The Financial Times broke the news that Samsung wants in on Mistral’s upcoming €3 billion funding round. While the original report politely estimates the South Korean contribution at “hundreds of millions of euros,” the industry grapevine quickly rounded that up to a cool €1 billion. Of course, both companies declined to comment to Reuters. That is just standard corporate poker face.

Hardware meets software

The logic behind the deal makes total sense. Samsung already rakes in cash by supplying the high-bandwidth memory needed to train AI models. Grabbing a stake in a frontier software lab simply secures their grip on the entire ecosystem.

For Mistral, the appeal is even more obvious. CEO Arthur Mensch wants to design custom chips to finally break free from Nvidia’s market chokehold. When you are trying to build your own silicon, having a global memory titan on your cap table definitely helps. They also just raised an €830 million debt facility to fund their own data centers in Paris and Sweden.

Buying an expensive insurance policy

Let’s be honest: Mistral’s models still lag slightly behind American heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic. So why the €20 billion price tag? Europe is absolutely desperate for a homegrown tech champion. With US export controls tightening, throwing money at Mistral is basically Europe buying a sovereign insurance policy.

The strategy is working. They already landed enterprise clients like Airbus and BMW. On top of that, Dutch chip equipment maker ASML previously dropped a massive €1.3 billion to become their largest shareholder, and EQT’s Scaleup Europe fund is reportedly joining this new funding round too.

If this deal closes, Mistral’s total funding hits roughly €6.5 billion. More importantly, a Samsung signature means Mistral is no longer just a European pet project – it officially becomes a global contender.

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You can check every box on paper, but a good relationship and the right relationship are two very different things. If your partner has you slightly wrong, it might seem like a minor annoyance today. Over a lifetime, however, it changes everything. Here is what the science says about finding the right match.

Flip the script: It is about you, actually

Juliana Schroeder and her research team at UC Berkeley recently dropped a counterintuitive truth bomb in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. After conducting seven different studies involving romantic partners, family members, and friends, they discovered what actually drives relationship satisfaction.

The variable that consistently predicted the quality of a bond had absolutely nothing to do with how well you understood the other person. Instead, it all hinged on whether you felt they understood you. Most people think relationship work is outward-facing, but the data clearly shows that what we actually need is to feel known through and through.

Feeling unseen is literally killing you

This dynamic goes far beyond feeling warm and fuzzy on the inside; it is a literal matter of life and death. A two-decade study published in Psychosomatic Medicine tracked over 1,200 adults to see how their relationships affected their bodies. They found that people who consistently felt unseen or misunderstood by their partners suffered from increasing emotional dysregulation. Ultimately, this predicted a higher mortality rate across all causes. The researchers did not even look at toxic conflict or obvious red flags; simply failing to feel “known” takes a severe physical toll.

This lines up perfectly with the famous Harvard Study of Adult Development, which followed participants for over 80 years. The researchers concluded that your relationship quality at age 50 predicts your physical health at age 80 much more reliably than your cholesterol levels or career success. Having someone truly in your corner matters more than a good diet.

The Michelangelo effect

Psychologists have a brilliant term for the ultimate relationship green flag: the Michelangelo effect. This happens when a partner sees the person you are capable of becoming and treats you exactly like that future version of yourself, rather than who you currently are.

Research tracking couples from young adulthood all the way into their 90s proves that this dynamic works at every single stage of life. Simply put: who your partner thinks you are has a funny way of becoming exactly who you are. If they see a masterpiece, you become one.

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Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, has spent a career studying animal behavior, and his position is unglamorous. Humping is ordinary dog stuff. The meaning lives entirely in the circumstances: who started it, who received it, what happened in the ten seconds beforehand, where everyone was standing.

The data does not support your theory

Bekoff and a crew of citizen scientists logged 312 mounting incidents involving around 40 dogs at local parks, which is a genuinely uncomfortable amount of time to spend watching dogs at a park with a clipboard. Males were responsible for 58% of them, females 42%. Body size turned out to be irrelevant.

Here’s where it falls apart for the amateur behaviorists. In roughly 65% of cases, researchers concluded the dog had simply drifted into a physical position and instinct did the rest. No agenda. Play explained another 26%. And dominance, the explanation basically everyone jumps to first, accounted for about 9%.

