One of the most storied news franchises in history has a fresh leader, as CBS News names journalist Nick Bilton the executive producer of “60 Minutes.” Bilton’s significant experience as a reporter likely made him an appealing choice for CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss. But others at the program are questioning how Bilton, who has never worked in television news, will run the iconic show.

‘Some of that kind of gonzo journalism’

Bilton wants to ensure that “‘holding people to account’ and ‘investigative journalism’ remain core principles” of “60 Minutes” under his watch, he told The Hollywood Reporter. But there may also be opportunities for “some of that kind of gonzo journalism stuff” that Bilton has personally become known for. Examples include “Fake Famous,” his 2021 documentary film about social media influencers, and “American Kingpin,” his 2017 book about the online black market Silk Road.

There are a “lot of parts of ‘60’ that are fantastic and work really well, and I think there are other parts of it that can be brought into the modern era,” Bilton said to The Hollywood Reporter. The core premise of the changes “appears built around extending ‘60 Minutes’ to the places where consumers primarily get their news,” potentially moving away from traditional television. The primary goal, which “has been the focus of the show since its inception, is the story,” Bilton told Axios.

There will now be an “emphasis on telling stories beyond the weekly show and experimenting with new voices from outside traditional broadcast news,” said The New York Times. These changes come amid a larger shift at CBS News itself. In addition to hiring Bilton, Weiss “also fired Cecilia Vega, the program’s first Latina correspondent, and Sharyn Alfonsi, whose segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air abruptly last year.”

‘Fear what comes next’

Many are wary of what these changes mean for “60 Minutes” and its longstanding legacy of groundbreaking journalism. Particular criticism was levied at Bilton himself, a “credulous dope” who represents a “specific type of dolt from a bygone era,” said Defector. Some cited his 2015 article for The New York Times, which was “so factually f--ked, it now contains a 203-word editor’s note and a 98-word correction.”

Weiss is standing behind her decisions. Bilton is “one of the most entrepreneurial and ambitious journalists working today. I am thrilled that he is the next executive producer of 60 Minutes,” she said on X. But Weiss’ changes will “probably generate heat from the staff of ‘60 Minutes,’” who were fiercely loyal to prior executive producer Tanya Simon, said The Guardian. Many “viewed her promotion to executive producer last year as an indication that the new leadership of CBS News parent company Paramount wanted to preserve the show’s winning formula.”

Now some are cautious of the direction “60 Minutes” could be headed. “I very much fear what comes next,” Vega said in a statement after her ousting. Others have been even more blunt, including longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley. “‘She’s murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” Pelley said of Weiss in a heated meeting with Bilton, according to numerous sources. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

Dating apps are “rooted in rejection and judgement” and that’s “not healthy”, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd told Fortune. She had an “epiphany” during a 14-month leave of absence that users are just “hurt people hurting people”, and has vowed to bring “more joy and satisfaction” to her app.

Bumble is now shifting to matching-making driven by AI – and it’s not the only dating app to see this as the solution to increasing dating-app fatigue. But newcomer Breeze is taking another route: switching the focus to in-person experiences by reducing opportunities to chat in app, and sending only a time-specific, limited number of matches.

‘Payment and consequences’

“Breeze is a welcome disruptor in the dating app landscape,” said Isabella Silvers in The Telegraph. Since it launched in Europe in 2020, after winning investment from the Dutch version of “Dragon’s Den”, it has clocked up more than two million downloads. Users join “matching pools” that bring together “like-minded daters”, based on everything from hobbies (“outdoor lovers”) to niche interests (“rat owners/lovers”). To date, the app has arranged more than 737,000 dates, “resulting in 10 babies – that it knows of”.

Users receive a “select number of profiles” at 7pm every day and the key to the app’s success seems to be “payment and consequences”. Once you accept a match, you have to fill out your availability and pay a £9.50 deposit to secure a drinks date (or £4.50 for a “walk and talk”), “before being allowed to make a decision on anyone else”. The chat function for matched users is only opened up four hours before the date – prompting last-minute date confirmations, rather than “meaningless messaging”.

Breeze is “evidently working”, especially in the Netherlands where it’s “the third most popular and fastest-growing” dating app, said Lydia Spencer-Elliott in The Independent. “But can it save Britain’s dismal dating scene?” It can certainly save us from “boring convos generated by ChatGPT”, or being stood up or ghosted or “strung out” for weeks with no follow-through. But “what it absolutely can’t save” us from “is ourselves”. It’s ultimately “knackering” to keep “riding the rejection rollercoaster of the dating-app landscape” – and, sometimes, “the best remedy is to give it all a rest”.

‘Charming chatbots’

There is “rampant” dating-app burnout, said Catherine Pearson in The New York Times. As Bumble embraces AI-powered algorithms to re-engage those who “crave an experience that feels less overwhelming and more purposeful”, it’s also removing its swipe feature. It’s hoping to “end superficial, snap judgements” by altering “the dating habits of millions of users who have grown used to vetting partners with the flick of a finger”.

But the AI pivot comes with risk. Integrating AI features “sloppily” could “alienate” dating-app customers, said Tatum Hunter in The Guardian. Some users are already reporting “being plagued by AI paranoia, unsure whether the people they are messaging are real or charming chatbots”. The messaging from the industry is clear: “if we let AI take the wheel, this will all get less depressing”. But can a “smooth, mindless path toward connection” really make dating more joyful?

Evolutionary psychology reminds us that “only a signal that is difficult to fake can carry reliable information about the sender”, said Andrew King on Quillette. A rightward swipe behind a screen “communicates almost nothing about the sincerity of the person making it”. But making an approach in person at a bar or an event carries the potential for “public rejection”, and that cost is a signal of sincerity. These signals “matter” and “cannot be easily digitised”: “the discomfort is the point”.

Nvidia has unveiled a new superchip for personal computers, marking its first entry into the lucrative consumer market.

“This reinvention of the computer is as big a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone,” Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang said, as he unveiled the RTX Spark chip at the Computex technology show in Taiwan on Monday.

‘Real game-changer’

Selling artificial intelligence chips used in enormous data centres has helped Nvidia become the world’s most valuable company, currently worth more than $5 trillion (£3.7 trillion). “Now it’s looking to put its technology in people’s homes,” said The New York Times’ Tripp Mickle.

The RTX Spark is a “new superchip for the era of personal AI agents – offering a new class of computer that moves from tool to teammate”, Nvidia said on its website.

Expected to be released in the autumn, it will power laptop and desktop computers from Dell, HP, Microsoft, Lenovo and others and is designed to run local AI systems that can sort files and quickly perform tasks.

The move into personal computing fires a “warning shot across the bow” of historic industry leaders such as AMD, Apple and Intel, said TechRadar, which described the move as a “real game-changer”.

Intel, Microsoft’s long-term partner, was once the “undisputed king of PCs”, but its performance has “slipped in key areas like battery life” in recent years, said Mickle. In 2021, Microsoft made it possible to run Windows software with processers from rival providers, creating an opportunity Nvidia has now exploited.

With the RTX Spark, the company will be hoping to move in on the growing market for AI computers that is currently dominated by Apple, which ditched Intel processors for its own hugely popular and powerful M-series chips in 2020.

“Apple more or less owns this market today,” Max Weinbach, a technology analyst at Creative Strategies, a tech research firm, told The New York Times. “Nvidia wants to build a laptop ecosystem for Windows that’s an alternative.”

An AI supercomputer in every home

The chip “lies at the heart of Nvidia’s push to embed AI directly into end-user devices, aiming to transform PCs into personal assistants which perform various tasks such as searching email, fixing coding bugs and accelerating generative AI features in software including Adobe Photoshop”, said Aqsa Qaddus Tahir on The News International.

Shohag Hossain, a digital creator, posted on X that the Nvidia-Microsoft partnership had “quietly built the hardware layer that makes AI run locally, privately, instantly, no cloud needed”. The result is your laptop “becomes an AI agent that works offline”, which means “no more sending your data to some server farm”.

“The real competition isn’t Apple vs Windows any more, it's who owns the AI that runs on your device.”

This new superchip could be the first step towards AI supercomputers becoming a common home appliance in the future, in the way that home theatres, large televisions, lawn mowers and dishwashers are not unusual, Huang told the conference in Taiwan.

“I could totally imagine someday there’s an AI supercomputer in your house,” he said. “It’s running all of your agents, it’s running all your assistants, and they’re doing all kinds of things for you all the time.”

When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin first suggested blocking some international flights from cities that didn’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement during an April Fox News appearance, it “seemed more like a wild swing than a real plan,” said The Atlantic. Now, Mullin’s seemingly far-fetched pitch to remove immigration agents from certain airports and reroute flights to Republican-led cities feels increasingly plausible. If the plan is enacted, airline experts and officials warn the impact could be catastrophic across multiple vectors.

‘Devastating effect’

Removing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from international airports “would cause immediate and lasting harm,” said the U.S. Travel Association in a press release. A CBP drawdown may have a “devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries,” said trade association Airlines for America in a statement to CNN, causing “significant operational disruption to carriers, travelers and the flow of international cargo.”

The travel industry is “on edge” with worries that Mullin’s comments could “jeopardize international flights,” said The Associated Press. Major airlines “quickly condemned the idea,” and “even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said it doesn’t make sense to him.” The government “shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics,” said Duffy at a congressional hearing last month. Duffy also said he would “like to learn more about the context” of the proposal and “maybe ask Mullin a question about what he meant,” the AP said.

The Justice Department last month published a list of states and cities it claimed were “impeding U.S. immigration policies,” said CNBC. Among the locales listed were “major international air hubs” including Boston, Newark, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

‘Thin grasp of global-travel logistics’

Mullin is “pushing forward” with his plan despite concerns, said The Atlantic. Last month he convened a “small group of airline and travel-industry executives at DHS headquarters in Washington” and reportedly discussed reductions in CBP staffing at “major airports that serve sanctuary jurisdictions,” such as JFK in New York and Dulles in Washington, D.C. The secretary’s plans seemed to “reflect a thin grasp of global-travel logistics” and displayed an “inflated sense of the government’s ability to impose economic pain on specific cities.”

It’s “not clear” how Mullin’s goal to block international travel to certain cities would “work in practice,” said Time. The proposal is “actively insane,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, on X. Airlines would be forced to “cancel flights en masse,” which would cause “enormous economic damage” that extends “waaaaay beyond a few big cities that were the target.” It is also unlikely, said MS NOW, that officials in Democrat-run communities will be willing to “overhaul their approach to immigration policy” simply to “prevent Mullin from sabotaging many of the busiest airports in the Western Hemisphere.”

