Ugandan marathon runner and Paris Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei dies after being set on fire in a weekend attack. A 14-year-old Georgia high school student kills four and injures nine in campus shooting. Canada has been rejecting visa applications and turning away visitors in a border crackdown. Volkswagen’s announcement that the car maker is mulling German factory closures for the first time in its history could prove to be a risky move. And OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup pledges to focus on safe AI and has already raised $1 billion.
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Today, authorities confirmed the Georgia School shooting suspect was interviewed by law enforcement a year before the attack. Kamala Harris accepts the terms for next week's election debate. Canada rejects foreign workers and visitors as anti-immigration resentment builds. And a new AI company gets the attention of big donors with the promise of safe AI. It's Thursday, September 5th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Tara Oakes in Liverpool. And I'm Christopher Wall Jasper in Chicago. First, to some breaking news. Ugandan marathon runner Rebecca Cheptige has died in Kenya, days after being doused in petrol and set on fire. Donald Ricare, the president of the Uganda Olympics Committee, said that the 33-year-old had died following a vicious attack by her boyfriend. Kenyan and Ugandan media reported that Cheptige, who competed in the Paris Olympics, suffered burns to more than 75% of her body in the attack on Sunday. She's the third female athlete to be killed in Kenya since October 2021. Officials in Georgia have revealed the suspect in Wednesday's school shooting was interviewed by law enforcement last year. 14-year-old Carl Gray was spoken to over threats about committing a school shooting. He's in custody after four people died in the shooting at Appalachian High School in Winder. German police have shot dead a man after an exchange of fire near the Israeli consulate and a Nazi history museum in Munich. The consulate was closed to mark today's anniversary of a 1972 attack on the Olympic Games in Munich. When Palestinian Black September gunmen murdered 11 Israeli athletes. A public inquiry into the devastating 2017 London-Gremfell tower blaze has concluded that a culmination of decades of failure ultimately led to the disaster that killed 72 people. Wednesday's report blamed the disaster on failures across government, the construction industry and, most of all, companies fitting building exteriors with flammable materials. Vice President Kamala Harris has accepted the terms of a September 10th debate against Donald Trump, including muted mics when it's not a candidate's turn to speak. Stay with the Reuters World News podcast this weekend, while we'll have a special episode digging into the presidential debate. Things are still fragile over our markets today. Carmel Kremens chucks us through the mood. Yes, Tara, there's still a lot of caution out there after the big sell-off earlier in the week. Labor data out on Wednesday suggested that the US jobs market is losing steam and that's adding to worries about a potential recession, but it's also raising expectations that the Fed will cut rates by 50 basis points, not 25, when it meets later this month. The Fed is very focused on the health of the labor market, and there's a lot of data out this week, including non-farm payrolls on Friday, that's being scrutinized for clues. And speaking of market clues, this week's episode of my podcast, Reuters Econ World, is looking into why US stocks tend to fall in the fall. You can catch our dive into the so-called September effect on Reuters.com, the Reuters app, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing a possible surprise election this fall. After the left-leaning New Democratic Party pulled out of the coalition deal that's kept Trudeau's party in power. Justin Trudeau is proven again and again, he will always cave to corporate greed. NDP's leader, Jegmi Singh, in a video posted on social media site X. The coalition upheaval comes as new Reuters reporting shows that Canada's border services agency has been rejecting visa applications at a higher pace than recent years, while also turning away some at the border, despite having official documentation. Anna Miller-Papperni has been looking into Canada's shift in tone towards its international visitors. So Anna, who is this affecting? So it's a little bit of everybody. We're seeing tourists, we're seeing international visitors, we're seeing students and workers. In some cases, people apply and they can't get their visa approved. But in other cases, their visa is approved, they show up at a Canadian airport or show up at a border crossing, they get questioned, and then they get turned away. We spoke with a Ghanaian man who wanted to come to Canada for a carbon capture conference in Edmonton, and while he was about to board his connecting flight from Paris, he gets pulled aside, questioned by an immigration official, who asks him about his job, about his bank account, and at the end of it, they say, "You know what? You're not coming to Canada." And this we see happening more and more. What do we know about why this is happening? It's interesting because officially, we don't have a good reason, but the rhetoric that we're hearing from the public, from pundits, from politicians and decision makers in Canada is that migrants are causing problems. They're being blamed for housing crisis in Canada, even though experts argue that housing crisis is actually due to a multiplicity of factors, and that lawyers are telling us is filtering down to frontline officials who are making the decision of whether or not to allow people in. Folkswagen workers in Wolfsburg, ahead of a stormy emergency staff meeting, to discuss the threat of plant closures in Germany. VW's finance chief was heckled as he told them the company had one, maybe two years, to turn its main car brand around. Things are threatening strikes and say they'll fight any closures. Victoria Valdise is following the story. So this announcement by Folkswagen is really significant. It's Germany's largest industrial employer, it's Europe's top car maker, and tackling something like its job guarantee agreements is also very, very risky considering how much power unions hold in Germany in general, and particularly at Folkswagen. How critical is this for Volkswagen? So Folkswagen is in the midst of a cost reduction program at its namesake brand. It had already said last December that it wanted to save 10 billion euros. It's now saying that 10 billion is actually not enough, and that's where these discussions are coming from. Now, VW's had obviously various crises over the course of its decades-long history, but the fact that this time they're actually going so far as the threatened plant closures indicates that there's something quite existential going on, particularly in Germany in its home country. And who's also the start of a trial of former Volkswagen cheap exec Martin Wintercorn this week over the diesel emission scandal, right? It's that significant? The way that the two are related is that, you know, obviously a big part of the question. People are asking here in terms of to what extent these plant closures would be a sign of a VW strategy failure is whether the company took too long to transition to electric cars. The union said that part of the reason why the company is in this mess and not prepared to deal with the sort of onslaught of competitors. And people generally say that Folkswagen only really kicked into action with electrification after the diesel scandal as a way to try and improve its image. A new artificial intelligence company is getting a lot of attention and a lot of cash. Safe Superintelligence, or SSI, was co-founded in June by Ilya Sutskever, a former chief scientist at OpenAI and has already raised a billion dollars in cash, even as investors are becoming more wary of the profitability in AI startups. Our tech reporters, including Crystal, who sat down for an exclusive interview with the founding team. Crystal, why are investors giving SSI such a big financial vote of confidence? Well, in one word is Ilya. This 37-year-old AI scientist is considered one of the greatest minds in AI research in our generation, and he's behind the scaling loss that what's made generative AI possible today. So I think this is in line with VC's ethos, which is backing the greatest talent, the once-in-a-generation founder, and then take outsized the risk for potential outsized returns. Remember, just $1 billion funding came after Ilya and his team told the investors that they should not expect any immediate financial returns in the next few years, because they want to focus on fundamental AI safety research. AI safety is this idea that refers to preventing AI from causing harm. It has been an increasingly hot topic because we have seen what the AI systems are capable of. So there has been an increasing worry that AI could act against the interests of humanity or even cause human extinction. For today's recommended read, head to our story on wildfires in Brazil's Amazon rain forest, which have reached levels not seen since 2010. Record drought and weaker rainfall mean the rain forest has been especially vulnerable to fires this year. You can find a link to the story in today's pod description. And for more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Never miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast player. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. [MUSIC]
