the daily brief

• Russia launched one of its largest air attacks of the war overnight into Thursday — more than 70 missiles and 280 drones — killing at least 10 civilians across Kyiv, Lviv and other cities; Ukrainian air defenses report neutralizing 320 targets — npr
• A likely Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crashed in eastern Poland during the same barrage; NATO scrambled jets, Secretary-General Mark Rutte called it "yet another reckless act by Russia," and PM Donald Tusk called it a very serious incident while noting Poland was not the target — kyiv post
• President Trump says a deal has been reached for Hamas to disarm and Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza, though many hurdles, conditions and long timelines remain to wind down the war — npr
• At least 18 migrants died trying to reach the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, where Spain deployed its military after thousands breached the border from Morocco — npr
• Türkiye and Iraq signed five cooperation agreements as President Erdoğan and Iraqi PM Ali al-Zaidi discussed an energy partnership that could send up to 1 million barrels of oil a day to Ankara — turkish minute
• In Japan, crews began clearing debris at the AEON mall in Kashima, Kumamoto, damaged by an explosion that followed the recent earthquake — npr

• Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5, landing within 0.5% of Fable 5's peak benchmark scores at roughly half the cost per task — thursdai
• Earlier this month Claude Sonnet 5 hit 63.2% on agentic coding benchmarks (vs 58.1% for Sonnet 4.6), with introductory pricing of $2/M input tokens through august 31 — thursdai
• OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, Luna) became the first frontier release to clear the new US government review before going public, with Sol streaming ~750 tokens/sec on Cerebras hardware — aitoolsrecap
• OpenAI acquired TBPN, the daily live tech talk show — its first acquisition of a media company — techstartups
• Google DeepMind released Gemma 4, four open models (E2B, E4B, 26B MoE, 31B dense) built for advanced reasoning and agentic workflows — thursdai
• Moonshot's Kimi K3 became the largest open-weights LLM release yet at 2.8 trillion parameters — llm-stats

• Markets rebounded Thursday from the Fed-hold selloff: the Nasdaq closed +2.8% at 25,122 (snapping a six-day skid), the Dow gained 614 points to 52,208, and the S&P 500 rose 1.7% to 7,438 — cnbc
• Microsoft jumped 15% after $90.0B quarterly revenue beat estimates, with Azure up 43% at constant currency and capex of $41B, up 69% year-over-year — cnbc
• Alphabet fell more than 7% — its worst day in over a year — after raising 2026 capex guidance to as much as $205B and posting its first negative free-cash-flow quarter since the 2004 IPO — bloomberg
• Semiconductors surged, with the SOXX ETF up more than 8%, Micron +18% and AMD +13% — cnbc
• On today's earnings slate: Chevron, AbbVie, Moderna, Linde, Colgate-Palmolive, Eaton and T. Rowe Price — kiplinger
• Türkiye's central bank held its policy rate at 37% for a fourth straight meeting, citing an easing underlying inflation trend but warning of a temporary july uptick from energy prices — hürriyet daily news

• Stanford researchers identified a naturally occurring molecule that suppresses appetite and reduces body weight much like Ozempic — without several of its side effects — sciencedaily
• A major US trial found silver diamine fluoride, brushed onto cavities in seconds, stopped decay in more than half of treated baby teeth — sparing young children pain and surgery — sciencedaily
• A weakening Atlantic current (AMOC) could supercharge California's atmospheric rivers while leaving Greenland with fewer snow-producing storms — sciencedaily
• Oxygen is disappearing from oceans, lakes and rivers at an alarming rate, threatening aquatic life and the processes that help regulate Earth's climate — sciencedaily
• A global shift toward healthier diets could sharply reduce livestock farming and cut land-use-change emissions by 85% by 2050 — sciencedaily
• Songbirds appear to have evolved through rare explosions of change aligned with major climate shifts, separated by long stretches of slower development — sciencedaily

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