Migrant deaths in federal custody hit an all-time high this year, as the Department of Homeland Security executes President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies across the nation. Between October 2025, when the federal fiscal year began, and April 2026, at least 29 people died in DHS custody according to government data, “already surpassing 2004’s toll of 28, the previous record,” said NPR.

Suicides, in particular, have exploded at an “alarming” rate, said The Associated Press. And with tens of thousands of migrants still concentrated in DHS camps across the country, mortality rates have become a regular feature of the agency’s current tenure.

‘Something is going profoundly wrong’

The rise in deaths at DHS facilities comes as “detention numbers have skyrocketed during the Trump administration,” said NPR. Trump officials “denied there’s been a spike in deaths” and “attributed the increase to the large number of people in detention” overall. The increase in deaths is “because we do have the highest amount in detention that ICE has ever had since its inception in 2003,” said outgoing ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons at a congressional budget hearing in April.

That an “unprecedented number” of DHS detainees have taken their own lives is an “indication that authorities are failing to properly oversee the detention” of their tens of thousands of charges, said the AP. “Something is going profoundly wrong from any kind of public health or mental health perspective,” said epidemiologist Dr. Sanjay Basu, the co-author of a new study on mortality and suicide rates among ICE detainees, to NPR. “This is one of those alarming, sudden increases.”

Last year saw “more than 1,000 emergency requests” to 911 made from multiple detention centers around the country, 28 of which were prompted by “serious incidents of self-harm,” said NBC News. One detainee “swallowed a razor blade,” another “drank cleaning chemicals” and “at least three cut their own wrists.” Suicides among people in DHS custody are “tragic and rare,” an ICE spokesperson said in a statement to the outlet. Upon seeing “signs of a detainee being at risk for suicide,” detention center staff follow a “strict prevention and intervention protocol to ensure the detainee’s health and well-being is protected.”

‘Preventable’

More detainees have died in DHS custody last year than in any year in at least two decades, said CNN, with 2026 “on track to be even higher.” But many of the past year’s deaths “appear to have been preventable.” In “more than a dozen cases,” the “deadly outcomes” stemmed in part from “substandard treatment by at-times understaffed medical teams dealing with escalating detainee populations.”

California’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center and the Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, have each seen three migrant deaths in their respective facilities — the “most out of ICE’s sprawling detention operation,” said NPR. ICE has “repeatedly asserted” that all detainees are screened for “medical, dental and mental health conditions” within 12 hours of arrival, said the AP. But reviews of ICE’s own inspection reports and jail records show “three of the nine facilities where ICE detainees died by suicide have struggled to meet that standard.”

Vomiting, diarrhoea, sweating and a swollen face. Not the normal desired effects of a detox, but a kambo ceremony is not a normal detox.

Kambo is a poisonous secretion from an Amazonian tree frog, used by some indigenous people as traditional medicine. Its use as a wellness practice has spread to the US and Europe.

Last weekend it was reported that Kristian Trend, a 40-year-old wellness coach and cancer survivor from Leicester, had died after taking the frog poison. “He is believed to be the first British victim,” said The Times, but at least six deaths worldwide have been associated with kambo.

The substance is harvested from the defensive skin secretions of the Amazonian giant monkey tree frog. In the traditional medicine of some indigenous peoples of the Amazon, kambo “is applied to superficial burns on the skin of participants to produce an intense purging effect”, said Martin Williams, research fellow at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, on The Conversation.

‘Uncontrolled increase in fatalities’

Self-styled “kambo practitioners” have touted a range of supposed benefits for the purge and detox, including reduced anxiety, boosted energy and relief from chronic pain. Despite the documented side-effects, “the great majority of users of kambo anecdotally report positive physical, emotional and spiritual after-effects”, said Williams. Several celebrities have reportedly tried kambo, including actor Orlando Bloom, who told GQ that he had tried the treatment several times and claimed it left him with a “feeling of being clearer and wide open”. “You have this sensation of death and you kind of purge your body. But it’s incredible.” He did add, however, that “it was pretty brutal in terms of what it does to the body in the moment”, describing it as “coming out both ends”.

Kambo can also have more severe health consequences, with a paper published last year in Cureus, the online journal, warning of potential long-term issues. According to the scientists, the psychiatric effects were induced by hyperthermia and hyponatraemia, which were “often misinterpreted by participants as ‘astral travel’, instead of being recognised as potentially fatal conditions”. They added: “The widespread availability of kambo on the internet poses another pressing concern, contributing to an uncontrolled increase in fatalities.”

‘Absolute Western arrogance’

Governments around the world have acted to ban the poison. In Brazil, it’s illegal to sell or market kambo. In Australia, where two deaths after kambo rituals have led to coroner’s inquests, it was listed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration in 2021 as a Schedule 10 poison: a “substance of such danger to health as to warrant prohibition of sale, supply and use”.

Trend’s mother Angie told The Telegraph that she wants the treatment to be banned in the UK following her son’s death: “He was going to cleanse himself, that’s what he said to me. He was very spiritual. He took a lot of vitamins.”

Despite the dangers, the adoption of wellness rituals involving kambo continues to grow worldwide. “A lot of these Western wellness practitioners are exploiting people’s gullibility and exploiting those who are sceptical about Western medicine,” Prof Roger Byard, a forensic pathologist at Adelaide University, told The Guardian.

“But the techniques of shamans and healers in Indigenous communities have been used for hundreds of years and they have been trained to safely use these substances for certain, specific situations. To think that we can go into a community or spend a bit of time in another country and then take one of their time-honoured, cultural practices and then just take it for our own use is absolute Western arrogance.”

CBS needed a replacement after controversially canceling “The Late Show” hosted by Stephen Colbert and found a longstanding media name to fill the gap: Byron Allen, a billionaire industry mainstay whose “Comics Unleashed” panel comedy show ran in syndication from 2006 to 2016 and is now running in place of “The Late Show.” But unlike Colbert, Allen, who began his career in standup, has vowed to shy away from political humor.

Comedy roots

Allen, 65, was born in Detroit and eventually moved to Los Angeles with his mother. At a young age, he had an obsession with “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and at 18 became “one of the youngest comedians to perform stand-up on Carson’s show, making his debut on May 17, 1979, a week before graduating high school,” said CNN.

He eventually transitioned from the stage to a behind-the-scenes role and soon “developed a business model that would define his career: producing reality shows and selling them directly to local stations,” said CNN. Allen founded his eponymous company, Allen Media Group, in 1993 and currently “owns over a dozen ABC, CBS and NBC network-affiliate broadcast television stations around the country, 10 24-hour HD television networks and multiple digital streaming platforms,” said USA Today. He also owns The Weather Channel and recently “acquired a ‘majority stake’ in BuzzFeed.”

‘I’m not trying to replace him’

When it was announced in July 2025 that Colbert‘s show would be ending, Allen originally “urged CBS to ‘not put on another show’ if it went through with canceling the cancellation,” instead offering to buy the block of time, said NBC News. Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” ran in syndication from 2006 to 2016 before being slotted in to take over “The Late Show.” Under his deal with CBS, Allen “leases the hour and sells the advertising inventory himself.”

In another departure, Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” focuses “strictly on comedy and roundtable storytelling with no political content,” said NJ.com. Colbert was known for his humor revolving around President Donald Trump (many feel his cancellation was politically motivated, an accusation CBS denies). “I’m not trying to replace Colbert. I don’t think anybody can replace Colbert. I think he’s phenomenal,” Allen said to The Guardian.

There is “nothing like it on TV right now where you have five comedians sitting around with one purpose: making people laugh,” Allen told The Guardian of his show. When Allen “first started doing the show, and I’ve had on over 1,000 comedians, I said, ‘No political humor, nothing racist, nothing sexist, nothing antisemitic, nothing homophobic, just be funny.’” Allen has also claimed that people are okay with not hearing political humor in late-night.

“Would you have interest to look at news that was recorded a month ago or two months ago? That news is long gone,” Allen said to The Guardian. “So why do you want to hear about the political news from eight weeks earlier?” Allen claims that “Comics Unleashed” is already making a profit for CBS (the network cited financial reasons for axing Colbert’s show). Despite the controversy, the late-night slot is an opportunity Allen has long wanted. “If they are looking for a show, my hand is already up,” Allen said in October 2025 to Variety. “Fifty years I have been waiting for this moment.”

Target is back on target. The big-box retailer known for affordable style has returned to its roots, sparking a turnaround after a multiyear slump.

The company’s first quarter sales were its “best results in four years,” said CNN. That’s the product of CEO Michael Fiddelke’s move to “win back shoppers with new, buzzy brands” such as Pokémon and Parke. Fiddelke took over earlier this year after a “series of strategy mistakes,” including cutting DEI programs and Pride displays, which sparked boycotts by the company’s largely liberal customer base. But now, Target’s “comeback strategy is working.”

‘Style and design’

Target is attempting to get back to what “historically made the chain distinctive,” said Axios. The company does best when it’s “truly leading with style and design at an incredible value,” said Fiddelke to reporters. Those elements help distinguish the retailer from rivals like Walmart and Amazon and are being applied not just to the products on Target’s shelves but also to “store design, remodels and even shopping carts,” said Axios. Style must be at the “center of how we think about the business,” said Fiddelke.

The company is also “executing its largest grocery transition” in more than 10 years, said Retail Touch Points. Target added 3,000 new food items to its grocery aisles during the first quarter of 2026, as well as 1,500 new health and wellness items. Customers are “actively seeking newness,” Chief Merchandising Officer Cara Sylvester said to reporters. Such changes helped, but so did consumers who seemed ready to spend during the early part of the year. Bigger-than-normal tax returns “were a source of upside to consumer spending,” said Chief Financial Officer Jim Lee.

Target’s quarterly report comes as analysts are watching to see if “surging gasoline prices due to the Iran war” are leading to consumer cutbacks, said The Associated Press. The cutbacks are also a sign of how well the company can weather becoming a “flashpoint” in culture wars. But boycotts and politics have “never been the main issue” behind the company’s slump, GlobalData Retail’s Neil Saunders said to the AP. Instead, customers felt Target was “failing on execution,” said the outlet.

‘We want to be careful’

The turnaround “may not be as smooth as the latest results imply,” said MarketWatch. Target must pivot from halting the slump to sustaining “full-scale growth,” said Brian Mulberry, of Zacks Investment Management, to the outlet. Though the company has upgraded its sales expectations for 2026, Fiddelke acknowledges the headwinds as consumers pull back from spending. “We want to be careful not to get out over our skis,” he said to reporters.

Next up are store revamps. Target and other big retailers are “pouring billions of dollars back into their stores” to lure customers even as online sales continue to occupy a bigger share of consumer spending, said The New York Times. Remodeling brick-and-mortar stores, Fiddelke told the outlet, is part of the strategy for “elevating the Target experience.”

