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182 updates · 2061 entities · 29 Oct

Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA), the body that issues Hormuz transit permits, warned on Tuesday 27 October that it will take legal action from 1 November against every ship of Sinokor Merchant Marine, the South Korean shipping company whose ships carried nearly 40% of the crude leaving Hormuz in September, Bloomberg reported. The Korea Shipowners' Association says the listed ships are chartered, not Sinokor's own. In the same week the Mecca pact states met Iran's security chief in Tehran, Britain charged two men in the Fairford case and physical Brent climbed $13 in three sessions.

Fourth year of Russia's full-scale invasion, peace talks and escalation

29 updates · 608 entities · 22 Oct

Russia is ready to resume talks with the US and Ukraine "around the 10th of November", Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov said after Putin met Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg on 21 October, adding that "practical work" on a Russian diesel deal with Washington "has already begun". The same readout said Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy and logistics continue "as a retaliatory measure". Beijing would not confirm the Shenzhen three-leader meeting Ushakov described, and Ukrainian drones reached St Petersburg as Russia's seaborne crude fell to its lowest since March.

21 updates · 542 entities · 27 Oct

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) drew $15m on 5 October from a $25m Amalgamated Bank credit line, and in the same fortnight spent $16.14m alongside its Senate candidates to the NRSC's $4.84m, pre-general reports filed with the FEC on 22 October show. Republicans hold the bigger reserve: the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) had $88.42m on 14 October to Senate Majority PAC's $32.72m. Net of debt, on Lowdown's arithmetic, the DSCC is narrowly ahead of the NRSC, $5.67m to $5.20m.

15 updates · 369 entities · 22 Oct

Cuba published a law on 12 October that lets investors, and Cuban private firms with cabinet approval, hold oil concessions for up to 30 years, 12 days after a US Treasury rule barred American banks from keeping accounts for Cuba's private entrepreneurs. Between 30 September and 15 October Washington also ended U-turn dollar clearing, opened a second Cuba sanctions rulebook and blacklisted Banco Internacional de Comercio S.A. On the island the grid failed completely on 18 September, and after a plant fire on 16 October the state grid operator, UNE, had 740 MW available that morning against 2,260 MW of demand.

Local, Holyrood & Senedd

19 updates · 558 entities · 22 Oct

Councillors left Reform UK after ITV broadcast undercover footage from 14 October, and in Solihull two resigned their seats after council leader Karen Grinsell asked three to step down. Mark Pack's tracker of Reform's May intake now lists 62 entries, against 30 in early September, and Labour took two Reform council seats in October by-elections.

A standing ledger of every stressed British balance sheet, with the receipts

5 updates · 121 entities · 22 Oct

Britain's net debt passed £3 trillion for the first time at the end of September, £3,005.0bn on the Office for National Statistics' first estimate, yet at 94.0% of GDP it sits below the official forecast and 0.7 points under a year earlier. The same release revised the £8.1bn April to August overshoot Lowdown led on last time to about £4.1bn, and with September added borrowing ran £6.0bn over the Office for Budget Responsibility's half-year forecast. Lenders still bid more than three times over for gilts, so six days before the 28 October Budget the strain is the price of borrowing, not access to it.

Tracking layoffs, hiring, economic shifts, and geopolitical power changes driven by artificial intelligence.

21 updates · 461 entities · 22 Oct

Banque de France economists found that permanent hiring of French under-30s in the most AI-exposed jobs was 28% below its November 2022 level by March 2026, against 8% in the least exposed, the same shape the Bank of Canada found in August. Accenture's annual filing now says automation "has led and may continue to lead to reduced demand for our services", in a year its workforce grew by about 35,000. In the US, cuts citing AI rose in September but slipped to fifth among the reasons employers gave.

32 updates · 387 entities · 3 Aug

Two of the European Union's 27 member states, Portugal and Slovakia, have notified Brussels of measures transposing the recast gas market directive, with the Article 94 deadline for the other 25 falling on Wednesday 5 August 2026. The gap left no mark on price: TTF held roughly €55 to 58 per MWh and EUA sat at 81.04, both inside recent bands, while a record German solar mean of 18,761 MW on Sunday drove the clean spark spread to minus 18.48 EUR/MWh and heat-related curtailment took 7.6 GW, 12 per cent of the French nuclear fleet, offline on Monday.

22 updates · 250 entities · 3 Aug

ICE Brent for October traded at $83.64 a barrel at 03:33 ET on Monday 3 August, down 4.88% intraday, and NYMEX WTI for September at $79.57, down almost 6%, after President Trump said he had called off a planned strike on Iran. Four days earlier Argus assessed the West Mediterranean diesel crack at $91.67, more than $30 clear of the record this desk logged on 8 July. Both figures are true in the same week, and the gap between them, not either alone, is the story.

17 updates · 614 entities · 22 Oct

Local opposition has stopped work on the power line to NEXTDC's M3 data centre in West Footscray, Melbourne, and Jemena, the distributor, does not expect to restart before February 2027. NEXTDC cut its FY27 underlying EBITDA guidance to A$245m-A$265m from A$385m-A$410m and froze all new development. In Essex, Microsoft left Nscale's Loughton AI site after UK Power Networks warned that power might not arrive until the 2030s.

13 updates · 445 entities · 22 Oct

USA Today Co., which licenses content to Microsoft, sued seven OpenAI entities in New York on 8 October for over $250 million, naming no Microsoft entity. In the same six weeks, Canada's national publishers sued Anthropic while Village Media signed with OpenAI. In India, Bennett, Coleman and Co and the Indian Express Group signed with OpenAI as ANI's suit against OpenAI continues; only the New York plaintiff both licenses and sues.

