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Home Middle East Live Issued on: 31/08/2026 – 01:02Modified: 31/08/2026 – 01:18 File photo of a vessel moving past a barge along the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas in southern Iran taken August 10, 2026. © Atta Kenare, AFP The United States said Sunday it had carried out air strikes on Iranian rocket launchers on a small island in the Strait of Hormuz, its first attacks on Iran since late July.  Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Monday they had responded by attacking US military targets in Jordan, state media reported. Follow our liveblog for the latest updates. 31/08/2026 – 01:09Iran’s IRGC says…

A NEW CHAPTER FOR D.C. PLAYBOOK: Last month Adam Wren, Dasha Burns and Will Steakin were named the new co-authors of our D.C. Playbook, and today is the official relaunch. Coming off the heels of a string of exclusives from both sides of the aisle, Playbook will continue to provide unmatched reporting and analysis of the midterms, 2028 and more. Don’t miss out — subscribe to Playbook now. And subscribe to the Playbook Podcast for in-depth conversations with Burns, Wren and Steakin, alongside other POLITICO reporters.If you’ve been forwarded this newsletter, you can sign up free here. Problems on two…

I recently dug out my CDs and started reripping them all. I’ve found a few forgotten gems in there, but few hit harder for me than the beautifully concise Professor Murder Rides the Subway EP. There was a period of time in the mid-aughts in NYC where it seemed like every indie band wanted you to let loose, dance like no one was watching, and just have some damn fun. Few embodied that as much as New York dance punk band Professor Murder.LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture were the biggest names of the dance punk revival. But there were also…

Time to first token (TTFT) is the metric teams use to pick an inference API for voice. It is also the metric that misleads them. TTFT marks when generation starts; a text-to-speech model cannot speak until a full clause arrives. Between those two points sits the difference between an agent that feels conversational and one that gets interrupted. This piece benchmarks every layer of the voice stack including LLM, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech. Why TTFT Is the Right Entry Point and the Wrong Finish Line A voice agent is a latency budget with a language model inside it. Every stage…

Bitcoin (BTC) saw volatility after Friday’s Wall Street open as markets reacted to US Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh’s comments on future monetary policy.Key points:Bitcoin initially fell during Fed chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole keynote speech before circling $79,500.Warsh said he sees no trend change in inflation despite recent lower PCE and CPI prints.BTC price action sustaining above $83,000 hinges on Bitcoin derivatives traders, analysis says.Warsh: Inflation trends have not “meaningfully improved”Data from TradingView showed BTC/USD dipping to $78,442 on Bitstamp in volatile trading conditions, down around 1% at the time of writing.BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingViewIn his first keynote…

Glacial earthquakes are a special type of earthquake generated in cold, icy regions. First discovered in the northern hemisphere more than 20 years ago, these quakes occur when huge chunks of ice fall from glaciers into the sea. Until now, only a very few have been found in the Antarctic. In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, I present evidence for hundreds of these quakes in Antarctica between 2010 and 2023, mostly at the ocean end of the Thwaites Glacier – the so-called Doomsday Glacier that could send sea levels rising rapidly if it were to collapse.A recent discoveryA glacial…

Teenager struggled in Barca’s La Liga start at Elche but improves against Athletic Bilbao, according to Hansi Flick.Published On 30 Aug 202630 Aug 2026Barcelona coach Hansi Flick has indicated that teenage star Lamine Yamal is finding his way back to his “top level” before Monday’s La Liga clash against Rayo Vallecano.The 19-year-old struggled in Barca’s first match of the season at Elche but improved against Athletic Bilbao in the second, Flick said, although he did not find the net.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list“I know everyone is worried about how is Lamine, how is he doing. And of…

In the very first moments of the universe, matter didn’t exist as we know today. A millionth of a second or so after the big bang, the universe was a dense, hot soup scientists call quark-gluon plasma (QGP). For several years, particle colliders—which smash molecules together at nearly the speed of light—have been able to replicate this state, but often using heavy elements like lead.Now, a recent experiment by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN from its French acronym) has demonstrated this plasma can be produced by much smaller collisions. Since there’s no longer an accessible…

Circle’s wrapped Bitcoin product entered the market with unusually strong institutional credentials and almost no visible scale.The company paired cirBTC with segregated reserves, a federally supervised custodian, direct minting and redemption for eligible businesses, and the distribution infrastructure behind USDC. Circle’s Aug. 27 reserve panel nevertheless showed just 40.02450077 cirBTC outstanding about 11 weeks after its Ethereum launch.The same panel showed 42.5114162 BTC in reserve, equal to about 106.2% coverage and a 2.48691543 BTC cushion across 14 disclosed Bitcoin addresses. The reserve cushion settled the backing question at that snapshot. The 40-token float exposed the harder problem: Circle had built…

Using an in-home HEPA purifier for one month spurs a small but significant improvement in brain function in adults age 40 and older. That’s the result of a new study we co-authored in the journal Scientific Reports. HEPA purifiers – HEPA stands for high efficiency particulate air – remove particulate matter from the air. Exposure to particulate matter has been connected to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses as well as neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Environmental health researchers increasingly recommend that people use HEPA air purifiers in their homes to lower their exposure to particulate matter, but few studies…