A controversy surrounding a prize-winning short story has raised questions over the use of artificial intelligence in fiction.

“The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir was named the winner in the Caribbean category of the Commonwealth Prize, but “syntactical tics” alleged to be telltale signs of AI use, as well as “the verdict of an AI detection platform”, have caused an uproar in the literary world, said The Guardian.

Smelling a rat

The judging committee said the winning story was told in “a voice of restraint and quiet authority”, praising Nazir’s language as “sublime” and “precise yet richly evocative”. But soon “literary sleuths smelled a rat,” said LitHub.

“Off a hunch”, Ethan Mollick, a professor who studies AI, ran the story through Pangram, a program that claims to detect AI writing with 99% accuracy; the results came back with “100% red flags”. Writing on Bluesky, Mollick said: “Come on, if you know you know.”

Nazir has denied using AI to write the story, which he says was inspired by childhood memories. Granta, the magazine that published the winning story, said they were still investigating the allegations. The foundation that awarded the prize said that all entrants were required to confirm that their submission was their own work and not created with AI assistance.

The accusation is “another episode” in an “ongoing, frenetic conversation” about “whether artists and creators are passing off AI-generated work as their own” and whether publishers “will be able to reliably catch them doing it”, said The Guardian.

In April, Hachette pulled a novel called “Shy Girl” by Mia Ballard from bookshops after Pangram said it was 78% AI-generated, and in March, The New York Times cut ties with a freelance journalist after he admitted to having used artificial intelligence to write a book review. Such episodes have “fuelled discourse around the telltale signs of AI writing”, including frequent use of specific words (“delve” being one example), a “profusion of em dashes” and a predilection for “vague, soft intensifiers” such as “quietly powerful” and “deeply transformative”.

Detection industry

The “ideal” expressed by Razmi Farook, director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, who said she places “complete trust in writers”, may not “be enough to stem the tide of AI slop” in “everything from high literature to scientific research”, said Wired.

Some writers have already admitted that they use AI. Steven Rosenbaum acknowledged that his new book “The Future of Truth”, which “grapples with the nature of veracity in the AI age”, itself contains AI-hallucinated quotes. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk “outraged her own fans” by admitting that use of LLMs is “part of her creative process”.

But the “biggest bummer is to come”, said LitHub, because although “winning a literary prize is one small step” for AI, it’s “sure to be catnip for the pushers touting the technology’s creative potential”.

Meanwhile, the row over the Commonwealth Prize and similar controversies have “generated energetic business” for a “new cottage industry” of AI detectors, said The Guardian. Researchers into the efficacy of the models predict that there will be “a continuous technical arms race” between the detectors, AI models and writers adapting their usage of them.

Not long ago he was regarded as virtually Ukraine’s co-president, said Jamie Dettmer on Politico. Now, less than six months after being forced to resign as President Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak finds himself in custody.

He was arrested last Thursday on suspicion of helping to launder $10.5 million (£7.7 million) via the construction of four luxury homes near Kyiv, some of the funds reportedly being part of the proceeds of a $100 million (£77 million) kickback scheme on contracts signed at Energoatom, the state’s atomic energy agency.

A man with outsize influence

Many of Zelenskyy’s allies have already been implicated in the wider case, including his former business partner Timur Mindich, who fled to Israel last year, and the former energy minister German Galushchenko, who was arrested in February while trying to flee the country. But Yermak’s arrest brings the matter to the very heart of the president’s inner circle, fuelling speculation about what Zelenskyy himself “may have known – or ought to have known”.

Yermak’s arrest could prove disastrous for Zelenskyy, said Steve Gutterman on Radio Free Europe (Prague). In voters’ minds, there’s an “inseparable” link between the two men. They met in 2011 when both were working in television, and their close friendship and Yermak’s “outsize influence” as an unelected adviser mean that any stain on him could well “bleed over onto Zelenskyy”. The scandal also puts at risk Kyiv’s bid for fast-track EU membership, as one of Brussels’ key demands has been that Ukraine’s notorious corruption must be curbed.

Room for optimism

Zelenskyy has stayed “tight-lipped” since the Energoatom scandal broke in November, said Kateryna Denisova in The Kyiv Independent, but it may prove harder to downplay things this time round. He hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing himself, but ever since the name Vova (a diminutive for Volodymyr) popped up in a recently leaked audiotape conversation of two corruption suspects discussing a property development outside Kyiv, rumours about him have started to swirl.

Given the ongoing war with Russia, all these allegations feel particularly egregious, said Paul Niland in the Kyiv Post. However, there is room for optimism. The $10.5 million (£7.7 million) mentioned in the Yermak case is a “far cry” from the $10 billion (£7 billion) thought to have been stolen each year from 2010-14 under the former president, Viktor Yanukovych. Ukraine’s two anti-corruption agencies have been so determined to win the fight against graft that theft on that sort of scale is no longer possible. And there’s no clearer sign of that than the arrest of someone as powerful as Yermak.

After decades of maintaining steady numbers of American service members at sites across Eastern Europe, the United States has begun quietly shifting where and how it deploys troops along Russia’s doorstep. This month, the Pentagon “abruptly” halted an already underway deployment of some 4,000 soldiers to Poland as “part of a larger troop reduction,” fueled in part by President Donald Trump’s “anger over Europe’s refusal to aid in the war with Iran,” said The Washington Post. Similar reductions and withdrawals have been ordered for other American military assets in the region, and White House figures are defending the moves as part of Trump’s America First ethos.

‘Growing rift’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “last-minute decision” to pause the planned Poland deployment took Pentagon officials and European allies “by surprise,” said Politico. It is the latest instance of an “abrupt personnel move” that has “blindsided both sides of the Atlantic.”

The Pentagon has largely employed the easier process of canceling deployments “as opposed to yanking forces already stationed there,” The Associated Press said. In addition to nixing the planned Polish deployment, Hegseth’s orders also “led to the cancellation of an upcoming deployment to Germany of a battalion trained in firing long-range rockets and missiles.” Hegseth “scrapping plans” for a “long-range fires battalion to be stationed in Europe,” marks a “significant loss for the continent,” said the Post.

The change in troop levels comes as Trump has “repeatedly criticized NATO countries for not participating in the Iran war,” said CNN. Trump has also lashed out at German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has said the U.S. is “being ‘humiliated’ by Iran.” The move “reflects a growing rift between the administration and traditional European allies” that has been exacerbated by a “lack of support for the Iran conflict,” the AP said.

‘Overreacting’

Changing the Poland deployment was “not an unexpected, last-minute decision,” said the Pentagon to the Post. However, the military declined to “provide clarification on when the process started and when the order to depart was given,” the outlet said. Pressed on the changes, Vice President JD Vance also downplayed their significance. “We're not talking about pulling every single American troop out ⁠of Europe,” said Vance on ABC News Tuesday. The move merely shifts “some resources around in a way that maximizes ​American security,” and “frankly, a lot of the European media is overreacting to this.”

Polish lawmakers visiting Washington this week “welcomed U.S. statements clarifying” that the troop drawdown was a “temporary measure,” said the Post. Warsaw has also “lobbied to host some of the U.S. troops set to be withdrawn from Germany,” using the argument that “Poland already has the infrastructure needed to accommodate additional American forces,” said Polish broadcaster TVP World.

For now, the White House’s “broader strategy remains unclear,” said Politico. The upcoming German withdrawal is “still in the planning stages.” While it would be a “relatively minor drawdown of the 38,000 U.S. troops in the country,” it also signals to European allies that “they could pay a price for publicly disagreeing with the White House. “

Google has become so synonymous with online search that its name has evolved into a verb in its own right. Now, the company is attempting to “revamp its decades-old business model to fit the era of artificial intelligence”, said CNN. In essence, “Google wants to help you google less”.

‘New era’ for search

Although Google already offers “AI Mode”, it will now integrate the technology across the entire search experience through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. Rather than simply typing keywords or short phrases, users will be able to ask conversational questions, share images or voice commands with agentic AI, and even interact through live video.

Instead of generating only the familiar list of blue links, Google Search will give a customised AI-written summary of the topic being researched. This will then open a conversation with AI Mode directly on the main search page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions more naturally.

This marks a “new era for AI search”, according to a Google blog post, bringing “advanced model capabilities” and “new AI features” to Search. The update will allow users to deploy AI agents “just by asking a question”. The company is also introducing a new intelligent, AI-powered search box, which it describes as Google’s “biggest upgrade in over 25 years”.

Crucially, the shift means that search will become more conversational and personalised, reducing the need to click through to web pages. Increasingly, Google will function more like an assistant than a traditional index of third-party information providers.

‘Radical transformation’

For many people, Google’s search box is the “lobby of the internet”, said Time, so this “radical transformation” signals a major shift in how people use the web. It could “disrupt many industries” that rely on search traffic to attract customers, with news publishers and small businesses particularly vulnerable.

The changes will likely “further decimate” referrals from Google to publishers, which have “already been suffering from declining referrals” because of AI Overviews, said TechCrunch. The trend has already “put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse”.

Using AI-based searching could also erode important skills, said Riley MacLeod on internet news site Aftermath. Google Search is “one of the first and primary places that people experiment with and grow their information-searching skills”. While “spoon-feeding” users AI summaries and “obscuring or bypassing the source of the information” may seem convenient, it risks depriving people of the opportunity to build the “vital information literacy skills” they “need more than ever in an AI-obsessed world”.

For Google, however, the ambition is far larger: to move “closer” to its long-term goal of developing artificial general intelligence – a “theoretical stage of AI” where technology becomes as intelligent as humans across a broad range of subjects, said CNN. The competition is intense, with OpenAI, Meta and others all “racing to be the first to get there”.

Those who want to send weapons through snail mail may soon have the option, as the U.S. Postal Service considers a proposal to allow people to ship handguns. Doing so has been illegal for nearly a century, and some firearm safety advocates are warning that the proposed change could bring unintended consequences.

‘Bypassing a longstanding law’

Efforts to undo the ban on mailing handguns first came when the Postal Service introduced a rule change “bypassing a longstanding law prohibiting the practice,” said The Trace. It has been illegal to mail concealable firearms like handguns since 1927, though the mailing of long-barreled weapons like rifles and shotguns is allowed if they are properly secured. The new rule would “expand the scope of mailable firearms” by “allowing lawful handguns to be mailed under the same terms and conditions as lawful rifles and shotguns,” according to the text of the rule in the Federal Register.

