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Reuters reports that Iran told Yemen’s Houthis to be ready to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait if the US strikes Iranian power infrastructure. Annually, ~10-12% of global trade flows through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. US & ISRAEL + IRAN = CLIMBING A DANGEROUS ESCALATION LADDER.
07/15/2026July 15, 2026
Ten years after the Brexit referendum, only one-third of people in Britain believe that leaving the EU was the right decision. Among young people in particular, support for rejoining the European Union is strong.
Ten years after the Brexit referendum, a growing number of people in Britain are questioning the UK‘s departure from the EU. The activist Ceira Casey Sergeant is marching from London to Brussels to campaign for rejoining the European Union. Critics of Brexit cite weaker economic growth and pressure on the National Health Service. Some people who supported Brexit now say key promises made by “Leave” campaigners were never made good on. As public opinion shifts, over 80% of people younger than under-25s are said to support a return to the European Union, fueling a renewed debate about Britain’s future relationship with the EU.
| Looking for a deal? Try Tokyo |
 Data: Numbeo.com via Deutsche Bank Research Institute. (For an apartment in the “city center.”) Chart: Emily Peck/AxiosThe cost of living in Japan has gotten exceptionally cheap in dollar terms compared with other developed countries, Axios’ Emily Peck writes from a new report. Major U.S. cities have grown ever more pricey.  Inflation, a stronger dollar and a weaker yen, and larger economic shifts have scrambled the global cost-of-living map.The authors of the Deutsche Bank Research Institute paper write: “The old assumptions about which places are expensive, which are cheap and where wages compensate for living costs no longer always hold.”  The bank looked at 69 cities across six continents, comparing the costs of housing and dining out — plus things like the price of a “cheap date” and an iPhone.Tokyo ranks near the middle or bottom of the bank’s tables for many expenses. It’s 57th most expensive for a meal for two, and 40th for renting a three-bedroom apartment .  Stunning stat: The average monthly rent for a three-bedroom apartment in New York is now $8,900. In Tokyo, it’s just $2,400.Yes, but: Averages can skew the numbers, as super pricey rentals get thrown into the mix. Reality check: Jim Reid, head of the Deutsche Bank Research Institute, tells Axios that “being expensive isn’t necessarily an outright negative.” “It can be just because the economy runs well and attracts a lot of inflows.”Explore the data … Share this story. |
By
Reporter, News
July 15, 2026, 8:00 AM ET
Monumental builds fleets of compact, electric, self-driving bricklaying robots that show up on construction sites and lay walls.Courtesy of Monumental
Salar al Khafaji sold his last company, Silk, to Palantir in 2016. A week after he left, he knew he was going to build again. Al Khafaji landed on construction—an industry many in tech saw as a graveyard. “Most people told me it’s a really, really bad idea,” he told Fortune.
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His Amsterdam-based construction robotics company, Monumental raised a $32 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures, Fortune learned exclusively. The round follows a $25 million round in February 2024 co-led by Plural and Hummingbird. The new capital will fund a U.S. launch this year, scale its European robot fleet, and expand the range of tasks its machines can handle.
Al Khafaji’s nay-sayers weren’t wrong to be skeptical about the construction space. Construction technology has burned through substantial venture capital in the past seven years and investment activity in the space has ultimately declined 33% year-on-year. Katerra—a SoftBank-backed startup that tried to overhaul the entire construction supply chain under one roof—raised over $1 billion and went bankrupt in 2021. Australia’s FBR built a truck-mounted bricklaying robot arm that can lay up to 360 blocks per hour, but at nearly $6 million per machine it requires contractors to make a massive upfront bet on unproven technology. The pattern repeats: bold technology, wrong business model, contractor walks away.
The company uses whatever bricks and mortar a contractor already specifies, meaning regulators see nothing new to approve. Al Khafaji explained this as a deliberate workaround to the building-code fragmentation that killed many of its predecessors. The company currently has more than 150 robots on live European job sites.
