Brent crude fell almost 5% to under US$80 a barrel — its lowest since 13 July — after Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said talks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz have progressed and shipments could resume as soon as this week. Bessent told CNBC there is a “chance we may have a deal today or tomorrow to open the strait and move towards a more normalized position in this conflict.” Iran continues to insist it is not negotiating with the US and is only talking to Oman — the same disconnect that has kept markets volatile through months of failed de-escalation attempts. For Australia, the stakes are direct: fuel prices at the pump and global energy costs hinge on this waterway.
Analysis: a president used to bending US politics to his will is running into resistance from key allies — on trade, the tech levy fight and Middle East policy. The Hormuz talks themselves are a case study: MBS, the UAE and Qatar all urged Washington against strikes, and the White House has pivoted to diplomacy. The piece argues the gap between Trump’s domestic power and his international leverage is the defining tension of the moment.
Ukrainian drones struck two more Wildberries warehouses plus a third site near Moscow, killing five people in the region, according to Russian officials. Kyiv has increasingly targeted the logistics infrastructure of Russia’s largest online retailer — a campaign that began earlier this month — while Russia’s strike on Mykolaiv killed an 89-year-old woman and wounded two girls aged two and 12.
Palestinians held a mass funeral in Gaza for 112 people killed in an Israeli strike in 2023, as the territory’s war grinds toward a third year. Netanyahu reiterated there will be no Israeli withdrawal from Gaza until Hamas is “completely disarmed,” while Jordan warned Jerusalem’s most important Muslim religious site faces an ‘imminent’ threat of Israeli takeover.
French authorities rescued more than 150 people after their boat caught fire mid-crossing of the Channel, the latest incident in a stretched migration system. The drama comes as Europe reels from the Ceuta surge — some 70,000 of 72,000 arrivals in days — with the EU commending Spain’s ‘swift response’ even as the Spanish PM faces blistering criticism from within the bloc.
Satellite imagery shows the slick from the grounded tanker off Oman spreading sharply as cleanup efforts struggle to contain it. The spill — in waters near one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes — adds an environmental dimension to the region’s instability just as the US and Iran edge toward Hormuz shipping talks.
Results released today by ACARA — from 1.2 million students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 — show reading scores going backwards for almost every year group, with the share of students ‘exceeding’ or ‘strong’ at reading down to 66.3% from 68.2%. One in three students still misses benchmarks and one in ten needs ‘additional support’. The bright spot is numeracy: 67% now meet benchmarks and 29,000 more students are exceeding, with gains among Indigenous students. Tasmania’s results weren’t reported after industrial action, and writing tests were disrupted by a technical failure on day one. Education Minister Jason Clare called the results a ‘real challenge’ but welcomed the numeracy gains.
Day two of the 85-year-old broadcaster’s trial on 22 indecent assault and sexual touching charges. Complainant J, who met Jones at 14, told the Downing Centre court he received more than $110,000 from Jones over a decade and reported the alleged abuse after Jones’s 2024 arrest — “I’m a father now, and I want to teach my child right from wrong.” He described being told at the Fitzroy Falls farm: “There is only one rule here: there are no rules.” Jones has pleaded not guilty.
Police are investigating an arson attack on a Victorian defence company — and a related anti-weapons protest — as acts of ‘far-left terrorism’. The designation escalates the federal government’s response to domestic extremism and raises questions about protest policing, with the ABC reporting the arson is being treated as a terrorist act by ‘far-left extremists’.
Amendments released Tuesday will let widows and divorcees keep negative gearing and capital gains discounts after investment properties transfer to single ownership — closing the loophole that would have stripped tax advantages on death or divorce. The government is also consulting on carve-outs for newly built homes, affordable and disability housing, and its new CGT system, after the original design triggered a political firestorm.
A major US trade group has rubbished Labor’s plan to make more big tech platforms pay for Australian journalism, issuing a veiled warning about how Donald Trump may respond to the ‘deteriorating trend’. The escalation follows yesterday’s news that Google, Meta and X have lodged a formal complaint, raising the prospect of US trade pressure on Australia’s news media bargaining incentive.
