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Five baby orangutans were found in a forest in India’s eastern state of Odisha, thousands of kilometres from their natural habitat, prompting an investigation into how they got there, BBC News reported.

Locals spotted the young apes in Balasore district early Tuesday and alerted forest officials. The animals were given first aid and taken to Nandankanan Zoological Park in Bhubaneswar for quarantine. Orangutans are not native to India; the critically endangered apes live in the wild only in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Odisha’s forest minister said investigators are examining whether an international smuggling network trafficked the animals and abandoned them near a highway. Balasore District Forest Officer Pratik Prakash Indalkar told the BBC they could not have arrived naturally and may have been transported by road. They were found in Ranakata, a proposed reserve forest in Bhogarai block near the West Bengal border, close to a state highway.

Officials believe the orangutans had been in the area only two or three days. A forest search found no other orangutans or clues. Young orangutans normally stay with their mothers for years; five infants together with no adults nearby raised immediate trafficking concerns. Commercial trade in orangutans is banned under CITES. In 2022, two baby orangutans were found abandoned near the Assam–Mizoram border in a similar case.

Sources: BBC News

U.S. security agencies accused China-based AI companies of systematically extracting proprietary capabilities from American frontier models through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns, according to a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (AA26-251A) released Tuesday by the NSA, CISA, and FBI.

The advisory names DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI. It says the firms extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges from models including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok since at least late 2024 — using native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators, and a gray market of “transfer stations” that bypass geographic restrictions and obscure metadata.

Agencies say DeepSeek targeted reasoning and specialized functions to train R1 and V3; Alibaba used distillation to improve Qwen; Moonshot pulled Claude and GPT data for Kimi models. Tactics listed include bulk premium subscriptions shared across developer teams, chain-of-thought extraction via prompt injection, and automated failover when pathways get blocked.

The authoring agencies urge U.S. AI companies to detect anomalous accounts and usage, subtly alter responses to suspected distillation traffic, and share indicators across providers. Distillation itself is a legitimate research technique; the advisory focuses on aggressive, terms-of-use-violating campaigns at industrial scale.

Sources: CISA AA26-251A; Bloomberg; WSJ

Alphabet’s Google will invest at least €13 billion ($15.1 billion) in AI infrastructure in Finland over the next two years — its biggest European investment — including a major nuclear power purchase, the company said Wednesday.

The build-out covers three new data centers in northern Finland, where winter temperatures can plunge well below −10°C (14°F). Google’s President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat called the approach “BYOP, bring your own power,” and said it is Google’s first nuclear energy deal outside the United States.

Utility Fortum said separately it signed a 22-year agreement for Google to take up to 50% of the output of one of Finland’s two nuclear plants, supporting a lifetime extension and upgrade of the Loviisa plant through 2050. Fortum shares jumped about 15.5% on the news.

Google said the 2027–2028 investment should add about €3.6 billion to Finland’s GDP during construction and support roughly 7,000 jobs annually once operational. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said electricity supply looks sufficient and that Google is committed to keeping production and prices under control. Alphabet has raised its global investment target this year to between $195 billion and $205 billion as AI compute demand surges.

Sources: Reuters

The Trump administration moved Tuesday to ban imports of most Canadian alcohol, certain dairy products including whey and molasses, nonalcoholic beer, and Canadian motorcycles and mopeds starting at 12:01 a.m. ET on Sept. 29 — less than a day after Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on about $20 billion in U.S. goods took effect.

White House proclamations also add a further 50% tariff on Canadian cheese products, steel, aluminum, and bamboo furniture beginning next Tuesday, while rolling back some prior 50% tariffs on items such as toilet paper, cement, and fishing-rod parts after impact reviews.

Officials accused Canadian negotiators of ceasing good-faith talks and leaving trade barriers in place. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has pledged dollar-for-dollar matching; many provinces still boycott American alcohol. The White House says talks continue and an “alternative pathway” remains possible.

Separately, Trump directed steps to keep Canadian-origin products out of U.S. federal procurement and publicly threatened Bombardier sales in the U.S., drawing pushback from Kansas senators defending Bombardier jobs. A 50% tariff on Canadian autos, trucks, parts, and steel still looms for Jan. 1, 2027 if no deal lands.

Sources: CBS News; ABC News; Forbes; Reuters

OpenAI published what it calls a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem — one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s seven Millennium Prize Problems — produced by an internal multi-agent system in about 88 hours.

The company says roughly 10,000 coordinating agents, powered by an internal model stronger than GPT‑6 Astra, showed that an initially smooth fluid at rest can develop a singularity in finite time under a smooth force while energy stays finite, establishing statements “C” and “D” in the official prize formulation. Lean formalization and verification took another 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra.

OpenAI is sharing a writeup, paper, and machine-checkable Lean proof, and says it does not intend to claim the $1 million Millennium Prize. Agents spent about 2.7 million messages and 130 billion output tokens on Navier–Stokes alone.

