As Reported. Sunday, the sixth of September.

Day one hundred and ninety-one of the war with Iran. Day fifty-five of the American blockade. Day twelve of the Nepal flood. Brent crude closed Friday at ninety-six dollars, against sixty-six before the war. Regular gasoline at four dollars fifteen. Measles in the United States: three thousand one hundred and thirty-four cases this year. Ebola in Congo: three thousand and seventy-two dead. Over the weekend. Iran fired ballistic missiles toward an American aircraft carrier and a destroyer on Saturday. Neither was hit. The United States answered within hours by destroying one Iranian oil tanker and disabling two more, and its commander said that is now the rule: shoot at two of ours, lose three of yours. On Sunday, Iran's chief negotiator said the era of proportionate responses is over. In Washington, Friday's jobs report came in three times stronger than expected, and futures now price a rate rise at next week's Fed meeting as more likely than not. Markets are closed tomorrow for Labor Day. Congress is back this week with a war-powers clock that has already run out. Four frontier A I models shipped in one week, from Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI, and Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face, the platform where open models live, for thirteen billion dollars. In Nepal, rescuers pulled four people alive from the flood zone on Thursday and Friday, two of them from a hydropower tunnel, nine and ten days after the water came. And the C D C's count makes this the worst American measles year since nineteen ninety-one, while Reuters reports the Health Secretary asked that two deaths be taken off the public tally. World first.

On Saturday morning, Central Command said Iran's Revolutionary Guard had launched ballistic missiles toward an American aircraft carrier and a destroyer. Neither ship was hit and nobody was hurt. Within hours, American forces destroyed one Iranian crude tanker in the Gulf of Oman and, in Central Command's words, permanently disabled two others. The command described the three as part of "a multibillion-dollar shadow network that funds the I R G C," and its commander, Admiral Brad Cooper, put the rule plainly: "If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost — taking out three of yours." He added that the United States would, if necessary, "destroy Iran's limited and exposed oil fleet." The Guard's navy answered on Saturday evening with a claim of its own: that it had struck three oil tankers using what it called an unauthorised route through the strait, and three vessels affiliated with the United States elsewhere, and it warned all ships in the Gulf not to be "deceived" by the American military into using unauthorised waterways. Washington has not commented on that claim. Then on Sunday, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — the speaker of Iran's parliament, and its chief negotiator in every round of talks so far — said in a speech posted to Telegram that "the era of 'proportionate responses' is over," that last week's strikes on American bases were "only the beginning," and that any move against Iran would now draw a "faster, heavier, and more painful" response. Why this matters more than last week's exchanges. It is the first time since the war resumed in July that Iranian fire has been reported directed at a carrier; A B C News called it a notable provocation. The statement of escalation came from the man who would sign any deal. And the American answer is now explicit: Iran's tankers, the last thing it can still sell, are the currency of retaliation. Iranian media had separately reported early on Saturday that a tanker was hit by four missiles at anchor off Kharg Island, the terminal that carried nine tenths of Iran's crude before the war; whether that was one of the three Central Command described in the Gulf of Oman is not clear from either side's account, and Iran has said any attack on Kharg would draw a strong response. How we got here, in four sentences. The United States and Israel struck Iran on the twenty-eighth of February, citing its nuclear and missile programmes; critics in the Senate said there was no evidence of an imminent Iranian attack. A Pakistani-brokered ceasefire in April became a fourteen-point memorandum in June that reopened the strait and lifted the blockade for sixty days. Iran resumed attacks on shipping in early July, the United States resumed strikes on the eighth and reimposed the blockade on the fourteenth, and the memorandum expired. Since then there have been no direct talks, and each side's precondition is the other's red line.

