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The average U.S. 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.95% for the week ending Sept. 17 — up from 6.76% the prior week and the highest level in more than 19 months — Freddie Mac said Thursday, the Associated Press reported via the New York Post. A year earlier the average was 6.26%. The 15-year fixed average climbed to 6.26% from 6.09%.

Mortgage rates generally track the 10-year Treasury yield, which breached 5% earlier in the week for the first time since 2023 after inflation and oil-shock fears. The Fed’s Wednesday quarter-point hike to 3.75%–4.00% does not set mortgage rates directly, but bond investors watch Fed policy closely; the central bank also signaled another hike later this year.

“The rate hike all but guarantees that mortgage rates will remain stuck at or above the 7% threshold,” Bright MLS chief economist Lisa Sturtevant told AP — a psychological and financial barrier that squeezes affordability. Existing-home sales have been stuck near multi-decade lows as higher borrowing costs and thin inventory keep would-be buyers on the sidelines.

Sources: New York Post (AP); National Association of Realtors

U.S. stocks closed mixed on Friday, Sept. 18, capping a volatile post-Fed week: the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 95.40 points (0.18%) to 51,682.64, while the S&P 500 rose 12.74 points (0.17%) to 7,650.50 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 104.25 points (0.40%) to 26,522.55, according to Reuters via The Straits Times and Associated Press figures.

The 10-year Treasury yield topped 5% during the week — its highest level since 2023 — and oil remained above $100 a barrel, keeping inflation worries front and center even as crude eased from session highs after China, at Saudi Arabia’s request, asked Iran to limit Houthi attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure, The Straits Times reported.

For the week, the Dow posted its biggest weekly percentage decline since March (about −1.7%), the S&P finished roughly flat to slightly lower, and the Nasdaq ended higher than the prior Friday. CME FedWatch showed about a 55.4% chance of another Fed hike at the October meeting, up from 42.5% a week earlier. Declining issues outnumbered advancers on both the NYSE and Nasdaq as volume ran hot on quadruple-witching expiration day.

Sources: The Straits Times (Reuters); The Seattle Times (AP)

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark overnight rate by a quarter percentage point to a 3.75%–4.00% target range on Wednesday — the first hike since 2023 and the first policy shift under Chair Kevin Warsh — in a unanimous FOMC decision aimed at a “timelier” return of inflation to 2%, Reuters reported.

Updated projections showed 16 of 18 policymakers anticipating at least one more quarter-point increase by year-end, with the median path putting the policy rate in the 4.00%–4.25% range at the end of 2026 and holding there through 2027. Officials marked up PCE inflation to 3.7% for 2026 and do not project a return to the 2% target until 2029. Median real GDP was marked to 2.3% this year, with unemployment ending near 4.1%.

Warsh told reporters inflation “remains elevated” and said he would be “hard-pressed to describe broad financial conditions as restrictive,” framing the move as removing “a dose of accommodation.” President Trump repeated calls for rates near 1% on Truth Social after the decision; Warsh emphasized the committee’s inflation mandate. CME FedWatch showed markets pricing a high probability of another hike before year-end, Reuters said.

Sources: Reuters; Federal Reserve (Warsh opening statement); Bloomberg

A San Diego couple watched from an airplane as a burglar climbed into their Sherman Heights home — and their 4-year-old golden retriever, Nash, repeatedly brought the intruder toys to play with, City News Service reported via KESQ and Patch, citing NBC 7 San Diego and the Los Angeles Times.

Dante Rowley and his fiancée Stephanie Calderon opened their Ring app as their flight took off and saw a ladder propped against a slightly open second-story window. The suspect, John Cline, 57, climbed inside, removed his shirt and shoes, ate yogurt, turkey, and cheese from the fridge, and took a nap — while Nash kept offering different toys. “Nash is not the greatest guard dog,” Rowley told NBC 7. “We thought that he was going to be barking at people, and he did the exact opposite.”

From the plane, Rowley texted San Diego police and granted live camera access. Officers arrived within minutes, used a drone inside, and arrested Cline on suspicion of first-degree burglary. Nash greeted the cops with a toy, too. Rowley told the Los Angeles Times nothing was stolen and the home was largely undamaged beyond some fridge food and a broken outdoor flowerpot during the escape attempt.

Sources: KESQ (City News Service); San Diego Patch; NBC News

TypeSafe AI — founded by former OpenAI researcher Diogo Almeida, who helped invent reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) — this week released Jev, a transformer-based model that is not a large language model, TechCrunch reported Friday. Instead of outputting text, Jev produces calibrated probabilities, or what the company calls “calibrated decisions.”

Because users define outputs in advance, the company says Jev cannot hallucinate; it is also cheap and fast, with free output tokens and input tokens metered by the billion. Demand briefly overwhelmed the API. Vercel engineer Pranit Sharma said replacing OpenAI’s ChatGPT Luna 5.6 classifier with Jev for safety review of commands delivered results 5 to 18 times faster with greater accuracy. Bryo AI CTO Nikhil Mudholkar found Gemini slightly more accurate on email classification but 10 to 20 times more expensive, and prized Jev’s real probability scores for automation.

Almeida left OpenAI after concluding language optimization was a poor fit for software automation. Jev is trained only on synthetic data via “reinforcement learning from calibrated decisions,” and the company positions it for workflow automation, agent jailbreak monitoring, and model routing — not as a frontier lab chasing AGI hype.

