Kosovo’s parliament finally met this week to do the one thing it had somehow managed to avoid for two months: constituting itself, more than 60 days after the June 7 snap election. In all honesty, it was a shit show. Acting PM Albin Kurti asked lawmakers for more time to negotiate with opposition parties, and while they were weighing that request, opposition MP Time Kadrijaj walked to the front row and pelted him with eggs, shouting, “Shame on you!” Security moved in, the chair cut the live broadcast, and the session was suspended on the spot. With egg still on his jacket, Kurti later said that if getting egged is the price of keeping talks alive, he is happy to pay it. In Kosovo, egging your opponent may be the newest way to settle political differences.
That’s how fast a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage hit the Moon this week, carving out a fresh crater near Einstein Crater on the lunar far side. The rocket was nearly 14 meters long and weighed about 4,000 kg, launched in January 2025 carrying a lunar lander for the Japanese company ispace. All of this happened because the mission’s heavy payload used more fuel than expected, and the stage did not have enough propellant left to steer itself onto a safe disposal trajectory. The impact is a reminder that plenty of decades-old rocket hardware is still drifting through space, and eventually it will come down somewhere.
What It Is: Researchers at Stanford and the Broad Institute used an AI model to design viral genomes with no natural occurrence. They started with a naturally occurring phage, a virus that infects bacteria, not people, and the model generated thousands of candidate genomes. Scientists then built and tested about 300 of them in the lab. Sixteen turned out to be viable viruses, and a mix of them killed E. coli more effectively than the natural phage they were based on.
Why It Matters: The 16 viruses only infect bacteria, which is clearly a good thing from a medical standpoint. Antibiotic-resistant infections kill over a million people a year, and AI-designed phages could become a new weapon against them. On the flip side, the experiment also shows an AI model can now design a working virus from scratch, using a natural template as a starting point. Right now, that template happens to be a bacteria-killer. Nothing about the method says it has to stay that way.
The Big Picture: Biosecurity researchers at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Health Security reviewed the work and said that the ability to compose viral genomes with generative AI is now a reality, but no regulations exist on how to use it safely. A well-resourced lab or state with bad intentions no longer needs decades of virology expertise to try something dangerous. It needs an AI model, a lab, and a willingness to run the experiment. Nobody has a real plan for what happens when that combination is aimed at something other than E. coli, and if it ever is, there may be no vaccine or treatment waiting on the other side.
What It Is: The Chinese military has unveiled an AI system designed to plan and coordinate large-scale air strikes. It sorts through hundreds of possible targets, coordinates dozens of aircraft formations, and assigns tasks to more than 100 tactical units at once, all faster than a human planning team could manage on its own. According to the documentary, the system has already been used in training missions.
Why It Matters: China is not alone in doing this. The US, Israel, and others are also bringing AI into target selection and strike planning, because the side that can coordinate the most aircraft against the most targets the fastest gains a battlefield advantage. Use of AI in active operations raises a question none of these militaries have really answered: when an AI-assisted system recommends the wrong target, who is responsible?
The Big Picture: That question already has a body count attached to it. In February, a US strike on what targeting systems had flagged as a military site in Minab, Iran, hit an elementary school instead, killing more than 100 children. AI tools built on Anthropic’s Claude model, and embedded in the Pentagon’s Maven targeting system, chose the school as a target. An investigation later found that a human analyst had flagged years earlier that the site had changed from a naval facility to a school. The warning never reached the people who needed it in time. Months later, no one has been held accountable, and Washington still has not said who should be.
What It Is: Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, a mutual-defense pact that Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan says is effectively the same as NATO’s Article 5: an attack on one counts as an attack on all. The three countries also plan a NATO-style ministerial committee and a general secretariat based in Saudi Arabia. Turkish President Erdogan has already floated the idea of expanding the group, with Egypt mentioned as a possible candidate.
Why It Matters: The three countries complement each other quite nicely. Turkey brings NATO’s second-largest standing army and a huge military industry. Pakistan has a nuclear weapon. Saudi Arabia provides the economic clout. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia already had a bilateral defense pact in September 2025, after which Pakistani officials briefly suggested it extended nuclear protection to Riyadh before walking back that claim. This new pact brings Turkey into that arrangement.
The Big Picture: Much of this has been in development for some time, but the timing is hard to ignore. Israel’s wars against Gaza and Iran, as well as Iranian strikes across the Gulf, have unsettled Gulf states that once assumed a US security guarantee made them untouchable. Saudi officials have begun describing their approach as “strategic substitution”: not putting all the kingdom’s security eggs in the American basket. Turkey, already covered by NATO’s Article 5 for its own protection, now sits at the center of two overlapping mutual-defense guarantees. For India, a nuclear-armed Pakistan with Turkish military backing and Saudi financial support changes the math of any future confrontation.
UK: UK is planning to block AI chatbots from giving mental health advice, after therapists said more children are turning to chatbots for support and some are getting harmful advice back.
New Orleans: The city’s 911 emergency system now uses an AI voice agent instead of humans (yeah, not joking) to handle calls about car accidents
Japan: Tokyo has asked the Trump administration three times since April to stop using Mario, Pokémon, and Naruto in official social media posts without permission.
Israel: A new Tel Aviv University study found that nearly 270,000 Israelis left the country in 2023 and 2025, with doctors and engineers in their prime working years especially overrepresented among those who left.
Senegal: A court has jailed three TikTok creators for insulting President Bassirou Diomaye Faye in posts their lawyer says were meant as comedy.
EU: From 2 August, any chatbot, AI receptionist, or AI-generated media used in the EU must clearly disclose that it is not human under Article 50 of the AI Act, with fines of up to €15 million or 3% of global turnover for violations.
Finland: Navy divers and environmental crews pumped 60,000 liters of oil out of the wreck of the Ilmarinen, a coastal defense ship that sank in 1941 after hitting a mine and killing 271 crew members.
Iran: A senior US Central Command officer emailed military analysts asking for “creative and unconventional” ways to punish Iran.
Montenegro has become the first country in the Balkans to guarantee paid menstrual leave, giving women diagnosed with conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, or uterine fibroids up to two days off per month with pay. The bill passed unanimously through both parliamentary committees before clearing the full vote. Women need only renew a medical certificate once a year to keep the benefit. Feminist campaigners in neighboring Serbia are already citing Montenegro’s law in their own push for similar protections, so this one might not stay a one-off for long.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” — J. Robert Oppenheimer
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