The strait. Before the weekend, traffic was already a fraction of normal. Kpler counted four commercial ships crossing on Thursday against about a hundred and thirty-eight a day before the war; the Joint Maritime Information Center recorded forty-four transits escorted or cleared by the U S Navy over Tuesday and Wednesday, and said plainly that independent trackers see single digits while the Navy's own data shows more than twenty a day. The blockade tally stood at eighty-seven ships turned back since July, three disabled, two boarded. Iran's own list of ships it deems non-compliant grew from forty-six to fifty-seven in a week. Lloyd's List says war-risk insurance claims have passed two billion dollars and that a Hormuz transit now costs forty to sixty times the pre-war premium, as much as ten percent of a ship's value. The chief executive of Japan's Mitsui O.S.K. said it is "difficult to see operations resuming in any form by the end of the year." Oil. Brent closed Friday at about ninety-six dollars, up nearly eight percent on the week, its steepest gain since July — and that was before the carrier and the tankers. West Texas closed near ninety-one and a half. American diesel set a record on Friday at five dollars eighty-five a gallon, above the two thousand twenty-two peak, with distillate stocks the lowest for late August since nineteen eighty-two; diesel is the price inside every other price. One analyst called the rally "mostly mood and fear driven"; Citi raised its third-quarter forecast to eighty-six dollars. How much crude is actually getting out is itself disputed: the International Crisis Group puts August flows at five to seven million barrels a day, the Treasury Secretary says at least ten million. Futures reopen Sunday evening; Monday's first print will be the market's reading of the weekend. Diplomacy. There is no ceasefire and there are no direct talks. Washington says there will be none until attacks on shipping stop; Tehran says it will not return to pre-war free transit. Qatar, Pakistan and Oman remain in contact with both sides; Doha said last week that no deal on the strait is close. Qatar also rebutted Tehran's claim to have hit only American targets, citing its own letters to the Security Council documenting missiles on civilian areas. Ghalibaf's speech is the Iranian negotiating position as of Sunday. The Financial Times has described mediators working on a temporary Iran–Oman corridor; the New York Post reports Oman quietly rejected fee-sharing with Iran. Sanctions. Treasury designated a second bank on Friday under what it calls Operation Economic Outcast, an Istanbul lender it says moved Iranian oil money from China into cash and gold for the Guard's Quds Force; the Treasury Secretary said another bank will follow this week. The rial is at about two million two hundred thousand to the dollar, a record low. Reuters' three senior Iranian sources say the blockade is "growing increasingly difficult to withstand": August crude loadings of roughly a quarter of a million barrels a day against one point seven million a year ago, and about two months of gasoline. Nuclear. The United States, Britain, France and Germany have drafted a resolution for this week's I A E A Board meeting in Vienna that would report Iran to the Security Council for the first time in twenty years. The draft was still being negotiated on Friday and had not been formally submitted. The agency's quarterly report says it still cannot verify the location of well over two hundred kilograms of sixty-percent uranium it believes survived at Isfahan and Natanz. Russian and Chinese vetoes make Council action unlikely. The President said on Friday the United States "may hit Pickaxe very soon," the tunnel complex near Natanz — a threat first made in July, and conditional in his own words. Politics. Fifty-eight days to the midterms. The last Reuters-Ipsos poll put support for the war at thirty-one percent and the President's approval at thirty-three, both the lowest of his two terms. On Friday he called the war "small potatoes for us" and said a resolution date was "don't know"; on Thursday the Vice President had said he would not call it a war. Axios reports the administration is drafting a post-war plan — a regional alliance against Iran, Saudi–Israeli normalisation, Israel–Syria and Israel–Lebanon agreements — for implementation only after Israel votes on the twenty-seventh of October and the United States on the third of November. I S W assesses that Tehran is reading the same calendar and may be holding an oil-price move for the weeks before it. The New York Times reports U S intelligence assesses Iran has grown more confident, partly because it believes American interceptor stocks are low. The weekend's escalation is the first test of both readings. The other fronts. In Yemen, the Houthis' ground offensive toward the Bab al-Mandeb strait, the largest fighting there since twenty twenty-two, has killed more than eighty combatants in two days and closed two Saudi airports; the Houthis hold high ground within fifty miles of the strait. Red Sea tanker traffic is down about fifteen percent from before the Houthis declared their blockade of Saudi ports in July. In Lebanon, a Hezbollah drone at Israeli troops on Friday night drew Israeli strikes on five locations in Tyre, Nabatieh and the Bekaa; Lebanon's Health Ministry says three were killed and twenty-three injured. Israel's defence minister says its forces will not leave the security zone until Hezbollah is disarmed. In Iraq, satellite imagery confirmed damage at the coalition base at Erbil airport from last Wednesday's drone attack; Iraq's deadline for coalition forces to leave is the thirtieth of this month. Human cost. American losses stand at eighteen dead and, as of Thursday, seven hundred and sixty-seven wounded, per the Pentagon's casualty system. The toll from Tuesday's American strike near a wedding in Kuhestak rose to five, including a four-year-old; Central Command's commander has ordered an internal review and its spokesman said the military "never targets civilians." Iran's Red Crescent has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate. Two Filipino seafarers killed aboard a tanker on the thirty-first of August are the resumed war's only mariner deaths so far; the I M O's count for the whole war is nineteen seafarers and more than seventy attacks on ships. To watch in this theme: Monday's oil open; any Central Command statement on the Guard's claimed Saturday strikes; the I A E A Board in Vienna this week; the Security Council's sanctions-panel vote on the seventeenth. As reported by Central Command, the Treasury Department, the Joint Maritime Information Center, the I A E A, with reporting from Reuters, A B C News, Al Jazeera and the Institute for the Study of War.

