{"id":5130,"date":"2026-07-31T15:28:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T12:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/?p=5130"},"modified":"2026-07-31T15:28:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T12:28:36","slug":"saites-30-07-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/2026\/07\/31\/links-30-07-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"links: 30.07.2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

TechCrunch: Microsoft logs $3.2B from Anthropic investment, but OpenAI was a mixed bag<\/a><\/p>\n

TechCrunch reports that Microsoft booked a $3.2 billion gain on its Anthropic investments for the quarter, while writing down its OpenAI stake by about $600 million over the same period. A single quarter of Anthropic gains nearly matched a full year of OpenAI gains, which is why the company mentioned it separately. Microsoft invested $5 billion in Anthropic last November, and Anthropic in turn committed to buying $30 billion of Azure services.<\/p>\n

Wired: A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?<\/a><\/p>\n

Wired traces the first civilian air crash in the US attributable to military GPS jamming. In May an electronic warfare exercise at an army range in New Mexico blocked navigation signals across a radius of more than 600 kilometres, and a medevac plane flown by young, inexperienced pilots lost its bearings and flew into a mountain at full speed.<\/p>\n

Axios: Political profanity is having a f*cking moment<\/a><\/p>\n

Axios reports that swearing has become a political instrument. Since 1919, US presidents and candidates have cursed in public at least 692 times, and 605 of those instances have occurred in the past ten years. Research finds that profanity makes a candidate sound more informal and more like an ordinary person.<\/p>\n

The Athletic: FIFA’s $4.2bn World Cup stake sale: Who will invest? Who is the money for? Who could stop this?<\/a><\/p>\n

The Athletic unpacks Gianni Infantino’s plan to move every revenue-generating part of FIFA into a new company and sell a fifth of it for $4.2 billion to an investor group led by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Each of the 211 member associations is promised $40 million over the next four years instead of $10 million, and they have barely eight weeks to back the plan. In deals of this kind, the piece notes, the investment funds always win in the long run.<\/p>\n

Ir: One in 20 ninth-graders fails the basic-school exams. What now?<\/a><\/p>\n

The Latvian magazine Ir reports that 818 ninth-graders, one in twenty, failed to complete basic school this year, twice as many as last year’s 441. For almost all of them the stumbling block was maths. Teachers and experts point variously to pupils using AI instead of working problems out, to family circumstances, and to the fragmented education reform begun in 2020.<\/p>\n

Axios: Exclusive: Musk plans massive push for GOP in midterms<\/a><\/p>\n

Axios reports that Elon Musk is reviving his America PAC and plans to invest in turning out Republican voters before the November elections. In 2024 he spent more than $260 million and became the largest individual donor in a single election cycle in US history. Republicans already hold a $300 million advantage over the Democrats’ budget, which may let them paper over Trump’s weak support.<\/p>\n

Ir: Latvia’s own Borats<\/a><\/p>\n

Pauls Raudseps compares a parade at the Sabile Wine Festival, where locals in painted faces, turbans and Bolt delivery bags mocked couriers, to the film Borat. Only this time we are the ones being laughed at. He links it to a deliberately stoked intolerance. Of 235 people checked in the interior minister’s staged raids on Asian restaurants, exactly one lacked legal status, while Riga’s deputy mayor has called Pakistanis monkeys. Credit is due to the police, who investigated a viral social-media account of an assault by two men and established that none of it had happened.<\/p>\n

Wired: OpenAI’s Hacking Debacle Comes Down to Human Error<\/a><\/p>\n

Wired argues that OpenAI’s models escaping their test environment, and the hacking spree that followed, is not some new frontier of AI but a failure to observe long-established security basics. Safeguards had been deliberately switched off during testing.<\/p>\n

The New York Times: Mission to Save Falling NASA Space Telescope Suffers Setback<\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times reports that Link, the spacecraft sent to rescue NASA’s falling Swift telescope, is now in trouble itself. On Saturday it began spinning once every 40 seconds, and two of the three rotating discs used to turn the craft have stopped working. Swift, which has watched gamma-ray bursts for twenty-two years, is currently a little over 320 kilometres up and drops about two and a half kilometres a week. The mission is still promised, just two weeks later than planned.<\/p>\n

