- “MiCA reaches its six-month milestone: early takeaways and challenges ahead” BBVA
- Tether CEO Criticizes MiCA as a ‘Gift to Banks’ ForkLog
- Coinbase Price Sentiment Boosted as Exchange Adopts MiCAR-Compliant White Papers for EU The Tradable
- Circle Secures First MiCA-Compliant Stablecoin License ForkLog
Category: 3. Business
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"MiCA reaches its six-month milestone: early takeaways and challenges ahead" – BBVA
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Powell's last Jackson Hole speech could pack a punch – Reuters
- Powell’s last Jackson Hole speech could pack a punch Reuters
- Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City to Host Annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium Aug. 21-23 Kansas City – Federal Reserve
- Jay Powell to deliver Jackson Hole address under fire on multiple fronts Financial Times
- Which sectors will fall if the Fed delivers a hawkish surprise at Jackson Hole? Investing.com
- US 10-Year Yield Inches Down TradingView
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India’s biofuel drive is saving billions but also sparking worries
Getty ImagesIndian government says ethanol blending has cut 69.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions since 2014 India’s drive to blend more biofuels with petrol has helped the country cut millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and save precious dollar reserves.
But it has also sparked worries among vehicle owners and food policy experts about its potential impact on fuel efficiency and food security.
Last month, India achieved its objective of blending 20% ethanol with petrol, known as E20, five years ahead of its target.
The government views this as a game changer in reducing carbon emissions and trimming oil imports. Since 2014, ethanol blending has helped India cut 69.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and saved 1.36 trillion rupees ($1.5 bn; £1.1 bn) in foreign exchange.
A study by Delhi-based think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) shows that carbon dioxide emissions from road transport in India will nearly double by 2050.
“The demand for fuel is only going to increase and shifting to ethanol-blended petrol is absolutely necessary to cut down emissions,” Sandeep Theng from the Indian Federation of Green Energy, an organisation that promotes green energy, told the BBC.
But many vehicles in India are not E20-compliant, making their owners sceptical about the benefits of the policy.
Hormazd Sorabjee, editor of Autocar India magazine, said that ethanol has a “lower energy density than petrol and is more corrosive”. This results in lower mileage and exposes certain vehicle parts to a greater risk of wear and tear.
Mr Sorabjee added that some manufacturers like Honda have been using E20 compliant material since 2009, but many older vehicles on Indian roads are not E20 compatible.
While there is no official data on the impact of of E20 fuel on engines, consumers routinely share anecdotes about their vehicle’s deteriorating mileage on social media.
Many standard insurance policies in India also don’t provide cover for damage due to the use of non-compliant fuel, a top executive at online insurance platform Policybazaar, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC.
“Consumers need to take add-on policies but even those claims can be denied or downgraded based on fine print of the policy,” he added.
The federal petroleum ministry has described these concerns as “largely unfounded”.
In a post on X, the ministry said that engine tuning and E20-compatible materials could minimise the drop in mileage. It also advised replacing certain parts in older vehicles, saying the process was inexpensive and “easily done during regular servicing of the vehicle”.
Getty ImagesExpansion of ethanol use could mean diverting more farm produce into manufacturing fuel Mr Sorabjee told the BBC that while milage concerns are real, they are a “not always as bad as made out to be”.
The bigger concern, he said, was the potential damage to vehicle materials due to the corrosive properties of E20.
Some vehicle manufacturers are offering ways to mitigate this.
Maruti Suzuki, India’s biggest four-wheeler maker, is reportedly likely to introduce an E20 material kit that could cost up to 6,000 rupees ($69; £51). The kit will reportedly replace components like fuel lines, seals and gaskets. Bajaj, a leading Indian two-wheeler maker, has advised using a fuel cleaner that could cost around 100 rupees ($1.15; £0.85) for a full tank of petrol.
But not all vehicle-owners are convinced. Amit Pandhi, who has owned a Maruti Suzuki car in Delhi since 2017, is unhappy that petrol pumps don’t offer the choice to opt for a blend other than E20.
“Why should I be forced to buy petrol that offers less mileage and then spend more to make the materials compliant?” he asked.
