The Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combination is on hold until an antitrust trial scheduled for March 2027. That’s a long wait for a deal already measured in the tens of billions, and Paramount CEO David Ellison used a guest essay in The New York Times to make his case while the clock runs.

His argument is worth taking seriously, partly because it’s unusual and partly because it may be correct. The lawsuit, he says, challenges how much control the combined company would have over movie releases and cable channels. The real objection, in his reading, is CNN. He committed to maintaining CNN’s editorial independence and said news should be grounded in facts and truth.

Asked about a publisher’s claim that commercial operators must pay to use its material, a Perplexity spokesperson gave a four-word answer in substance: facts aren’t copyrightable. It’s a real defence, it’s been good law for a very long time, and it may be the wrong argument for what these systems actually do.

The copyright fight so far has been about training. Did the model ingest protected work to learn from it, and is that fair use. That question is enormous, unresolved and slow, and it’s being litigated in dozens of cases.

Freight has spent 2026 being repriced by events that have nothing to do with demand. A war closed a waterway, tariff deadlines pulled cargo forward, and carriers discovered that surcharges outlive the disruptions that justified them. Below is a walk through what has actually moved, and where the numbers come from.

The Rate Story

The cleanest signal did not show up in crude. It showed up in box rates on lanes that never touch the Persian Gulf: Asia-US spot rates ran 276% above their February baseline after the strikes on Iran, with East Coast rates up 232% over the same window. What made that interesting was what happened next. Capacity came back on the two major East-West lanes and rates stayed elevated anyway, which is the point at which a supply shock quietly becomes a pricing regime.

Every static site generator comparison opens with build times, and every one of them is measuring the thing that matters least. I took the same corpus, four hundred markdown files with frontmatter, images, tags and a couple of taxonomies, and pushed it through six generators to see what actually differed.

Build time differed by more than an order of magnitude. It changed nothing about which one I would pick.

The setup

Same content directory, copied six times. Same images, same frontmatter schema, same target output: a paginated index, per-post pages, tag archives, an RSS feed and a sitemap. Minimal theming, because theme complexity dominates build time in most generators and I wanted to compare the engines rather than my CSS.

An exhibition hall is a bad room to photograph in. The lighting is mixed, the backgrounds are visual noise, and the thing you actually want, which is people talking to each other about something they care about, lasts about four seconds before somebody looks up at the camera.

The frame above is a delegation working through printed material at a booth. Nobody posed. The useful part is the pointing hand and the two men reading, and everything else in the picture is there to say “trade show” and then get out of the way.

I went to Brussels to photograph a World Heritage site and came home with a picture of the sky. The Grand-Place is in the frame, barely. A sliver of the Town Hall on the left with its rank of statues on corbels, a run of gabled houses on the right, and between them a long grey wedge with two aircraft trails crossing it.

Everything below the rooflines is legally frozen. The square went onto the UNESCO list in 1998, and the protection is granular in the way heritage protection always is. Shopfront lettering, paint, the mortar you point the brick with, the colour of an awning. There is a whole apparatus of committees deciding what a facade is allowed to look like, and it applies to a strip of city about two hundred metres long.

Boston Consulting Group has published its first Intelligent Cities Index, a comparative study of how 61 major cities across 39 countries put technology to work for residents and businesses. London took the top overall spot, followed by Dubai, New York City, Washington, DC, and Amsterdam — but BCG’s own data shows that even these five leaders fall short of dominance. None of them scores highest across every category the index measures, a finding the report’s authors say reflects the reality that city leadership is built from different combinations of strengths rather than a single template.

Second pass through the same pile, different tabs. No argument here either — just the things that stayed open after everything else got closed.

Start with the money that didn’t arrive. DeepSeek pausing its $1.5 billion second round days before signature is the sort of event that gets read as a funding story and is really a compute story, and the leaked transcript is where the actual information sits. Set that against the state-level version of the same problem: twenty-nine signatures on the WAICO founding agreement in Shanghai, open weights offered as an alternative to chips nobody can buy. One of those is a company running short of hardware. The other is a country building an institution around the shortage.

The pile refills faster than it empties. Here’s another pass across it, no order implied.

Money first, and it’s a big number: the reported Stripe and Advent bid for PayPal at roughly $53 billion, a deal that would consolidate stablecoin payments in one stroke. Against it, a quieter structural read on why enterprise money is leaving old-school IBM for AI infrastructure — the collapse as a demonstration of where budgets actually go.

The New-Tech Exhibition 2026, Israel’s international trade show for the hi-tech and electronics sector, ran June 30–July 1 at the Expo Tel Aviv fairgrounds. The show paired its usual exhibition floor with four parallel conference tracks, each running a full day of back-to-back sessions in its own hall.

Hall C1 — Opto-Tech: The Annual Electro Optics Conference

Focused on photonics, quantum optics, and imaging. Sessions included organic photonic neuromorphic devices from the Holon Institute of Technology, mid-infrared SPAD imaging from Tel Aviv University’s Femto-Nano Laboratory, quantum computing and QKD research from Ben-Gurion University’s Center for Quantum Science and Technology, and SWIR-to-visible up-conversion for AR devices.