Economy
Turkish Airlines’ passenger count reaches 64M in 8 months
Türkiye’s national flag carrier served 5.4% more passengers in the first eight months of 2026 compared to a year ago, according to data released on Tuesday.
The number of passengers Turkish Airlines (THY) carried in the January-August period reached 64 million, the company said in a filing with the Public Disclosure Platform (KAP).
The carrier served 10 million passengers in August, an increase of 5.6% from the same month last year, the data showed.
The number of international passengers increased 6.1% year-over-year in the first eight months to 41.8 million, while domestic passenger traffic rose 4.3% to 22.2 million.
Last month, international passenger numbers rose 5% to 6.4 million, while domestic passenger traffic increased 6.8% to 3.6 million.
THY’s passenger load factor climbed to 84.7% in the January-August period from 82.7% a year earlier. The factor reached 88% in August, up from 86.6% a year earlier.
The international load factor stood at 84.5%, while the domestic load factor was 86.5%. The international load factor last month was 87.6%, while the domestic load factor stood at 91.3%.
The number of destinations served by Turkish Airlines increased to 358 from 353, while its fleet expanded by 13% to 566 aircraft from 501.
Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms are set to face tighter restrictions after the European Commission proposed new rules Wednesday to help authorities address housing shortages in tourism-heavy areas.
The move by the EU executive aims to harmonize rules across Europe after authorities in cities including Paris, Barcelona and Venice turned to a raft of diverse rules to crack down on Airbnb, which subsequently triggered legal challenges.
The shortage of affordable housing due to the surge in short-term holiday rentals has prompted residents, especially young Europeans, to take to the streets to protest.
“A year ago, I promised to tackle Europe’s housing affordability,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement.
“Today, we are taking one step in this direction. By providing more clarity and support to local authorities and communities, anchored in local realities,” she said.
The proposal, which will need to be agreed with EU countries and the European Parliament in the coming months before it can become law, provides a first-ever common European framework for assessing housing measures.
The Commission said authorities can identify areas with a housing squeeze by checking whether the price-to-income level is high or if there has been an upward trend for the past 10 years.
It said any subsequent restrictions against short-term rentals must be based on evidence, necessary and limited to the affected areas, and not be retroactive.
Airbnb echoed comments made by lobbying group CCIA Europe, which called for independent scrutiny of restrictions or effective redress. The company said the crux of the problem is the short supply of housing.
“That means focusing it (the regulation) where the shortage actually is: construction, renovation, and the homes standing empty across Europe today,” George Mavros, Airbnb’s head of government affairs for the European Union, said in a blog post.
CCIA Europe’s head of policy, Alexandre Roure, criticized the EU proposal to allow cities to police their own compliance.
“Without independent scrutiny or effective redress, this proposal will remain a paper tiger, leaving disproportionate restrictions in place and undermining the legal certainty the Affordable Housing Act is meant to provide,” he said.
It will be up to authorities to decide whether to take action. The proposal also recommends authorities unlock land for housing and modernize the planning and construction process.
An artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both U.S. companies of recklessness and of “playing with our lives” in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.
Jacob Coxon spent the past three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its fiercest rival Anthropic. Pretraining is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data.
“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote Tuesday on the social media platform X.
Superintelligence is the theoretical point when AI’s capabilities exceed human intelligence.
The 27-year-old Briton’s warnings add to signs of mounting safety concerns within top AI companies.
Coxon cautioned that the power of the AI technology should not be underestimated. He said these would soon be able to “hack everything” and have the ability to “acquire real power and resources.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said. “This is not a marketing stunt.”
Over 10% chance of killing humanity
He separately told The Wall Street Journal that under the “most aggressive scenarios” things could already spiral out of control by the end of next year. A central danger is that AI can develop on its own, making it harder to control, he said.
Anthropic safety executive Evan Hubinger, who is partly responsible for ensuring AI remains aligned with human interests, backed up Coxon.
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” he said, adding that he personally thought the risk of AI killing humanity over the coming decade was more than 10%.
Hubinger said Anthropic is “trying its best,” but does not yet have a plan to ensure an AI system that surpasses human capabilities would obey its creators. He said there was a “low” risk of that happening with current models.