Monumental’s latest round coincides with a greater shortage of construction labor. Global construction accounts for 13% of world GDP but has seen virtually no productivity gains in 50 years. In the U.S., the industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 alone, and the housing shortfall sits at 3 to 4 million units. Al Khafaji is blunt about the scale: “You could have 10,000 robots a day and we would literally have just touched a few percentage points of the shortage.” That framing—filling a hole, not displacing workers—is also Monumental’s political cover entering a union-heavy market where tightening immigration enforcement is already shrinking the informal labor pool that much of American construction quietly depends on.
The company isn’t the only bet on the sector. Last November, Zurich-based Gravis Robotics raised $23 million to outfit existing heavy machinery—excavators, loaders—with cameras and AI so they can operate autonomously or be guided remotely via tablet.
Monumental’s entry is targeted at Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Arizona, where building activity and labor shortages are most acute. Al Khafaji’s 18-month benchmark is a permanently deployed fleet in the high double to low triple digits across at least two states. The longer roadmap stretches from bricklaying to full facades. Someday, he mused “you’ll drive around and find them on an average construction site.”
The Fortune 500 Innovation Forum will convene Fortune 500 executives, U.S. policy officials, top founders, and thought leaders to help define what’s next for the American economy, Nov. 16-17 in Detroit. Apply here.
About the Author
By Lily Mae LazarusReporter, News
Lily Mae Lazarus is a news reporter at Fortune.
| 1 big thing: Train your nose |
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| Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios |
| Exercising your sense of smell may help preserve brain health as you age. Why it matters: Smell is arguably the least valued of the five senses. American students say they’d rather lose their sense of smell than their hair, phone or even a pinky toe. But researchers see this sense as both an early indicator of cognitive health and a potential way to keep the brain sharp, Richard Sima writes for The Washington Post (gift link).  Zoom in: Losing your sense of smell is often one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, sometimes appearing a decade before other symptoms, Sima writes.But it’s not just a sign. Training your nose can boost cognitive function by improving neuroplasticity, or how well the brain can change itself, according to early research in Neuropsychology Review.  How it works: Try sniffing a range of different scents for about 20 seconds at a time, once or twice a day. You can buy smell training kits, but you can also just take in all the wonderful smells you encounter every day.Common smell training scents are lemon, rose, eucalyptus and clove, Sima notes. But you could also pay closer attention to the smells of your morning cup of coffee, your lawn after a fresh mow or your favorite dessert in the oven. Grab blindfolds and turn smell training into a game to play with kids or grandkids. The bottom line: As Sima puts it, “stopping to smell the roses is good life advice.” |
| AI godfathers converge |
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| Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos via Getty Images |
| The three men racing hardest to build superhuman AI — Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei — all agree the frontier needs to be regulated ASAP, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column. Why it matters: For the first time, the CEOs of Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic are on the record, in writing, converging on the same diagnosis and remarkably similar prescriptions. The three rivals each published a detailed distillation of their views in the past five weeks — the same extraordinary stretch in which Washington twice intervened to restrict or delay access to frontier models. We hear Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is working on his own memo, too.  Zoom in: Hassabis’ proposal, published Tuesday, drew rare praise across the bitterly competitive AI industry, including from Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and even longtime rival Elon Musk.Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark called the framework “excellent,” writing: “At this point, everyone at the frontier of AI agrees that third parties should test out AI systems and use these to develop standards to feed into policy. “The Trump administration itself is torn: Publicly, it has championed deregulation and resisted anything resembling “an FDA for AI,” determined not to choke off U.S. innovation in the race against China. Privately, officials admit a total hands-off approach is untenable: Cyber fears have already forced them into improvised regulation twice this summer — first over Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models, then over OpenAI’s GPT-5.6.  