Tracking the structural growth of unmanned systems across industrial operations and defence applications.

19 updates · 648 entities · 26 Oct

China's commerce ministry said on 19 October that from 18 November drone autopilots, heavy-lift motors, turbojets and counter-drone technology need export licences for any destination, where August's rule covered only the US. In the same weeks Germany, Japan and the European Commission paid for Ukrainian-designed interceptors and Ukrainian-made drones, while Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait bought American and British counter-drone shields.

17 updates · 480 entities · 22 Oct

The European Commission will send requests for information to the developers of frontier AI models involved in recent loss-of-control incidents, using questions the AI Office and the AI Scientific Panel drafted after a special meeting on 9 October. At the chip, cloud and compute layers the month's record points towards the capitals: Ireland's Council presidency would route Chips Act II data requests through national authorities, nine states gave about 97% of awarded cloud lots to home providers, and Greece opened a supercomputer funded 65% from its national recovery plan. ASML, the sole maker of the most advanced chipmaking machines, says planned supply for 2027 and 2028 will fall short of demand.

15 updates · 566 entities · 22 Oct

Attackers switched supermarket refrigeration controllers to defrost overnight on 11 to 12 October, spoiling chilled food in more than 300 French stores by BFM TV's count and at sites in six other European countries. A week later ENISA said the EU's Cyber Resilience Act obliges makers to report flaws in such end-of-life controllers but not to fix them. The same fortnight brought a 38-company extortion batch aimed mostly at ports, zero-day attacks on Ivanti and BeyondTrust remote-access products, and PHP fixes that skip every version below 8.2.

16 updates · 720 entities · 22 Oct

Stryker agreed on 12 October to put about $400m (about £300m) of preferred equity into CMR Surgical, the Cambridge maker of the Versius robot, and took an exclusive option to buy the whole company at a price neither side disclosed. In the same month the British state committed £180m to six AI venture funds, split £50m of quantum grants and took a £10m direct stake in Salience Labs, while American, Dutch and Danish investors co-led OMass Therapeutics' $310m round. The exceptions were the British Business Bank's lead on Microbiotica's £36m Series C and Airtel Money's conditional London debut at £5.3bn.

Tracking the structural growth of unmanned and autonomous systems on land, on the water, and beneath it, across defence, maritime, and industrial use.

13 updates · 386 entities · 7 Oct

The US Navy moved from testing robot boats to ordering them in batches on 29 September, buying 30 medium uncrewed surface vessels, ten each from Galliano Marine Services, HII and Saronic Technologies. In the same weeks Turkey set off a 100kg live warhead from a crewless boat, Spain launched a loitering munition from a naval drone at NATO's REPMUS exercise, and a Ukrainian sea drone destroyed a Russian one, which UK Defence Intelligence says is almost certainly a first. Europe's public subsea notices told a smaller story: one vehicle at a time.

15 updates · 432 entities · 22 Oct

Bundibugyo ebolavirus has reached Kenya and Nigeria: Kenya counts eight cases traced to one traveller from DR Congo who died in Nairobi on 5 October, and Nigeria confirmed its first case, a woman who travelled from Uganda, on 20 October. Inside DR Congo the outbreak reached an eighth province, Nord-Ubangi, as ECDC counted 9,552 confirmed cases and 4,602 deaths to 18 October. Beyond Ebola, WHO says it cannot rule out a laboratory exposure in a Russian technician's death, and yellow fever has been declared in neighbouring Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.

11 updates · 141 entities · 17 Apr

Six days after splashdown, the Artemis II crew fronted a post-flight press conference at Johnson Space Center on 16 April while NASA's chief radiation scientist was absent from the podium for the third consecutive public window, leaving crew dose figures from a mission that crossed a G3 geomagnetic storm and an M7.5 flare still unpublished. The Space Launch System core stage for Artemis III rolls from Michoud Assembly Facility on Monday, and a post-mission quantification has placed the O2 manifold helium leak at 10 times the rate ground tests predicted. ESA has issued one named-official statement since splashdown; Airbus Defence and Space has issued none.

15 updates · 468 entities · 22 Oct

Spain now lets a town hall raise property tax on a tourist flat by up to 150% when its owner holds four or more, and Barcelona gave the surcharge initial approval on 15 October. In the same weeks Poland's Sejm voted to let a building's residents ban short lets, Ireland tied host registration to planning compliance and Shinjuku City proposed barring new home-shares from its residential zones. Mexico's deputies cut the rise in the visitor entry fee to 17.8% and sent 57% of it to the defence ministry.

First triple-host tournament — USA, Canada, Mexico — expanded to 48 teams

48 updates · 815 entities · 28 Jul

Nine days after the World Cup final, Arlington has banked a record $31 million June hotel-tax month, Comcast has told investors the tournament was worth $440 million to its own results, and Mexico City, Mexico's national chamber of commerce and the federal tourism secretariat have published three different totals for the same five weeks. FIFA, the one body positioned to reconcile any of it, published an operational report on 27 July that itemises accreditation scans and turf and says nothing about revenue or cost. Meanwhile Foxborough and the Kraft Group are settling their own tournament bill in a Massachusetts courtroom, and La Liga president Javier Tebas has told FIFA to its face that its system is rotten from the root.