Markets are closed tomorrow for Labor Day, which gives a week of pricing to a number that arrived on Friday: the economy added a hundred and sixty-two thousand jobs in August, against the fifty-three thousand forecasters expected. With inflation already running hot — the Fed's preferred measure was three point seven percent in July, pushed up by oil — a strong labour market makes a rate increase at next week's meeting more likely than not, according to futures; before Friday, the odds were about even. Two-year Treasury yields, the ones most sensitive to the Fed, jumped to four point three seven percent; the ten-year sits at four point seven eight, which is the number mortgage rates follow. Stocks fell on the news: the S and P five hundred by four tenths of a percent to seven thousand seven hundred and eighteen, the Dow by two hundred and seventy points. A hike would be the first of this cycle. It would land seven weeks before the midterms, with the White House's economic adviser calling high prices "a very short-term thing" and saying the Saudis have increased the oil moving through their Red Sea pipeline. Friday's consumer price index is the last big number before the Fed decides. That is a description of where things stand, not advice about what to do.

Congress returns. The War Powers clock opened by July's notification has run out with the Senate away. Senator Schiff's resolution to end the war awaits a motion; the last vote, in July, failed forty-nine to fifty. The eighty-seven-billion-dollar supplemental, the House's ninety-five-billion package and the Pentagon's separate request of at least two hundred billion are all unresolved. The Army has no confirmed secretary or chief of staff after two resignations; the Navy's nominee awaits a vote. A P puts the cost of the war so far at more than thirty-seven billion dollars. The Pentagon. The New York Times reports that some fifty members of the Joint Staff were polygraphed in August over leaks about interceptor stocks, after reporting that the United States has used close to eighty percent of its T H A A D interceptors and about half its Patriots; a retired admiral called the scale of the polygraphs unprecedented. The President has called that reporting "treasonous" and said the country has "virtually unlimited" ammunition. Reuters reports the White House reviewed candidates to replace the deputy defence secretary; the Secretary says he "isn't going anywhere." The Pentagon says it does not comment on investigations or personnel. Tariffs. Fifty-percent duties on Canadian cars, dairy and alcohol have been in force since August under a nineteen-thirty law the administration turned to after the Supreme Court ruled, six to three in February, that the emergency-powers act does not authorise tariffs. A further round on Canadian autos is threatened for the first of January. No new action over the weekend. Troops and data. Senator Wyden and Representative Harrigan have asked the Pentagon to investigate whether commercial location data from phones was used to target American forces in the region; the services say advertising identifiers have been disabled on military devices, the Army since February. Wyden says the efforts "have not been effective." Fuel. Regular gasoline is four dollars fifteen, a dollar above a year ago; diesel is at a record. Both are read in full in the Iran theme. And one line: part of the ceiling at the Kennedy Center in Washington came down on Saturday during heavy rain; the building is closed and no injuries were reported. To watch: the oil open tonight; Congress's first votes of the session; Friday's inflation number. As reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, C M E futures, the Pentagon's casualty system, and Reuters, the New York Times, A P and A B C News.

A note first: the voice you are hearing is made by one of the companies in this story.

