Plus, EU opens door for Canada to become its first associate member.

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Daily Briefing

Daily Briefing

By Kate Turton

Hello. A Saudi coalition says a Houthi drone was destroyed near Mecca, we exclusively report OpenAI's rogue agents probed Hugging Face for weaknesses two months before its major hack, and the EU opens a door for Canada.

Plus, sign up for the Misinformation Monitor. Our latest newsletter from my colleagues on the Reuters fact-checking team will help you track global misinformation.

Today's Top News

 

Smoke billows into the sky in a screengrab from a video said to show Houthi fighters attacking Saudi-backed forces. HOUTHI MILITARY MEDIA/Handout via REUTERS

Middle East

  • Saudi Arabia's air defences destroyed a Houthi drone south of Mecca before it entered prohibited airspace over the holy city, a spokesperson for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen ‌said, prompting retaliatory strikes on Houthi positions, according to Houthi and Saudi-backed government officials.
  • UN peacekeeping forces are set to lose their mandate in south Lebanon the end of the year, reports Beirut bureau chief Maya Gebeily, who got rare access inside the force. She tells the Reuters World News podcast, that when UNIFIL goes, Lebanon doesn't just lose humanitarian support, it loses its eyes on the ground.

In other news

  • Rogue AI agents from OpenAI hijacked Hugging Face user accounts and probed the site itself for vulnerabilities as early as May, nearly two months before the July breach of the ‌open-source repository drew global attention. Read our exclusive.
  • More than 15 years after the US Supreme Court reshaped American politics with its Citizens United campaign finance ruling, Montana voters will decide this November whether to make their state the first in the nation to bar corporations from spending money on elections through a ballot initiative.
  • An experimental peptide backed by US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and often taken together with a second peptide, TB-500 in a combination popularly known as the "Wolverine stack," is being ‌used for a wide range of ailments. This is despite little safety and efficacy evidence from human studies, a new analysis found.
  • As a digital billboard behind her displays an advert urging Russians to sign up to fight in Ukraine, Polina Lermant tries to hand out flyers to passers-by urging them to "vote for peace" in a parliamentary election starting on Friday. Meet the lonely opposition candidate with an uphill battle to win in Russia.
  • Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was found guilty ‌of war crimes by the Kosovo war crimes tribunal. He was sentenced to 25 ⁠years in prison for crimes including murder, torture and illegal detention.
 

Business & Markets

 

US Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh holds a press conference. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

  • The Federal Reserve is expected to hike interest rates for the first time since 2023, a decision driven by stubbornly high inflation and a global rise in borrowing costs that will heighten scrutiny of how US central bank chief Kevin Warsh describes the first monetary policy change on his watch.
  • European militaries are increasingly exploring cheaper missiles and interceptors after conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East exposed the limits of small inventories of high-end weapons.
  • Surging government bond yields are raising credit costs across the US economy and could factor into Federal Reserve monetary policy deliberations, but analysts see the central bank resisting any explicit call from the Trump administration to bail out the market.
  • South Korea's SK Hynix is in talks with Intel about a deal that would see it manufacture memory chips on US soil for the first time, three people familiar with the discussions said.
  • More than 20 banned skin-bleaching products containing mercury are available for purchase on third-party marketplaces run by Amazon, Temu and TikTok Shop in several countries, despite decades of efforts by health advocates and regulators to prevent their sale, a Reuters review of publicly available information found.
 

How Trump’s war on EVs derailed America’s auto-factory revival

 

A shuttered entrance to the EV battery factory in Lordstown in May. REUTERS/Quinn Glabicki

A wave of manufacturing investment promised to revive struggling heartland towns and build a US supply chain for electric vehicles and batteries. But policy changes since Trump's return to office have upended the boom, costing thousands of jobs.

Read our special report
 

And Finally...

Cast member Daisy Edgar-Jones attends the world premiere of the film "Sense and Sensibility" in London, Britain. REUTERS/Toby Shepheard

Daisy Edgar-Jones said the latest film adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel celebrates sisterhood and self-discovery, rather than simply defining its two protagonists by "sense" ‌and "sensibility".

Director Georgia Oakley echoed this sentiment at the world premiere, saying: "In the book ... Elinor's character is a sense character, Marianne is a sensibility, and Marianne kind of gets judged by the society and she has to learn from Elinor. Whereas in our version it's so much more symbiotic and it's about the two sisters learning from each other."