North Korea Fires More Ballistic Missiles In Unrelenting Test Streak

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed that North Korea launched multiple ballistic missiles toward its eastern waters on Tuesday, extending a streak of weapons demonstrations that has gathered pace in recent weeks. The missiles were fired from an area around Pyongyang, according to the South Korean military, which tracked the launches in real time. Japan's coast guard warned vessels in the Sea of Japan as suspected debris zones were identified offshore.

The launch comes amid a year of unusually frequent testing by Kim Jong Un's regime. Analysts read the cadence as a message to Washington and Seoul that Pyongyang intends to press its nuclear deterrent rather than return to stalled diplomacy. State media in the North has framed each test as proof of readiness against what it calls hostile forces on the peninsula.

Tuesday's firings add pressure on Seoul's government, which has balanced offers of engagement with joint military drills alongside the United States. The tests also complicate the quiet diplomatic channels that showed signs of life earlier this year. As the arsenal advances faster than sanctions can constrain, the region braces for whatever Kim stages next.

UK Prime Minister Declares Russia Interfered In Brexit Vote

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said it is "clear" that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum — the first public acknowledgment of Moscow's role by a sitting British leader. The declaration follows years of pressure from parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, which accused successive governments of dodging the question to avoid undermining the referendum's legitimacy. Burnham's statement shatters that silence and opens a contentious chapter in Britain's reckoning with its departure from the bloc.

Intelligence assessments have long pointed to Russian disinformation targeting British voters before the vote, though officials stopped short of claiming the efforts changed the outcome. Burnham drew the same line, but his willingness to name the interference publicly breaks with the cautious language of his predecessors. Conservative critics questioned the timing, arguing the statement risks reigniting the divisions that have defined British politics for a decade.

The acknowledgment carries consequences beyond Westminster. Relations between London and Moscow, already frozen over Ukraine, now carry an added historical grievance. Calls are growing for a full public inquiry into the referendum, and campaigners who spent years demanding one see an opening. How Burnham manages the fallout will test his premiership at a moment when European security remains fragile.

Trump's Putin Diesel Deal Triggers Rare Bipartisan Revolt

President Donald Trump is confronting a rebellion from his own party over a diesel agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as lawmakers from both parties warn the deal would finance Moscow's war machine in Ukraine. The pact would reopen American commercial ties with Russia's energy sector

• Canadian banks surged today ahead of earnings season, with TD.TO leading the group's gains at 1.9%. CNBC →
• Geopolitical instability in the Middle East continues to disrupt energy markets, though crude prices fell 1.8% to $92.05 as expectations for increased Russian supply grew. Yahoo Entertainment →
• US dollar strength persists despite falling Treasury yields, a disconnect partly attributed to growing concerns over France's ability to balance its books. Forex.com →
• China is purchasing record amounts of gold as Beijing seeks to diversify reserves away from the greenback. CNBC →
• Microsoft president Brad Smith is calling for global AI regulations, arguing the sector is currently less regulated than the dairy industry. BBC News →
• Bitcoin climbed 2.2% to $83,531.45 as traders react to broader macroeconomic volatility and ongoing conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine. CNBC →
• Citroën unveiled an electric concept version of the 2CV, targeting a budget-friendly €15,000 production price for the European market. InsideEVs →
• TikTok's CEO predicts AI will drive major scientific breakthroughs within three years but warns that autonomous systems require stricter safeguards. CNBC →

No playoff games yesterday.

Skepticism

Every day you stake your life on claims you cannot prove: that the bridge will hold, that the driver will stop at the red light, that the coffee in your cup is safe. Skepticism is the philosophical tradition that asks whether those stakes are ever justified — whether you actually know the things you confidently act on, or merely believe them.

The key distinction here separates two kinds of doubt. Ordinary skepticism denies knowledge we never claimed to have; nobody minds admitting they don't know whether the Milky Way contains an even number of stars. Philosophical skepticism is more unsettling, because it targets the knowledge we think we possess. To say you don't know the sun will rise tomorrow strikes most people as absurd, and that reaction is precisely the point. The philosopher's job is to ask whether it really is absurd, or whether we have simply never inspected the ground beneath our confidence.

That ground traditionally has three parts. Knowledge is standardly taken to require belief, truth, and justification — good reasons linking what you think to the way things are. Philosophers call the stances you can take toward any claim "doxastic attitudes" (from the Greek *doxa*, meaning opinion): belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment. Suspension deserves particular attention. Withholding assent is not the absence of a stance but a genuine position, and like belief it can be warranted or not. Refusing to commit on whether Paris is the capital of France is unreasonable; staying neutral on the star count is perfectly sensible. Skeptics press the further claim that once you demand reasons for your reasons, and then reasons for those reasons, the regress never ends — and suspension starts looking sensible in places you would never expect, perhaps everywhere.

The tradition runs long and varied. Pyrrho of Elis, and later Sextus Empiricus, taught in the ancient Greek world that tranquility comes from refusing to assert anything at all, since every argument can be matched by a counterargument of equal weight. René Descartes weaponized doubt in the seventeenth century: by imagining an evil demon might be deceiving him about everything, he tried to demolish his beliefs and rebuild knowledge on whatever bedrock survived the assault. David Hume then observed that our confidence the sun will rise rests on assuming the future will resemble the past — an assumption no observation can secure, because any evidence for it already presupposes it.

Here lies the unresolved tension. The skeptic's challenge has proven remarkably hard to answer on its own terms, yet no skeptic can live by it; Hume admitted his doubts dissolved the moment he left his study for a game of backgammon. So which lesson follows? Perhaps knowledge is genuinely impossible, and our everyday claims to possess it are vanity. Or perhaps the concept of knowledge was pitched impossibly high from the start, and philosophy's task is to recalibrate it for the fallible creatures we are. Whether lowering the bar counts as honest repair or quiet surrender remains one of the oldest unsettled disputes in the field.

Want to go deeper? Read the full Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Skepticism →

• Apple's "Welcome home" event in New York is just two days away, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has already leaked 16 details about the refreshed home hardware lineup. Expect a new Apple TV 4K, a device called HomeView, and a second-generation HomePod mini. MacRumors →
• Linus Torvalds is using Claude Code to drive a hefty Linux kernel improvement, building on his established habit of applying AI tools to kernel debugging. Outside the kernel tree, he has also done some vibe coding with Google's Antigravity. Phoronix →
• An insider tip claims Samsung will offer the Galaxy S27 Ultra exclusively with a Qualcomm chipset, with no Exynos variant planned for the top-tier model. Cheaper siblings — the S27, S27+ and S27 Pro — would still split between Snapdragon and Exynos depending on region. GSMArena.com →
• Rambler, the voice-to-text feature that debuted on Google's Pixel 11 and Googlebook, has been ported to other Android phones by an outside developer. The workaround spreads one of Google's most praised AI input features well beyond its intended hardware. 9to5google.com →
• Jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles can now boot genuine PS2 discs at up to six times their original resolution, thanks to a new tool called PS5SX2. Users face the customary hazards of console modification, from stability problems to the risk of a permanent ban. Tech-insider.org →