The push by the Postal Service seemed to come largely at the behest of the Trump administration. The proposal was introduced two months after a Justice Department opinion declared that a ban on handgun mailing was “unconstitutional as applied to constitutionally protected firearms” because it “serves an illegitimate purpose and is inconsistent with the nation’s tradition of firearm regulation.” If the rule passes, it will “allow people to use the Postal Service to mail handguns to each other within the same state without involving a licensed gun dealer,” said The Trace.

The rule would additionally let people “send handguns across state lines as long as they address the package to themselves ‘in the care of’ a resident in the destination state,” said The Trace. It would also lift the prohibition on mailing handguns to out-of-state gun dealers. Gun rights activists lauded the rule, which represents “another key victory for America’s law-abiding gun owners,” John Commerford, the executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, told the Los Angeles Times.

‘Gun trafficking pipeline’

Some are concerned that allowing handguns to be sent through the mail will increase the chances of gun-related crimes. Passing the rule would turn the Postal Service into a “gun trafficking pipeline” by giving “felons, abusers and straw purchasers a direct line to illegal firearms while stripping law enforcement of the tools they need to prevent and investigate gun crime,” John Feinblatt, the president of the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, said to USA Today.

Others are worried that the rule would make the Postal Service the “only option for handgun owners seeking to mail their firearms,” said The Trace. FedEx and UPS only allow guns to be shipped by licensed dealers, while DHL “prohibits the shipping of firearms altogether.” There are concerns that forcing all handgun owners to go through one channel could instate new problems.

A group of 22 attorneys general from largely Democratic states has sent a letter to the Postal Service urging it not to pass the rule. “This irresponsible loophole blatantly disregards public safety and would create a direct strain on state resources,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. The rule is likely to be “challenged in court,” Andrew Willinger, an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, told The Trace, because the 1927 statute “says mailing concealable firearms is prohibited.”

The sound of typing has been the background hum of office work for a century and half. But now it’s all about whispers.

After years of bashing typewriters, then tapping keyboards, desk-bound employees are, in ever-increasing numbers, murmuring to AI dictation apps to send emails, draft reports and write code.

‘Double words per minute’

Voice-to-text software has been around since the 1960s but it was always “clunky” and slow and “never worked quite right”, said employment reporter Jo Constantz on Bloomberg. But now advances in AI have made it “viable”: it can “take the messiness of speech and package it into something more useful”.

Early adopters of AI dictation apps are “drawn inexorably to the promise of ever-greater productivity”. In “voice mode”, you can produce double the words-per-minute than you can when typing.

Dictation is definitely “having a moment”, said Joe Castaldo, business reporter at Canada’s The Globe and Mail. More and more software engineers, in particular, are switching from “pressing keys individually” to “adopting AI-powered speech-to-text apps to verbally issue instructions” to tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code. Eight months ago, internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman posted on his LinkedIn platform that he has been “voicepilled”: he’d realised you can “amplify your ability” by “seriously using your voice to interact with technology”.

Start-ups today are like “a high-end call centre – except everyone is chatting with AI”, one venture capitalist told The Wall Street Journal. There is an “etiquette”: “users try to keep their voices low and often wear headphones to block out sound from their dictating neighbours, dialling down the annoyance factor”. But talking to yourself is still “weird, if not a little embarrassing”.

‘Velocity towards voice’

It’s too early to say if and when “the Qwerty keyboard might follow the ticker tape and fax machines into obsolescence” but “the velocity towards voice is accelerating”, Dylan Fox, CEO of San Francisco-based AssemblyAI, told the Los Angeles Times. We’re predicting a 10 to 100-fold “increase in demand for voice, AI applications and interfaces”.

There’s now “a mad dash to dominate any corner of the evolving field”, said Bloomberg’s Constantz. The market for AI voice generators alone is estimated to be worth $7.7 billion (£5.75 billion) this year, rising to $21.8 billion (£16.27 billion) by the end of the decade, according to US consulting firm Grand View Research.

Google, Apple and Microsoft have invested heavily in their voice-to-text products, and dictation app start-ups – many with variations of “whisper” in their name – have experienced remarkable growth over the past year. After all, Superwhisper founder Neil Chudleigh told The Globe and Mail, “we’re talking about replacing every keyboard on the planet”.

Conservatives have long gone after what they perceive as discrimination against whites in hiring and have now found their latest target. The Florida attorney general sent the National Football League investigative subpoenas over alleged civil rights violations in its hiring practices. The issue centers on a longstanding NFL rule, and an investigation by Florida could have wider implications for diversity in sports.

‘Raises more questions’

The escalation began when Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) issued a letter to the NFL earlier this year, alleging that its Rooney Rule violates Florida’s civil rights laws. The rule, in place since 2003, requires all NFL teams to “interview at least two external minority candidates for open head coach, coordinator and general manager jobs,” said Politico. Though his letter led the NFL to alter some of the diversity language on its website, Uthmeier claims the league didn’t go far enough with its changes, resulting in him doubling down with the May 13 subpoenas.

“We appreciate how quickly the NFL changed its website in response to our letter and capitulated on some of their discriminatory hiring quotas,” Uthmeier said on social media. But the NFL’s response “raises more questions about the Rooney Rule, and we look forward to their cooperation with the investigative subpoena.” The subpoenas are Uthmeier’s way of “keeping pressure on the NFL after he previously gave the league a May 1 deadline to scrap the Rooney Rule,” said Politico.

The NFL showed no signs of capitulating. The league’s diversity efforts are “consistent with both Florida and federal law,” NFL General Counsel Ted Ullyot said in a responding letter. The Rooney Rule “doesn’t impose any hiring quotas or mandates nor does it even limit who may be interviewed,” and “diversity of the candidate pool, both on the field and off, is also a critical part of the NFL’s success.” The league itself “does not permit the consideration of race, sex or any other legally protected characteristic in any hiring decisions or employment actions.”

‘An existential challenge’

Florida’s subpoenas are “just the latest target of MAGA backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts,” said NPR. While the effectiveness of the Rooney Rule has been “panned by many, including coaches, former coaches, the NFL Players Association and football fans,” continued legal pushes could represent an “existential challenge” to the NFL’s hiring practices.

Legal challenges could also expand to other areas of the NFL beyond the Rooney Rule. Uthmeier’s subpoena targets “many of the NFL’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including a now-discontinued mandate that required teams hire a minority offensive assistant,” as well as the “league’s diversity accelerator program” and a rule related to compensatory draft picks if a “minority assistant coach or executive a team developed is hired away,” said ESPN.

Uthmeier’s threats “echo a broader campaign waged by the Trump administration,” said NPR. They come as the White House and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have “now made tackling discrimination against white people, especially men, a priority.” While there could be implications for the NFL, the effect of the legal challenges could also be seen beyond sports. The head of the EEOC has repeatedly “warned employers that even in the interview selection process, they should not take into consideration a candidate’s race, sex or any other protected characteristic” of the Civil Rights Act.

Reading test scores have been on the decline since the mid-2010s, then the pandemic made recovery that much more difficult. And the proliferation of screens, student absenteeism and a push away from phonics-based teaching has further led to the reduction in scores.

Contributing factors 

The U.S. entered a “learning recession” in 2013 as “student progress in math and reading stalled and began to decline,” said Education Scorecard. From 2017 to 2019, “students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024,” said The New York Times. Reading scores were “down last year in 83% of school districts where data was available,” while “math scores were down in 70%,” compared to a decade ago. The declines have “affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.”

The reduced scores “coincided with a dismantling of test-based accountability in schools and a dramatic rise in social media use among young people,” said Education Scorecard. While it “remains unclear whether and how much each factor caused the decline in scores, both are likely candidates.” The shift is an "enormous problem that’s not getting enough attention,” Nat Malkus, a senior fellow studying education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said to the Times.

A variety of factors have reduced reading capabilities in students. For years, “schools taught reading using approaches that deemphasized phonics and encouraged strategies such as guessing words based on context clues,” said The Associated Press. In addition, the pandemic “accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students,” and to this day, student absenteeism “remains higher than prepandemic,” said the Times.

Over the past decade, screen time has also increased exponentially. “There’s no question that swiping has decreased students’ focus and persistence, and time on devices has displaced time spent reading or studying,” said the Times. “Far more teenagers — nearly one in three — now say they ‘never or hardly ever’ read for fun.” The good news is that “some states and school districts are making progress,” said the AP. A “common factor was a shift toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support in other ways as well for struggling readers.”

Little recovery

“Scores inched upward in reading last year and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022,” said the Times. But “it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground.” Only “five states plus the District of Columbia had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025,” said the AP. Nationally, “students remain nearly half a grade level behind prepandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.”

The country has also seen a U-shaped recovery, which “suggests the middle has been left behind,” said Education Scorecard. There have been “larger improvements among the highest-income and the lowest-income school districts in the country,” while “middle-income districts (those with between 30% and 70% of students receiving federally subsidized lunches) have seen the least improvement on average.” The pandemic “was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion in achievement,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor who helped create the Education Scorecard, said to the AP.

In the early 1950s, thousands of UN troops in Korea fell ill with a mysterious fever, said Chris Smith in The Spectator. Doctors suspected that a virus might be to blame – but it wasn’t until 1978 that a Korean scientist isolated the culprit in a mouse, and named it after a nearby river, the Hantan.

He also showed that hantaviruses, which are carried by rodents, can be inhaled by humans in dust contaminated by droppings or urine. The troops had likely kicked the virus up as they dug foxholes.

Old vs. New World

Since then, numerous strains that can be transmitted to humans have been identified. They divide into two groups: Old World hantaviruses, in Europe and Asia, cause kidney dysfunction and have a mortality rate of 1% to 15%; New World ones, in the Americas, lead to severe lung infections and are fatal in around 40% of cases. It was the latter group that caused the outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius, and specifically the Andes strain, the only hantavirus that – in very rare cases – can pass from human to human.

It is not yet clear how this outbreak started, said Esther Addley in The Guardian, but it is thought that one, or possibly two, passengers were carrying the virus, which has an incubation period of up to 42 days, when they boarded the ship in Argentina on 1 April. A Dutch ornithologist who fell ill on 6 April and died five days later has been identified as “patient zero”. He had spent months travelling in South America with his wife – who died on 26 April. A German woman then died on 2 May. By 10 May, seven others had fallen ill.

No pandemic

This week, 20 British nationals on board flew home to the UK, and were bussed to an isolation facility on the Wirral, said Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph. Described as healthy, they were assessed for 72 hours and then asked to self-isolate at home for 42 days.

Health officials have stressed that we are not facing a pandemic. The Andes strain does not spread easily: it requires intimate or very close contact. And though many passengers left the ship weeks ago, there have so far been no “third-generation” cases – among people who were not on board. Given the virus’s incubation period, clinicians say that 21 June is the date to watch: if there have been no third-generation cases by then, it means the outbreak has run its course.

