Morning Briefing #145 — August 29, 2026

Morning Briefing #145 — August 29, 2026Your daily briefing connecting world events, technology, and education.No political slant. Just facts.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━📋 IN TODAY'S EPISODE━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🌍 WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE WORLD────────────────────────────────Trump Announces Deal With Venezuela For Control Of Oil ReservesPresident Trump says the United States has finalized an agreement giving it majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven oil reserves, calling it the biggest oil deal in U.S. history. Venezuela's interim government, led by Acting President Delcy Rodriguez, described the arrangement as a milestone for the country's economic recovery. Officials say the deal creates a new joint venture with a 55% effective output stake in fields across the Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo, negotiated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Analysts are still working out what the arrangement could mean for global oil markets and gas prices at home. The deal comes as Venezuela works to rebuild its economy following a period of political upheaval.Norway's King Harald V Dies At 89, Son Becomes King Haakon VIIIKing Harald V of Norway died Friday at Oslo University Hospital after complications from a rare blood condition that had hospitalized him for more than a week. He reigned for 35 years as Europe's oldest monarch and was widely credited with modernizing the Norwegian royal family and expanding its public role. His son immediately succeeded him as King Haakon VIII. Harald was remembered by many for his humility and a well-known speech embracing the country's growing diversity. A state funeral is being planned in Oslo in the coming weeks.US, South Korea And Japan To Hold Trilateral Military Drill Amid North Korea TensionsThe United States, South Korea and Japan confirmed they will proceed with the "Freedom Edge" military exercise starting September 7 in waters off South Korea's Jeju Island. Officials describe the five-day drill as defensive, aimed at improving joint missile-defense and surveillance coordination in response to North Korea's continued weapons testing. It's the latest round of an exercise series the three countries launched in 2024 to deepen security cooperation. North Korea has previously criticized the drills as a provocative show of force. Organizers say the goal is regional stability rather than escalation.---💻 THE TECH CONNECTION────────────────────────────────Z.ai Releases GLM-5.3-Flash, A 1M-Token Open-Weight Multimodal ModelChinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.3-Flash, an open-weight multimodal model with a 1-million-token context window, distributed under the permissive MIT license. The model activates 18 billion of its 320 billion total parameters per query and boosts performance on coding and long-running agent tasks by reviewing its own visual output — like a rendered interface or document — and revising its work based on what it sees. It's aimed squarely at developers building coding assistants and autonomous agents rather than casual chatbot use. Z.ai is offering discounted API pricing through early September to encourage adoption. The release adds to an unusually fast pace of large model launches this August from labs in both the U.S. and China.Meta Closes Loophole That Let People Secretly Record With Smart Glasses(continued in YouTube show notes)