China’s Foreign Ministry said Monday that warnings from American artificial intelligence executives about the dangers of Chinese AI development amount to fearmongering. The statement was the Chinese government’s first direct response to the debate that has dominated technology coverage since Saturday, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the industry to slow the development of its most capable models. Elon Musk and Sam Altman had agreed with Amodei by Sunday. The Chinese government did not. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to lead the first official U.S.-China AI talks under the Trump administration this week, ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s September 24 arrival in Washington for his summit with President Trump. NBC News has the summit’s AI dimensions.
In November 1969, the United States and Soviet Union held their first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Both nations had possessed nuclear weapons for more than twenty years with no formal framework governing their use or their growth. The SALT talks didn’t produce disarmament. They produced, over years of difficult negotiation, a shared vocabulary for managing a technology neither side was willing to abandon. Whether this week’s conversations about artificial intelligence produce anything comparable is too early to know. What isn’t too early to say is that the two governments are at the same table. The Japan Times has the reported agenda.
The September 24 summit’s agenda extends beyond AI. Trade, Taiwan, and the Iran war are expected to be on the table. It will be the leaders’ second meeting of 2026, following their Beijing summit in May. CNBC has the full summit preview.
Russian drones struck Kyiv overnight, killing at least one person and injuring twelve, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko. A man died at a hospital after being critically injured when a drone struck a gas station in the city’s Darnytskyi district. Ukrainian air defense intercepted a portion of the incoming drones. The Inquirer has the overnight report.
Russia has conducted drone and missile attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities regularly since beginning large-scale strikes on civilian infrastructure in October 2022. Tuesday’s strike came hours after NATO jets intercepted and shot down a drone over Lithuanian airspace, the first confirmed shoot-down in Lithuania’s airspace since the full-scale invasion began. The two events aren’t connected operationally. Their proximity in a single week describes the current shape of the war.
Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman federal prosecutors describe as a primary financial operator for former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, pleaded guilty Tuesday in a Miami federal court to a single count of money laundering and agreed to cooperate with continuing federal investigations. He agreed to forfeit $195 million in criminal proceeds. Click On Detroit has the plea details.
The case centers on Venezuela’s CLAP program, a government initiative set up in 2016 to deliver subsidized food staples, including rice, corn flour, and cooking oil, to poor Venezuelans during a period of severe hyperinflation. Saab is accused of securing those contracts by bribing Venezuelan officials, then misrepresenting the origins of the imports to skirt U.S. sanctions. Prosecutors say what was described as a food relief program became a mechanism for moving money through a network of shell companies. The money laundering charge carries a maximum twenty-year sentence. Prosecutors have agreed to recommend a lower sentence if Saab’s cooperation proves substantial.
What he knows and what he’s willing to say are open questions. Cooperation agreements in major financial cases have produced landmark prosecutions. They’ve also produced years of testimony that led nowhere. Saab was extradited from Cape Verde in 2021, pardoned by President Biden in 2023 as part of a prisoner exchange, and returned to U.S. custody in May, when Venezuela deported him. The outcome depends on specifics prosecutors aren’t disclosing.
Indonesian search and rescue teams entered their fourth day Wednesday looking for 128 people still missing after the ferry Virgo Transport 8 capsized in the Java Sea on September 13. Six people have been confirmed dead. One hundred and nine passengers and crew have been rescued. The vessel was traveling from Surabaya in East Java to Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan, carrying 243 people, when it encountered rough weather in the early morning hours. Officials said they’re still working to determine “whether the cause was natural factors, technical factors or human factors,” according to a statement from the Directorate General of Sea Transportation. NPR has the continuing search coverage.
The Java Sea has a long history of passenger ferry disasters. Indonesia’s inter-island shipping network connects thousands of islands across an archipelago stretching more than 3,000 miles, and the combination of rough monsoon weather, aging vessels, and irregular enforcement of passenger limits has produced tragedies with grim regularity over the decades. Whether those factors were present on the Virgo Transport 8 is among the questions investigators are working to answer.
The USDA released its weekly crop progress report Monday showing “excessively wet” conditions as harvest begins in Iowa. Roughly 2 percent of Iowa’s corn acres had been harvested in the week ending September 14. Thirty-eight percent of the corn had reached maturity, on pace with the five-year average but seven percentage points behind last year’s progress. Several weather stations in western and central Iowa recorded rainfall at 400 to 600 percent of normal for the reporting period. Guthrie Center recorded 7.76 inches in a single week. More rain is in the forecast. The Iowa Capital Dispatch has the crop report.
Iowa grows roughly 15 percent of the nation’s corn each year. When its harvest falls behind, the effects aren’t immediate. They move through the supply chain in commodity prices and, eventually, in grocery stores. The corn that can’t be harvested in wet conditions doesn’t disappear. It stays in the field and waits for weather that may or may not come in time. Extended wet stretches bring mold risk, structural losses in grain quality, and yield hits that can’t be recovered after the fact. This is the kind of story that doesn’t lead anyone’s broadcast. It’s also the kind of story that determines what a box of corn chips costs in January.
Something good, to end the day.
A paper published in May in Nature Communications describes a finding that surprised the researchers who produced it. Scientists studying satellite data from the 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, the underwater volcano in the South Pacific whose explosion was among the most powerful ever recorded, found evidence that the volcanic plume destroyed a measurable quantity of methane in the atmosphere. The mechanism appears to involve chlorine particles formed when volcanic ash mixes with saltwater in the stratosphere. When sunlight strikes those particles, chlorine atoms are released. Chlorine is reactive enough to attack and break apart methane molecules. ScienceDaily has the findings.
Methane is roughly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas over a twenty-year period, and its concentration in the atmosphere has been rising. The Hunga Tonga finding doesn’t mean volcanoes are solving the climate problem. The eruption itself released more greenhouse gases than the methane destruction removed. What the finding means is that the atmosphere is doing something existing models didn’t predict, and that the gap between prediction and observation is where useful knowledge tends to live. The researchers say the measurement approach could be used to test strategies for actively removing methane from the atmosphere. That’s not a solution. That’s a direction worth having.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