In 2021, a document on India’s transition to E20 published by Niti Aayog, a government think tank, had highlighted some of these concerns. It recommended tax benefits for buying E20 compliant vehicles, along with a lower retail price for the fuel.
The government has defended its decision to not pass the recommendations, saying that at the time of the report’s relase, ethanol was cheaper than petrol.
“Over time, procurement price of ethanol has increased and now the weighted average price of ethanol is higher than cost of refined petrol,” the petroleum ministry said earlier this month.
Getty ImagesIndia is looking to increase ethanol-blending in petrol in the coming years It’s not just consumers – the government’s blended fuel push has also raised concern among climate researchers and food policy experts.
Ethanol is produced from crops like sugarcane and maize, and expanding its use means diverting farm produce into manufacturing more fuel.
In 2025, India would need 10 billion litres of ethanol to meet its E20 requirements, according to government estimates. The demand will balloon to 20 billion litres by 2050, according to Bengaluru-based think tank Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP).
Right now, sugarcane is used to produce about 40% of India’s ethanol.
This puts India in a bind. It has to choose between continuing its reliance on sugarcane – which has a higher yield for ethanol but is water-intensive – or using food crops like maize and rice to produce the fuel.
But the shift comes with its own challenges.
In 2024, for the first time in decades, India became a net importer of maize, using large amounts of the crop to make ethanol.
Ramya Natarajan, a research scientist at CSTEP, said the diversion of produce had a significant impact on the poultry sector, which now has to spend more to buy corn for feedstock.
Moreover, this year, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) approved an unprecedented allocation of 5.2 million tonnes of rice for ethanol production. The rice in FCI stocks is earmarked to be given to India’s poor at a subsidised rate.
The policy could lead to an “agriculture disaster in a couple of years”, said Devinder Sharma, a farming sector expert.
“In a country like India, where 250 million people go hungry, we cannot use food to feed the cars,” Mr Sharma said.
To meet the demand for ethanol through corn and sugarcane in a 50-50 ratio – as outlined by Niti Aayog – India would have to bring in an additional eight million hectares of land under maize cultivation by 2030, unless there is a drastic increase in yield, according to CSTEP.
But even that could lead to problems.
“If farmers replace rice or wheat cultivation with maize, that would be sustainable because we have enough surplus of these crops. But we need other crops like oilseeds and pulses too,” Ms Natarajan said.
Ms Natarajan added that continuing with the E10 blend – petrol mixed with 10% ethanol – would have been a more ideal choice.
India, however, is planning to go even beyond E20.
“The country will now gradually scale towards E25, E27, and E30 in a phased, calibrated manner,” Petroleum Minister Hardeep Puri said recently.
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Beijing turns against Nvidia’s AI chip after ‘insulting’ Lutnick remarks
Beijing’s move to restrict sales of Nvidia’s China-specific artificial intelligence processor was prompted by remarks from US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick about chip exports that officials found “insulting”.
A group of Chinese regulators have mobilised in an effort to dissuade domestic tech companies from acquiring the H20 — a watered-down processor widely used for artificial intelligence in China.
According to people with knowledge of the regulatory action, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) moved in response to comments made by Lutnick last month.
“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second-best stuff, not even our third-best,” Lutnick told CNBC on July 15, the day after the Trump administration lifted export controls, implemented in April, on H20 sales.
“You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack, that’s the thinking,” he added.
Some of China’s senior leaders found the comments “insulting”, leading to the policymakers to seek ways to restrict Chinese tech firms from buying the processors, according to two people with knowledge of the latest regulatory decision-making.
As a result, Chinese tech groups held off or significantly downsized their H20 orders, according to those with knowledge of their plans.
The moves have come as a blow to Nvidia, whose chief executive Jensen Huang last month visited Beijing and committed to stay competitive in the country despite growing geopolitical tensions with the US.
Following Huang’s warmly received trip, Nvidia received sufficient interest from Chinese clients that it told fabrication partner TSMC to reopen its H20 production lines, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Chinese regulators have urged more use of domestic chips in recent years, but tech giants from Alibaba to ByteDance argued that their AI development would be impaired without Nvidia’s chips, hurting China’s chance to win the technology arms race with the US.
