US-Iran 7-Day War Spreads to Kuwait BoK Rate Hike · Coupang Warehouse Fire

Trump declared the Hormuz blockade reinstated and a 20% transit toll on July 13. VP Vance signaled no return to military action while indicating parallel technical talks in Doha. The US and Iran opened 14-point technical negotiations on Hormuz in Doha.

The Supreme Court confirmed a 2-year prison sentence for Rep. Kwon Seong-dong on July 16, immediately stripping him of his National Assembly seat.

Japan's upper house passed an Imperial Household Law revision on July 17 to secure the number of imperial family members, but continued to prohibit female succession. Polls show 60-90% of the public support female emperors.

Following Trump's Hormuz blockade declaration, the KOSPI fell 4.62% on July 14 to the 7,130s, with the won-dollar rate settling above 1,500. AI chip sell-offs in the US pushed the Nasdaq down 2.9% for the week.

TSMC reported a 77% year-on-year surge in Q2 2026 net profit on July 16 — an all-time record driven by AI semiconductor demand.

Under the US GENIUS Act, six federal agencies were set a statutory deadline of July 18 to finalize stablecoin rules.

China's AI companion regulations took effect July 15, prompting ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to fully suspend their agent features.

Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and added cloud computing features for writing and executing code from user files. Currently available to AI Ultra subscribers and Workspace enterprise customers, with 30 million users and 600,000 organizations worldwide.

Anthropic announced that its flagship Fable 5 model will be included as standard in Max and Team Premium plans from July 20, within 50% of usage limits.

Meta recruited Dave Brown, a senior VP for compute and AI at AWS for nearly 20 years. Brown will lead Meta Compute, a business offering surplus AI computing resources to external companies.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu ordered Apple and Google to remove 13 AI nudify apps within 28 days, saying both companies were aware of California law violations yet profited from the apps.

AI drug discovery startup Chai Discovery raised a $400M Series C led by Index Ventures, with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins participating. The company was valued at $3.8 billion.

Crunchbase News reported that payments startup Stripe and private equity firm Advent International are jointly exploring a proposal to acquire PayPal valued at around $53 billion.

Eli Lilly announced on July 16 an acquisition of psychedelic drug developer atai BeckLEY at $6.75 per share, totaling $2.8 billion. Lilly's lead pipeline candidate BPL-003 has entered Phase 3 trials for treatment-resistant depression.

Novartis's iptacopan (Fabhalta) received traditional FDA approval on July 16 for slowing kidney function decline in primary IgA nephropathy. Phase 3 24-month data showed 48% slower kidney function decline versus placebo.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider confirmed the detection of diffusion ripple phenomena in ultra-hot quark-gluon plasma during lead nucleus collision experiments. Predicted theoretically over 20 years ago, this marks the first experimental observation. Results were accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

Microsoft reported a sharp rise in ACR Stealer campaigns since late April, exploiting ClickFix, WebDAV, and MSHTA. The malware targets enterprise browser credentials, authentication tokens, and OneDrive/SharePoint documents.

A public PoC chaining CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137 was published on GitHub, with watchTowr detecting early signs of in-the-wild exploitation. Affected versions include WordPress 6.9.0-6.9.4 and 7.0.0-7.0.1.

A third consecutive European heatwave pushed excess deaths past 1,300 and broke temperature records in 13 countries. A wildfire broke out near Paris and 13 people died in Spain.

Korea Meteorological Administration issued the nation's first extreme heatwave warning in Pohang and Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang Province. An emergency heatwave alert later extended to the wider province, with apparent temperatures reaching 38°C.

MOIA officially launched an autonomous shared ride service in Hamburg. The same day, UNECE approved the world's first international safety standard legally permitting fully autonomous driving systems.

Tesla Korea will switch FSD from a one-time payment of 9,043,000 KRW to a 150,000 KRW/month subscription from August 10.

The Minimum Wage Commission confirmed the 2027 hourly rate of 10,700 KRW on July 14. Both labor and management have expressed opposition.

US Census Bureau data show June retail and food service sales of $768.6 billion, up 0.2% month-on-month and 6.7% year-on-year.

Samsung will hold its Galaxy Unpacked event in London on July 22. The Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8 will be joined by the first reveal of Galaxy Glasses based on Google's Android XR, with collaborations from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.

Databricks released Apache Spark 4.2, improving performance for agentic AI workloads and real-time streaming. Agents can consume new data and trigger pipelines to supply downstream analytics with low latency.

Colliers data show Q2 2026 Seoul average office vacancy rose 1.7pp quarter-on-quarter to 4.9%, but average nominal rents hit a record 40,335 KRW/sqm — the first time above 40,000. Total Q2 office transaction volume reached approximately 4.2 trillion KRW.

The first summary prosecution occurred over TOEIC exam cheating using AI glasses. Education authorities are considering banning AI glasses from the national college entrance exam.

A National Pension Research Institute survey found that middle-aged Korean workers retire at an average of 52.9 years but want to work until 73.4 years, creating a roughly 20-year income gap.

In EWC 2026 LoL semifinals, Karmine Corp defeated T1 2-1 and DPlus KIA defeated Gen.G 2-1 to advance to the grand final. Korean teams T1 and Gen.G will compete in the third-place match.

BTS exclusively released the 'NORMAL' MV on Spotify on July 17. The YouTube release followed on July 19.

Korea's June exports reached $102.3 billion, making Korea the world's 4th country to achieve $100 billion in monthly exports.

Following its Nasdaq listing on July 10, SK Hynix began official trading under the ticker SKHY on July 13.

Candidate registration closed for the Democratic Party leadership election, forming a four-way race.