Polymarket is in early talks to raise about $1B at a valuation above $20B, up from $15B in an April round. Annualized revenue has more than tripled since April to over $1.2B. Rival Kalshi was valued at $22B in May and may raise again at $40B.

Meta $META launched Muse Spark 1.1, its strongest AI coding model yet, to compete with Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. Meta priced it at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, undercutting rivals in a market Anthropic has led.

SpaceX $SPCX posted 92% revenue growth to $7.81B in its first earnings report since going public, but capex jumped 2,013% year over year to $15.8B. The stock fell about 8% in extended trading. Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25B a month for AI compute through 2029.

An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 migrants remain camped on a beach in Ceuta a week after roughly 72,000 crossed from Morocco, Spain's largest surge, per CNN and CBC. The death toll: 72 on the Spanish side, 11 Moroccan. Among those remaining are 862 unaccompanied minors, who cannot be deported.

An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 migrants remain camped on a beach in Ceuta a week after roughly 72,000 crossed from Morocco, Spain's largest surge, per CNN and CBC. The death toll: 72 on the Spanish side, 11 Moroccan. Among those remaining are 862 unaccompanied minors, who cannot be deported.

Zero of the 24 ballistic missiles Russia fired at Kyiv overnight were intercepted, per CNN. At least 17 were killed, 44 injured as the barrage, which included 115 drones, hit warehouses of Epicentr, Rozetka, Nova Poshta and Fozzy Group, per NPR. The miss signals thinning Ukrainian air defenses.

Microsoft $MSFT unveiled Project Perception, agentic AI (Red, Blue, Green) that find, prioritize and patch vulnerabilities. Its new MAI-Cyber-1-Flash model, paired with GPT-5.4, scored 95.95% on the CyberGym exploit benchmark vs about 83% for rivals, per Axios.

Nvidia $NVDA is weighing over $750 billion in AI financing deals and partnerships, per Bloomberg via Axios, including a discussed $250 billion guarantee for an OpenAI data center. Nvidia already paid $20 billion for AI chip startup Groq in December.

China has begun mass-producing homegrown immersion DUV lithography machines, per The Information and Tom's Hardware. First units land at SMIC, Hua Hong and CXMT this year: about 5 machines in 2026, 20 in 2027. Some parts still come from Japan. ASML $ASML alone ships roughly 130 a year.

Two people have died and at least 98 have been hospitalized in a Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations across nine states, the CDC says. Taylor Farms de Mexico recalled the lettuce July 17. Both deaths involved underlying health conditions, per CDC.

Matcha's trendy, but daily drinkers are rare. A Statista Consumer Insights survey of 1,000 Americans found just 9% of people in their 20s and 30s drink matcha regularly, 8% of those in their 40s, and 4% aged 50-64. Most who know it have only tried it. Source: Statista.

Real GDP growth rate, % for 2025: Spain 2.8%, EU27 1.4%, France 0.8%, Italy 0.5%, Germany 0.2%. Source: Eurostat.

A Russian drone hunted a vegetable vendor at his Kherson market stall, chasing him around his van before exploding as he dove for cover. He survived with shrapnel wounds. Ukrainian police released the footage, accusing Russia of a war crime. Reuters verified the location via satellite imagery.

South Korea's Yangsan hit 42.5C Sunday, the highest temperature in the country's 122 years of weather records. President Lee Jae-myung declared the heatwave a national disaster Tuesday after 19 deaths, and Seoul just received its first-ever severe heat wave warning. Per Korea Herald, AP.

German Finance Minister Klingbeil is reviving a plan to scrap the one-year tax-free holding period for crypto gains in the 2027 budget draft, Cointelegraph reports. Crypto taxed like stocks: 25% plus surcharge, any holding time. Goal: 2bn euros. Merz's CDU/CSU has resisted the idea before.

UBS $UBS Financial Services hit with $125M in US penalties from FinCEN, FINRA and CFTC for willful Bank Secrecy Act violations, the largest ever against a broker-dealer. Failed to vet high-risk clients tied to Russia and Latin America, 2019-2023. Fined $14.5M for similar failures in 2018.

HP, Asus and Acer have begun using small amounts of DRAM from China's CXMT in select budget laptops sold outside the US, Nikkei Asia reports, as an AI-driven memory shortage squeezes supply. Chips stay off US models, makers wary of upsetting suppliers Micron $MU, Samsung and SK Hynix.

Trump admin drafting ban on new Chinese optical transceivers in US data centers, per Reuters, citing malware, data theft risk. Targets Zhongji Innolight, on Pentagon's China military list since June. Rivals Lumentum $LITE, Coherent $COHR up 7-11%.

Snap $SNAP posted Q2 2026 revenue of $1.6 billion, up 19% year over year and beating estimates by $60 million. Net loss narrowed to $164 million from $262.6 million. Shares rose 17.3%. Most growth came from subscriptions and other revenue, up 85%; core advertising grew just 9%.

Palantir $PLTR posted 93% revenue growth in Q2 2026 to $1.94 billion, with US commercial revenue up 149% to $764 million. Stock jumped 12% after hours. The company builds no large language models of its own; growth comes from linking enterprise data to other firms' AI.

The White House meets Anthropic, OpenAI, Google $GOOGL and other AI firms Tuesday to review a new voluntary framework: labs would give the government access to their most advanced unreleased models for up to 30 days to test cybersecurity risks before public launch.

UK Department for Education confirms hackers stole roughly 607,000 records, names, job titles, emails and phone numbers of school leaders, university staff and officials, after breaching its help desk and Turing Scheme portals. Group ExfilSquad published the data and demanded payment.

Every organization still running an unpatched SonicWall SMA 1000 VPN appliance is a target right now. INC ransomware is the dominant group exploiting CVE-2026-15409, a maximum-severity (CVSS 10) flaw giving root access without credentials. Patched July 14; exploited since June 22.

China leads global humanoid robot investment with $4.4B poured into startups since 2017, edging the US at $3B, according to Tracxn data via Statista. 2025 alone drew over $3B, more than 2017-2024 combined. Unitree and Agibot each shipped 5,000+ units last year.

CO2 emissions per capita, tonnes in 2024: United States 14.2t, Russia 12.3t, China 8.7t, Germany 6.8t, Brazil 2.3t, India 2.2t. Source: Global Carbon Budget (2025); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data.

Australian officials warn H5N1 bird flu is likely to spread further after the country's first mass mortality event from the virus: 49 dead and 35 sick greater crested terns found on rocks off Cape Jaffa, South Australia, per Al Jazeera and US News.

Ukraine's HUR used modified Magura naval drones to strike Russian ground targets in occupied Crimea for the first time, hitting a Podlet radar command vehicle and a Parol-4 IFF interrogator, per Kyiv Independent and Ukrainska Pravda. The drones had previously only hit ships and aircraft.

Every person alive today carries DNA from two extinct human relatives science did not know existed. A new method called TRACE found a ghost lineage that interbred with humans in Africa over 50,000 years ago, and a super-archaic lineage from 1.8 million years ago tied to Denisovans. Per Science.

A study published in Science Advances found that moonquakes can reveal buried water ice at the lunar south pole before any drilling. Seismic waves move two to three times faster through icy soil, letting researchers map ice down to 2,625 feet deep. NASA is eyeing the region for crewed landings.

Apple is suing OpenAI in California federal court, alleging former engineer Chang Liu exploited an unknown authentication bug to keep pulling confidential hardware files from Apple's internal cloud storage for weeks after leaving for OpenAI $AAPL. Apple says it has since patched the flaw.