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Israel rejects ceasefire with Hezbollah

Israel rejected global calls for a ceasefire with Hezbollah on Thursday, dimming hopes of preventing an all-out war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to target the Lebanese group with “full force” as he prepares to address the UN General Assembly in New York on Friday, which comes as the conflict in Gaza approaches a year, and as Israel barrels toward another war. The prolonged conflict is also taking a toll on Israel’s economy, The Washington Post reported: Its high-tech industry remains strong, but construction, agriculture, and tourism have all been hit hard. Israel’s economy has usually been resilient during conflicts, but this “is the mother of all wars,” one expert told the Post, “and the money has to come from somewhere.”

IMF grants Pakistan $7 billion bailout

Pakistani stocks hit a record high hours after the International Monetary Fund approved a $7 billion bailout for the country’s struggling economy. The loan — which Pakistan pledged would be the last of more than 20 it has secured from the IMF since 1958 — comes after the country’s inflation receded significantly this year due to tight austerity measures. But Islamabad “risks falling further behind” without more economic reforms, the IMF said, and still faces “formidable” structural challenges. “If Pakistan were a startup, it would have shut down 50 years ago,” a Silicon Valley entrepreneur told the Chaos Theory Substack, arguing that the country’s weak and corrupt leadership has failed to harness its vast talent pool and resources.

Chinese submarine sinks in naval setback

China’s newest nuclear-powered submarine sank earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported, a setback in its ambitions of exerting authority over the South China Sea. Beijing, which scrambled to cover up the incident, has strived to catch up to the US in undersea technology, while the US Navy is focusing on speeding up ship and submarine maintenance to prepare for a possible war with China in 2027. Meanwhile, India — which recently launched its second nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine — is aiming to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific, but significantly lags behind China’s submarine capabilities, a former Indian naval officer told the South China Morning Post.

Japan poised for new leader

Japan’s ruling party will select its next prime minister Friday. The process is usually a predictable ritual decided by “old men… in back rooms,” but the contest to replace outgoing leader Fumio Kishida is marked by “excitement, diversity, and unpredictability,” The Times’ Asia editor wrote. The top three candidates are moderate Shinjiro Koizumi, a former prime minister’s son who at 43 would be Japan’s youngest post-war leader; Sanae Takaichi, a nationalist who would “infuriate China” and who could be Japan’s first female leader; and populist frontrunner Shigeru Ishiba, who has called for an “Asian NATO,” The Economist wrote. Whichever Liberal Democratic Party member wins will “face big tests at home and abroad,” amid tense relations with China and a new US president, the magazine said.

The death of the popular politician

The era of the popular politician is over, a Financial Times columnist argued. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was only elected in July, but his approval rating has plunged 45 points with no clear cause. Other Western leaders are similarly despised: France’s Emmanuel Macron incurred the worst protests in his country in half a century, Australia has changed prime ministers seven times since 2007, and no US president wins 400 electoral college votes anymore. The reason? “Decade after decade of peace and affluence has had the perverse consequence of raising expectations,” Janan Ganesh wrote. Few people alive in the West today have clear memories of existential war or uncontained financial crisis, and so they are harder to please: “The one constant is us.”

Global lithium prices decline

Global lithium prices have fallen to 25% of their levels a year ago, forcing mining companies to scale back production. Australia, the world’s largest lithium producer, has been particularly affected, with three major firms announcing redundancies. Oversupply of lithium ore and lower-than-expected sales of electric vehicles, which use lithium in their batteries, are pushing prices down. Some firms are confident that the fall is just a blip, however, and are doubling down on production in hopes of a bounceback, the BBC reported: One Perth-based miner is upping ore production by 50%, betting that the market’s short-term volatility is less important than the long-term trend of electrification.

Norway starts carbon capture service

Norway opened the world’s first commercial carbon dioxide storage service. The project will take CO2 captured at factory smokestacks, compress it into liquid, and inject it into vast reservoirs underneath the North Sea. It will initially take up to 1.5 million tons a year, with plans to scale up to five million if there is demand. That’s a tiny fraction of total global emissions, but a company executive told AFP that the plan was to demonstrate that carbon capture and storage (CCS) “is feasible” at commercial scale. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report made it clear that CCS is necessary to avoid the worst outcomes from climate change.

23andMe board resigns

The entire board of DNA testing company 23andMe resigned over its CEO’s plans to take the firm private. Since going public in 2021, 23andMe has never made a profit, and its share price is down more than 95% from its high. Interest in genetic testing surged in the late 2010s, with tens of millions of people seeking to discover more about their ancestry. But by 2020 the market had begun to collapse because of privacy concerns, questions over the tests’ accuracy, and the fact that customers typically only use the kits once. “The move is almost certainly the final nail in the coffin for the embattled company,” Fortune wrote. CEO Anne Wojcicki said she was still committed to taking 23andMe private.

