外媒每日新闻 Hormuz Standoff & AI Race Edition

Tensions around the Strait of Hormuz remain high after President Donald Trump claimed the United States had "total control" over the strategic waterway. Iran swiftly rejected the assertion, with the Persian Gulf Strait Authority insisting the strait would remain blocked until Tehran's conditions are met — including an end to the US war and blockade, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and a wider regional ceasefire. Meanwhile, the Pacific-based aircraft carrier USS George Washington has begun heading toward the Middle East to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has endured a record-setting 260+ days at sea supporting the Iran war. Military families and members of Congress have raised growing concerns over a worsening mental health crisis aboard the Lincoln, where approximately 5,000 sailors and Marines face unprecedented deployment strain. Separately, Iraq announced September 30 as the deadline for the full withdrawal of remaining US military forces, ending a presence that began with the 2003 invasion. Trump also ordered the Navy to return to an older steam-catapult system for launching jets off aircraft carriers, directing the change for the fourth Ford-class carrier.^[1][2][3][4]

Ukraine's General Staff confirmed that its forces struck the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat oil refining and petrochemical complex in Russia's Republic of Bashkortostan overnight, causing a fire at the facility. The complex, located about 1,300 km (800 miles) from the Ukrainian border, is one of Russia's biggest refining facilities — making it one of the deepest strikes Ukrainian forces have carried out since the war began. It was the fourth refinery strike in three days as Kyiv presses its campaign to choke Moscow's vital oil sector. The Orsk oil refinery, attacked separately by Ukrainian forces, has been completely shut down with repairs expected to take up to six months due to the need to replace imported components under sanctions. Russia, meanwhile, launched 56 air strikes using 183 guided aerial bombs, deployed 6,597 kamikaze drones, and carried out 1,982 shellings in a single day, according to Ukraine's General Staff. A Russian drone also struck a passenger train in the Odesa region, killing at least two people. The Black Sea drone war has escalated further, with Ukrainian drones striking port infrastructure and grain terminals at Novorossiysk on August 12.^[5][6][7]

President Donald Trump announced that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the youngest person ever to hold the role at 27, will leave the administration at the end of August to spend more time with her young family. Leavitt, 28, called the decision "bittersweet" and said the demands of the job made it difficult to give sufficient time to her two young children, including daughter Viviana born in May. She will continue as one of Trump's senior outside advisers. Separately, CNN revealed new details of Trump's secret flight from Turkey last month: fighter jets accompanied both the president's actual aircraft and the decoy Air Force One, which carried journalists and cabinet members including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on the alternate plane with Trump, along with close personal aides Natalie Harp, Walt Nauta, and Dan Scavino. The hours-long deception plan on the ground in Turkey was prompted by Israeli intelligence warning of a potential Iranian assassination cell in Ankara, possibly armed with shoulder-fired missiles. However, some American officials viewed the threat with skepticism, suspecting Israel might be trying to influence Trump's thinking at a sensitive moment when his ceasefire with Iran was near collapse.^[8][9]

U.S. stocks extended their record run on Thursday as producer prices came in cooler than expected, easing inflation concerns and boosting equities. The S&P 500 hit fresh highs while the Nasdaq gained on semiconductor strength. Gold fell $61.80 to $4,405.70, and Bitcoin dipped slightly to $63,327. WTI crude oil settled near $83 per barrel after a cumulative 10% gain over the previous four sessions, as negotiations between Iran and the U.S. regarding the Strait of Hormuz showed little sign of a breakthrough. The 2-year Treasury yield was around 4.20% and the 10-year around 4.68%, with the yield curve still positive by roughly 48 basis points — not signaling recession but a manageable growth-inflation mix despite Middle East noise. Oil prices fluctuated during the session as the Hormuz blockade continued to disrupt shipping, with the market oscillating between optimism about potential diplomatic progress and fears of prolonged supply disruption. Traders assessed data from major energy forecasting agencies while China continued anti-dumping duties on optical fiber imports from India for five more years.^[11][12][13]

