Evening edition··Coverage: since the afternoon brief (~13:00 → 19:40 CEST)
What matters
A global bond sell-off sends US yields to 24-year highs and oil back above $100; the first nuclear clocks tick in Vienna and Beijing; the EU agrees its biggest Russia sanctions list.
US 10-year Treasury yield rose more than 8bp to about 5.356%, its highest since April 2002; the 30-year reached about 5.725%, highest since May 2002 (Quartz).
Stocks slid a day after record closes: Dow −451 points (−0.9%), S&P 500 −0.6%, Nasdaq −0.9%. Europe’s Stoxx 600 fell 1%, Italy’s FTSE MIB nearly 2.5%.
NBC: French and Italian bond yields were heading for their biggest one-day jump since March, and the UK 30-year gilt yield hit its highest since 1998.
Why it matters —This is the cost of the Iran-war energy shock moving into government borrowing costs. Higher long-term yields feed into mortgages, corporate debt and budgets, including the German and French ones.
Two teams published in Nature: TU Wien in Vienna and a Tsinghua-led group in Beijing. Both keep time with thorium-229 nuclei embedded in crystals, using the atomic nucleus instead of electrons as in atomic clocks.
Both prototypes drift by only a few millionths of a second per year. That is still several orders of magnitude worse than today’s best atomic clocks, but this is the very first generation (Welt der Physik).
Why it matters —Nuclear clocks could eventually beat atomic clocks and test whether the constants of nature really are constant. Braunschweig’s national metrology institute, the PTB, is part of the story.
Agreed unanimously in Brussels on Wednesday: 743 individuals and 826 entities tied to Russia’s war effort, plus 77 lawmakers who ran in occupied Ukraine in September’s Duma vote (Euronews).
Targets span Russia’s defence industry, from shipyards and aviation firms to electronics makers, armoured-vehicle repair shops and aerospace companies (Kyiv Independent).
Why it matters —It shows unity after last month’s fight over delisting Usmanov and Fridman, but sanctions still need unanimity, and the plan to switch to majority voting needs unanimity too.
Musk on X: “@SpaceX will use the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno and other leading APIs.”
In a follow-up post he said simple questions go to small, fast models and complex ones to large models. He did not say which jobs go to which outside provider (TNW).
Why it matters —Agent products are turning into routers that pick a model per task, which makes the model behind the brand matter less than the routing.
Unveiled together by Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang at Wednesday’s Windows and Surface event in San Francisco (Quartz).
RTX Spark is Nvidia’s first main processor for Windows PCs: a Blackwell GPU fused with a MediaTek-designed Arm CPU (N1X), up to 128GB unified memory and 1 petaflop of AI compute.
Why it matters —Microsoft wants part of the AI workload off Azure and onto Windows PCs, and Nvidia gets into laptops as the main chip, not just the graphics card.
Playground (Google Labs): describe a game in text, pick 2D/3D and single- or multiplayer, then share it by link or publish it to a gallery with leaderboards. Unity Spark integration is coming later.
It starts US-only for 18+. Playing is free; creating uses weekly tokens, with higher limits for Google One AI subscribers (TechCrunch).
Why it matters —Google is making it easier to create media and to check it on the same day; the checker only catches watermarks from companies that opt in.
Bremen loses about 400,000 passengers a year, more than a fifth of its traffic. Ryanair had paid the city roughly €3M a year (n-tv, airliners.de).
Economy senator Kristina Vogt (Linke): Ryanair wanted the airport’s services “almost free of charge”. Meeting its demands would have cost about €4M more a year and broken state-aid rules.
Why it matters —Low-cost flying in Germany keeps shrinking toward subsidised regional airports. For Bremen, an airport already being restructured, the gap is hard to fill.
The Court of Appeal in London overturned the convictions of Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon and Colin Bermingham on Wednesday (BBC).
Four had served jail terms; Moryoussef was sentenced in his absence in 2018 after France refused to extradite him.
Why it matters —One of the signature prosecutions of the post-2008 era keeps falling apart, which puts pressure on the UK Serious Fraud Office.
Formed Wednesday off eastern Mexico; the NHC expects rapid strengthening into a strong Category 2 before landfall between eastern Louisiana and the western Florida Panhandle (Guardian).
The Atlantic season’s first hurricane has not formed this late since 8 October 1905; a strong El Niño had kept the Atlantic quiet.
The Bundestag transport committee backed the Hannover–Hamburg high-speed line plus about €250M in upgrades to the existing route by 2034. The aim is under an hour between the cities; the full Bundestag vote looks like a formality.NDR
Chrome explains its JPEG XL support (decoding since Chrome 155): 30–50% better compression than JPEG, lossless JPEG recompression, HDR, and a decoder rewritten in Rust (jxl-rs) for memory safety.Chrome for Developers
Warriors: Kristaps Porziņģis is out indefinitely with an undisclosed health issue and didn’t travel to camp in Hawaii. Steve Kerr calls it “definitely concerning”; he has missed 90 games over two seasons (POTS diagnosis in 2025).Bleacher ReportYahoo Sports