AI podcast on pager attacks

A US media company used artificial intelligence to release a fictional podcast on last week’s deadly Hezbollah pager explosions just hours after the attacks. The founder of Caloroga Shark Media thought the explosions would make for an “intriguing” story, WIRED reported. He used multiple AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT to produce a 10-part audio series titled Pager Protocols in which an AI-generated narrator tells the story of an intelligence agency pursuing terrorists who have purchased pagers. While the idea of liberally using AI to create quick-turnaround content “might sound terrifying” to fans and creators, WIRED said industry insiders think it’s an inevitability. One podcaster said he sees AI as a way for creators to “produce at the speed of culture.”

You can’t buy this popular camera

A wildly popular digital camera has turned around the fortunes of a struggling Japanese photography firm, but you still can’t buy it. The Fujifilm X100V went viral on TikTok in 2022 thanks to its vintage film camera-looks and nostalgic, warm-hued images, Bloomberg reported. It revitalized sales at Fujifilm, which 15 years ago was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year owing to analog photography’s decline. But the company has been unable to keep up with demand, partly because of a global chip shortage, and the X100V and its successor are still unavailable on the company’s website, while resale values have soared. One camera shop owner attributed the X100V’s popularity to the “clinical, soulless” images produced by smartphones, saying: “Everyone has one of these things.”

September 27:

• Pope Francis meets Belgium’s King Philippe and Prime Minister Alexander De Croo.
• UK climate activists are sentenced for throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
• Loewe unveils its Spring/Summer 2025 collection at Paris Fashion Week.

Rojak is a colloquial Malay word for “eclectic mix,” and is the name for a Javanese dish that typically combines sliced fruit and vegetables with a spicy dressing.

Billion-dollar problem

Artificial intelligence could fuel what Nonzero Substack writer Robert Wright dubs “billionaire conspiracy theory syndrome.” He points to how several influential Silicon Valley leaders — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Bill Ackman — have recently shared dubious claims related to the upcoming US presidential election, which is already rife with concerns about misinformation and a lack of trust in the voting process. A recent study by MIT and Cornell psychologists found that while AI chatbots are effective at undermining people’s belief in conspiracy theories, they are still extremely persuasive.

As AI advances, it will be wielded as an “instrument of massive influence” by powerful people and companies who can rapidly deploy it at scale, Wright argued, further concentrating power. “The Elon Musks and Peter Thiels and Bill Ackmans of the world may soon play a bigger role in the world than they already play,” he wrote.

Wilting olive branch

Lebanon is bracing for an apparent ground invasion by Israel after a deadly bombardment that has further strained the country’s fragile economy. But Lebanese olive farmers, having endured years of conflict, know the importance of diversifying their businesses because the region’s “unpredictable circumstances make it difficult to plan ahead,” the Ideas Beyond Borders geopolitical Substack wrote.

Israeli rockets contaminate soil and ruin olive oil quality, so one Lebanese farmer interviewed by the newsletter is using the waste products from olive oil production to create “olive logs,” a sustainable alternative to wood that can be burnt for fuel. The challenge will be in picking the olives during the upcoming harvest season, as harvesters don’t want to be out in the fields with war looming. “We have to stay positive as much as we can to move forward,” the farmer said.

Bad habits

Unlike in the West where people drink for fun, drinking in China is “more purposeful and controlled” and an integral part of work culture, especially among the country’s bureaucracy, one consulting blog wrote. However recent political reforms are starting to shake things up, according to research by Chinese sociologist Qiang Ge, translated by the Inside China Substack.

The bureaucracy’s three main problems are “insufficient information flow, unclear job duties, and weak worker motivation,” Qiang wrote, and civil servants use alcohol to “[build] trust and [provide] extra motivation when the system falls short.” Beijing has recognized these issues and is changing some fundamental structures, he noted, such as allocating more resources to local governments, reducing the need for “personal relationships to compete for resources, thus embedding drinking behavior into governance.”

A memorial commemorating Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë that misspelled the literary sisters’ surname has been corrected after 85 years. The editor of the Brontë Society Gazette noticed that a plaque in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner spelled their last name without the diaereses. She persuaded the abbey to correct the 1939 plaque to reflect Brontë’s pronunciation — “as if it rhymed with Monty, not font,” The Guardian wrote. The dean of Westminster said he was grateful for the “lively remembering” of the writers. “Memory is not a locked cupboard, but an active thing,” he said.

• Mike Pence quietly lays the groundwork for a post-Trump future.
• Harris escalates her courtship of crypto.
• Nvidia-backed robotic manufacturing startup taps new CEO with an eye to AI.