It’s stress, not a power grab

Dr. Karen Sueda, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist at VCA West Los Angeles Animal Hospital, told Vetstreet that a dog working on your leg is almost never staging a coup. She reads it as displacement behavior, the canine equivalent of jiggling your knee in a waiting room. Feelings pile up, the dog has nowhere to put them, and something has to give.

A stranger arriving at the door will do it. So will a chaotic day at daycare, or the confusing emotional cocktail of being told off by someone you love. Owners typically reach for neutering as the solution, and it frequently disappoints. Testosterone can linger for as long as six weeks after surgery, and if the dog was already at it beforehand, hormones may have stopped being the driver a while ago. By then it’s just a habit with a long history.

And then there’s Reggie

Some dogs are simply committed. Bekoff describes a dog named Reggie whose owner reported that he went after water bowls, beach balls, other dogs from whatever angle presented itself, and human legs, at any hour. Turned down, Reggie moved on without visible distress.

Bekoff also raises a possibility that should quietly humble every owner: the dog being mounted may be issuing an invitation you cannot detect. Smells, sounds, small visual signals. The dogs are having a conversation. You are not in it.

So the next time it happens, skip the apology and look at what just occurred. Reggie’s owner never worked it out. Reggie, for his part, never appeared to want an explanation.

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The draft appeared on Russia’s official portal for normative acts and was flagged by the investigative outlet Agentstvo. Current rules already require the agency to plan ahead for protecting its own personnel, civilian staff, workers at affiliated entities, family members and property. The amendments add protection “from dangers arising during mobilization, under martial law, and in wartime,” and widen the range of civil defense tasks the agency takes on.

An explanatory note attached to the draft says the changes are needed to align the agency’s internal rules with national civil defense legislation updated in 2025. That law redefined civil defense as a system for protecting the population during mobilization, martial law and wartime, replacing older wording built around emergency situations and military action.

Casualty estimates near 1.4 million

The paperwork lands against a grim backdrop. Western intelligence and defense assessments put Russian casualties in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine at roughly 1.4 million killed and wounded by mid-year.

Recruitment has struggled to keep pace with those losses. In February, the US-based Institute for the Study of War warned that contract recruitment was falling short of front-line attrition.

Rumors of an autumn call-up

Over the summer, pro-war Russian social media channels circulated claims that an October mobilization could target up to 1.2 million people. Human rights advocates report that more Russian men are being handed mobilization notices when they visit military enlistment offices for routine record updates.

The Kremlin had earlier issued strict regional directives to boost contract recruitment. Local authorities that missed their quotas responded by ramping up the activity of enlistment offices and security services.

Two groups bore the brunt of that push. People with significant debts listed in enforcement databases and former prisoners under administrative supervision were detained on a large scale and pressured into signing contracts with the Russian armed forces.

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Wong pointed to a technical rule of thumb that gold tends to find support when it drops to 90% of its 200-day moving average, a level the metal has already blown through. But he said the case rests on more than one indicator. “Internally, I have five or six other measures that show minus two or minus three standard deviations oversold,” he told Kitco News. “Add them all up, and what does it mean? It means that it’s harder and harder to push down the price of gold.”

He was careful about what that signals. “It doesn’t mean it’s the low, it just means the bulk of the selling is probably done,” Wong said. Positioning backs that up, in his view. CTAs have gone flat, CFTC long positions have fallen back to 2018 levels, and outflows from European and North American ETFs have been more than offset by growth in Chinese holdings.

Waiting for a catalyst

A rebound still needs a trigger. “What is it going to get to spark it back up? That’s the whole thing,” Wong said. He noted that gold usually bottoms in summer, with early August the average seasonal low, though last year the turn came at the end of August around the Jackson Hole meeting. Gold then ran from $3,600 to roughly $4,500 before falling back.

Wong expects something similar this year. “Probably sometime in August, whether it’s Jackson Hole or something sooner, or something blows up in the Middle East, or the bond market goes bonkers,” he said.

