The first hep-th paper today (posted at 19:00:03 UTC) is the result
Four Dimensional \(\NNN=4\) SYM and the Swamplandby Cumrun Vafa and Houri-Christina Tarazi (Harvard) and Hee-Cheol Kim (Pohang, Korea). Note that there are no European surnames here – and in much of interesting research.

The general principle promoted by this paper is the "string lamppost principle" or SLP. That's simply the statement that the string landscape – the set of vacua and their excitations constructed by all the well-known string methods – enumerate all consistent situations and theories in quantum gravity.
In other words, string theory isn't a proper subset of the consistent quantum gravity – but the very same thing.