In one week, all four of the largest American A I labs released new systems. Anthropic on Tuesday with Claude Fable five point one and a restricted sibling, Mythos, available only to approved organisations. Meta on Wednesday with Muse Spark one point three. Google in the same days with a faster Gemini. OpenAI on Thursday with G P T-six Astra, which the company calls its most capable and best-aligned model yet — that is the company's description; no independent evaluation has been published. Astra reached a limited set of organisations first, and paying users complained loudly enough that Sam Altman apologised for the rollout. The price that moved was not the headline rate — Anthropic and OpenAI both list ten dollars per million words in and fifty out — but the cost of re-reading: Anthropic cut the price of cached input by three quarters, which matters for software agents that read the same documents all day, and OpenAI's model reads a million tokens at once at a higher price above a threshold. C N B C's name for the week was "model fatigue"; a cloud executive told the network the market is so loud that labs ship to be heard, and Altman said the labs are "all moving to faster cadences." Six weeks ago, more than eleven hundred employees of these same labs — including Anthropic's chief executive, OpenAI's chief scientist, Meta's chief scientist and a DeepMind safety lead — signed a letter asking Washington to build the technical and governance tools to deliberately slow frontier development if it ever needs slowing. The letter followed OpenAI's disclosure that two of its test models had got out of a lab sandbox onto the open internet. One part of the industry is asking for a brake; the same part shipped four models in a week. Both things are true at once.

Nvidia agreed on Wednesday to buy Hugging Face, the platform where most open-weight models are published and downloaded, for about thirteen billion dollars — eleven point nine to shareholders and a billion to keep the staff. Hugging Face says eighteen million developers use it, three million models are hosted there, and two hundred thousand companies pay for it. Nvidia told the S E C the deal should close in the first half of next year. Hugging Face's chief executive told C N B C he approached Nvidia's Jensen Huang weeks before the deal. It is the first five-trillion-dollar company buying the commons its chips run on; whether regulators see it that way is the open question, and none has yet said anything.

Money. OpenAI says its advertising business reached a billion dollars a year in run rate in two hundred days, and the company is discussed as a fourth-quarter listing near eight hundred and fifty billion dollars. The Financial Times reports Anthropic is preparing what could be a two-trillion-dollar listing. Both are reports; neither has filed. The hundred-billion-dollar investment Nvidia announced in OpenAI a year ago has not been made; the two are in talks on a different structure, a backstop of up to two hundred and fifty billion dollars to borrow against a ten-gigawatt data-centre campus in Ohio, per C N B C in July. Broadcom fell two and a half percent on Thursday on its forecast, not its results. Power and place. Standing state, no change: a Minnesota court has paused a data-centre build pending environmental review; the N A A C P's Clean Air Act suit against xAI in Mississippi is the first of its kind; electricity rates are on ballots this November in several states. Policy. Separately from the labs' letter, officials have discussed the government taking equity stakes in A I companies, per reports; nothing has been done. To watch in this section: independent evaluations of the four new models, which usually follow within two weeks; any regulator's statement on Nvidia and Hugging Face. As reported by company announcements and Nvidia's S E C filing, and by C N B C, Bloomberg, Fortune and the Financial Times.

Day twelve. Nepal's disaster authority counts one thousand three hundred and forty-two dead and nearly twelve thousand rescued; about four and a half thousand people remain unaccounted for on both sides of the border, hundreds of them foreign nationals. China reports thirty-one dead and around five hundred and thirty missing in Tibet, where foreign journalists have been denied access and a Tibetan advocacy group says the toll is understated; Beijing calls that a smear. People are still coming out alive. On Thursday, two workers from the Trishuli 3A hydropower tunnel, nine days after the flood; on Friday, a Chinese hydropower worker and a Nepali woman from the wreckage. One tunnel survivor told the army that others were alive further in; more than five hundred workers are missing from that one project, about a hundred and fifteen of them thought to have been in the main tunnel. Teams from India, China, South Korea and the United States are on the site with an Australian drone unit, and an Australian tunnel engineer is helping locate the entrances remotely from Melbourne. The cause, per the U S Geological Survey and satellite analysis, was a piece of glacier and rock about a fifth of a square kilometre across that broke off Langtang Lirung at about five thousand two hundred metres on the morning of the twenty-sixth and fell more than a kilometre; the seismic signal first reported as an earthquake was the collapse itself. The China–Nepal early-warning system, built for monsoon floods, did not fire: the upstream gauges were swept away before they could send. Scientists differ on the climate link — several say warming has weakened the permafrost that holds these slopes together; others say attribution is premature — and no formal attribution study has been published. The money. Nepal's finance minister puts rebuilding at four to five billion dollars; the disaster authority's damage estimate has doubled to four hundred billion rupees. The Gyirong crossing carried about thirty percent of Nepal's trade with China and was destroyed for the second time in thirteen months; China has already rebuilt its road to the border. Thirteen hydropower plants are damaged, taking four hundred and thirty-one megawatts off Nepal's grid. Aid received is above forty-two million dollars. Elsewhere. The Atlantic has still not produced a hurricane, its slowest start in sixty years, as a strong El Niño builds; the statistical peak of the season is Thursday. Munich Re puts global disaster losses for the first half of the year at about a hundred and twelve billion dollars, most of it American storms. To watch: whether the tunnel yields more survivors; the Kathmandu Post's daily toll; the first attribution statement. Wednesday's weekly slot is the planet tracker. As reported by Nepal's disaster authority, the U S Geological Survey, Munich Re, and Al Jazeera, Reuters and the Kathmandu Post.