On Sunday, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, called for “extreme caution.” He wrote in a blog post that he was concerned nobody was prepared for a rapid advance in AI capabilities.
“International coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world,” Pachocki said.
AI models are not regulated by federal law in the United States.
In September, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Rep. Greg Casar introduced a bill seeking to suspend AI development until a federal regulator is created.
Pachocki said history has reached a moment in which machine intelligence was beginning to surpass that of humans.
The OpenAI executive described in greater detail why modern AI systems were harder to control. He said AI has been allowed to “grow” rather than being designed.
AI systems were a product of complex processes. “Our large-scale training runs are experiments and we are sometimes surprised by their results.”
And the more machines’ capabilities surpassed human ones, the more difficult it would be to understand what they were capable of.
At the same time, Pachocki sees an argument for continuing rapid research, as developing AI intelligence could defend against the dangers posed by other AI.
It would be needed, among other things, to protect infrastructure and develop entirely new defense mechanisms.
Wake-up call
Coxon’s resignation comes as Anthropic prepares for its market debut, following a summer marked by unauthorized hacks carried out by so-called AI agents, which independently broke into other companies’ systems in test runs in a wake-up call for the industry.
AI leaders say so-called “recursive self-improvement,” a stage where AI systems could essentially design and train the next generation of AI with little human involvement, is drawing near.
Coxon considers Anthropic’s efforts genuine but said he believes no company can responsibly develop an AI that surpasses humans without government intervention or a coordinated slowdown.
“At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first – they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,” he said.
In February, Anthropic removed a pledge from its safety charter to halt the development of its models if it failed to control their risks.
It argued that if it unilaterally paused its work, its less cautious rivals would dominate the industry, making it less safe overall.
At the end of July, more than 1,000 tech industry employees, including Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, called on Washington to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI systems.
The AI agents are programs that are intended to carry out tasks independently for users.
In a test at OpenAI, one model found a way to get from an ostensibly isolated test environment onto the open internet and then hacked the computer system of the AI platform Hugging Face.
It did this while trying to find a solution to a task assigned, but the incident showed just how far AI systems can go off on their own unexpectedly without their developers noticing.
It also recently emerged that OpenAI’s AI agents had already misused a German-language wiki page on a large scale in the spring to coordinate among themselves. The EU said it was looking into the incident.
OpenAI halted training of its latest models for two weeks in August before resuming it under tighter controls.
A current protective mechanism used by AI developers is requiring models with AI to explain their actions in human language.
In test runs, the AI agents used the communication option to exchange answers to questions they were asked with each other via notes on the wiki page.
China’s consumer and producer prices accelerated slightly in August but remained subdued, official data showed on Wednesday, as the world’s second-largest economy grapples with weak domestic demand.
The consumer price index (CPI), a key measure of inflation, came in at 0.8% in August, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The figure was up from 0.5% in July and in line with a forecast from a Bloomberg survey of economists.
Beijing has battled a persistent slump in domestic spending since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CPI has remained below the current target of 2% for more than three years, slipping into negative territory several times during that period.
The sluggish activity has presented challenges to leaders aiming to maintain growth momentum, even as exports and various high-tech sectors perform strongly.
Prices paid at the factory gate also picked up in August, the NBS figures showed, expanding 3.8% year-over-year.
That was faster than July’s 3.5% and topped the 3.6% forecast in the Bloomberg survey.
The readings come a day after data showed China’s imports and exports surged last month.
Overseas shipments have been boosted this year by heightened global demand for technology products amid the artificial intelligence boom.
Beijing is targeting economic growth of 4.5% to 5% this year, a pace that would outstrip most developed economies but rank among the lowest in decades for China.
The economy expanded just 4.3% in the second quarter, missing forecasts and marking its weakest pace in more than three years.
Flights from British airports resumed early Wednesday following a major air traffic control failure, but operators warned a full return to normal operations would take time as scrutiny of the reliability of Britain’s aviation systems intensified.
The hours-long outage Tuesday, which resulted in the cancelation of more than 1,000 flights and left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded, has ramped up pressure on air traffic control provider NATS and its boss Martin Rolfe.
Transport Minister Heidi Alexander will later Wednesday hear from Rolfe after she summoned him to explain what happened, amid concerns that the infrastructure and technology are not up to scratch.