Sources: TechCrunch

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway after more than 60 years guiding the conglomerate, Berkshire said in a statement Friday, NBC News reported. Buffett was named chairman emeritus effective immediately, with his son Howard G. Buffett taking over as chairman.

“As Chairman Emeritus, Mr. Buffett will remain a member of the Board of Directors and will continue to offer his valued judgment and perspective,” Berkshire said. The move comes just eight months after Buffett stepped down as CEO and was replaced by longtime lieutenant Greg Abel — at which point the company had said Buffett planned to keep the chairman title.

“Father Time always wins,” Buffett, now 96, wrote Friday in a letter to shareholders. “He has, however, been generous with me.” He noted he has “served Berkshire since 1965” and became chairman in 1970. Even recently he remained an active investor: in July he told CNBC Berkshire had initiated an Alphabet stake now worth more than $27 billion — Berkshire’s fifth-largest holding — while Apple remains its largest, worth almost $80 billion as of Thursday.

Sources: NBC News

A diminutive wild cat from Bolivia’s Yungas cloud forest has been formally named a new living species — the first time scientists have done that for a cat in more than a century — Reuters and The Hindu reported, citing a study published Thursday in Current Biology.

Called tilcayo by local communities and given the scientific name Leopardus tilcayo, the animal is part of the South American tiger-cat group. It measures about 18 inches (46 cm) long and weighs around 3 pounds (1.4 kg), smaller than a typical house cat, with light-brown fur and irregular rosettes. National Geographic Explorer Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz and colleagues used genetic data from 38 cats across several countries, including museum specimens, and found tiger cats are five genetically distinct species — not one. Genetic analysis suggests the tilcayo lineage split from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. The team also described a new Peruvian subspecies, Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo.

Little is known about the cat’s lifestyle; rodent remains in scat and camera traps hint at a nocturnal diet. One live individual is a 10-year-old male at Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary after living with a local family. IUCN currently lists tiger cats as two vulnerable species; researchers say an upcoming review of the five lineages separately could find tilcayo endangered on its own as Yungas forests face deforestation, fire, agriculture, and mining.

Sources: Reuters; The Hindu (Reuters); Al Jazeera; Current Biology

Anthropic has quietly set up a Bay Area wet lab for physical biology experiments as it expands its artificial-intelligence push into drug science, Reuters reported Friday in an exclusive, citing two people familiar with the matter and a confirmation from the company’s head of life sciences.

Eric Kauderer-Abrams told Reuters the final test in biology “is still and will be for a while in real lab work,” and described Anthropic’s approach as typical of biotech — some work in its own facilities, some with external partners. A spokesperson later clarified the lab is not for drug discovery specifically. Sources said Anthropic wants Claude to direct robotic units through lab experiments with limited human intervention, while the company stresses human oversight remains essential for safety.

The effort sits beside Anthropic’s stated aim to unlock treatments for rare and “undruggable” conditions the traditional industry may skip financially — including complex antibody designs — while stopping short of running clinical trials so it is not competing head-on with pharma customers. Life sciences is already one of its biggest investment areas by headcount; the firm launched Claude Science software, added Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board, and acquired Coefficient Bio to help build drug-development tools. The lab build arrives as Anthropic researchers warn about catastrophic AI risk and the company prepares f

Russians began voting Friday in a three-day parliamentary election for the 450-seat State Duma — the first since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — as Ukraine launched a massive drone barrage on the Russian capital and other regions, Reuters and Al Jazeera reported, citing AP and Reuters.

President Vladimir Putin framed the tightly controlled vote as a barometer of support for the war. In a televised address he said casting a ballot would show that “millions of people stand behind our soldiers.” United Russia is widely expected to keep dominance; most anti-war candidates were barred, and the liberal Yabloko party — which wants a ceasefire — was ruled off the party list last month by the Supreme Court. Senior Yabloko figures have drawn long jail terms for war-related comments. Voting spans Russia’s 11 time zones through Sunday evening GMT, including balloting Moscow has organized in occupied parts of Ukraine.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said more than 350 Ukrainian drones targeted the capital Friday morning; most were destroyed at an outer defensive perimeter, with 64 shot down approaching the city. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces also hit the Yaroslavl oil refinery overnight and damaged aircraft at a Rostov military airfield. Russia reported strikes on a Nova Poshta logistics hub near Odesa and a cargo vessel at Chornomorsk, and a Russian drone attack injured five people, including three children, in the Kyiv region, officials said.

Sources: Reuters; Al Jazeera (AP/Reuters)

A bottlenose dolphin nicknamed Bubbles at Australia’s Lady Elliot Island has been filmed chasing bigeye trevally until they vomit — then eating the regurgitated prey — in what researchers say is the first formal documentation of the behavior in dolphins, Discover Wildlife reported Thursday, citing a paper in Ecology and Evolution.

PhD candidate Romney Edwards-Francis of the University of the Sunshine Coast caught the behavior while snorkeling for the Leaf to Reef Project after reef guide Pieter Demmers and marine biologist Jacinta Shackleton tipped her off. Shackleton has watched Bubbles do it repeatedly: chase the fish, wait for the spew, scarf it down, then click as if bragging. The paper logs 20 foraging records from June 2021 to October 2025; 11 ended with Bubbles eating the fish’s regurgitated meal.

Scientists call it kleptoparasitism — stealing food from another animal. Frigatebirds pull a similar airborne stunt on noddies. The team figures forcing a reliable trevally school to surrender lunch is easier than hunting live prey on lean days. Whether other dolphins do the same remains unknown; underwater observations this specific are rare.

Sources: Discover Wildlife; Ecology and Evolution (study)