Since it swept to power in 2014, little has stood in the way of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But West Bengal – India's fourth-most populous state – was a rare exception, said Nadim Asrar in Al Jazeera (Doha). Well over 25% of its some 105 million population is Muslim, and for the past 15 years its voters have spurned the Hindu nationalist BJP in favour of the centrist Trinamool Congress (TMC), whose leader, Mamata Banerjee, has sought to appeal to Muslims and Hindus alike.

But all that changed last week, when the BJP won a “stunning” majority of 207 seats in the state's 294-member assembly.

Dislodging ‘Didi’

It's hard to exaggerate just how stunning this victory is, said Sadanand Dhume in The Wall Street Journal. It's a bit like the Democrats winning the governorship of Texas for the first time in a landslide.

The 71-year-old Banerjee is India's fiercest female politician and one of Modi's toughest critics. Her supporters refer to her as “Didi” (older sister), and love her for her disdain of luxury – she wears “simple” saris and flip-flops. But her detractors regard her as a petty despot who has “pandered to fundamentalist Muslims”.

And the BJP was determined to dislodge her, said Robin Jeffrey on Inside Story (Melbourne). West Bengal is a prize they've hungered for. Its capital, Kolkata, was once “the intellectual centre of India” and home to many of the heroic events and figures revered by the BJP. So Modi's people “threw a kitchen full of sinks at Banerjee and her party”.

‘Ferrari and a bicycle’

That they did, said the Deccan Herald (Bengaluru). In the run-up to last month's vote, the election commission – a supposedly independent body often accused of doing the BJP's bidding – stripped more than nine million names, nearly 12% of the total, from the state's electoral register under a process called Special Intensive Revision. The ostensible aim was to remove alleged illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh from the rolls. And at least 2.7 million people, mostly Muslims, were thus excluded from voting.

In dozens of constituencies, the BJP's margin of victory was smaller than the number of voters removed, said Aparna Bhattacharya on The Wire (New Delhi). But, in fairness, the BJP would probably have prevailed in any case. “Didi” had been in power too long: her TMC had grown increasingly unpopular over issues such as high unemployment.

With “Didi” gone, Modi is close to “his dream of an opposition-free India”, said Alex Travelli in The New York Times. The BJP now controls 20 of the 28 state governments, a dominance not seen since Congress Party rule in the 1960s. And as the BJP's income is six times that of its nearest rival, it will be hard for other parties to compete, said Nadim Asrar.

It's “a race between a Ferrari and a bicycle”, as the writer Arundhati Roy once put it. Good for Modi, maybe, but perhaps not so good for India.

This March, a car carrying alleged Sinaloa cartel figure Francisco “El Payin” Beltrán mysteriously exploded on a busy Mexican highway outside the capital city. The incident, said CNN, was part of an “expanded and previously unreported CIA campaign” that has sent American assets to “dismantle the entrenched cartel networks” in Mexico. Both the CIA and the Mexican government have denied the network’s allegations of an agency-run disruption program south of the border, even as newly reported details suggest a complex — and widening — operation.

Source of friction with Mexico

“Since last year” CIA assets have “directly participated in deadly attacks on several, mostly mid-level cartel members” on Mexican soil, said CNN. The operations are a “significant expansion of the kind of thing the CIA has been willing to do inside Mexico,” with the “lethality” of their work “seriously ramped up,” said a source to the outlet. The covert CIA presence comes largely in the form of the agency’s “elite Ground Branch unit,” whose work reportedly includes “directly participating in ​targeted assassinations,” said Reuters.

The renewed focus on potential CIA activity within Mexico comes as President Donald Trump pursues an “aggressive campaign” against alleged Latin American drug cartels, a campaign that critics claim has “overstepped legal and presidential norms,” said Al Jazeera. The effort has been a “source of friction with Mexico” and culminated last month in a threat from President Claudia Sheinbaum to “sanction authorities” who allegedly allowed CIA operatives to “participate in raids on clandestine drug laboratories.”

Still, after Beltrán’s death, Sheinbaum, in a press briefing, “strongly denied that CIA agents were operating in Mexico, let alone working there to kill someone,” said The New York Times. The CIA also rejected CNN’s allegations as “false and salacious,” said agency spokesperson Liz Lyons on X.

The “presence of CIA agents on the ground in Mexico,” for the second time in less than a month, has “unsettled the Sheinbaum administration,” said El País. “At different times” denials from the CIA and Sheinbaum government might have “resonated more strongly with the public,” but “in light of the events of recent weeks, doubts now surround their statements.”

‘Who did this?’

Security officials from both governments have “repeatedly” said their anti-cartel cooperation is “limited to intelligence sharing and training, with no on-the-ground role for U.S. forces,” the Times said. Crucially, operations with potential CIA involvement often attract “little attention outside of Mexico or in some cases beyond even the specific region where they take place,” CNN said. That localization, combined with the relative obscurity of many of the intended targets, has allowed the CIA’s involvement to “remain a secret” in a “playbook” not dissimilar to “counterterrorism missions designed to destroy groups in the Middle East.”

The CIA “definitely wanted this incident to create the question in everyone’s mind of ‘who did this?,’” said a former agency paramilitary officer to CNN about Beltrán’s death. It is also “in the Mexican government’s interest” to accept the CIA’s denials of its participation in operations on Mexican soil “given the taboo of direct U.S. intervention,” said The Washington Examiner.

Hearing that one football club has spied on another “conjures images of classic, covert espionage”, said the BBC. But, as Middlesbrough have found out, sometimes it’s “not that difficult”.

The English Football League has charged Southampton with spying on their opponents two days before the first leg of the Championship play-off semi-final on Tuesday. Middlesbrough claim the supposed spy was a Southampton analyst observing a training session.

Southampton then beat Middlesbrough in extra-time of the second leg to progress to the play-off final at Wembley, but the Middlesbrough manager, Kim Hellberg, has accused them of trying to cheat in what has become known as “spygate”.

‘Understandably incensed’

Southampton have launched an internal review to “ensure that all facts and context are properly understood” before “conclusions are drawn”, said chief executive Phil Parsons. “Given the intensity of the fixture schedule and the short turnaround between matches, we have requested time to complete that process thoroughly and responsibly.”

But the club have “not tried to fight the accusation that they tried to gain an unfair advantage”, said The Telegraph. They reportedly claimed the analyst was “acting on his own initiative and had not been instructed to travel to Rockliffe Hall hotel, adjacent to Boro’s training ground, to spy on Kim Hellberg and his players”. Middlesbrough, though, were “understandably incensed” after their media team “caught the spy lurking near some bushes with professional surveillance equipment”.

Boro have also “been led to believe by whistleblowers that this is not the first time Southampton have spied on their opponents’ training sessions”.

Cases of spying were “practically unheard of” until 2019, said the BBC, when Leeds United boss Marcelo Bielsa admitted he had sent a member of staff to spy on “every team they played that season”.

At that time, there was no specific regulation against spying; “bullish” Bielsa “even paid the fine himself”. The EFL then introduced rule 127: “no club shall directly or indirectly observe (or attempt to observe) another club's training session in the period of 72 hours prior to any match”.

That’s what Southampton have been charged with breaching, as well as rule 3.4: clubs must “act towards each other with the utmost good faith”.

But perhaps the “most high-profile case of spying” was during the 2024 Olympics in Paris, when New Zealand’s women’s football team spotted a drone above their training session before their game against Canada. French police found its operator: a member of Canada’s staff.

That it was Canada who “performed such an egregious breach of the rules”, a country “known for its people being polite, respectful, laidback and just terribly nice”, added to “the ironic drama”, said The Athletic.

‘Tainted triumph’

Back in the Championship, “spygate 2.0 has become the biggest crisis in play-off history”, said The Independent. And it risks being “Spygate £200 million”, the potential value of a place in the Premier League, if – as predicted – Southampton beat Hull in the final at Wembley on 23 May. If they do, it will be a “tainted triumph”.

The EFL is in an “impossible position”; Southampton would usually have 14 days to respond to the charges, but the EFL has asked the independent disciplinary commission to fast-track the case, given the time pressure. There are also “logistical issues as well as moral ones”.

The “nuclear option” – expelling Southampton from the play-offs – creates “an almighty mess”. But finding them guilty and fining them would cost far less than the prize for promotion, which isn’t likely to “assuage Middlesbrough”.

Meanwhile, Middlesbrough are in “limbo”, continuing to train in case they have to take Southampton’s place in the play-offs. Southampton or the EFL could also appeal any verdict, but Middlesbrough cannot, although they could pursue legal action.

Some Southampton fans are planning to go to Wembley “dressed as hedges or carrying binoculars”. But for Boro and the EFL “this is no laughing matter”.

As the Trump administration scrambles to control its war with Iran, both countries have turned to an unexpected moderator: Pakistan, which has led multiple rounds of ceasefire negotiations between the two nations. Now, Pakistan is quietly growing its influence in the region while Washington and Tehran circle one another for another round of talks.

From ‘kind of a sideshow’ to being in Trump’s ‘favor’

Islamabad’s role as a major player in this conflict, for many observers, has “come as a surprise,” given Pakistan’s “global position, domestic challenges” and “volatile relationship” with the first Trump administration, said the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA). But “perhaps it shouldn’t,” the BBC said.

Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir “is in U.S. President Donald Trump’s favor,” with the president asserting that the Pakistani leader knows Iran “better than most.” Pakistan, in its own messaging, has hailed a “brotherly” relationship with neighboring Iran, with the two nations sharing “deep cultural and religious ties,” said the BBC.

Although Pakistan was “kind of a sideshow” during the first Trump administration, it has “really reached out” to both the White House and “Donald Trump personally, as well as his family members, to try to build influence in Washington,” CCGA said. Pakistan’s connections to Saudi Arabia and China have also allowed it to “place itself in a mediator role” with a “greater level of geopolitical clout and influence than we might have expected a couple of years ago.”

Given Pakistan’s reputation for corruption and military authoritarianism, it “would not be an exaggeration” to describe it as a “failed state,” said The Spectator. But simply “being a nuclear power” affords Pakistan a “head start in terms of credibility” by gracing Islamabad with the “nuclear aura that Iran would love to possess.” China, which has played a “background but crucial role” in the peace negotiations, has also had a “longstanding close relationship” with Islamabad, as both nations “enjoy common cause against India.”

Pakistan as a ‘responsible middle power’

“Playing the role of mediator” between the United States and Iran — or “at least message-bearer” — has “been a boon for Islamabad,” Le Monde said. The country has undergone “its authoritarian drift,” in which it “silenced its large Shiite minority during the war and solidarity movements with Iran.”