The shutdown comes three years after the last system meltdown in August 2023, when canceled flights on one of the busiest travel days of the year cost airlines 100 million pounds ($135 million).
A radar-related technical issue also disrupted flights in July 2025, affecting major airports including Britain’s largest, Heathrow.
“I am seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job,” Alexander said on the social media platform X.
NATS boss under pressure
Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, has been calling for Rolfe to resign since 2023, while Wizz Air’s U.K. managing director also said he should consider his position.
Ryanair said Britain’s airspace underperformed other countries.
“We’ve had minor issues in other places, but nothing at the scale that we see, and consistently see, in the U.K.,” Ryanair’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon told the BBC.
Rolfe, who apologised to those affected by the issue, denied that Britain was worse than other countries and said the country’s air traffic service was well regarded from a safety and resilience perspective.
“We have, at this point, ruled out cyber(attacks),” Rolfe told the BBC when asked about the cause, adding he believed it would be different to previous outages.
As operations restarted, Heathrow said passengers should check with their airline before heading to the airport as schedules would have changed due to the problems on Tuesday.
“We are expecting knock-on impacts as aircraft and crew reposition,” the U.K.’s busiest hub said in a statement.
“We… are working closely with our local NATS team and airline partners to recover normal operations as quickly as possible.”
London Gatwick, Britain’s second busiest airport, and the city’s Luton and Stansted also said they were operating but told passengers to check with their airline first.
Ryanair said around 150,000 of its passengers had been affected Tuesday and it canceled more than 200 flights, while British Airways said it had canceled or diverted 100 flights with tens of thousands impacted.
NATS is a public-private partnership which is partially owned by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds and the government.
Criticizing the 175 million pounds of dividends NATS paid to its owners last year, Ryanair’s McMahon said NATS should reinvest its profits into technology and boost its staff numbers.
Singapore’s political leaders are getting a raise for the first time in 15 years, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said Tuesday, adding more than 60% to what are already the world’s highest ministerial salaries.
Singapore has justified high-end salaries for its political leaders, arguing they attract talent and deter graft, but the issue is thorny in the city-state, where the median wage worker made 5,775 Singapore dollars ($4,558) a month in 2025.
Wong told Parliament that under a revised salary framework, the benchmark annual pay for a minister at the lowest grade will rise to 1.8 million Singapore dollars ($1.42 million), from 1.1 million Singapore dollars ($868,330).
The prime minister’s benchmark salary will jump to 3.6 million Singapore dollars ($2.8 million) from 2.2 million Singapore dollars ($1.7 million), he said.
The government ministers who will receive raises are elected lawmakers who lead ministries and help make national policies, while allowances for other lawmakers will also increase.
But Wong said ministers and other political officeholders will not immediately move to the new salary benchmark. Instead, they will get a one-time adjustment up to 9% beginning Oct. 15, with the increase depending on performance and responsibilities.
Wong expects most ministers at the lowest grade to earn about 1.35 million Singapore dollars ($1.06 million) by the end of the current term. Salaries thereafter will vary by performance and responsibilities, rather than automatically reaching the benchmark of 1.8 million Singapore dollars, he said.
He didn’t say how much his salary would be, although a 9% adjustment would raise it to 2.4 million Singapore dollars ($1.89 million).
Political pay is a sensitive issue in Singapore as ministers earn far more than most citizens and the prime minister’s salary is among the highest for national leaders worldwide.
In comparison, the British prime minister makes $230,000 while U.S. President Donald Trump earns $400,000, according to data from non-profit PoliticalSalaries.com, which ranks the Singapore prime minister as the highest-paid world leader.
The data set shows the Hong Kong chief executive is the second-highest earner globally with $719,000 annually, followed by the Swiss president at $606,000.
“The sums involved are more than what most citizens earn, so I understand why Singaporeans scrutinize them closely and why many feel strongly about the matter,” Wong said, adding that he would donate his increment to charity for the next five years.
The government has defended the system as necessary to attract capable people from the private sector and public service and to maintain a clean government.
Singapore chose to deal with political remuneration openly, with no hidden salary components or perks outside the published framework, Wong said.
“Good government did not come naturally to Singapore. It was built deliberately over many years. And there is nothing automatic about sustaining this,” he said.