Asian stock markets surged sharply, with semiconductors driving the Nikkei and KOSPI higher. In Tokyo, the TOPIX index set another record while South Korea's KOSPI gained around 4%. The Japanese Nikkei 225 rose about 1.5%-1.8% in morning trading, moving around 68,600-68,700 points. The broader TOPIX gained about 0.5%-1% and set a new record around 4,160-4,170. The Shanghai-Shenzhen market exhibited a "spike and pullback" pattern, with all three major indices opening strongly before the Shanghai Composite fell 0.87% by close as biopharma gains were offset by broader selling amid rising U.S. inflation concerns. Meanwhile, the escalating Black Sea drone war is hitting global wheat exports, as increasingly this conflict is fought with drones against ports, ships, refineries and other infrastructure, where the economic damage can be vastly greater than the cost of the weapon used. Ukrainian drones and missiles struck port infrastructure and grain terminals at Novorossiysk, one of Russia's most important Black Sea ports, on August 12 — directly threatening global food supply chains.^[14][15][16]

An explosion at the Dutch port of Rotterdam on Thursday killed at least one person and injured several others, city police said. The blast at Europe's biggest port happened late Thursday morning at a refinery and fuel terminal run by Gunvor Energy. Police said a crime scene has been set up, and the explosion "appears to be a workplace accident for the time being." Rotterdam hosts Europe's largest oil refinery, Shell's 404,000-barrel-per-day Pernis plant, in addition to other refineries operated by BP, ExxonMobil and Vitol. Gunvor said it was investigating the cause. Separately, a huge explosion sparked by a fire at an ammunition factory sent up a towering plume of smoke Thursday in the town of Colleferro, near Rome. A helicopter dropped water over the scene of the blast. The explosion caused fright but no injuries, according to authorities. The factory is operated by Italian defense contractor Rheinmetall.^[17][18]

Rivers are rising in Indiana's catastrophic flood zone as new storms threaten the Midwest, with water rescues and evacuations still underway following historic rainfall. The White River exceeded twenty feet at Anderson for the first time since 1958, breaking benchmarks set in the historic 1913 flood — a 113-year record. A severe derecho struck the Midwest on August 11, prompting the National Weather Service to issue rare flash flood emergencies for Indiana on August 12. Half a million customers remained without power on August 13. More heavy rain is headed to flood-ravaged parts of the state, with localized areas across central and eastern Indiana recording 5 to 7 inches of rainfall. The catastrophe comes as Colombia continues rescue operations after a devastating 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck on August 10, with the death toll rising to 281 and 348 people rescued. Rescuers called for silence around earthquake rubble as the window for finding survivors narrows. Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella asked Trump to suspend tariffs to help earthquake recovery.^{[19][20][21][22]}

An Army AH-64E Apache attack helicopter crashed in a central Texas field on Wednesday, killing both people on board and sparking a large grass fire that forced the evacuation of nearby homes. The helicopter, based at Fort Hood, crashed near Salado in Bell County, about 40 miles north of Austin and just south of Fort Hood — a major Army helicopter base. Texas Governor Greg Abbott confirmed the deaths on X: "Today, an Apache helicopter crashed in Bell County during Fort Hood operations, killing two members of our military." The impact was so forceful that it triggered a large brush fire of about 150 acres, with video showing the helicopter hit the ground very hard. Nearby residents were briefly evacuated as emergency teams worked to contain the blaze. The identities of the soldiers had not been released pending family notification. The Army temporarily halted Apache helicopter training missions after the crash, with the cause remaining under investigation by the Combat Readiness Center in Fort Rucker, Alabama.^[23]

Elon Musk's xAI released Grok 4.6 on August 13, a model built on Grok 4.5 with a focus on long-running agents and more ambitious interactive and visual work. Grok 4.6 matches OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol on benchmarks while costing only $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens — well below the pricing of top-tier closed models. The model stays with complex tasks across many steps, whether researching, working across a codebase, or turning an idea into a polished app, and was trained in part on anonymized interaction data. The next day, GitHub made Grok 4.6 available in Copilot across eight surfaces: VS Code, Visual Studio, the Copilot CLI, the cloud agent, the Copilot app, JetBrains, Xcode, and Eclipse — reach unusually wide for a new model addition. xAI also launched Grok Bot, a new service offering AI agents with their own cloud computer that execute complete tasks from start to finish, available in beta for SuperGrok Heavy and Cursor Ultra subscribers. The rapid succession of releases intensifies the AI model competition as xAI challenges OpenAI's pricing dominance.^[24][25][26]