The Hay Street institution — famous for queues for its 70¢ cream puffs — was ‘legally re-entered and possession taken’, per a sign on the facade. Operators Stanley and Valentine Yee are fighting the action: an ATO-initiated winding-up application against Emperors Garden Pty Ltd is before the Federal Court on Friday, and a 16-storey tower DA sits over the site. BBQ King, Marigold and Golden Century have all gone before it — another Chinatown grand dame is on the ropes.
Broadsheet’s winter hit list rounds up six of the city’s best fish pies — including a French number with barramundi simmered in champagne and one topped with panko breadcrumbs and parmesan. Useful ammo for the winter menu conversation.
Good Food’s Kevin Cheng hands 15/20 to a casual new wine and sake bar run by a husband-and-wife team mixing fine-dining pedigree from Paris and Tokyo with local neighbourhood vibes. The creamy, savoury dish in question has earned one of the critic’s strongest quotes of the year — worth knowing for the Somm circuit.
Casella Family Brands — home of Yellow Tail — announced two new non-wine partnerships in Australia effective 3 August: Heaps Normal (alcohol-free beer) and Four Loko (flavoured malt drinks). A notable diversification play from Australia’s biggest wine exporter as the sector battles a 22-year export low and the smallest crush in 25 years.
Broadsheet’s roundup tracks the week’s moves: a spanakopita pizza pop-up in the CBD, star Melbourne chef Audrey Shaw returning to Sydney, and a former Bentley chef launching a Portuguese dinner service. Plus the Leichhardt Bowlo’s new bistro-first look — chef movement and venue news to file away.
The campaign to save Ku-ring-gai’s Marian Street Theatre hits its crunch moment: the $100,000 GoFundMe target to force an extraordinary general meeting is due tomorrow (Thursday), after Sunday’s Rally in Red drew residents and performers to Gordon Library. Unless the money is raised, Council lets the long-approved DA expire on 19 August — writing off more than 20 years of planning and $1.7 million of public design investment. Margolyes, Weaving and Williamson are among the backers. If this matters to you, today is the day to chip in.
High school student Jon Platz has become the first school-aged composer commissioned by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. A modest but telling signal of the pipeline investment happening at state-orchestra level while the sector waits on the next National Cultural Policy.
Composer Liza Lim — ‘deeply honoured’ — will receive the Richard Gill Award at the 2026 Art Music Awards for a body of work exploring ritual, ecology and humanity’s relationship with nature. The APRA-adjacent awards remain one of the few reliable recognition-and-cash moments for Australian composers.
A German court found US-based AI music tool Suno breached copyright by training on protected music; damages will be paid. A significant European ruling for artist compensation in the AI era — one to watch for how it shapes Australian licensing debates.
Shieldstral frames content moderation as a question-answering task: you supply a plain-language policy at inference time and it returns a calibrated safety score — no retraining to re-target. Released under Apache 2.0, it matches or beats open guard models up to 7× its size across text safety, refusal detection and multimodal moderation, and runs on a single 16GB GPU. Also marks Mistral’s inaugural membership of the Open Secure AI Alliance with NVIDIA.
A production-grade community config runs the 304B DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 checkpoint entirely in HBM on one MI300X — 156.67 GiB of weights, no quantisation or offload — delivering ~168 tok/s single-stream decode and up to 830 tok/s aggregate at 64-stream burst. For cost-per-token maths, the write-up notes the MI300X costs roughly half an H100 at list. The fixes for FP8 format, MoE routing and speculative verification are all pinned in the repo.
Nothing new overnight: v0.20.0 (2026.8.3) remains the latest release, with v0.19.1 (Jul 30) the preceding patch. The Herald release — streaming voice with barge-in, on-device wake words, A2A v1.0 and grounded citations — was covered in yesterday’s briefing; no follow-up versions or hotfixes have landed since.
Apple’s data-theft probe has widened: the company now says additional former employees may have taken confidential information to OpenAI. The case has drawn heavy attention on Hacker News (200+ points) as a bellwether for talent-mobility and trade-secret disputes in the AI hiring war.