Wong said the pay issue could not be avoided simply because it was uncomfortable. Ministerial salaries had increasingly fallen behind comparable earnings in the private sector and civil service, making a review necessary, he noted.
The salary framework uses the median income of Singapore’s top 1,000 citizen earners as a reference point, with a 40% discount applied to reflect the nature of political service.
The new salary scheme would give Wong and future prime ministers “a better chance of persuading capable Singaporeans to step forward, and of building the strongest possible team for Singapore,” he said.
The new framework will be reviewed every five years, the government said.
Lawmakers will debate the issue in Parliament on Thursday.
The current political salary framework was established following a 2011 review and debated in Parliament in 2012. Salaries were cut by about 36% under that review as the public expressed concern over political pay.
Wong said it was “easier politically” for him to leave things as they were but that “would not be the right thing to do” as salaries in the private sector, civil service, judicial service and public sector had moved higher since 2012.
A subsequent review in 2017 recommended adjustments, but the government decided not to implement them. A second review due in 2023 was deferred until now because of economic uncertainty.
Referring to the top earners’ benchmark, Chong Ja Ian, a political scientist at the National University of Singapore, said: “Given rising income disparity, this could mean that ministers associate more with the very rich rather than the experiences of ordinary Singaporeans.”
Many people were too frightened to speak publicly about Elon Musk, director Alex Gibney said on Tuesday, as he unveiled his marathon documentary about the billionaire entrepreneur at the Venice Film Festival.
Gibney has made films about powerful people, corporations and organizations before: Enron, Elizabeth Holmes, Scientology and the U.S. military’s abuses at Bagram and Abu Ghraib are just a few. And yet, he said, nothing compares to the scope of power held by his latest subject.
With a nearly four-hour runtime, “Musk” is having its world premiere this week at the Venice Film Festival. It’s one of the most hotly anticipated of the festival and the year – Bleecker Street is releasing it in theaters in October.
The movie charts Musk’s rise from the dotcom era to become one of the world’s most influential figures, questioning how an unelected tech titan came to wield such sway over politics and public debate.
“There was a tremendous sense of fear of talking, really almost existential fear, both among people who were his critics, people who were his business colleagues and people who are his friends,” Gibney told Reuters.
“I talked to many, many, many, many people who, except for some of the brave people who are here, declined to speak.”
The Tesla and SpaceX chief has dismissed the film, writing on his social media platform X this month that Gibney was biased and was “obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of.”
Hooking up with Trump
Joined by journalist Zoe Schiffer and Ashley St. Clair, Musk’s former partner and the mother of one of his many children, Gibney said he began work on the project in 2023 and had originally planned a less ambitious movie.
“We intended to make a shorter film before Elon Musk became wrapped in the career of Donald Trump and the presidency of the United States,” Gibney said. He added that the first thing he did was to contact Musk, who declined to be interviewed.
Gibney, whose previous subjects have included the collapse of energy firm Enron and Scientology, said Musk’s ascent was “the story of the confidence man” whose empire was built on an ability to sell inflated visions and hyped-up promises.
Without necessarily presenting any new bombshells, the film links Musk’s takeover of Twitter, his government cost-cutting drive and his reliance on federal contracts to the creation of unprecedented power and wealth in the hands of just one man.
Global political agenda
The documentary uses an AI-generated version of Musk that speaks words he has uttered over the years. Asked whether he expected legal challenges, Gibney said: “We consulted our lawyers, and they gave us a sign-off to go forward.”
After embracing Trump’s MAGA movement, the film shows Musk’s growing support for far-right political causes internationally, including the surging Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
“I think he’s pursuing a global right-wing agenda, both for ideological and for very practical and monetary reasons,” said Gibney, adding that Musk was “extremely” dangerous to world democracy.
He also offered an unflattering assessment of the billionaire’s character. “I would say he has a very difficult time with empathy,” the director said.
St. Clair, who revealed in the documentary that she had turned down a $40 million non-disclosure agreement after her relationship with Musk ended, echoed the criticism.
“His most complicated relationship is with the truth,” she said. In the film, she says simply: “Elon is a nuke.”
“Musk” is being shown out of competition at the Venice festival, which runs until Sept. 12.
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