Axios: AI labs face prisoner’s dilemma as momentum grows for safety slowdown<\/a><\/p>\n

Axios reports that more than 1,200 employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta have signed a petition urging Washington to back an international agreement on slowing the pace of AI development. The signatories themselves concede that no lab can do this alone. And let’s be honest, this is the classic prisoner’s dilemma.<\/p>\n

Financial Times: Meta shares tumble as Mark Zuckerberg tries to sell his vision for AI ‘agents’<\/a><\/p>\n

The Financial Times reports that Meta’s share price fell 8% after Mark Zuckerberg failed to convince investors about AI infrastructure spending that could reach $145 billion this year. Meta’s free cash flow for the quarter collapsed by 91%, from $8.5 billion to $784 million. Zuckerberg promises personal AI assistants that will handle users’ health, finances and careers for them, while analysts ask whether this is diversification or a turn away from the core business.<\/p>\n

Al Jazeera: Trump cuts WHO off from Gavi vaccine alliance funding<\/a><\/p>\n

Al Jazeera reports that the US has allocated $600 million to the Gavi vaccine alliance while stipulating that none of it may reach the World Health Organization. In exchange, Gavi has undertaken to phase out mercury-containing vaccines.<\/p>\n

SBS: As eSafety takes Telegram to court, Russia moves against the man behind the app<\/a><\/p>\n

SBS sets side by side two terrorism cases brought against Telegram in a single week. Australia’s online safety regulator is going to court because video of the Christchurch massacre and of Islamic State executions remains accessible on the app, with penalties of up to $54.4 million. Russia’s FSB has charged founder Pavel Durov with assisting Ukrainian intelligence, which it says used a dating chatbot to recruit 46 Russians aged 12 to 22.<\/p>\n

Le Monde: Night terrors: How our half-asleep brains make us scream and move erratically<\/a><\/p>\n

Le Monde explains what happens during a night terror. It is a deep-sleep parasomnia and not a nightmare, since nightmares come in the second half of the night and are remembered in the morning. In a night terror the brain is half awake, the frontal lobes and the hippocampus still asleep while the motor cortex and the emotional centres are up. So a person sits bolt upright, screams, tears at their hair or runs, and remembers none of it in the morning. Between the ages of three and ten 15% of children experience it, and among adults it is 2.2%. Interrupting an episode is not advised.<\/p>\n

Le Monde: The secrets of birdsong, organized by eight elementary motifs<\/a><\/p>\n

Le Monde reports on a study that analysed 116,000 bird songs from 3,160 species and identified eight building blocks: three kinds of trill, three kinds of whistle, chaotic note sequences and harmonic series. Each species uses about five of them on average, and the choice is governed by how densely the birds live, how large the beak is, and how well the environment carries sound. In humid tropical forest, where undergrowth muffles sound, slow trills and flat whistles dominate, and in temperate zones modulated whistles and fast trills.<\/p>\n

ABC: Neptune’s moon system is bizarre. James Webb Space Telescope data helps explain why<\/a><\/p>\n

ABC reports that the James Webb Space Telescope has helped explain why Neptune’s family of moons is so odd. Triton alone accounts for more than 99% of their combined mass, and it orbits backwards. Clay has been found on two of the small moons and in the rings, a mineral that can only form in liquid water, so in the warm depths of a large body. Most likely Neptune once had a family of large moons, shattered by Triton after the planet’s gravity captured it, and what we see now are their components.<\/p>\n

RNZ: English to become official language of NZ alongside Te Reo M\u0101ori and sign language<\/a><\/p>\n

RNZ reports that New Zealand’s parliament has granted English official language status alongside te reo M\u0101ori and sign language. The bill runs to two pages, the minister who introduced it said nothing in the debate, and even governing-party MPs kept their contributions brief. The opposition pointed out that te reo M\u0101ori was given protected status because it had been systematically beaten out of its speakers, whereas English has never been under threat, and that England has no official language either.<\/p>\n

Meduza: A clinic offering IVF with Pavel Durov’s sperm has added a note to his name about his listing as a terrorist<\/a><\/p>\n

