An opening on the Gulf, a section missing

Let’s start with the absence, because it’s the thing the reader has a right to know first: today Sport remains without an article. We had worked on a piece on the US Open — the exits of Auger-Aliassime, de Minaur and Musetti — and it did not make it through production. We did not replace it in time for 6:30. It is a gap, not a choice.

The rest of the edition starts from the Gulf. The Iranian military states it struck bases used by US forces in Kuwait and the UAE; the more detailed confirmation does not come from Tehran but from the Kuwaiti side, which reports the activation of air defenses. This is why the piece leads and why it is built on attributed statements: when the parties to a conflict are also the only source of what they claim to have done, our job is to distinguish who says what, not to add up the communiqués.

The second choice is arithmetic: as of September 4, the Meloni government reaches 1,413 days and surpasses the second Berlusconi government. A duration record is not a political judgment, it is a calendar fact; the analysis treats it as such, reconstructing the count from the swearing-in on October 22, 2022.

On the other sections the criterion was verifiability. The morning report from the National Interagency Fire Center on the fires in Washington and Oregon is a primary, institutional source, but it is a single origin and we state this in the piece. The same disclosure applies to the postponement of the European methane database to September 2026: the date appears on the Commission’s page, the pickup is single-sourced, and the reader finds this stated at the top of the article.

Two pieces are here because they change concrete procedures. As of September 1, the EMA no longer accepts the old PDF form for medicine variation applications: this is regulatory organization, not clinical matter, and it is the only form in which our Health section covers drugs. On GPT-6 Astra, on the other hand, everything read about performance comes from OpenAI: we say so before the figures, not after.

From China comes the data point we prefer in this edition: 12.498 billion yuan in summer box-office revenue, 38.51 million screenings and the lowest average ticket price since 2022. The growth is made of low prices, not big titles — information that the revenue figure alone would have hidden. Closing out are the European markets for September 3 and the Booker calendar, with the shortlist on September 22.

In Briefs, the bombings on Kyiv on September 3: one victim and thirteen wounded according to city authorities, tallies verifiable at the time of publication.

The afternoon edition comes out today at 16:30. There we will try to recover Sport.