Zero's Briefs

Foreign Affairs and Geopolitics — Moscow claims 598 drones shot down in one night — Russia’s Defense Ministry stated that on the night between August 14 and 15 air defenses destroyed or intercepted 598 unmanned aerial vehicles over central, southern and northwestern regions of the Federation; in the Moscow region, in Shatura, a drone reportedly damaged the roof of a home. The newspaper Izvestija reports another 180 devices shot down in the following twelve hours. Russia enforces restrictions banning the publication of images concerning anti-aircraft activity and crash sites: the claim comes from a single source, the Defense Ministry’s statement, and no independent confirmation is available. (Argumenty i Fakty, Izvestija)

Foreign Affairs and Geopolitics — The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to transit — The passage has been largely blocked since February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched the air campaign against Iran: the Revolutionary Guards have banned transit, boarded and attacked merchant vessels, and laid mines. On April 13 President Trump ordered a blockade of Iranian ports with an exception for humanitarian aid; CENTCOM reported diverting more than 140 ships. The Congressional Research Service notes that in early August Iran’s leadership appears determined to maintain pressure on the strait. (International Crisis Group, CRS)

Foreign Affairs and Geopolitics — Lula remains three points ahead of Flávio Bolsonaro — According to a poll by the Quaest institute released on August 15 and reported by Sputnik Mundo (Russian state news agency), the Brazilian president maintains his lead but the gap has narrowed to three points; in July it was five, 44% against 39%. In a hypothetical runoff Lula is credited with 43%. The survey was conducted between August 10 and 13 on 2,004 interviews, with a margin of error of two points. General elections will be held on October 4, with a possible runoff on the 25th. (Sputnik Mundo, Exame)

Italy — The 2027 budget could exceed thirty billion in proposals — Work on the next budget law could exceed 30 billion euros, though the final figure has not been set: on the table are personal income tax, wages, contract renewals, pensions, energy and measures for businesses. The League’s proposal to ask major banks for a contribution has reopened a divide within the majority coalition. Negotiations over resources will intensify after Ferragosto. The story currently comes from a single source, the August 15 review of Italian newspapers; no independent confirmation is available. (Sarno Notizie)

Chronicles — Sixteen dead in Luzon after nine days of monsoon — The Philippines’ civil protection office reported at least 16 victims on the island of Luzon from flooding, landslides and weather-related accidents, seven of them in the city of Baguio; three people remain missing. The deaths occurred after nine consecutive days of heavy rain. The archipelago is hit by an average of twenty storms and typhoons a year, being the first major landmass on the path of Pacific cyclones. (AFP via RFI, Euronews)

Economy and Markets — The yen remains close to the 160 threshold — The Japanese currency held steady at around 159.36 per dollar, near the level that in the past has preceded intervention by the authorities. Government sources cited by Bloomberg indicate that Sanae Takaichi’s administration favors a Bank of Japan rate hike in September or October. Japan’s benchmark rate stands at 1%, the highest since September 1995, compared with 3.5-3.75% for the fed funds rate; in May Tokyo spent about 11,700 billion yen, roughly 73.5 billion dollars, on currency intervention. (Bloomberg, OMFIF)

Tech & AI — An automatic transcription service exposes 181,000 meetings — The security researcher known as bobdahacker disclosed a vulnerability in the transcription service tl;dv, used with Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams: due to a missing rule for isolating data between different clients, 181,874 transcripts relating to 84,312 users and 35,003 email domains were reportedly queryable by any authenticated user. About a thousand transcripts were found to be public and 715 addresses exposed. The researcher states the issue was reported on January 28, 2026. Single source: the researcher’s disclosure. (AI Weekly)

Tech & AI — Alibaba releases Qwen 3.8 under Apache 2.0 license — The Qwen team has released a language model with 27 billion parameters featuring built-in visual capabilities and a native context window of 262,000 tokens, extendable up to one million; the architecture combines Gated DeltaNet and Gated Attention blocks. The FP8 variant reports 61.7 on SWE-Bench Pro, 73.0 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 90.3 on LiveCodeBench v6: these are results declared by the manufacturer on standard evaluation tests, not independently verified. Single source available. (AI Weekly)

Tech & AI — Google presents HEIR for inference on encrypted data — Around the same time as Alibaba’s release, Google presented HEIR, an open-source toolchain that enables inference on encrypted data without exposing inputs to the servers processing the request. It belongs to the field of homomorphic encryption applied to models: the promise is to run a model on data that whoever hosts it cannot read. The story comes from a single source; no independent confirmation is available. (AI Weekly)

Cinema & Entertainment — The Golden Leopard of Locarno goes to Romania’s Florin Șerban — The 79th edition of the Swiss festival closed on August 15 with the top prize going to “Nu e locul tau aici” (“You Don’t Belong Here”), the director’s first feature film in eight years. The Special Jury Prize went to the Brazilian-German film “A Margem do Rio,” Best Director to Hong Sangsoo, and Leopards for Best Performance to Kim Minhee and Monica Bellucci. The 80th edition is set for August 4-14, 2027. (RSI, The Hollywood Reporter)

Number of the Day — 12.3 million passengers a year pass through Catania — This is the annual traffic of the Sicilian airport, fifth in Italy, which has been intermittently closed since August 7 due to ash from Mount Etna: between August 8 and 11 about 700 flights were cancelled, affecting over 100,000 passengers, with more than 250 connections diverted to Comiso, Palermo and Trapani. (Il Post)

On This Day — The European 1500m record had stood since 2016 — Ten years ago Hungary’s Boglarka Kapas set the European championship record in the 1500m freestyle. The record fell on August 14, 2026, in Paris, where Simona Quadarella won in 15:46.22, claiming her tenth individual continental gold in the long course. (Sportface)