The big picture: Amodei, Altman and Hassabis (plus countless CEOs and investors) basically agree on a rough regulatory framework.Independent testing: All three want frontier models subject to outside scrutiny before reaching the public — a break from the industry’s old self-reporting standard. One governing system: All three cite legacy regulatory models, proposing bodies that set standards, certify compliance and can limit access to frontier systems deemed too dangerous. America First: All three want the U.S. — not a fragmented patchwork of states or rival national regimes — setting the terms for a body with international reach. Threat awareness: All three cite imminent national security vulnerabilities, including dangerous cyber and bioweapon capabilities. Innovation protection: None of them is calling for a broad crackdown on AI. The shared target is the small class of frontier models powerful enough to create catastrophic or strategic risk. Where they disagree: The AI godfathers part ways on whether the government itself should be the sole final referee. Amodei wants an FAA for AI: a federal agency with the power to block a model’s release immediately, from Day 1.Hassabis wants a FINRA for AI: an industry-funded, federally overseen standards body that starts with voluntary pre-release reviews and could harden into mandatory market-access rules. Altman, writing in the Financial Times ($), pushes an IAEA for AI: a U.S.-led international forum that certifies countries, companies and safety standards, using access to frontier models and markets as leverage for compliance.  Between the lines: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic already have the lawyers, security teams, government relationships and technical staff to navigate a complex certification process. Startups and open-source developers would face a much steeper climb.Critics fear this could lead to regulatory capture: Rules written to make AI safer may wind up entrenching the biggest AI companies. The bottom line: The Wild West era of AI development is officially over. The people with the most money, the most compute and the most to lose from an AI slowdown are the ones lobbying hardest for regulation. Zachary Basu contributed … Share this column.  Read the manifestos: Demis Hassabis … Sam Altman (April preview) … Dario Amodei. |
Jul 15, 2026 #JeffreySachs#Russia#Ukraine
As the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to reshape global politics, economist Jeffrey Sachs’ 2025 speech at the European Parliament has resurfaced and is once again drawing international attention. In this address, Sachs warned Western leaders against provoking Russia, criticized NATO’s eastward expansion, and argued that decades of Western foreign policy had increased tensions with Moscow. He also discussed the concept of “Finlandization,” using Finland as an example of how neutrality once helped maintain stability. This is archival footage from 2025. The views expressed are those of Jeffrey Sachs at the time.
#JeffreySachs#Russia#Ukraine#NATO#EuropeanParliament#RussiaUkraineWar#Geopolitics#ForeignPolicy#jeffreysachs#russia#putin#ukrainewar#nato#europeanparliament#geopolitics#breakingnews#europe#news#ukrainecrisis#Moscow Download the Hindustan Times App from Playstore/App Store for all the latest news & updates. google app store : https://play.google.com/store/apps/de… Apple Store : https://play.google.com/store/apps/de… Add Hindustan Times as your preferred source on Google. Click here: https://www.google.com/preferences/so… Hindustan Times Videos brings all the News for the Global Indian under one umbrella. We break down news from across the globe from the unique lens of a Rising India. Tune in for Explainers, Opinions, Analysis and a 360 degree view of big events in India and the World which impact your present and future.
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Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs: Von der Leyen will go down in history as the one who did most damage of any European leaders in history of Self Destruction.
https://twitter.com/ErikMagnethi/status/2077525681714442467/video/1
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Published: July 15, 2010Last Updated: May 28, 2025
On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project yields explosive results as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Plans for the creation of a uranium bomb by the Allies were established as early as 1939, when Italian emigre physicist Enrico Fermi met with U.S. Navy department officials at Columbia University to discuss the use of fissionable materials for military purposes. That same year, Albert Einstein drafted a letter with the Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard and sent it to President Franklin Roosevelt supporting the theory that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction had great potential as a basis for a weapon of mass destruction.
In February 1940, the federal government granted a total of $6,000 for research. But in early 1942, with the United States now at war with the Axis powers, and fear mounting that Germany was working on its own uranium bomb, the War Department took a more active interest, and limits on resources for the project were removed.
Some of the brightest American minds were called to work on the Manhattan Project, including a number of Black scientists and engineers.
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Brigadier-General Leslie R. Groves, himself an engineer, was now in complete charge of a project to assemble the greatest minds in science and discover how to harness the power of the atom as a means of bringing the war to a decisive end. The Manhattan Project (so-called because of where the research began) would wind its way through many locations during the early period of theoretical exploration, most importantly, the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi successfully set off the first fission chain reaction. But the Project took final form in the desert of New Mexico, where, in 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer began directing Project Y at a laboratory at Los Alamos, along with such minds as Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Fermi. Here theory and practice came together, as the problems of achieving critical mass—a nuclear explosion—and the construction of a deliverable bomb were worked out.