The bond market decides

For Wong, the real pressure sits in government debt. He put US debt at $39.5 trillion, up $3.8 trillion over roughly the past year, with interest expense now exceeding military spending. Bond yields in the United States, Germany and Japan are all pushing higher, he said, and central banks are running out of room.

“You’re going to have to give up something,” Wong said. “Either you lose control of the bond market, but you can’t because you have to keep financing the debt, or you debase the currency. That’s the heart of the debasement trade. It’s still on, it’s still there, and the pressure’s still building.”

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Speaking on public broadcaster France 2, Bregeon pointed directly to events in the Middle East as the reason behind the increase at the pump. “These are obviously the consequences of what is happening in the Middle East. The French know this and I understand that it is very difficult for many of our fellow citizens,” she said, referring to fluctuations that are hard to anticipate.

She offered no forecast. “The trend as we speak is upward. I am not able to tell you what will happen in the coming days or weeks,” Bregeon said.

Support runs until the end of August

The government has put assistance in place for what Bregeon called “the most exposed sectors” and “the most vulnerable French citizens” to soften the blow of higher prices. That aid is still running, she said, and people who qualify can draw on it until the end of August.

Whether the measures will be extended beyond that date remains open. Asked about a possible extension, Bregeon said the government “will take stock by the end of August.”

Oil prices rebound since July

Oil prices have climbed back since the start of July. Renewed hostilities in the region reversed part of the drop that followed an interim agreement between the United States and Iran, a deal that had raised expectations of safer transit through the Strait of Hormuz and more regional energy supply reaching the market.

The latest escalation has also dimmed the prospect of fresh talks. Tehran is demanding that Washington first deliver on earlier commitments regarding shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian oil exports before negotiations resume.

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The numbers show how far member states have leaned on borrowing to absorb the economic pressure of recent years. Governments in the single-currency bloc took in €2.3 trillion in total revenue over the quarter, or roughly $2.63 trillion. Spending ran ahead of that at €2.4 trillion, leaving a gap that had to be financed.

Deficits hold near the 3% mark

The government deficit in the euro area landed at 3% of gross domestic product for the first three months of the year. The European Union as a whole recorded a marginally wider gap of 3.1% over the same period.

That 3% line matters because it is the reference value written into the EU’s budget rules. Member states that drift above it can end up under closer scrutiny from the European Commission, which has been tightening its grip on national budgets since the revised fiscal framework took effect.

A gap that keeps widening the debt pile

Debt ratios and deficits feed into each other. As long as governments spend more than they collect, the outstanding debt stock keeps growing relative to the size of the economy, unless growth or inflation erodes it faster.

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Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín signed off on the settlement on Monday, months after she pushed back on the deal and asked the plaintiffs’ lawyers to explain their fees more clearly. The case, Bartz v. Anthropic, started in 2024 when novelists Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber and non-fiction writer Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class action covering roughly half a million works. The payout comes down to about $3,000 per book, far above the going rate in comparable AI copyright disputes. Reuters was first to report the approval.

A split ruling that cut both ways

The case hinged on a distinction drawn by Judge William Alsup, who has since retired. In June 2025 he ruled that training a model on lawfully purchased books counts as fair use, a first-of-its-kind win for the AI industry. But he found that Anthropic’s decision to download millions of titles from the shadow libraries Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror was illegal on its own terms.

That left the company facing statutory damages that could have run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Anthropic agreed to settle in September 2025 rather than let a jury decide the piracy question.

“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law, which remains the law today,” said Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic’s deputy general counsel.

No precedent for the rest of the industry

Because the case ended in a settlement rather than a verdict, it sets no binding precedent. Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic’s choice to settle means it will never reach an appeals court. Other judges remain free to reach their own conclusions.

That matters, because similar lawsuits against Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI are still working their way through the courts. Last week a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier and author Scott Turow, filed a class action against Google over its use of copyrighted works to train Gemini.

Martínez-Olguín defended the deal in her order. “The $1.5 billion settlement provides substantial benefits to the class in light of the novel claims asserted,” she wrote, adding that “success at trial was not assured, and a loss would have left the class with no recourse.” She did trim the lawyers’ fee award by roughly $86 million, according to Law.com.

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