builds the Lincoln Nautilus, Aviator and Ford Explorer and Edge L SUVs, according to Ford’s website.
A Department of Defense’s multimillion-dollar contract has brought a metal casting competition to the worldwide stage as reality show competition in an effort to spread awareness of the skill trade and inspire a new workforce.
Germany’s governing CDU/CSU bloc has fallen to its lowest level of support in almost five years, trailing the opposition AfD by eight points, according to an INSA poll published by Bild. Approval ratings for Merz’s coalition, comprising the Christian Democratic CDU/CSU bloc and the Social Democratic Party, have declined steadily since it took office in May 2025.
Local police are investigating a shooting at Charles Young Park that killed one person and injured four others in Lexington, Kentucky, on Saturday evening. A 4-year-old, a 14-year-old and two adults were taken to hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening, local police chief Lawrence Weathers said. The person who was killed was not immediately identified.
Luigi Mangione has admitted to fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and pleaded guilty to two federal stalking charges. The 28-year-old entered the plea before US District Judge Margaret Garnett in Manhattan on Friday, according to the Department of Justice. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole, with sentencing scheduled for December 18.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Saturday called on Pyongyang to engage in dialogue to formally end the Korean War, which has remained unresolved for more than 70 years. The two countries have technically continued to be at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
Islam Makhachev now holds the record for the longest winning streak in UFC history at 17, which automatically bumps him up among the greatest of all time. The onetime lightweight king defended his welterweight belt for the first time at UFC 330 on Saturday, defeating Ian Machado Garry handily.
Pallister was swimming under world-record pace for much of the race and touched in 8 minutes, 6.10 seconds to erase Ledecky's championship record from 2018. Ledecky took silver in 8:07.26. Ledecky is the four-time Olympic champion in her signature event.
Makhachev (29-1) extended his win streak to 17 with a unanimous decision over Ian Machado Garry (17-2) inside Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia. The five-round bout was competitive throughout, but Makhachev's tenacious wrestling and a stunning head kick knockdown in the second round proved to be the difference.
Shields (19-0, 4 KOs), ESPN's No. 1 pound-for-pound women's boxer and the current undisputed women's heavyweight champion, dropped down three weight classes to fight at middleweight for the first time since 2023, when she was the 160-pound division's undisputed champion. Still, she looked as sharp as ever in outclassing and overpowering Scott to regain her titles.
Ellison whines about the “needless costs” of the empire he’s buying, Melania tops the Epstein subpoena list, and Ivanka can’t buy her way into Miami’s most exclusive club. David Ellison, the MAGA billionaire buying Warner Bros., is having a temper tantrum about the “needless costs” of the antitrust suit standing between him and CNN.
Donald Trump is now telling families of sailors trapped on an aircraft carrier with reportedly horrid conditions that their deployment hasn’t gone on “nearly long enough. He also bragged to a crowd that “beautiful young girls” can’t stop fawning over him at the White House.
Hunter Biden recently joined Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson, where the second son of the 46th president of the United States sounded off on President Donald Trump’s corruption, the fight over holding Trump officials accountable under a future Democratic administration, the future of the Democratic Party, his views on the war in Gaza and his own recovery from addiction, among other topics.
His administration is destroying one of the paper trails investigators need to follow secret money…. U.S. President Donald Trump walks to speak with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Michigan, U.S., July 27, 2026. Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious…
All season long, baseball fans can watch Minor League Baseball games for free on the Bally Sports Live app or at BallySports.com. Fans may also purchase an MLB+ subscription, which includes access to MiLB games live and on demand, live MLB audio for all 30 teams, MLB Network, and MLB Big Inning.
Joshua Báez had an MLB debut for the ages on Saturday, when the Cardinals rookie became the first player ever to launch three homers in his first big league game. He'll get a chance to show what he can do for an encore today as St. Louis goes for a series win against the rival Cubs at 3:15 p.m.
