Morning Digest
35 stories from 10 sources, 68 more held back.
Kentucky farmers take on AI data-center boom – WSJ. A farming family in rural America has rejected a multimillion-dollar offer to sell their land for a data center development, joining opposition to a rapid buildout of such facilities driven by the AI boom in the US.
Ukraine’s press gangs function like organized crime – Zelensky party MP. The government body overseeing Ukraine’s mobilization drive has all the hallmarks of an “organized criminal group,” with some officials allegedly paying bribes of up to $150,000 to secure senior positions, Ukrainian lawmaker Aleksandr Kachura has said.
Zuckerbeg’s Meta in $1.4 trillion addiction showdown: Why is the giant in court again? Meta is heading to court on Tuesday to face accusations that it broke child safety laws and harmed underage users’ mental health. A loss could bankrupt Mark Zuckerberg’s company and force permanent changes to Facebook and Instagram.
Belgium battles record wildfire near German border (VIDEO). Belgium is battling its largest wildfire on record, with the blaze scorching around 3,000 hectares and spreading toward the German border, according to local officials. The fire broke out on Friday in the High Fens nature reserve in eastern Belgium and remained out of control on Monday despite cooler weather and overnight rain.
Latvia wants EU billions for its anti-Russia policies. Latvia wants Brussels to provide billions in additional funding as lost trade with Russia and soaring military spending put growing pressure on the Baltic state’s finances, Politico reported on Monday.
Two Ukrainian children were attacked by two adults in Poland for speaking their native language, Kiev’s consulate in Gdansk has claimed. The incident has come amid increasingly negative attitudes toward Ukrainians in Poland and a diplomatic row over Kiev’s veneration of nationalist groups implicated in the WWII-era massacres of ethnic Poles.
Maggie Haberman comes up with viral nickname for Natalie Harp, Trump DOJ to send 1,000 election observers to polling places, sailors adrift for 4 days without power. U.S. President Donald Trump's executive assistant Natalie Harp disembarks Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., August 16, 2026.
A new report confirms that Donald Trump has stacked his administration with more centimillionaires and billionaires than the last three presidents combined. New polls shows that even the most hardcore Trump supporters are turning on him with less than three months to go before the midterms.
With the new robot, Diligent is also launching its learning flywheel. The Austin, Texas-based company claimed that the proprietary world model learns from the experience of its robot fleet and improves continually with every hospital deployment. “Today, we’re deploying our most sophisticated physical AI platform yet,” stated Andrea Thomaz, founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics.
Coronary artery bypass grafting, or CABG, is the most common type of cardiac surgery in the world. Despite this, and the heavily invasive nature of the surgery, only 1% of these procedures are performed with the help of robots. At the El Camino Health Heart and Vascular Institute (HVI), surgeons are now performing CABG with Intuitive Surgical‘s da Vinci robotic system.
Summer is about creating memories. And for robots, that translates into generating lots of data. It’s also a time to catch up on reading.
The construction industry has been slow to automate, but demand for infrastructure repairs, AI data center buildouts, and U.S. reshoring and defense needs could change that. Gravis Robotics today announced that SoftBank is investing $200 million in its Series A round, which it claimed is the largest in construction robotics history.
The Buss family in a statement earlier Monday said they had voted to sell their remaining shares to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger at the same $12.5 billion valuation that Mark Walter agreed to last week. They believed they had the right to sell based on a tag-along provision that had been included in the previous sale to Walter in June 2025.
Lamour's dismissal was confirmed on Monday in the latest domino effect of Infantino's proposal to sell stakes in a company to run the World Cup to private investors. The plan by the Swiss supremo was rejected by three continental confederations before it was withdrawn and led to UEFA's threat to boycott all FIFA competitions.
Tyson was hurt Thursday during the Saints' joint practice with the Jacksonville Jaguars that New Orleans hosted at its facility. The Saints will open the season at the Detroit Lions on Sept. 13. A two-month timetable from the injury would be Week 6, leading up to New Orleans' game at the New York Giants.
