US destroys five Iranian tankers; Iran strikes Jordan base as oil nears $100

The US military says it destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman after Iran’s IRGC fired ballistic missiles at a US Navy warship on two consecutive days. Iran then struck a US military base in Jordan — Jordanian air defenses intercepted part of the barrage — while explosions were also reported at Iran’s Kharg Island oil export terminal. Oil prices edged toward $100 a barrel, and the IRGC warned crews aboard tankers in Kuwait and Bahrain to evacuate. The escalation marks the most direct US-Iran military confrontation in years, with analysts warning of potential oil spills across Gulf waters.

Commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has fallen to a 10-day average of 10 vessels a day, the lowest since May. Maritime firm Marisks called the weekend strikes a “major escalation” as commercial tankers are now “deliberately used as instruments of reciprocal economic pressure.” Twenty-seven projectile incidents have struck vessels since July 6, and no VLCC has exited the strait since last Wednesday. (Also covered in Investigations)

Lyman salient cut as Putin sells Trump a distorted battlefield and the Kremlin hardens its terms

Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps has cut the Russian salient near Lyman after a four-month counteroffensive, liberating roughly 200 km² and pushing Russian forces back toward the Zherebets River — broadly restoring the frontline to its May 2025 position. Russian milbloggers are publicly acknowledging the scale of the setback, warning it will prolong the battle for Donbas by at least a year, and blaming systematic false reporting by Russian commanders. ISW cautions that its own maps underestimate the gains.

Putin used his September 8 call with Trump to present what ISW describes as a systematically distorted picture of that frontline while pressing maximalist demands. ISW’s data tells the opposite story: since March 8, Russia has managed a net territorial gain of only 361 km², compared to 2,400+ km² in the preceding six months when the US 28-point plan was drafted. The Kremlin says Trump told Putin he wants a swift end to the war and a restoration of US-Russia relations. Ukrainian MP Anna Skorokhod says Witkoff and Kushner returned from Moscow with even harder terms than before, including constitutional changes and formal territory recognition, and in Kyiv told Zelensky he must “make compromises.” Lavrov, meanwhile, declared “we are at the start of a real war with the West.” Zelensky counters that the US has formally acknowledged Ukraine’s stronger battlefield and negotiating position and wants trilateral talks resumed in September or October; Rubio said a roadmap could emerge in weeks, but Kremlin officials continue to refuse direct trilateral meetings. (Also covered in Ukraine)

US bans Canadian alcohol and motorcycles; Canada answers with 50% tariffs as EU and Canada form new alliance

The US has imposed import bans on Canadian alcohol, motorcycles, and other goods as the bilateral trade war escalates beyond tariffs into outright prohibitions. Canada has imposed retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on US goods, and Prime Minister Carney warned Canadians of “tough times ahead” in a national address as Canada’s own $20B counter-tariffs took effect. The EU and Canada are reported to be planning a far-reaching new partnership, both powers drawing closer as US economic pressure mounts on each. The Center for European Policy Analysis warns Europe and the US are heading toward “economic friendly fire” — mutual damage from uncoordinated trade policy at a moment when Western economies need to sustain capacity for strategic competition with China and Russia.

Adding a new front, a National Observer investigation found a coordinated network of fake websites linked to US interests systematically publishing pro-Alberta separatism content, apparently designed to be scraped by AI language models and shape their outputs on Canadian political questions — targeting LLM training pipelines and retrieval sources rather than human readers directly.

OpenAI claims Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize solution — alongside authorship pressure allegations

OpenAI announced that an internal model, described as significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra, produced a proof for the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s seven Millennium Prize Problems. Roughly 10,000 concurrent agents ran over 88 hours, consuming about 130 billion output tokens, to produce an analytical proof and Lean formalization that smooth 3D fluid motion can develop a singularity in finite time. As a side result, around 100 agents also resolved the unforced Euler regularity problem in about 50 hours. OpenAI says it is not claiming the Millennium Prize.

The announcement landed amid serious controversy. Before it, NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge (Harvard/Anthropic) had published a proof of finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for the 3D incompressible Euler, Boussinesq, and IPM equations — a landmark standalone result and the natural mathematical precursor to Navier-Stokes. Buckmaster alleges OpenAI’s Sébastien Bubeck offered him two deals: either post the Euler paper while OpenAI posted Navier-Stokes the next day, or write a paper acknowledging OpenAI’s result with Alpöge removed from authorship, explicitly because Alpöge works at Anthropic. Buckmaster declined both. OpenAI denies its proof builds on their work. Simon Willison raises a further concern: even if training data wasn’t directly used, researchers discussing their work in ChatGPT sessions may have contributed to the models that produced the result — an ambiguity OpenAI has not resolved.

Terence Tao, separately, raised a structural worry: AI systems working through the accumulated corpus of near-ready open problems may deplete the stock of tractable problems built up over decades faster than the field can generate new ones. (Also covered in Tech)