You know what they say: A division isn’t won in April. Sure, sometimes the team atop the standings in April does end up capturing the division crown, but a lot can change over the course of a baseball season -- and even over the course of the final two months.
CHICAGO -- Cubs starter Matthew Boyd watched plenty of video of Joshua Báez before the Cardinals rookie stepped into the batter’s box at Wrigley Field on Saturday afternoon. Boyd studied his strengths and weak spots, coming up with a game plan for facing the highly touted slugger. Boyd will now be studying up on what just happened.
Matt Shaw, slotted as the Cubs super-utility man this season, may be nearing a return from a sprained left hand that’s sidelined him since June 28. “I think we’re basically at a point where we’re considering a rehab assignment very soon, manager Craig Counsell said before Saturday’s 8-4 loss to St. Louis. At Triple-A Iowa maybe this week?
Cubs ace left-hander Matthew Boyd came into Saturday’s game against St. Louis on a roll. Cardinals left fielder Joshua Báez, making his major-league debut, slammed the brakes on it in – in historic fashion. Báez homered in his first three at-bats in the “bigs,” becoming the first player to ever do so.
Before leading a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch of the Cubs game, Mr. T practiced in the press box with starstruck journalists and staffers. He wanted to nail the “root, root, root” cadence and put extra emphasis on the line, “I don’t care if I never get back!”
“No one performs an experiment once and considers the work done. They repeat it with different variables, correcting what they thought they knew, adding what they’ve learned.”
At recent major tech events, humanoid robots were everywhere. Some of them walked, navigated, and manipulated objects with a level of dexterity that would have seemed unrealistic just a few years ago. And yet, despite all of this progress, I find myself consistently underwhelmed when I try to communicate with them at Treble.
Marc Kermisch is the chief technology and AI officer at Protolabs. He leads the Maple Plain, Minn.-based company‘s global technology organization, overseeing its software product development, digital manufacturing platform evolution, and enterprise-wide artificial intelligence and research & development strategies.
Neros Inc. this week announced it raised $250 million in a Series C round. This brought the drone defense contractor to a $2.5 billion valuation. “This newest round of funding accelerates Neros into a multi-capability drone manufacturer,” stated Soren Monroe-Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Neros.
On June 24, Agility Robotics Inc., a leading humanoid robotics and physical AI company, announced it had entered into a definitive business combination agreement with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company or SPAC. The deal values Agility at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity valuation.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Objects constructed by robots are ubiquitous. If you’ve used a car, household appliance, or smartphone today, you’ve used an object constructed at least in part by robots. The more products that manufacturers want to produce (and consumers want to consume) at lower costs, the more industrial robots will be needed.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “Covered List,” originally published in 2021, identifies communications equipment and services that it says pose a threat to national security.
I built this today (with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with the --cors option and OpenRouter, and both work fine.
Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) in the entire Pacific Ocean. He showed up in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco 14 years ago.
I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has 1,856 tags - likely too many to feed to an LLM in one go and say "which of these tags match the following content". Doug Turnbull has a neat solution.
Fixes a crashing bug in sqlite-utils 4.2. I'd introduced code that looks like this:. from typing_extensions import Self.
Trump’s proclamation also orders Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to establish an onshoring incentive program for entities investing in manufacturing drones and their components. China’s drone market, projected to reach a $15.6 billion value in 2025, has the largest global presence and the “deepest component supply chain,” according to research firm Drone Intelligence.
Ford and Changan Automobile launched the Changan-Ford JV in 2012. The JV produces both Ford and Lincoln brand vehicles for the China market. The JV factory in Hangzhou, which opened in 2015, currently builds the Lincoln Nautilus, Aviator and Ford Explorer and Edge L SUVs, according to Ford’s website.
A Department of Defense’s multimillion-dollar contract has brought a metal casting competition to the worldwide stage as reality show competition in an effort to spread awareness of the skill trade and inspire a new workforce.