After having sheltered Osama bin Laden, Pakistan “wants to convince international opinion that it is no longer a breeding ground for terrorism,” said Gilles Boquérat, an associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, to Le Monde. Instead, it is portraying itself as a “responsible middle power, capable of ensuring regional security from the Arabian Peninsula to the Indian border.”

But Pakistan’s ties with Iran have earned Islamabad its share of critics during the current war, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.). “I don’t trust Pakistan as far as I can throw them,” Graham said during a Senate hearing this week regarding reports that the Pakistani government has aided Iranian forces. “If they actually do have Iranian aircraft parked in Pakistan bases to protect Iranian military assets, that tells me we should be looking maybe for somebody else to mediate.”

GPS jamming across the Middle East has exploded since the US and Israel began their war against Iran in February, “plunging both sides into an ‘electronic warfare arms race’”, said The Independent.

“Underlying the dramatic clashes across the region”, forces on all sides are “quietly fighting an invisible war by land, air and sea, distorting tracking information to sow chaos or hide in plain sight”.

‘Electronic warfare arms race’

Jamming of the Global Positioning System (GPS) works by disrupting signals from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) with electromagnetic noise. “Spoofing” is more sophisticated and involves transmitting fake signals to provide a false location. Both are used to distort drone and missile guidance systems.

Interference “isn’t a new phenomenon”, said CNN. It has been used in modern warfare since the Second World War but has become “a major issue” for shipping and aircraft since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The problem is now “endemic” in regions such as the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and parts of the Middle East, said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, from shipping intelligence firm Windward.

While all sides engage in it, Iran is particularly “prolific” in spoofing. Tehran uses it to “add confusion and disrupt any of the allied intelligence gathering”, said Philip Ingram, an intelligence expert and former British Army colonel.

The tools used by Iran are likely to be domestically produced or made with equipment sourced from Russia or China, Thomas Withington, from the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told the BBC.

Tracking ‘has stopped telling the truth’

The problem with GPS jamming is that it cannot be contained within precise geographic boundaries and does not discriminate between military and commercial systems.

On the first day of the war alone, electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters, according to a Windward report cited by Inside GNSS.

“The missiles and drones make for good headlines, but they’re a distraction,” said Erik Bethel, from investment firm Mare Liberum, and Windward CEO Ami Daniel in Fortune. The “real story” is that the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes, has “gone dark. Not in some poetic sense, but literally.”

In effect, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) – the network that’s supposed to be the “gold standard” for commercial tracking and is used by ships to avoid one another – “has stopped telling the truth”.

The same thing happened in the region last year during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran and has also troubled vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. But “this is next-level”, said Bockmann. “We can’t over-estimate the huge danger this places to maritime navigation and safety.”

“Without reliable and accurate” navigation systems, ships are “effectively sailing blind”, said The Wall Street Journal.

‘Anti-jam antenna system’

There are various technologies that offer protection against GPS jamming. These can include “automatically detecting jamming or interference and switching to unaffected frequencies”, said the BBC.

UK defence giant Raytheon produces an “anti-jam antenna system” device the size of an ice hockey puck that can be installed on different kinds of vehicles and uses multiple channels to overcome jamming. Other companies have “developed navigation tools that work around GPS’s flaws”.

Alternative navigational tools that do not rely on GPS at all but instead harness quantum technology are also in development “but remain a long way off operational use”, said CNN.

“GNSS is a wonder of the modern world,” said Ramsey Faragher, chief executive of the Royal Institute of Navigation in London. “You can switch it on and within a few seconds, it works out where you are to within a metre and what time it is to within a nanosecond. Unfortunately, the luxurious era of those signals not being messed about with intentionally is over. We need to rapidly catch up.”

With the Supreme Court set to rule on President Donald Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship, an oft-cited practice is at the center of it all. The practice, called birth tourism, has become commonplace for women who want their kids to have U.S. citizenship. But the Supreme Court may further support the Trump administration’s anti-immigration stance by cracking down on it.

‘Side issue into a main argument’

Birth tourism occurs when pregnant women from other nations “travel to the U.S. for the purpose of giving birth, thereby obtaining citizenship for their babies,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. The practice is regularly mentioned by legal scholars, yet birth tourism is “actually rare, despite the outsized role it’s gained in the debate over citizenship.” There are about 26,000 cases of birth tourism in the U.S. annually, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

While this is just a small fraction of the 3.5 million yearly U.S. births, the White House has “elevated what was once a side issue into a main argument for revocation,” said the Inquirer. It is part of Trump’s “aggressive immigration agenda that includes attempts to restrict birthright citizenship,” said Newsweek. Trump signed an order banning birthright citizenship in 2025, triggering a “series of legal challenges now before the Supreme Court” given that the practice is enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration continues to use birth tourism as a primary point of contention when presenting its case to the court. Immigration laws have “spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in oral arguments to the Supreme Court.

‘The scale of the problem is marginal’

Even though the White House has positioned birth tourism as a major factor in why birthright citizenship should be overturned, proponents “say that the scale of the problem is marginal,” said The New York Times. They typically “argue that it can be addressed through regulation and law enforcement without eliminating what has long been considered a central tenet of the United States — equality at birth, regardless of race, religion or the immigration status of the parents.”

Republicans have long used birth tourism as a way to highlight criminal enterprises. In 2019, officials in California “arrested three people who operated multimillion-dollar birth tourism companies and had charged as much as $100,000 to Chinese couples” for a luxury bundle that included “housing, nannies and shopping excursions to Gucci,” said the Times. GOP lawmakers have also “cited birth tourism in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory that has looser visa requirements and is closer to China.”

Support for overturning birthright citizenship remains low. Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 65%, think citizenship “should be granted to all children born on American soil, no matter the circumstances,” according to a recent AP-NORC survey of 2,596 adults. Republicans are less convinced; only 44% are in favor of birthright citizenship. “It’s fundamental to sovereignty, being able to determine who is a citizen,” said Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, to the Times.

Is Benjamin Netanyahu's time finally up? Is Israel's longest-serving prime minister, in power for almost 15 of the past 17 years, heading for a fall at the forthcoming October general election?

Following the decisive move made by Israel's opposition parties last week, that is now a real possibility, said Ravit Hecht in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). The hardline right-winger Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair Lapid have announced they will be merging their two parties to form a single party called Yachad (Together). Prior to their announcement, polls had Bennett's party projected to win 21 seats and Lapid's party seven. A total of 28 seats would make Yachad the biggest party in the 120-seat Knesset, ahead of Netanyahu's Likud, on a projected 25.

‘Era of correction’

This pair have teamed up before, said Philissa Cramer on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. After the 2021 election that briefly dislodged Netanyahu from office, before he stormed back in late 2022, they struck an unusual power-sharing deal, agreeing to take it in turns to serve as prime minister. And this time they are presenting their combined party as a more permanent antidote to the polarisation in Israeli society that has deepened under Netanyahu. “Our unity is a message to the entire people of Israel,” declared Bennett on announcing the merger. “The era of division is over. The era of correction has arrived.”

Don't be so sure, said Ori Wertman in The Jerusalem Post. This merger may well backfire. True, the two men have agreed on some significant issues, including the need for an eight-year cap on a PM's time in office and for a full army draft with sanctions on Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft evaders. But the fact remains that Bennett is an Orthodox Jew who has called for the annexation of parts of the West Bank: in teaming up with Lapid, a secular Jew who has previously endorsed the two-state solution, he may well prompt some of his supporters to defect to Likud.

Conversely, Lapid's shift to the right – he has agreed to rule out the possibility of a coalition with any of Israel's Arab parties – will alienate much of his moderate base. And indeed, the first post-merger poll projects the new party winning just 26 seats, not the 28 total forecast when the two parties were running separately.

‘Same troubled system’

Still, there is a clear political logic behind the merger, said Aaron T. Walter in The Times of Israel. Lapid's support has crashed since his party won 24 seats in the last election, while Bennett – who is going to lead the new party – has gained in popularity. The trouble is, Yachad has a “core arithmetic problem”.

Without Arab parties, which it has ruled out as potential coalition partners, its only hope of securing the 61 seats needed for a majority is to lure Gadi Eisenkot, former chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, in to join the party. Eisenkot's military credentials and his moving personal story of having lost a son to the war in Gaza have made him a leading contender of the Right. But for that very reason he'd probably only join if made leader, something Bennett has made plain he won't countenance.

But what would a Yachad victory actually achieve, asked David Issacharoff in Haaretz. Lapid and Bennett are keen to highlight the corruption charges Netanyahu has managed to fend off by staying in power, and to blame him for the security failures that enabled Hamas's October 2023 attack. But on the big questions – how to extricate Israel from the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon; how to prevent settler violence in the West Bank – they've nothing new to say.

Yachad's central weakness, said Hani Hazaimeh in Arab News (Riyadh), is that its focus is simply on removing Netanyahu from office. By refusing to address “the unresolved Palestinian issue” and “the normalisation of military-first policies”, they have missed the chance to redefine Israel's future in any meaningful way. Even if his rivals do displace him, Netanyahu's fall would be less a “political revolution” and more a “reshuffling of power within the same troubled system”.

While the “Avatar” movie series remains one of director James Cameron’s most celebrated works, a new lawsuit revolving around the first film could have widespread implications. The lawsuit, which accuses Cameron of using a performer’s image without permission, comes amid concerns about the legal ownership of actors’ faces.

‘Without credit or compensation’

The actor Q’orianka Kilcher filed a lawsuit alleging that in 2005, when she was 14, Cameron “extracted her facial features” from a movie about Pocahontas called “The New World” then “directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri” in 2009’s “Avatar,” said a release about the suit, per NBC News. Kilcher’s face was supposedly “captured in production sketches, sculpted into maquettes and laser-scanned into high-resolution digital models, then distributed across multiple visual effects vendors to render Neytiri’s final appearance.”

Kilcher’s face as Neytiri “went on to appear in the films, on movie posters and on merchandise, without her knowledge or consent,” the release said. Kilcher is of Native Peruvian heritage, and the case “exposes how one of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers” used Kilcher’s “cultural heritage to create a record-breaking film franchise — without credit or compensation to her — through a series of deliberate, non-expressive commercial acts,” the lawsuit said.

‘In the age of AI, our likeness is no longer safe’

The lawsuit raises broad concerns about who truly owns actors’ likenesses: the actors themselves or the studios they work for. It is possible that lawyers for Cameron and Disney “will be able to make some kind of fair use argument here, claiming that Neytiri is enough of a transformation of Kilcher’s original appearance as to be cleared of any of her claims,” said the AV Club.