Meduza reports that a Moscow clinic offering IVF using Pavel Durov’s donated sperm has added a note to his name on its website recording his addition to the register of terrorists. The law does not require this, as the requirement applies only to organisations. Durov said in 2024 that he became a donor fifteen years ago and has helped more than a hundred couples in twelve countries. The procedure at the clinic is free, because he covers the costs himself.<\/p>\n

Meduza: People in Yakutia spend months hunting mammoth tusks in remote regions \u2014 then sell them to China<\/a><\/p>\n

Meduza republishes a Lyudi Baikala feature on Yakutia’s mammoth tusk hunters. Since 2017, when China banned ivory imports, mammoth tusks have been sold as “ethical ivory”. 80% of world supply comes from northern Yakutia, and up to 97% of it ends up in China. One good season can earn enough for a flat. Unfortunately the hunters wash out the permafrost with fire hoses, yet what matters to science is not only the mammoth bones but also the ground they lie in. Researchers in Hong Kong have also found that smuggled elephant ivory still enters China under the “ethical” label.<\/p>\n

SBS: What is Garma Festival? Australia’s biggest Indigenous gathering returns for 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

SBS explains what the Garma Festival is. It is Australia’s largest Indigenous gathering, held on Yol\u014bu country in Arnhem Land since 1999. In Yol\u014bu Matha the word denotes a place where different ideas meet and both sides learn from one another, which is why ministers and business leaders travel there rather than the other way round. This year Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will not attend, despite promising last year to come every year he leads the government.<\/p>\n

NPR: Here’s how ‘parasite’ went from a laughing matter to a serious biological threat<\/a><\/p>\n

NPR’s Word of the Week traces how the word “parasite” went from a joke to a threat. In ancient Greek it was formed from \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03ac (par\u00e1, “beside”) and \u03c3\u1fd6\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2 (s\u012btos, “wheat, grain”), and denoted a poor guest who entertained a rich host in return for a meal. In comedy it became a beloved clown figure. Today the word also covers Cyclospora, which has just caused intestinal illness in at least nine US states, and there is nothing funny left in it.<\/p>\n

The New York Times: ‘This Is Very Strange’: Ancient Smallpox May Have Been Less Deadly<\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times reports on smallpox genomes about 500 years old recovered in Chile. They are the first ever found in the Americas. Compared with Viking-era and later samples, they show the virus steadily shedding genes, roughly one or two per century, and becoming ever better adapted to humans specifically. That suggests smallpox may have begun as a relatively mild illness and became a scourge over the centuries, perhaps only reaching its modern lethality in the 18th century.<\/p>\n

Axios: AI-focused hedge fund sells all of its stocks<\/a><\/p>\n

Axios reports that Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund, has sold its entire public equities portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. The fund was founded in 2024 by Leopold Aschenbrenner after he was fired from OpenAI, and recently managed around $20 billion. Only the day before, the Financial Times had written that the fund was seeking capital after heavy losses in the AI stock rout. A day later the AI portfolio was gone.<\/p>\n

Le Monde: In China, the hidden death of Mei, a 6-year-old girl, after gene therapy raises many questions<\/a><\/p>\n

Le Monde reports on the death of six-year-old Mei in Shanghai. A girl with a rare genetic syndrome, she died a week after a gene therapy her parents had funded to the tune of \u20ac756,000. The hospital’s ethics committee approved the treatment without assessing the toxicology data. All four monkeys in the trials had liver damage and one also had kidney damage, and signs of kidney injury later appeared in the girl too. Her life had not been in immediate danger, the hospital was fined \u20ac3,200 for inadequate supervision, and the case only came to light after an investigation by Science and Retraction Watch.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TechCrunch: Microsoft logs $3.2B from Anthropic investment, but OpenAI was a mixed bag TechCrunch reports that Microsoft booked a $3.2 billion gain on its Anthropic investments for the quarter, while writing down its OpenAI stake by about $600 million over the same period. A single quarter of Anthropic gains nearly matched a full year of OpenAI gains, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1476],"tags":[288,1486,685,1599,1487,947,1375,303,1568,534,1571,1525,1540,1550,692,1623,1604,1631],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5130"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5144,"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5130\/revisions\/5144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ojars.kapteinis.lv\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}