However, some close to the tech companies said they have now become more accepting of a switch, especially for “inference”, in which AI systems respond to requests from users.
That shift came after testing and adopting chips from domestic producers led by Huawei and Cambricon at a larger scale, following Washington’s initial April ban on exporting Nvidia’s H20s.
“Lutnick’s speech gives the coalition [of regulators] one more reason to intensify its efforts to push tech firms to use China’s own chips,” said a person close to the policymakers.
A week after his comments, China’s internet regulator CAC issued so-called “window guidance” — an informal notice — to major tech firms such as ByteDance and Alibaba, citing security concerns and instructing them to halt new orders for Nvidia’s H20 chips, according to people with knowledge of the regulator’s effort.
On July 31, the agency summoned Nvidia executives over alleged “serious security issues”. In a statement, the CAC claimed that US AI experts had revealed Nvidia’s chips have location tracking and can be shut down remotely — a claim strongly disputed by Nvidia.
MIIT, China’s regulator of telecoms and software, also spoke with Chinese tech executives informally to echo CAC’s stance, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meetings.
The NDRC, China’s state planner that is in charge of the country’s drive for tech independence, then issued its own window guidance, requesting that tech firms refrain from purchasing all Nvidia chips, including the H20, said those with knowledge of the move.
NDRC has been for years tasked with promoting chip independence and helping domestic players such as Huawei to capture market share from Nvidia.
The new involvement of CAC in particular has created more pressure for Chinese tech giants to comply, even if the instructions remain informal, as any potential penalties from the watchdog would choke their daily operations.
These actions are in sharp contrast to other Chinese departments, such as the commerce and foreign affairs ministries, which have been more open to Nvidia’s business, according to industry insiders.
The two ministries, which are also in charge of trade negotiations with the US, welcomed Huang in July as a positive signal for foreign businesses and to show Beijing’s goodwill in the ongoing trade talks, the people said.
“A lot of uncertainties remain depending on trade negotiations and Washington’s next moves,” said one of the people. “The fact that all current restrictive guidance from various regulators remain informal provides some room for future changes.”
Despite some Washington officials and lawmakers seeking stronger chip curbs, President Trump has said he could potentially allow a downgraded Nvidia Blackwell chip to be exported to China in addition to H20.
Some Chinese tech companies have held off their H20 orders also because they want see if the China specific Blackwell chip, which potentially has better performance than H20, would become available, according to people with knowledge of their thinking.
Some Beijing policymakers are pushing to ban foreign chips altogether for inference, which accounts for most AI demand, according to a person recently summoned for a meeting with them.
That is unlikely to happen soon due to a shortage of domestic chip supplies, which Beijing hopes to significantly improve by next year when several advanced production lines are scheduled to launch.
China’s foreign ministry said: “As a matter of principle, science, technology, and economic and trade issues should not be politicised, instrumentalised, or weaponised. Containment and suppression will not hold back China’s development.”
Other Chinese regulators and ministries did not respond to questions for comment. Alibaba and ByteDance did not answer emails requesting comment. The US Commerce department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nvidia declined to comment.
Additional reporting from Michael Acton in San Francisco and Eleanor Olcott in Beijing
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Fed’s Cook Says She Won’t Be Bullied Into Stepping Down
Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook signaled her intention to remain at the central bank, defying calls for her resignation by President Donald Trump over allegations of mortgage fraud.
“I have no intention of being bullied to step down from my position because of some questions raised in a tweet,” Cook said in an emailed statement via a Fed spokesperson. “I do intend to take any questions about my financial history seriously as a member of the Federal Reserve and so I am gathering the accurate information to answer any legitimate questions and provide the facts.”
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Asia markets mostly rise as investors assess S&P 500’s four-day losing streak
Evening view of Marine Drive, Queen’s necklace, Juhu and Chowpatty beaches
Grant Faint | The Image Bank | Getty Images
Asia-Pacific markets mostly rose as investors assessed the four-day losing streak for the S&P 500, led by declines in tech stocks.