Wright is leaving the team to reportedly further his acting career. "Two things he's really passionate about were colliding, and he decided to pursue this opportunity," Bengals coach Zac Taylor said Saturday. He was fun to be around, he really competed hard for us.
HISA accused Gramm, an economics professor at Rhodes College, of "deliberately and methodically" misappropriating confidential horse health information he accessed on its website during a six-week period, beginning in early May.
Ohio State and Oregon were 1-2 in the Associated Press Top 25 released Monday, giving the Big Ten Conference the top two teams in the preseason rankings for the first time in 65 years and just the second time ever. The Buckeyes received 40 first-place votes and Oregon received 14 in voting by 69 media members who cover college football for the AP and other news organizations.
Things were feeling a lot like May and June on Monday at Wrigley Field, with ample injury news and the Crosstown-rival White Sox on the schedule, challenging for intra-city supremacy.
Fortunately, the local Fox affiliate has an over-the-air sister station for such occurrences. WPWR-Channel 50, branded as Fox Chicago+, will carry the Cubs’ game, with pregame coverage beginning at 6 p.m. First pitch is scheduled for 6:15 p.m., with Aaron Goldsmith and John Smoltz on the call for a regional audience.
The Cubs entered their weekend series against the Cardinals as one of the hottest teams in the majors. They had won nine of their last 12 games and were beginning to creep up on the National League Central-leading Brewers. Now they’re entering a three-game set Monday against the White Sox in a much worse place.
Wrigley Field is way better than Rate Field. Way better at attracting frat bros, you mean? The Cubs are the best team in the city.
One of the Cubs’ most durable players will be out for at least 10 days. Shortstop Dansby Swanson (left oblique) left Sunday’s game against the Cardinals in the bottom of the third inning after swinging through a 0-0 Hunter Dobbins pitch. Swanson immediately grimaced in pain and was replaced by pinch-hitter James Triantos.
If you saw him before the game Sunday and didn’t know better, you would think David Ross was just another journalist working at Wrigley Field.
Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies which seems to be entirely focused on making that happen. Persona’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economically viable for robots right now, and they’ve found one that was also the job of one of the very first industrial robots ever sold: welding.
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility. Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media.
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May, but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans riding bicycles this is a problem that I needed to solve!
Friday’s big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba’s Qwen research lab. I’ve been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen’s self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening.
The MOU also orders DOD to replace the aircraft carrier-based Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch Systems and the Advanced Weapons Elevators with “traditional steam and hydraulic systems” during the construction of the aircraft carrier CVN 81, or the USS Doris Miller.
Despite the U.S. economy losing 23,000 jobs last month, employment in manufacturing didn’t see much change according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, underscoring the sector's persistent demand for talent.
Some might call these the dog days of summer, but with as much activity and excitement as there has been in baseball for the last week — Field of Dreams! A wild Brewers-Dodgers series featuring the best pitchers on earth — we’ll confess to not feeling particularly dogged down right now. If these are the dog days, sheesh, wait until things get really exciting.
CHICAGO -- The Cubs shuffled their pitching staff Sunday to accommodate the return of hard-throwing starter Edward Cabrera from the injured list. Javier Assad was optioned to Triple-A Iowa, and David Peterson was moved to the bullpen.
CHICAGO -- Dansby Swanson removed his helmet and immediately threw it to the dirt at his feet as he exited the batter’s box in clear discomfort on Sunday afternoon. Moments later, the Cubs shortstop knew he had to exit the game against the Cardinals.
CHICAGO -- There have been times this season when the Cubs’ rotation depth was thinned to the point of wondering how the team would fill out a five-man staff. Things have changed in the wake of the Trade Deadline and with Edward Cabrera coming off the injured list on Sunday.
AI has a trust problem, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei doesn't think a marketing campaign can fix it. Amodei just made a rare X appearance to answer claims that his AI safety talk is backfiring, framing the warnings as honesty rather than doom and pitching real breakthroughs in areas like medicine as the only route back for public opinion. P.S. — We’re hiring for seven open roles at The Rundown!
