The Stateside Beat — Thursday, September 3, 2026 (Evening Wrap)

Polls put the AfD above 40% in Saxony-Anhalt, 15 to 20 points ahead of the CDU, with other parties refusing to work with it.

Norway seized a Russian vessel in Svalbard to satisfy a compensation award owed to a Ukrainian energy firm, drawing anger from Moscow.

Syria has begun destroying remnants of the clandestine chemical weapons programme created under former President Bashar al-Assad, a UN envoy says.

Israel freed five Lebanese detainees who were arrested in recent months, in a goodwill gesture tied to further negotiations.

The French president viewed the 11th-century tapestry on loan to Britain during a visit that also produced an agreement to scale up action on small boats.

Nvidia will pay roughly $13 billion to acquire the open-weight AI platform Hugging Face, the company confirmed on Thursday.

Volkswagen's supervisory board approved a turnaround plan flagging 50,000 possible job cuts and four plant closures across the group.

OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra with benchmark results it says mark the start of the AGI era — and the model's first "critical" cyber capabilities.

The Dow climbed 635 points, or 1.2%, while the S&P 500 rose 1% and the Nasdaq Composite traded up 1.3% as Treasury yields slid.

The Meta chief called a national AI regulator a flawed idea during a private call with President Trump, according to a report.

The laptop offers 14- or 15-inch OLED displays, measures 14.9mm thick and starts at 2.87 pounds.

Nvidia's RTX Spark AI PCs arrive in October in two configurations, with designs from partners including ASUS and Lenovo.

The new Personal AI Router tool links idle computers into a cluster so GPU-intensive AI agents can borrow spare cycles across your network.

PlayStation and Rockstar Games' marketing deal will produce two limited-edition GTA 6 DualSense controllers — one in white, one in black.

The flip phone features 35 hand-positioned Swarovski crystals and a 32-facet crystal on the hinge for its signature look.