Google announced on August 12 that its Gemini app crossed 1 billion monthly active users, becoming the company's fastest-growing product ever. The milestone comes weeks after OpenAI reported ChatGPT crossing the same threshold, reflecting Gemini's deep integration across Google's services — with 63% of users interacting by voice and over 100 million active iOS users. The next day, Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash, its self-described most intelligent workhorse model yet, aimed squarely at coding, agentic workflows, and knowledge work. It arrived only three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash and, per Google's model card, is a refinement of that model with algorithmic improvements rather than a fresh pretraining run. It keeps a 1 million-token context window and costs $0.75 per million input tokens through year-end — half the price of 3.6 Flash. The release also coincided with Nvidia's announcement of Nemotron 4, a new generation of open AI models targeting roughly one trillion parameters, putting the chipmaker further into building frontier-scale AI models itself and adding a hardware giant to the open-model movement.^[27][28]

The hashtag #Hormuz trended worldwide on Thursday as Iran's swift rejection of Trump's "total control" claim went viral across social media. Iran's paramilitary Basij commander Hossein Taeb declared: "The Strait of Hormuz is under the control and management of Iran," according to the semi-official Fars news agency. Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority confirmed the blockade would continue until Tehran's conditions — including an end to the US war, the release of frozen assets, and a regional ceasefire — are accepted. The hashtag #TotalControl also gained traction as users mocked the disconnect between Trump's claims and ground reality. One viral post read: "Trump says 'total control' while the Navy rushes a new carrier because the old one is falling apart after 260 days." Another widely shared post noted: "One fifth of the world's oil and LNG used to flow through Hormuz. Now it's blocked and both sides just claim 'control.'" Images of the USS Abraham Lincoln's record deployment and reports of the mental health crisis aboard fueled debate about the human cost of extended carrier operations. Users also highlighted the irony of Trump ordering a return to older steam-catapult launch systems for carriers while claiming dominance over one of the world's most strategic waterways.^[1][2][3]

The hashtag #Leavitt trended in the US on Thursday as Karoline Leavitt's "bittersweet" departure announcement went viral, with many noting the coincidence that her resignation came the same day CNN revealed new details of Trump's secret flight from Turkey. Leavitt, who called the decision "bittersweet" in a social media post, became the youngest person to serve as White House press secretary when Trump appointed her at age 27. The revelation that Defense Secretary Hegseth and close personal aides — not the cabinet members on the decoy plane — were actually with Trump on the secret flight sparked debate about the administration's inner circle. A viral post read: "Leavitt is leaving 'to spend time with family' — the classic political exit. But she's staying on as a 'senior outside adviser.' Translation: she's still in the orbit." Another widely shared thread documented the dramatic details of the Turkey deception: Trump spirited away in a catering van to an alternate aircraft, fighter jets escorting both planes, and Israeli intelligence about an alleged Iranian assassination cell in Ankara. Skepticism about the Israeli intelligence — with some officials suspecting it was designed to influence Trump's thinking — added another layer. "So the press and cabinet members were on the decoy plane and didn't even know? That's not a security measure, that's using your own staff as human shields," read another trending post.^[8][9]

The hashtag #IndianaFlood trended on Thursday as images of the catastrophic flooding — breaking a 113-year record set in 1913 — spread across social media. The White River exceeded 20 feet at Anderson for the first time in 68 years. Half a million customers without power after a derecho struck the Midwest prompted viral posts about climate resilience and infrastructure. A viral video showed water rescues in progress as new storms threatened the already-flooded region. Meanwhile, #ColombiaEarthquake also trended as conspiracy theories blaming a research program in Alaska for the 7.4 magnitude earthquake resurfaced on social media. AP's fact-check team debunked the claims, which linked the quake to the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). Soldiers clearing debris in Cali three days after the earthquake became an iconic image shared widely. The death toll reached 281 with 348 rescued and hundreds still missing, as rescuers called for silence around the rubble to listen for survivors. Colombian President de la Espriella's request for Trump to suspend tariffs to aid earthquake recovery also went viral, with users noting the irony of trade barriers hampering disaster relief. "You can't tariff your way through an earthquake," read one trending post.^{[19][20][21][22]}