🇸🇦 Two Saudi officers killed in helicopter crash as Riyadh rejects Houthi claims

Two officers were killed when an AH-6 helicopter crashed in Saudi Arabia's Najran province, the Saudi Defense Ministry said.

The crash was caused by a technical failure, Ministry spokesman Turki al-Maliki said.

Riyadh denied claims by Houthis that the aircraft was shot down during a combat mission.

The Houthis had said a Saudi air force helicopter was brought down in the border area of Najran while conducting a military operation against Yemeni positions.

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🤥 Trump wants to drop MOAB on Iran for ‘visually pleasing moment’ – Scott Ritter

💬 “He’ll drop the MOAB [mother of all bombs], it will go boom, it will look great. He’ll declare victory,” Scott Ritter speculated on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive podcast.

The problem, Ritter explained, is that the destructive potential of a MOAB may be highly exaggerated, and that this type of ordnance is unlikely to pose any real threat to any of Iran’s underground sites – just as the US failed to take out the Iranian nuclear sites during Operation Midnight Hammer last year.

He also suggested that Iran may play along with Trump’s charade and let him use the MOAB deployment as a face-saving way to finally exit from the war in the Gulf.

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📲 AI bubble: Could it burst?

A 2026 paper from Brookings calculates that expanding US data-center capacity could require as much as $10.3 trillion in investment by 2032.

One of the study's central assumptions is that infrastructure would have to bring in roughly $3.7 trillion a year to generate a 10% unlevered return.

Experts caution that a single serious safety incident, a failed IPO, or weaker-than-expected AI revenues could trigger a significant market shock.

The AI spending story could unravel in several ways:

🔴 Revenue may grow too slowly to justify the enormous capital outlays, leaving data-center operators with returns that fail to cover costs

🔴 Competition could compress margins across the industry, eroding the profitability that investors have priced in

🔴 The buildout may outpace actual demand, leaving swaths of computing capacity idle

If spending slows, chipmakers, cloud providers, and investors could all absorb losses, with the shock rippling through equity and credit markets.

History offers three warnings:

🔶 The Nifty Fifty of the 1970s: fifty blue-chip American companies, including Coca-Cola, IBM, and Xerox, traded at price-to-earnings ratios of 80 to 90 on the belief that their growth would never falter, only to lose 60% to 90% of their value in the 1973–1974 bear market — proof that even excellent companies become disastrous investments when bought at excessive prices

🔶 Japan in the late 1980s: property and stock prices soared, then collapsed, leaving damaged balance sheets and years of economic stagnation in their wake.

🔶 The dot-com crash of 2000–2002: the internet revolution was real, yet the Nasdaq still lost roughly 77% from its peak. Technological progress offered investors no protection from overvaluation.

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🚨Yemen’s Houthis have released footage they say shows the downing of a Saudi National Guard AH-6 Little Bird helicopter over Najran, contradicting Saudi authorities’ earlier claim that the crash, which killed both pilots, was caused by a technical malfunction.

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🇪🇬Egypt’s National Defense Council pledges full support for Saudi Arabia

Egypt’s National Defense Council, chaired by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has decided to provide all necessary and possible support to Saudi Arabia to defend its security, stability, territorial integrity, and Islamic holy sites amid escalating regional attacks.

The council also declared full solidarity with Saudi Arabia and agreed to intensify diplomatic efforts with regional and international partners to reduce tensions and resolve regional crises peacefully.

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🇮🇱 Israeli settlers ambush European diplomats during olive harvest visit in occupied West Bank

Seven settlers on ATVs surrounded the convoy of vehicles, carrying European diplomats from France, Belgium, and Poland during an olive harvest visit to the Christian Palestinian village of Taybeh, near Ramallah, according to Israeli and Palestinian media.

They demanded IDs, threw stones, and smashed the window of a Belgian consulate car.

Mayor Bernard Baudoux of the French city of Aulnoye-Aymeries was among those injured.