The announcement lands beside concurrent work by NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic’s Levent Alpöge on related fluid blowup results. OpenAI says it launched after hearing rumors of Millennium progress, later linked to that pair, and insists its researchers and agents did not see their work before public release — while acknowledging it cannot fully rule out de-identified product-usage data improving models. Buckmaster has publicly questioned the timeline and credit framing.

Sources: OpenAI; CNBC; BBC; The Next Web

Iran said Wednesday it attacked 10 ships near the Strait of Hormuz — including two U.S. vessels and eight oil tankers — after the U.S. military destroyed five Iranian oil tankers, in the biggest declared tit-for-tat shipping assault since the six-month war began.

Brent crude, the global benchmark, briefly traded at $100 a barrel for the first time since July as markets priced in prolonged supply risk. U.S. crude climbed as well.

U.S. Central Command said it struck five Iranian crude carriers on Tuesday after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard twice targeted a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles over two days. CENTCOM released video of vessels ablaze and said no Americans were harmed. Named hulls included Riesco, Kivik, Charminar, Horizon 1, and Derya near Kharg Island.

Iran also fired ballistic missiles at a U.S.-used base near Al Azraq in Jordan. Jordan said it intercepted 18 of 20 missiles; two fell in unpopulated areas with no casualties. Maritime reports added civilian toll: one seafarer killed aboard the Hercules Star off Dubai, another missing; the New Andros fuel-oil tanker caught fire in Iraqi waters with 22 crew reported safe.

The IRGC threatened a much larger off-limits zone and said if the enemy hits two or three Iranian targets, Iran will hit 20. Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the U.S. tanker strikes as standing policy: try to hit American warships, lose tankers.

Sources: Reuters; CNN; BBC; NPR

Meta Muse is now pitched as a personal AI agent for US users — one that can connect to email, calendars and payment tools to handle real-world tasks. It is available through muse.ai, iOS, Android and WhatsApp, with glasses support promised later.

Muse can send email, book travel, lower bills, fill forms and turn grocery lists into purchases from recipe reels. Checkout runs through Link by Stripe. The pricing ladder is $20 a month for Power and $100 a month for Maximum, with a card required.

Under the hood is the Muse Spark model. Meta says a Secure VM and Sentinel protections help keep the agent boxed in and monitored, but the pitch still asks users to hand over access to the apps, money rails and decisions that run their lives.

The launch arrives less than two weeks after an $18 billion multistate settlement, putting Meta’s trust problem directly on the welcome mat as Muse asks for even more reach.

Source

TechCrunch

On Sept. 8, Google rolled out Europe search changes under the Digital Markets Act, warning that the result will degrade the user experience and raise costs for EU businesses. The company called it the biggest quality cut in its 29-year history.

The new layout favors vertical and price-comparison sites — hotels, airlines and restaurants, including players such as Expedia and Booking — over simple local listings. One specialized engine leads, two others follow, and a carousel of real-time prices sits below with key price data stripped out.

The move follows a €460 million ($534 million) July fine over favoring Google’s own shopping, hotels, transport and sports services. Google has 60 days to comply or face periodic penalties of up to 5% of worldwide turnover.

Nick Fox said the rules force Google to degrade the experience and send more business to intermediaries. The changes do not affect searches outside the EU. Earlier DMA changes were linked to roughly a 30% drop in free direct-booking traffic; a separate Play anti-steering fine reached €430 million, taking total EU antitrust penalties to about €10.38 billion.

Source

Reuters

Early Tuesday, Houthi attacks wounded 73 people, including women and children, and sparked fires at southern Saudi oil facilities and utilities. The Energy Ministry said operations were temporarily suspended.

The strikes hit Abha, Jazan, Najran and Khamis Mushait, according to Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki. Jazan’s refinery has capacity of roughly 400,000 barrels per day.

The Houthis claimed dozens of ballistic missiles and drones targeted oil sites and King Khalid Air Base, framing the barrage as retaliation. Riyadh vowed resolve as the fires pushed the region’s energy map closer to a breaking point.

That means two choke points are now in the frame: the Bab al-Mandeb at the Red Sea’s mouth and the already-strained Strait of Hormuz.

Sources

• NPR
• Al Jazeera
• France 24

Fujitsu announced what it calls the world’s first working prototype of a diamond-spin quantum computer that puts tin-vacancy (SnV) centers into photonic integrated circuits — joint work with Delft University of Technology and QuTech that started in 2020.

The machine operates at −271.6°C, warmer than the roughly −273.13°C typical for superconducting quantum systems, and Fujitsu says it can already be used through the Fujitsu Hybrid Quantum Computing Platform without specialist know-how. The pitch is modular scaling: high fidelity plus optical links between modules.

Fujitsu plans a multi-module diamond-spin prototype by 2027 and will work on combining diamond-spin with superconducting approaches toward practical systems — aiming for about 250 logical qubits by fiscal 2030 and 1,000 by fiscal 2035 on its roadmap. CTO Vivek Mahajan framed SnV diamond spin as both a standalone path and a possible extender for superconducting machines.

Sources: Fujitsu / JCN Newswire