Kentucky farmers take on AI data-center boom – WSJ. A farming family in rural America has rejected a multimillion-dollar offer to sell their land for a data center development, joining opposition to a rapid buildout of such facilities driven by the AI boom in the US.
Ukraine’s press gangs function like organized crime – Zelensky party MP. The government body overseeing Ukraine’s mobilization drive has all the hallmarks of an “organized criminal group,” with some officials allegedly paying bribes of up to $150,000 to secure senior positions, Ukrainian lawmaker Aleksandr Kachura has said.
Zuckerbeg’s Meta in $1.4 trillion addiction showdown: Why is the giant in court again? Meta is heading to court on Tuesday to face accusations that it broke child safety laws and harmed underage users’ mental health. A loss could bankrupt Mark Zuckerberg’s company and force permanent changes to Facebook and Instagram.
Belgium battles record wildfire near German border (VIDEO). Belgium is battling its largest wildfire on record, with the blaze scorching around 3,000 hectares and spreading toward the German border, according to local officials. The fire broke out on Friday in the High Fens nature reserve in eastern Belgium and remained out of control on Monday despite cooler weather and overnight rain.
Latvia wants EU billions for its anti-Russia policies. Latvia wants Brussels to provide billions in additional funding as lost trade with Russia and soaring military spending put growing pressure on the Baltic state’s finances, Politico reported on Monday.
Two Ukrainian children were attacked by two adults in Poland for speaking their native language, Kiev’s consulate in Gdansk has claimed. The incident has come amid increasingly negative attitudes toward Ukrainians in Poland and a diplomatic row over Kiev’s veneration of nationalist groups implicated in the WWII-era massacres of ethnic Poles.
The Buss family in a statement earlier Monday said they had voted to sell their remaining shares to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger at the same $12.5 billion valuation that Mark Walter agreed to last week. They believed they had the right to sell based on a tag-along provision that had been included in the previous sale to Walter in June 2025.
Lamour's dismissal was confirmed on Monday in the latest domino effect of Infantino's proposal to sell stakes in a company to run the World Cup to private investors. The plan by the Swiss supremo was rejected by three continental confederations before it was withdrawn and led to UEFA's threat to boycott all FIFA competitions.
Tyson was hurt Thursday during the Saints' joint practice with the Jacksonville Jaguars that New Orleans hosted at its facility. The Saints will open the season at the Detroit Lions on Sept. 13. A two-month timetable from the injury would be Week 6, leading up to New Orleans' game at the New York Giants.
Wright is leaving the team to reportedly further his acting career. "Two things he's really passionate about were colliding, and he decided to pursue this opportunity," Bengals coach Zac Taylor said Saturday. He was fun to be around, he really competed hard for us.
HISA accused Gramm, an economics professor at Rhodes College, of "deliberately and methodically" misappropriating confidential horse health information he accessed on its website during a six-week period, beginning in early May.
Ohio State and Oregon were 1-2 in the Associated Press Top 25 released Monday, giving the Big Ten Conference the top two teams in the preseason rankings for the first time in 65 years and just the second time ever. The Buckeyes received 40 first-place votes and Oregon received 14 in voting by 69 media members who cover college football for the AP and other news organizations.
Maggie Haberman comes up with viral nickname for Natalie Harp, Trump DOJ to send 1,000 election observers to polling places, sailors adrift for 4 days without power. U.S. President Donald Trump's executive assistant Natalie Harp disembarks Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., August 16, 2026.
A new report confirms that Donald Trump has stacked his administration with more centimillionaires and billionaires than the last three presidents combined. New polls shows that even the most hardcore Trump supporters are turning on him with less than three months to go before the midterms.
Some might call these the dog days of summer, but with as much activity and excitement as there has been in baseball for the last week — Field of Dreams! A wild Brewers-Dodgers series featuring the best pitchers on earth — we’ll confess to not feeling particularly dogged down right now. If these are the dog days, sheesh, wait until things get really exciting.