Finally, on the morning of July 16, in the New Mexico desert 120 miles south of Santa Fe, the first atomic bomb was detonated. The scientists and a few dignitaries had removed themselves 10,000 yards away to observe as the first mushroom cloud of searing light stretched 40,000 feet into the air and generated the destructive power of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. The tower on which the bomb sat when detonated was vaporized.
The question now became—on whom was the bomb to be dropped? Germany was the original target, but the Germans had already surrendered. The only belligerent remaining was Japan.
Jul 13, 2026 New EpisodesEx-
OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo walked away from $2 million rather than stay silent, and now reveals why he believes there’s a 70% chance AI leads to human extinction, why superintelligence could arrive before the end of the decade, and the one plan he thinks could still save us all! Daniel Kokotajlo is a former OpenAI researcher and one of the world’s leading AI forecasters. He is the founder of the AI Futures Project and the lead author of ‘AI 2027,’ the widely-read scenario mapping the trajectory of artificial intelligence. His follow-up, ‘AI 2040: Plan A,’ sets out how the world could still navigate superintelligence safely. He explains: ■ What he saw inside OpenAI that made him walk away ■ Why the people building AI privately believe it’s coming even sooner than the public is being told ■ What happens if AI becomes powerful enough that humans can no longer control it, and why he puts the odds of catastrophe as high as 70% ■ Why almost every job could be automated, and what that means for the next generation ■ The plan he believes could still lead to abundance and a future worth living in
00:00:00 Intro 00:02:34 Why This AI Mission Could Affect Everyone 00:04:21 Why the Average Person Should Care About AI 00:08:29 Are AI Experts Overreacting or Sounding the Alarm? 00:10:06 Why He Joined OpenAI—and What He Saw Inside 00:13:24 Why He Left OpenAI 00:15:53 What It Was Like Inside OpenAI During ChatGPT’s Launch 00:17:16 The $2 Million NDA Controversy Explained 00:19:30 Is Full AI Automation Coming Faster Than We Think? 00:24:19 The AI 2027 Forecast That Changed the Conversation 00:26:33 AGI vs. Superintelligence: The Difference That Matters 00:27:17 How Robots Could Soon Become Part of Everyday Life 00:30:23 Why AI Works More Like the Human Brain Than You Think 00:36:14 Can AI Ever Be Truly Creative? 00:41:15 What Are the Real Odds of Human Extinction From AI? 00:47:58 What AI Will Do to Jobs 00:54:45 The Skills That Will Still Matter in an AI World 01:00:21 AI 2040: What the Future Could Look Like 01:04:36 The Different Futures AI Could Create 01:09:33 Will AI Become Earth’s Apex Species? 01:13:18 How AI CEOs Really Make Decisions 01:15:37 Will AI Decide the 2028 Election? 01:18:58 Is There a Safe Path to Accelerating AI? 01:22:11 By 2031, AI Could Do 20% of Cognitive Work 01:25:15 Should Everyone Receive AI Dividends? 01:32:41 What It Will Feel Like to Live Through the AI Revolution 01:34:11 How People Find Purpose After AI Replaces Jobs 01:46:12 Would He Shut Down AI Forever If He Could? 01:49:56 What Can We Actually Do About AI? 01:57:25 Is It Already Too Late to Change Course? Follow Daniel: X – https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/47vmwiA Substack – https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5alnhzB Read Daniel’s AI predictions: ‘AI 2027’: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/7W2L8di ‘AI 2040: Plan A’: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/EFjbRzP AI risk reading list: https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/ai… The Diary Of A CEO: ■ Join DOAC circle here – https://doaccircle.com/ ■ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here – https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ■ The 1% Diary is back – limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ■ The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: https://linkly.link/2hm7r ■ Get email updates – https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ■ Follow Steven – https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb
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