Frustration over ballot paper shortages at more than 90 polling sites last week unleashed one of South Korea's most extensive political protests since its martial law crisis in 2024
A South Korean court sentenced former President Yoon Suk Yeol to 30 years in prison over charges linked to military drones sent over Pyongyang to help create a pretext for his failed December 2024 martial law declaration, Yonhap reported
The AI buildout is fueling record Big Tech borrowing:
Alphabet $GOOGL, Amazon $AMZN, Meta $META, Microsoft $MSFT, and Oracle $ORCL have issued a record $159 billion in corporate bonds in 2026.
This already surpasses the full-year 2025 total by +47% or +$51 billion.
To put this into perspective, between 2020 and 2024, these companies issued a total of ~$150 billion in debt.
Oracle alone has issued $43 billion since September 2025.
Meanwhile, AI-related global debt issuance is expected to more than double to a record ~$570 billion in 2026, according to Morgan Stanley.
AI is reshaping global credit markets.
Anthropic just retook the AI crown from GPT 5.5, and split its model in two: Fable for the public, Mythos for trusted organizations. Apple admitted it lost the foundation model race and handed Siri's brain to Google.
-- Brian Armstrong's NewLimit: $435M raised, $3.1B valuation, reversing cellular aging. Human clinical trials targeted for next year.
-- Global longevity investment hit $8.49B in 2024 more than double the prior years.
-- Apple paying Google ~$1B/year for a custom 1.2 trillion parameter model to rebuild Siri.
-- Fable 5: 80.3% on SWE-Bench Pro. On the harder FrontierCode Diamond set: 29.3% vs Opus 4.8's 13.4%