Two cool inflation reports in two days pushed the S&P 500 above 7,800 for the first time, even as new reporting revealed an Iranian missile threat forced President Trump onto a different plane leaving the NATO summit. Anthropic keeps buying compute, this time $9.1 billion of it from a bitcoin miner in Texas, and it is now watermarking Claude's output. Cava showed fast casual can still pull real traffic, Adley Rutschman finally caught a game for the scuffling Red Sox, the Patriots open the preseason tonight at Gillette, and back home a federal lawsuit over student voting IDs lands a month before the state primary.
Consumer prices rose 0.1% in July, easing the annual rate to 3.4% from 3.5% in June. Core CPI rose 0.2% on the month and 2.5% over the past year, the slowest core reading since 2021. Energy fell 1.5% in July but is still up 14.7% from a year ago on the war, which is most of the gap between headline and core. Traders read the report as the Fed staying on hold in September, and stocks rallied.
President Trump boarded Air Force One in front of cameras at the NATO summit in Turkey. He then left through an elevated catering truck and flew home on a military aircraft after a credible Iranian missile threat, according to reporting Wednesday. The U.S.-Iran war is approaching the six-month mark, and threats around it remain a standing risk for oil and equities.
Riot will supply 191 megawatts from its Rockdale, Texas campus under a 20-year lease, with the first 96 megawatts due in late 2027. Extension options could push the total to $16.1 billion. Riot lined up $573 million from Morgan Stanley for construction, and its stock jumped about 20% on the news. It is the clearest sign yet that bitcoin miners are converting their power contracts into AI data center revenue.
Boston's deadline pickup came off the injured list Tuesday and went 1 for 3 with two walks behind the plate in a 5-3 loss to the Blue Jays. The Sox then dropped Wednesday's game in Toronto for a fifth straight defeat. Rutschman had been out since July 20 with wrist inflammation and had not played for Boston since the trade from Baltimore. The bat helps, but the losing streak is the story right now.
The producer price index was unchanged in July against expectations for a 0.2% gain. Under the hood, the core measure excluding food, energy and trade services rose 0.4% on the month, boosted by a 6.5% surge in portfolio management fees. That core measure runs 4.7% above a year ago. That core reading feeds the August 26 PCE report, the last major inflation print before the Fed's September meeting.
The index touched a record 7,816 Thursday morning after the tame wholesale inflation report, its first trip above 7,800, before easing back toward 7,784. Two calm inflation prints in two days have traders betting the Fed stays put in September. Thin August volume can exaggerate swings around fresh highs, something index futures traders feel first.
New Claude models now embed a statistical watermark in generated text and images worldwide, a response to the EU AI Act's transparency rules. The mark survives copy and paste and some editing, but Anthropic says it proves an AI processed the text, not who authored the ideas. Heavy edits or short passages can defeat detection. Anyone building products on Claude should assume detectability is the new default.
Daybreak Blue tunes GPT-5.6 Sol for defensive security work, while Daybreak Red is purpose-trained for vulnerability research and exploit validation. Both are limited to customers vetted through OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber program and run with no operator access to prompts or outputs. AI is now a first-class tool on both sides of security, which raises the bar for anyone running a public-facing app.
Kavukcuoglu, a 2012 DeepMind hire who rose to chief technology officer and then Google's chief AI architect, now runs DeepMind day to day. Cofounder Demis Hassabis moves up to chair of the lab and chief scientist at Alphabet. He inherits the race to catch OpenAI and Anthropic on frontier models. Leadership churn at the top labs is worth watching because it tends to show up in model release schedules.
Second quarter revenue rose 31.3% to $365.4 million, with same-restaurant sales up 9% against the 7.1% analysts expected. Guest traffic contributed 5.3 points of that, meaning more bodies through the door, not just higher menu prices. Net income hit $23 million, the chain opened 17 net new locations, and shares jumped about 10%. Traffic-led growth is the healthy kind, and proof people still eat out when the offer feels worth it.
Technomic's Top 500 data show chain sales growth trailing foodservice inflation for the second year running, and decelerating for a fourth straight year. In the No. 101 to 150 band, 28 chains grew sales year over year and 26 added units, while the rest went flat or closed locations. When the big chains cannot outgrow their own costs, pricing discipline and menu engineering matter even more for a single-location operator.
Gerber started as a McDonald's crew member in Switzerland 25 years ago and most recently ran restaurant operations for the UK and Ireland. He takes over U.S. restaurant operations September 1, with McDonald's USA president Skye Anderson saying he knows first-hand how restaurants run. The crew-to-boardroom path is a story worth telling your own staff.
The NBA rolled out the full 2026-27 schedule Wednesday. Boston opens against Detroit in a 3 p.m. ET tip built for European prime time, and the Celtics were left off the Christmas Day slate entirely, with the marquee opening-night window going to the Lakers and 76ers instead. For a franchise this size, getting skipped on the holidays reads as a message about where the league thinks Boston stands.
Kickoff is 7:30 p.m. ET Thursday in Foxborough. Drake Maye is not expected to start, with Tommy DeVito getting an extended look, while Indianapolis plans to play Anthony Richardson the entire first half. Books flipped the line from New England -1.5 to Indianapolis -2.5 on the quarterback news, a reminder that preseason lines move on playing-time reports, not team quality.
The PGA Tour playoff opener at TPC Southwind carries a $20 million purse, and prediction-market volume on the winner has already topped twice that. Scottie Scheffler trades at 16 cents, far ahead of Rory McIlroy at 5.6, pricing slightly better than the sportsbooks in some spots. Prediction markets keep pulling volume that used to belong to the books, which is exactly why DraftKings and FanDuel are building their own.
The Department of Corrections wants to acquire and subdivide a piece of city-owned land behind the current state prison in Concord, its preferred location for a replacement facility. A land swap with the city may be how it gets there. The prison project is one of the state's biggest pending capital decisions, so how this deal shakes out matters for the budget fights ahead.
The Coalition for Open Democracy is asking for immediate reinstatement of school-issued IDs for voter registration and ballots. The group argues the repeal unfairly targets young voters who are less likely to carry other identification. The timing is the point: absentee ballots for the September state primary are already available, so the court's speed matters as much as its answer.
Researchers are tracking new crab species establishing themselves along the Seacoast as warming water lets southern species survive here year-round, a shift inside the same ecosystem that supports the lobster fishery. For a restaurant that buys New England seafood, the species mix on the dock is slowly changing, and menus will eventually follow it.
Chef Ed Aloise is back in the kitchen at the Nashua state liquor store with a pairing-dinner menu that nods to his old Manchester restaurant Republic. Downtown Manchester also cut the ribbon on a new cocktail bar called The Grey Dog. Worth a look for any local operator curious what draws a paying crowd on a weeknight.