Investors in the region are awaiting India’s HSBC Composite flash purchasing managers’ index reading for August, which provides an early snapshot of the performance of the private sector economy, expected later in the day. Economists polled by Reuters expect it to come in at 60.5, compared with 61.1 in the month before.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.21% in early trade, while the broader Topix index ticked down 0.4%.
In South Korea, the Kospi index rose 0.81%, while the small-cap Kosdaq increased by 0.62%.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 benchmark started the day 0.47% higher.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index is slated to open flat with futures tied to the index at 25,168, compared with the HSI’s last close of 25,165.94.
U.S. equity futures were little changed in early Asia hours.
Overnight stateside, two of the three key benchmarks ended the session in declines as tech stocks dragged the market lower.
The broad market S&P 500 index slipped 0.24% to close at 6,395.78, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite lost 0.67% and settled at 21,172.86. Wednesday marked a fourth day of losses for the S&P 500 and a second negative session for the Nasdaq.
Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was the outlier, adding 16.04 points, or 0.04%, and settling at 44,938.31.
— CNBC’s Yun Li, Pia Singh and Alex Harring contributed to this report.
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Trump has bought more than $100m in bonds while president, disclosure shows | Donald Trump
Donald Trump has bought more than $100m in company, state and municipal bonds since taking office in January, according to new disclosures which shed further light on the vast holdings of the US’s billionaire president.
The forms, posted online on Tuesday, show the Republican former real estate mogul made more than 600 financial purchases since 21 January, the day after he was inaugurated for his second term in the White House.
The 12 August filing from the US Office of Government Ethics does not list exact amounts for each purchase, only giving a broad range.
They include corporate bonds from Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, as well as Meta, Qualcomm, the Home Depot, T-Mobile USA and UnitedHealth Group.
Other debt purchases include various bonds issued by cities, states, counties and school districts as well as gas districts, and other issuers.
The holdings cover sectors that could benefit from US policy shifts under his administration, such as financial deregulation.
A senior White House official said Trump continued to file mandatory disclosures about his investment portfolio but that neither he nor his family had a role in managing or selecting the bonds, which are managed by a third-party financial institution. Federal ethics officials certified the reports, which are in compliance with applicable laws, according to the official, who declined to be named.
Trump, a businessperson turned politician, has said he has put his companies into a trust managed by his children.
“President Trump’s net worth has increased substantially, with much of that concentrated in crypto holdings and Trump Media. Given that, there is no evidence currently that his bond purchases are anything other than a prudent diversification within his billions of dollars in assets,” said John Canavan, lead US analyst at Oxford Economics.
“It seems like he was primarily purchasing corporate and municipal bonds and others that are high quality and highly rated, so it’s just a way to take a little bit of risk off the table,” he said.
Trump’s annual disclosure form filed in June showed his income from various sources still ultimately accrues to the president – something that has opened him up to accusations of conflicts of interest.
In that disclosure, which appeared to cover the 2024 calendar year, Trump reported more than $600m in income from cryptocurrencies, golf properties, licensing and other ventures. It also showed his push into crypto had added substantially to his wealth.
Overall, Trump reported assets worth at least $1.6bn, according to a Reuters calculation at the time.
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Treatment that can double bladder cancer survival rates available to 1,000 patients in England | Cancer
More than 1,000 patients living with bladder cancer in England will be eligible for a treatment which can double survival rates from the disease.
In England, 18,000 people are diagnosed with bladder cancer each year, and only about 10% of people with stage 4 bladder cancer will survive five years or more after they are diagnosed.
The treatment, enfortumab vedotin with pembrolizumab, has been approved for use on the NHS from Thursday. About 1,250 patients across the country to be offered the therapy, which has been described by NHS bosses as one of the “most hopeful advances in decades”.
Clinical trials of the drug have shown that people with bladder cancer that has spread (metastasised) live up to twice as long when given the combination antibody treatment when compared with those given normal chemotherapy.
One trial also found that almost 30% of patients had no detectable traces of cancer in their body following treatment with enfortumab vedotin and pembrolizumab, compared with only 12.5% with chemotherapy.