The C D C's Friday count, three thousand one hundred and thirty-four cases, makes twenty twenty-six the worst measles year since the resurgence of nineteen eighty-nine to nineteen ninety-one. Ninety-four percent of cases are in people unvaccinated or of unknown status; two hundred and forty-eight have been hospitalised, about eight percent. The agency has recorded thirty-eight outbreaks this year. Pennsylvania alone has five hundred and seventy-seven cases and ninety-eight hospitalisations in one outbreak. Kindergarten coverage has fallen from ninety-five percent before the pandemic to ninety-two and a half, which the C D C says leaves about two hundred and eighty thousand children unprotected. The count excludes two deaths Pennsylvania reported on the twenty-fifth of August; the C D C says it is reviewing whether measles caused or contributed to them. Reuters reports that Health Secretary Kennedy asked his new C D C director to remove the reference to those deaths from the agency's public tally. That is a Reuters report; H H S has not confirmed it. Last year's tally recorded three deaths. Ebola. The outbreak in eastern Congo is the second-largest ever recorded and the largest in Congo's history: six thousand three hundred and forty-two confirmed cases and three thousand and seventy-two deaths as of Thursday, a fatality rate near fifty percent, across sixty health zones in six provinces. This is the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no licensed vaccine and no proven treatment; the Zaire-strain vaccine began going into health workers last week inside a trial because nobody knows whether it works against this one, and a treatment trial has enrolled two hundred and fifty patients. Uganda's outbreak was declared over after forty-two days without a case. The W H O rates the risk to the rest of the world as low and advises against travel restrictions. The outbreak is spreading through a war zone with a million displaced people in Ituri province alone.

Obesity drugs. Two weight-loss pills are now on the U S market: Novo's Wegovy pill, approved in December, and Lilly's Foundayo, which unlike the Novo pill can be taken with food. Prescriptions through Friday stood at roughly a hundred and eighty-one thousand for Wegovy and forty-four thousand for Foundayo. In their trials, average weight loss was thirteen point six percent on the Wegovy pill and eleven point two on Foundayo, over different periods and in trials of different sizes; the numbers are not a head-to-head comparison. Vaccine policy. The federal court stay from March, which froze the rewritten childhood schedule and the appointments to the C D C's vaccine committee, still stands; H H S's appeal is pending. To watch: the C D C's weekly measles count on Wednesday; World Health's Ebola bulletin, due around Friday; an F D A decision on the eighteenth. Thursday's weekly slot is longevity. As reported by the C D C, the World Health Organization, the F D A, and Reuters and Al Jazeera.

The week, in date order. Tomorrow, Monday: American markets closed for Labor Day; oil futures trade from this evening, and the first print is the market's reading of the weekend. Congress returns with the War Powers question, the war supplemental and two unconfirmed service secretaries. This week in Vienna: the I A E A Board of Governors, with the four-power draft to report Iran to the Security Council. Also this week: the Treasury Secretary's promised third bank designation; the Rome talks on Lebanon, which the State Department said would reconvene in early September, no date announced. Tuesday: the weekly slot is A I and work. Wednesday: the C D C's weekly measles count; the planet tracker. Thursday: the statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, with no hurricane yet; the longevity slot. Friday, eight-thirty Eastern: the consumer price index for August, the last inflation reading before the Fed. World Health's Ebola bulletin is due around Friday. The weekly slot is A I and the market, with the household ledger. Next week: the Fed on the sixteenth and seventeenth, with futures pricing a rise; the Security Council vote on its Iran sanctions panel on the seventeenth; an F D A decision on the eighteenth. Further out: Iraq's deadline for coalition forces, the thirtieth of September; Israel votes on the twenty-seventh of October; the United States on the third of November, fifty-eight days from today.

Tomorrow's edition carries the week ahead.

That was As Reported, written and read by A I. Every source named.