This case revolves around a “complex area of the law that has taken on a new immediacy in the age of generative AI, an emerging technology that allows anyone with an internet connection to easily create images that replicate existing art, photographs and human likenesses,” said The New York Times. Laws attempt to balance First Amendment rights by “distinguishing between commercial exploitation” and artistic works. But “there is not always a bright line,” Jennifer E. Rothman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said to the Times.

The lawsuit “reflects a core fear among Hollywood performers in the artificial intelligence age: losing control of their own faces,” said the Times. And such a problem could seep into the general public as well. New pushes against AI are “less about the technology than who owns your image, voice and likeness,” said Forbes. The “fight over AI has entered a harder phase, one measured in licensing fees, fraud claims, takedown demands and liability.” Celebrities are simply an “early test case,” as the law must now reckon with a question “it did not have to answer at this scale before: When does a digital version of a person become something that person can control?”

As the debate over likeness usage rages, actors like Kilcher are standing up for themselves. “In the age of AI, our likeness is no longer safe,” Kilcher told the Times. “While what happened to me is personal, it’s also a big warning that, if we don’t act now, this type of thing will become standard. This case is about the future of identity.”

The deadly outbreak of the rare hantavirus aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship has highlighted the growing trend of tourism in Antarctica.

No tourists visited the icy southern continent until the 1960s and only 8,000 a year set foot there three decades ago. By last year, this had risen to 80,000, with a further 36,000 seeing it for themselves from ships docked in Antarctica’s spectacular bays.

This “unchecked tourism growth” risks “undermining the very environment that draws visitors”, said two academics from the University of Tasmania on The Conversation.

Irreversible melting

Those first tourists set foot on Antarctica on 23 January 1966. The mission, with 57 guests, was intended to “inspire people to become stewards for the planet, by exposing them to one of its most awe-inspiring places”, said The Independent. But some now think the trip was a “mistake” because it began a process that is endangering the “fragile” environment.

Sixty years on, “tourism to the bottom of the world is soaring”, said The Associated Press. This is “driven in part by fears that the frozen landscapes of Antarctica may be irreversibly melting away because of climate change”.

“High costs” and the “time it can take” to travel there mean visitor numbers are “still small”, but they’re “growing so fast that scientists and environmentalists are sounding alarms”. The University of Tasmania academics estimated that the number of tourists could triple or quadruple to more than 400,000 a year by 2033-34.

The draw is clear: the experience of visiting Antarctica, with its whales, seals, penguins and icebergs, is “unique and not replicable anywhere else on the planet”, Claire Christian, from the environmental group Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, told AP. “It’s all really stunning and it makes a huge impression on people.”

‘Loved to death’

Between 2002 and 2020, nearly 150 billion tonnes of Antarctic ice melted each year, according to Nasa. Experts warn that more visitors will bring an increased risk of contamination, illness and other damage to the continent.

Tourists can threaten ecosystems by compacting soils, squashing fragile vegetation and bringing in non-native microbes and plant species. They can also disturb breeding colonies of birds and seals.

Each cruise ship visitor to Antarctica produces between 3.2 and 4.1 tonnes of carbon, and that doesn’t include their travel to the port of departure. This is comparable to the carbon emissions an average person produces in a year.

So the answer to Antarctica avoiding being “loved to death” may “lie in economics”. Some suggest a rule requiring visitors to pay a tourism tax, or a “cap-and-trade system” to limit the number of visitor permits for a fixed period.

The guidelines of the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators stipulate that only 100 people can set foot on the ice at any given time, and ships carrying more than 500 passengers are not allowed to dock.

Visitors are told to avoid touching the ground with anything but their feet. Some crews and passengers use vacuums, disinfectants and brushes to keep shoes and equipment free of bugs, feathers, seeds and microbe-carrying dirt, said AP.

Kimi Antonelli is too young to legally buy a drink in the US, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. But by the end of the Miami Grand Prix, the 19-year-old Italian had “most assuredly earned a stiffener”. Still in only his second season in Formula One, the Mercedes driver held firm in the face of “immense pressure” from last year’s champion, McLaren’s Lando Norris, to notch up his third straight victory.

In both his previous wins, in China and Japan, Antonelli greatly benefitted from his Mercedes car having a big pace advantage over its rivals, said Tom Cary in The Daily Telegraph. Miami, however, was a more even affair, with the likes of McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari having recently made upgrades that “closed the gap significantly”. That makes Sunday’s victory – which was founded on a successful undercutting strategy – all the more impressive.

Many predicted that Antonelli’s British teammate, George Russell, would be the dominant driver this season, said Jonathan McEvoy in the Daily Mail. But the Italian, to whom Russell was “meant to offer mentorship”, is proving a “mighty big thorn in his race overalls”. In Miami, Russell finished fourth, and now trails Antonelli by 20 points. “The Hard Rock Stadium track is not one Russell likes, so perhaps this should be filed as a minor setback.” But unless he improves, it may look like a “harbinger of things to come”.

The thymus is a small organ behind the breastbone that helps to establish the body’s immune system early in life. Since it shrinks with age, it was once thought to become mostly inactive over time. And many people have had their thymus removed, primarily as a treatment for myasthenia gravis. But this mini organ may be mightier than expected.

The organ has been “overlooked for decades and may be a missing piece in explaining why people age differently and why cancer treatments fail in some patients,” said Hugo Aerts, a corresponding author on both studies, in a press release. And now two different studies published in the journal Nature — one connecting the long-term health of adults with their thymic health and the other analyzing cancer therapy outcomes and thymic health — point to the thymus playing an important role in wellness.

T-cells and immunity

The thymus’ main function is to “generate a diverse T-cell repertoire, which provides adaptive immunity throughout life,” said the Nature study on thymic long-term health consequences. While the “relevance and abundance of the T-cell repertoire at a young age are well documented,” it’s likely that the thymus “retains a continued role in T-cell production throughout adulthood and that the pattern of decline of thymic function in adults is associated with poorer health outcomes.”

Higher thymic health scores are “associated with laboratory markers of continued T-cell production, greater T-cell diversity in blood and tumors, and stronger activity of immune pathways, supporting thymic health as a proxy for immune competence,” said the press release. “When thymic health and T-cell diversity decline, the immune system becomes less able to respond to new threats, like cancer or other diseases.”

Surprising health indicator

People with better thymic health had “about a 50% lower risk of premature death, 63% lower risk of cardiovascular death, and 36% lower risk of developing lung cancer compared to those with low thymic health,” said the release. Researchers saw “similar patterns across many other causes of death, suggesting that thymic health may reflect overall immune resilience.”

A healthy thymus is also “associated with reduced risks of progression and all-cause mortality” in cancer patients, said the Nature study on thymic health and cancer. The outcomes were especially positive for those with lung cancer. People with “healthier thymuses were more likely to respond to cancer immunotherapy drugs, which trigger the immune system to fight cancer, but don’t work for many patients,” said The Washington Post. Because of the T-cells’ role in immunity, those with their thymus removed can also have an “increased risk of autoimmune disease,” said a 2023 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Future solutions

The general health of the thymus can be influenced by “lifestyle and metabolic health measures, such as smoking, physical activity or HDL levels,” said the long-term health consequences study. Thymic decay is “highly individualized even in presumed healthy adults, indicating that thymic function can also be substantially reduced in individuals who did not have their thymus surgically removed.” While the thymus cannot be directly attributed to better health outcomes, there are now “new leads to be explored,” said the Post.

In the future, it might be possible to “engineer a thymus from an organ donor to help people who receive transplants tolerate their new organ without taking harsh anti-rejection drugs,” said the Post. There’s also interest in “probing whether there are ways to slow down the thymus’ natural deterioration,” which could have “many applications in autoimmune diseases, improving people’s responses to vaccinations as they age or improving how people respond to cancer immunotherapies.”

Life on board the MV Hondius has turned from a dream adventure to a tragic nightmare after the outbreak of hantavirus.

Three people were today evacuated from the boat that is currently off the coast of Cape Verde. The patients – British, German, and Dutch nationals – are being taken to the Netherlands to receive medical care. In addition to the three passengers who died earlier in the cruise, five other people are thought to have symptoms consistent with an outbreak of hantavirus.

Though the “overall public health risk remains low”, the World Health Organization is closely monitoring the health of passengers and crew on board the ship, said WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Earlier, the Canary Islands government announced its opposition to Spain’s plan to allow the Hondius to dock there. Its originally intended destination, Cape Verde, had also refused the ship entry.

‘Tragic echoes’ of Covid

When the MV Hondius set sail in April, it was embarking on a “voyage of adventure to some of the world’s most remote islands”, said CNN. “Whales, dolphins and penguins awaited; landscapes of icy expanses, towering cliffs and rolling green hills beckoned.”

Now, the “nearly 150 passengers” are “isolating in their cabins, trapped aboard a ship anchored in the Atlantic, taking what measures they can to shield themselves from an outbreak of a deadly virus”.

Travel vlogger Kasem Hato, who is on board, said: “Most of the people on the ship are taking the matter very calmly.” The ship’s captain and staff are keeping passengers updated at regular intervals, while the passengers themselves are keeping “busy by reading, watching movies, drinking hot beverages”. He added: “If it were going to become an epidemic, it would have happened a long time ago.”

Crew and passengers are not only “trapped” on a ship experiencing a “lethal hantavirus outbreak”, but they are also “totally isolated from the rest of the world”, said The Times. Thought to cost around £10,000 per person, the cruise has “descended into something with tragic echoes of the early days of the Covid-19 epidemic”.

Whether the ship can dock in the Canary Islands has become a “hot political issue”, said the BBC. Fernando Clavijo, the islands’ president, has called his lack of involvement in the initial decision to permit docking there an act of “institutional disloyalty” by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The head of the Island Council of Tenerife has announced her “outright and utter rejection” of the plan to allow the ship to dock in the territory.

A ‘miserable wait’

There are two possible ways passengers could have contracted hantavirus, said Thomas Jeffries of Western Sydney University on The Conversation. One is exposure while on a shore excursion, and the other is the possibility of rodents entering the ship in its cargo. “Hygiene standards and food storage practices may have caused the infection to spread more quickly.”

For investigators, the exact cause of the outbreak is a “mystery”, said The Telegraph. The Hondius “did not travel anywhere where the virus is endemic”, and Antarctic cruise ships have to adhere to “scrupulous infection control” to protect the environment. Passengers are “usually hosed down with disinfectant” before and after disembarking to avoid contaminating the area with any pathogens.

In the coming days, it may be possible to track down the source through the infected crew members, as they rarely accompany passengers on trips. “Narrowing down who went to particular locations should help pinpoint the source of the outbreak.” Unless a mouse or rat has “stowed away” on board, it is more likely that “several passengers on the ship were exposed at the same time, probably during an excursion”.

