Keir Starmer has sacked the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, Olly Robbins, after it emerged that officials in his department rubber-stamped Peter Mandelson’s appointment as British ambassador to the US even though he failed government security vetting. No 10 says Starmer won’t resign over the scandal because he was not made aware of Mandelson having failed the vetting process until this week. A 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah came into effect this morning, though Lebanon claims Israel has already violated the agreement by launching “several attacks” in the country’s south. Donald Trump told Hezbollah to act “nicely” and said there should be “no more killing” during the ceasefire. A Parisian engineer has won an original Pablo Picasso painting worth €1m in a charity raffle. Ari Hodara, who paid just €100 for his ticket, now owns Tête de Femme (below), a 1941 portrait of the artist’s partner, Dora Maar. When told by Christie’s that he had won the work, the 58-year-old responded: “How do I know this isn’t a prank?”

It was barely reported outside the financial press, says Patrick Quirk on Substack, but just over a week ago the US Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve chairman convened an “urgent, in-person meeting” with the heads of America’s five largest banks. The reason was the announcement by AI firm Anthropic that its latest large language model, Claude Mythos, had identified thousands of cybersecurity vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, and in other critical software. Anthropic has, for now, only made Mythos available to a handful of trusted parties. But still. The federal government evidently thinks something has shifted in the cyber threat landscape – and that this constitutes a risk to the entire financial system.

For those of us monitoring these things, the shift was obvious long before Anthropic’s announcement. Already this year, hackers have reportedly stolen 10 petabytes of sensitive data – the equivalent of two billion high-resolution photos – from a Chinese state supercomputer; pinched technical blueprints from US defence giant Lockheed Martin; and dumped the contents of FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal inbox online. And those are just a few examples. The full list is much, much longer. The reason these hackers – mostly either organised criminals or linked to Iran, North Korea or Russia – are having so much success seems to be AI. Around 80% of phishing emails now contain AI-generated content, which is both vastly quicker to produce and over four times more effective than human-written scams. With big organisations dependent on a “long chain” of suppliers and developers, all it takes for a breach is one person somewhere in that chain to click a dodgy link. No wonder the government is worried.

💻😬 One hack that did hit the headlines was when a finance worker at a multinational firm transferred $25m into Hong Kong bank accounts after being told to do so by his London-based CFO on a video conference call. It turned out the CFO and all the other “colleagues” on the call were AI-generated deepfakes. That was two years ago – just think how sophisticated the scammers are now.

It’s impossible to know precisely how much the war in Iran has depleted America’s military arsenal, says Garrett Graff in The New Yorker, not least because the exact numbers are classified. But there are indicators. People “familiar with the matter” say the US fired around 850 of its estimated 3,000 Tomahawk missiles in just the first month of the war – around $3bn worth. The US also deployed two Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense systems, or THAADs, to Israel, which between them fired off more than 150 interceptors, around a quarter of the total number the US has ever bought. Each interceptor costs $13m.

DIY die-hard Steve Wainwright has become a local celebrity in Cambridgeshire for his “supersize” versions of household items, say Faye Mayern and Ashlea Hickin in Cambridge News. His creations include a 1.5-metre pencil, a one-metre cassette tape, a giant key and an enormous electrical plug. The Peterborough-based 62-year-old, who was forced into early retirement from his job as an ambulance worker after a drunken patient left him with a shoulder injury, says he began making the oversized objects because he could “only cook and clean for so many hours”.

The idea that Iran is going to emerge from all this stronger than ever before has become a popular trope in Western media, says Bobby Ghosh in Foreign Policy. The regime has absorbed the US-Israeli bombing campaign, the thinking goes, and delivered a “decisive counterstrike” by closing the Strait of Hormuz, shocking the world economy and forcing Washington to plead for a parley in Pakistan. This take is dead wrong. Iran has been “badly battered”, and any proper recovery will require time, money and political stability that Tehran painfully lacks. The regime’s decapitation has been thorough; the destruction of ballistic missile stockpiles and production facilities has been substantial. Reconstruction of blasted civilian infrastructure will be virtually impossible unless America lifts sanctions.

As for the much-touted “Hormuz weapon”, far from being a now-proven superpower, it is overwhelmingly likely that it can never be used again. Donald Trump attacked Iran with, it turns out, no plan for Hormuz. Iran would be astonishingly lucky to face so hapless an adversary in future. Oil traders and others who rely on the strait for commodities like fertiliser are already working on permanent re-routes to avoid future pain. And the other Gulf states are helping to firm up alternatives: they’re so furious at being targeted that they’re closer to each other, and to Washington, than ever. In any future conflict, a better-prepared US and a better-prepared market would manage without Hormuz. Iran’s defence doctrine has always relied on “asymmetric innovations” that work for a while, then get neutralised. It happened with their until-recently-much-feared network of regional proxies, and it’s happening with Hormuz. Make no mistake: the regime may be surviving, for now, but Iran is “devastated”.

The fact that Google’s “AI summaries” are now correct 90% of the time is impressive on one level, says Helen Lewis on Substack. But it also represents a real “shifting of the goalposts” if you consider the scale on which Google operates. Imagine, for example, if your iPhone called the wrong person 10% of the time, or your banking app sent your mortgage payments to the wrong bank one in every 10 months.

Every year since 1976, says Jonn Elledge on Substack, America’s space boffins have published the Nasa Spinoff Report listing things that were invented for use in space and have made their way into everyday life. Random examples include those infrared thermometers theatre ushers pointed at punters during the pandemic, originally intended to measure the radiation emitted by distant stars; cordless vacuums, which grew out of drills designed by Black and Decker to collect moon rocks; wireless headphones, invented so astronauts didn’t get tangled up in zero gravity; and Nike Air trainers, which use the same “blow rubber molding” technique used in space helmets. See the rest here.

It’s the Jaecoo 7, a £29,000 Chinese-made SUV, which was the UK’s best-selling car last month. It’s a sign, says the FT, of just how good China is becoming at producing high-quality hardware that sophisticated consumers around the world actually want to buy. Twenty years ago, the first “China shock” wiped out whole industries in advanced economies with a flood of cheaply manufactured alternatives. Since then, vicious domestic competition, vast industrial scale, masses of engineering talent and some of the highest subsidies in the world have generated world-beating Chinese champions in EVs, solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and a “lengthening list of advanced manufacturing sectors”.