Morning Brief — 2026-08-13

🎙 Audio recap: delivered as a voice note in your Discord #theo channel.

🇺🇸 US News

Trump is heading to California and Nevada to raise money and sharpen his economy message as midterm control of Congress looms.
Karoline Leavitt will step down as White House press secretary at the end of August, forcing another communications reset.
ICE's plan to issue electric-shock gloves to officers is drawing misuse concerns from rights groups and lawmakers.
Severe Midwest weather brought tornadoes, flooding, deaths and widespread power damage across several states.

A Russian strike hit a Ukrainian port as Zelenskyy warned of an acute shortage of Patriot interceptors.
Major Russian grain export terminals were hit in a Black Sea port attack, tightening pressure on both Russian and Ukrainian shipping.
Rescue work in Colombia entered a final phase after the earthquake death toll rose to 265.
Japan protested after Putin visited the disputed Kuril islands, reviving a long-frozen territorial fight.

S&P 500 futures were nearly flat after Wednesday's close, with traders watching cooler inflation, oil and earnings signals.
The Dow slipped about 0.4% in early quote data while defensive tone returned ahead of more inflation data.
The Nasdaq hovered near unchanged after AI strength met profit-taking in megacap tech.
QQQ was up about 0.4% in early quote data, keeping the AI-heavy index ahead of the broader market.

Anthropic's Claude watermarks mark a new compliance and detection front as EU transparency rules bite.
TechCrunch says some Claude users are angry that Anthropic's new watermarks could expose AI use at work or school.
OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings raised $2B to build AI into enterprise service firms.
Google used Made by Google 2026 to push Gemini deeper into Pixel devices and everyday mobile features.
CNN reports autonomous AI agents were used in attacks on Taiwan, sharpening the cyberwarfare debate.

CoreWeave jumped more than 20% after earnings reinforced demand for AI infrastructure capacity.
Yahoo Finance says CoreWeave, Supermicro and Nebius helped lift AI infrastructure stocks.
Nvidia was up about 3% in early quote data as investors read the infrastructure results as good news for accelerator demand.
Microsoft and Alphabet traded lower in early quote data, showing some rotation out of software megacap AI winners.

OpenClaw's latest public release train includes npm plugin metadata fixes and app-server progress-reply repairs.
The 2026.6.34 release highlights safer browser and network boundaries plus more resilient provider runs.
ClawHub's front page continues surfacing new and popular skills, including document, browser, API and workflow tools.