The Cradle cites Amit Orfali, an activist who was part of the delegation, as saying the attackers threatened to kill them.

The assault came a day after Washington Post journalist Heidi Levine, a US citizen, was injured in a similar attack by settlers rampaging amid the Palestinians’ traditional olive harvest.

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🇮🇷 Strait of Hormuz to reopen on sixth day if US meets Iran's conditions - FM Araghchi

Tehran's seven-day proposal remains on the table, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, stressing that its demands are fair and based on commitments previously made by the US, with negotiations set to resume on the seventh day.

The plan calls for Washington to fulfill seven conditions, including lifting its naval blockade, easing oil sanctions, and halting hostilities.

Araghchi stressed that the demands are not new but reflect commitments made by the US under the June 17 Islamabad agreement, which collapsed in July amid renewed US strikes on Iran and mutual accusations of violations.

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🗣 Anthropic seeks legal advice to prep AI agents to negotiate on users’ behalf

Anthropic is consulting law firms on how its AI agents should bargain on behalf of people to secure better outcomes, the FT reported.

Whether settling customer disputes, improving salary offers, or haggling over prices, Anthropic wants to establish clear “negotiation norms” for these encounters.

Issues under discussion reportedly include:

➡️ how aggressively should agents pursue their user’s interests when facing counterparts with opposing goals

➡️ how often should agents they pause to seek users’ input and how much freedom should they be given

➡️ how to detect dishonest tactics without becoming excessively suspicious of other agents

➡️ whether users should provide signed instructions that define an agent’s authority and limits

The company has already tested these ideas.

In a recent internal experiment, employees used Claude agents – with a track record for going sometimes off-script - to buy and sell books on a virtual trading floor, each agent working from a ranked preference list.

Agents told to be “ruthless” secured slightly better results, while more cooperative ones sometimes accepted less-preferred books so that every participant ended up with something.

However, there is a downside: trials raised concerns that people with access to stronger models could gain a systematic advantage in agent-to-agent negotiations.

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⚔️ Iraqi resistance group vows to defend Iran against existential threat

Kata'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada has pledged to join Iran in fighting US and Israeli forces if the Islamic Republic faces a threat to its existence.

🔊 “If Iran faces a genuine threat to its existence, we will certainly participate in that battle,” the group's Secretary General Abu Ala al-Walai said, stressing that his faction would stay out of a conflict that did not pose such a threat, as it did during the recent war.

Walalai described ties with Tehran as deeply rooted in shared religious beliefs and battlefield cooperation, recalling Iran's military and logistical support to Iraqi forces during the fight against Daesh.

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Huckabee’s family sells pay-to-play access tours to Israel - report

The family of US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is still profiting from paid tours that promise American citizens access to senior Israeli officials, according to a Zeteo report.

The travel business, now run by Mike Huckabee’s son, and previously marketed as “The Israel Experience with Governor Mike Huckabee,” has taken hundreds of Americans to Israel over the years.

🔴 the price tag is $5,250 per person, covering flights from New York, five-star hotels and meals

🔴 itineraries promise exclusive access, such as meetings with senior Israeli officials and evening lectures featuring hardline pro-Israel figures

🔴 Palestinian communities and towns are entirely absent from the tours

A previous NYT report found that Huckabee’s chief of staff, David Milstein, had diluted or blocked embassy assessments critical of Israel to present PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s government more favorably to President Donald Trump.

Milstein was also reported to have subjected staff to loyalty tests, asking whether they were “pro-Israel” or “pro-Hamas” - an approach that reportedly left some officials afraid to speak openly.

❗️Huckabee himself has repeatedly denied that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and claimed there is “no such thing as a Palestinian.”

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🇮🇷 Iran's new defense minister warns US over Trump's MOAB remark

🔊Iran has taken "all necessary measures" in case the US drops a MOAB on Iran, Defense Minister Mehrdad Akhlaghi said, warning that any new attack would cause "massive damage to both themselves and the region."

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