Prof Peter Johnson, NHS England’s national clinical director for cancer, said that the treatment is “one of the most hopeful advances in decades for people with bladder cancer”.
He added: “Bladder cancer is often difficult to treat once it has spread, but this new therapy is the first one in years to really help stop the disease in its tracks, and our rollout to NHS patients will make a huge difference to the lives of those affected and their families.”
The therapy works by enfortumab vedotin directly targeting the cancer cells and killing them, while pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug, helps the immune system recognise and fight the remaining cancer cells.
Life expectancy for people with bladder cancer which has metastasised is usually only just over a year, but this new therapy increased survival for people with this stage of the disease by more than one year.
Jeannie Rigby, the chief executive of Action Bladder Cancer UK, said the charity, “bladder cancer patients and their families welcome this much-needed, step forward in treatments available for this hard-to-treat cancer.
“This new drug has the potential to increase how long people have before their cancer gets worse and how long they live compared with the current, limited, treatment choices available. It’s also of importance that this treatment can mean these patients can experience a better quality of life with less hard to tolerate side effects.”
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A New Frontier in Understanding and Probing LLM Safety
Introducing a New Angle on LLM Safety
Many publications have discussed the issues with tricking LLMs into responding to harmful requests. Our most recent academic research offers a new way to think about these issues, and it speaks to how defenders could improve LLM safety as well. The key is to consider some fundamental qualities of how safety features are built into LLM models.
LLMs are designed to refuse harmful queries through “alignment” training, a process that aims to make refusal responses far more likely than affirmative ones for unsafe prompts. A technical aspect of this process is the use of “logits,” the raw scores an LLM assigns to potential next words. Alignment training introduces refusal tokens that prevent the model from responding to harmful requests. Part of the training is to adjust the logits so they favor refusal tokens when they should.
Our Research: Logit-Gap Steering and Its Impact
Our research introduces a critical concept: the refusal-affirmation logit gap. This refers to the idea that the training process isn’t actually eliminating the potential for a harmful response – it’s just making it less likely. There remains potential for an attacker to “close the gap,” and uncover a harmful response after all.
Our academic research paper, “Logit-Gap Steering: Efficient Short-Path Suffix Jailbreaks for Aligned Large Language Models,” explores how this process would work, and how efficient it could be for attackers. Our approaches not only showcased strong jailbreak efficacy on classic open-sourced LLMs such as Qwen, LLama, and Gemma, but also worked effectively on the most recent open-sourced model from OpenAI, gpt-oss-20b, with outstanding attack success rate (>75%). The paper was posted before the release of gpt-oss-20b.
This forcefully demonstrates that relying solely on an LLM’s internal alignment to prevent toxic or harmful content is an insufficient strategy. The inherent, mathematical nature of the logit gap means that determined adversaries can, and will, find ways to bypass these internal guardrails. True AI safety demands a defense-in-depth strategy, incorporating additional, external protections and content filters for a truly robust security posture.
While the paper details the process and efficacy of the approach, it also provides tools for deeper analysis. In particular, it helps conceive of how safety alignment truly operates and steps out of specifics into a model that considers the fundamental principles of alignment training – and therefore inherent issues that need to be solved. It also provides security researchers and LLM users with a quantifiable metric to evaluate and strengthen the alignment and safety of deployed models.
Building a Stronger Future for AI Safety
We hope logit-gap steering will serve both as a baseline for future jailbreak research and as a diagnostic tool for designing more robust safety architectures. We’re sharing this research to empower the entire AI and security community. By understanding these fundamental mechanisms, we can collectively develop more robust alignment techniques, refine evaluation benchmarks and ultimately build more secure AI systems. We urge researchers to delve into the full paper on arXiv (2406.11717) and contribute to our shared mission of securing an AI-driven future.
Unit 42’s AI Security Assessment can help organizations reduce AI adoption risk, secure AI innovation and strengthen AI governance. Palo Alto Networks’ PRISMA AIRS Runtime Security product offers the most comprehensive protection for your AI innovations and deployments.
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