CHICAGO -- The Cubs shuffled their pitching staff Sunday to accommodate the return of hard-throwing starter Edward Cabrera from the injured list. Javier Assad was optioned to Triple-A Iowa, and David Peterson was moved to the bullpen.
CHICAGO -- Dansby Swanson removed his helmet and immediately threw it to the dirt at his feet as he exited the batter’s box in clear discomfort on Sunday afternoon. Moments later, the Cubs shortstop knew he had to exit the game against the Cardinals.
CHICAGO -- There have been times this season when the Cubs’ rotation depth was thinned to the point of wondering how the team would fill out a five-man staff. Things have changed in the wake of the Trade Deadline and with Edward Cabrera coming off the injured list on Sunday.
Things were feeling a lot like May and June on Monday at Wrigley Field, with ample injury news and the Crosstown-rival White Sox on the schedule, challenging for intra-city supremacy.
Fortunately, the local Fox affiliate has an over-the-air sister station for such occurrences. WPWR-Channel 50, branded as Fox Chicago+, will carry the Cubs’ game, with pregame coverage beginning at 6 p.m. First pitch is scheduled for 6:15 p.m., with Aaron Goldsmith and John Smoltz on the call for a regional audience.
The Cubs entered their weekend series against the Cardinals as one of the hottest teams in the majors. They had won nine of their last 12 games and were beginning to creep up on the National League Central-leading Brewers. Now they’re entering a three-game set Monday against the White Sox in a much worse place.
Wrigley Field is way better than Rate Field. Way better at attracting frat bros, you mean? The Cubs are the best team in the city.
One of the Cubs’ most durable players will be out for at least 10 days. Shortstop Dansby Swanson (left oblique) left Sunday’s game against the Cardinals in the bottom of the third inning after swinging through a 0-0 Hunter Dobbins pitch. Swanson immediately grimaced in pain and was replaced by pinch-hitter James Triantos.
If you saw him before the game Sunday and didn’t know better, you would think David Ross was just another journalist working at Wrigley Field.
With the new robot, Diligent is also launching its learning flywheel. The Austin, Texas-based company claimed that the proprietary world model learns from the experience of its robot fleet and improves continually with every hospital deployment. “Today, we’re deploying our most sophisticated physical AI platform yet,” stated Andrea Thomaz, founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics.
Coronary artery bypass grafting, or CABG, is the most common type of cardiac surgery in the world. Despite this, and the heavily invasive nature of the surgery, only 1% of these procedures are performed with the help of robots. At the El Camino Health Heart and Vascular Institute (HVI), surgeons are now performing CABG with Intuitive Surgical‘s da Vinci robotic system.
Summer is about creating memories. And for robots, that translates into generating lots of data. It’s also a time to catch up on reading.
The construction industry has been slow to automate, but demand for infrastructure repairs, AI data center buildouts, and U.S. reshoring and defense needs could change that. Gravis Robotics today announced that SoftBank is investing $200 million in its Series A round, which it claimed is the largest in construction robotics history.
Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies which seems to be entirely focused on making that happen. Persona’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economically viable for robots right now, and they’ve found one that was also the job of one of the very first industrial robots ever sold: welding.
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility. Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media.
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May, but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans riding bicycles this is a problem that I needed to solve!
Friday’s big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba’s Qwen research lab. I’ve been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen’s self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening.
The MOU also orders DOD to replace the aircraft carrier-based Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch Systems and the Advanced Weapons Elevators with “traditional steam and hydraulic systems” during the construction of the aircraft carrier CVN 81, or the USS Doris Miller.
Despite the U.S. economy losing 23,000 jobs last month, employment in manufacturing didn’t see much change according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, underscoring the sector's persistent demand for talent.
AI has a trust problem, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei doesn't think a marketing campaign can fix it. Amodei just made a rare X appearance to answer claims that his AI safety talk is backfiring, framing the warnings as honesty rather than doom and pitching real breakthroughs in areas like medicine as the only route back for public opinion. P.S. — We’re hiring for seven open roles at The Rundown!