Thankfully, this is “not a new pandemic waiting to begin”, said The Telegraph. “The risk for the rest of the world is negligible.”

Having said that, isolating passengers are likely to “face a miserable wait”. Due to the incubation period of the virus, the ship may need to quarantine for up to eight weeks, and it’s likely the number of infections will rise. However, it is “unlikely to spread between passengers, so only those initially exposed will be at risk”.

Russia’s Africa Corps is reeling after an alliance of separatist and jihadist groups in Mali launched a series of attacks on the country’s Putin-backed junta government in late April. Is this merely an instance of renewed violence in a country that has seen multiple coups this century? Or does the bruising rebuke to a feared Russian expeditionary force mark a potential crisis for one of West Africa’s most powerful and demanding benefactors?

‘Limits of Moscow’s reach and military might’

The “series of reversals” experienced by Mali’s “Moscow-backed military government” has “dented Russia’s image as a self-styled security guarantor in Africa,” said Reuters. The recent violence also “threatens” Moscow’s “strategic and economic interests ​on the continent.”

The attacks across Mali by “al Qaeda-linked rebels and mostly-Muslim Tuareg tribesmen” mark a “turning point in Moscow’s influence in West Africa,” said Fox News. Russia has been “grabbing Mali’s precious minerals, including gold,” while promising to “protect the country against the rebels.” The “wave of coordinated, surprise attacks” by Malian rebels has “exposed the limits of Moscow’s reach and military might in the impoverished West African state,” said The Guardian.

In recent years, Mali had “drastically pivoted toward Russia” as the junta pushed out Western governmental support, said The New York Times. Russia has dispatched “thousands” of fighters from its Africa Corps, the military intelligence-run force born from the infamous mercenary Wagner Group that “provides security support to several African governments” in exchange for payment or “lucrative contracts for access to resources.” Mali is part of a chain of African nations, including Burkina Faso and Niger, that Moscow has “worked hard to cultivate” for both “geopolitical clout and access to mineral wealth,” said Irina Filatova, an honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town, to Reuters.

Withdrawing from Malian sites during the recent attacks “punctures the claim that Moscow could deliver where France and other Western allies could not,” particularly in the town of Kidal, which had “come to symbolize Russia’s promise” of stability, said Bloomberg. By “negotiating themselves out of Kidal” and “leaving their Malian counterparts behind,” Russia “doesn’t give a good impression of them as security partners,” Nina Wilén, the director of the Africa Programme at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations, said to the outlet.

Insurgents participating in the past week’s attacks were not expecting to “seize and control cities,” said a “security source” to La Agence France-Presse, per France 24. The goal instead was to “carry out coordinated actions in order to at least capture Kidal, which is a rather powerful symbol.”

‘Reputational damage’

The Africa Corps has “really lost credibility” in the region, said Ulf Laessing, the West Africa program lead at the Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung think tank, to Al Jazeera. Putin’s forces will “struggle to attract new clients” because they “just didn’t do their job — it’s reputational damage, what has happened.”

Russia’s potential “collapse” in Mali “threatens the region” but it also presents Washington an “opportunity to reassert the control it had foolishly relinquished,” said Hudson Institute Fellow Zineb Riboua at The Washington Post. African nations once tight with Moscow “have seen what Russian reliability looks like.” As those bonds are increasingly called into question, the U.S. should “seek to make that reversal permanent.”

The Metropolitan Police are trying to bring the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann to the UK to stand trial before the 20th anniversary of the incident next year. German national Christian Brückner was named prime suspect in her disappearance in 2022, while serving a prison sentence for the rape of an elderly woman.

“If the evidence is strong enough to extradite the prime suspect and try him here, that is what we would seek to do,” a Scotland Yard source told The Telegraph crime editor Martin Evans. “Clearly, there are numerous hurdles but our priority at the moment is to amass the strongest evidence we can against that prime suspect.”

‘Diplomatic and legal row’

The force “believes it can gather a strong enough case” for the Crown Prosecution Service to authorise charges against Brückner, said The Telegraph. A “small team of specialist detectives” are handling the missing person case, though they are building evidence for the CPS for suspected abduction and murder.

Telecoms data placed his phone in Praia da Luz around an hour before the abduction in 2007, and he had been “suspected of burgling hotel rooms and breaking into apartments and villas” in the area. In 2021, the lead prosecutor on the German investigation into Brückner, Hans Christian Wolters, said that he was “100% sure” that Brückner had murdered Madeleine McCann.

But despite Brückner remaining the only suspect in the McCann case, no charges were brought against him before he was released after his most recent sentence in September last year. Last year, he refused to be interviewed by the Met, just days before he was due to be released from prison.

Attempts to bring Brückner to British shores could provoke a “diplomatic and legal row”, said The Times. Despite the 2021 introduction of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement – a reciprocal extradition agreement – Article 16 of the German constitution retains the right to overrule extradition of its citizens to non-EU countries. If Germany refused to hand him over, it is understood that the Met would be “committed to ensuring that he still faces charges in Germany or in Portugal”.

‘Dropped off the radar’

Since his release from Sehnde prison last autumn, Brückner has “drifted around northern Germany”, “rarely staying in the same place for more than a few weeks”, said The Telegraph. Though his current whereabouts are unknown, he must wear an “ankle tag” as a condition of his release, living “under constant German police surveillance”.

He had initially relocated to Kiel on Germany’s north coast, into sheltered housing because he had reportedly “run out of money”. Following local “outcry” and the leak of his address online, he had to be escorted away from the area by German authorities. Since then, he is thought to have been living in a “makeshift campsite” in woodland near the city.

In November 2025, he was approached by ITV News reporters, “asking whether it was true that he had killed Madeleine”, said The Telegraph. Brückner responded by shouting at the news crew, and “knocked over a reporter’s microphone without answering”. After another failed attempt to relocate to a private flat, this time in Braunschweig in March 2026, he has “dropped off the radar”.

Most people likely only think of Uber for ordering rides and food, but the company wants to change this perception by expanding into a full-service travel app. The brand has announced it is partnering with Expedia for a wide variety of vacation-related services, including hotel reservations and general concierge services. The expansion is part of Uber’s effort to become an “everything app.”

‘Become the one app for everything’

The biggest change is that users can now book hotels directly on the Uber app without having to go through a third-party reservation site. By connecting with Expedia’s hotel database, Uber will offer “access to a wide selection of hotels, which will ultimately grow to more than 700,000 properties in destinations around the globe,” the company said in a press release. There is also cross-pollination with Expedia, as Uber rides “will be integrated directly in the Expedia app” starting in June 2026.

Notably, the partnership will allow Uber to offer hotel bookings “for properties in countries where it doesn’t currently offer rideshare services, if the properties are listed through Expedia,” said The Wall Street Journal. Plans to add rental property bookings through the Expedia-owned Vrbo are also in the works. Beyond hotels themselves, the company will provide specified Uber Eats “room services” that can “deliver food and any forgotten items, such as a toothbrush or phone charger, directly to the hotel,” said NBC News. There is also voice-enabled booking powered by AI.

The goal is for Uber to “become the one app for everything,” Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, said to The New York Times. The “more convenience we can bring to our consumer on a global basis, the better.” The partnership is also helping “hotels get access to travelers, get more demand, get more exposure,” which “strengthens the value proposition we bring to our hotels,” Ariane Gorin, the CEO of Expedia, told the Times.

‘There’s a catch’

Many are wondering if Uber’s new venture will make hotel rooms cheaper than competitors’ booking sites, which does indeed seem to be the case. At a Hilton hotel near Tampa International Airport, a booking through Uber with an added refund window cost $140.19, while the “same room would have cost $144” through Hilton’s website, said The Washington Post. A “reservation with a comparable refund window would have cost $165” on booking.com and $159 on hotels.com. So “Uber was the cheapest.”

But “there’s a catch” for people looking to stock up on hotel rewards points. When people “book with a third-party online travel agency” like Uber, they are “likely forgoing the brand-specific points,” said the Post. Despite this, Uber is hoping the benefits outweigh the negatives. Adding hotels could prove to be an important experiment for the business model, as the partnership “pushes Uber into a higher-value category” and “tests whether the ‘super app’ model — which has taken off in parts of Asia — can take hold in the U.S.,” said Axios.

Making the “everything app” plunge by starting with hotels does seem to be natural, as “more than 1.5 billion Uber trips took place globally outside a rider’s home city last year,” said Axios, and 100 million users ordered rides from airports. The company is “betting it can deepen its role in travel by building on behavior that already exists.”

Nine weeks since the start of Donald Trump’s Middle East war, the US and Iran “have entered a precarious standoff”, said the Financial Times. Trump says he won’t lift the blockade of Iranian ports unless Iran agrees to a deal. The Islamic regime insists it won’t resume talks or reopen the Strait of Hormuz as long as the blockade is in place. This “intransigence” caused the cancellation of a second round of talks in Islamabad – and “Trump is now stuck”.

Midterms looming

He’s “trying to look relaxed”, said James Ball in The i Paper, but it’s not very convincing. The president promised voters a strong economy, with low inflation and cheap fuel; it’s becoming obvious he will deliver on none of these things. The midterm elections are looming, and there is an even more pressing deadline ahead of him: on 1 May, it will be 60 days since Trump notified Congress of his action against Iran, at which point, on paper at least, he needs congressional approval to continue military action. So far, most Republicans have not openly criticised his unpopular war. But they would prefer to avoid voting in favour of it.

Trump’s critics believe he has “worked himself into a trap”, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal, but the situation is “sustainable”, for now. True, the war has gone on longer than hoped, but financial markets have stabilised. Trump remains popular with his base. Without taking casualties, the US navy has “consolidated a crushing blockade of Iran”; and with a third aircraft carrier in the region, military options are expanding.

The pressure on Iran is great, said Jonathan Spyer in The Spectator, but the US has made the mistake of believing its leaders think “like us”. They are not remotely pragmatic: they have “mortgaged” Iran’s economy to its project of “resistance” for decades. There appears to be no appetite now for accepting anything they “regard as surrender”.

‘This can’t go on’

Trump could cut a deal, said Paul Krugman on Substack, but it wouldn’t look like a victory. In the meantime, oil markets are pessimistic. The oil price drop that followed the 8 April ceasefire has been near reversed. The world is coping by taking oil out of storage. “Since there’s only so much oil in the tanks, this can’t go on.”

The war has removed an estimated 650 million barrels of oil from the international market, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. This could soon reach one billion. The effects are already all too visible in the Asia-Pacific region, which receives 80% of exports from the Gulf. Asian jet fuel has doubled in price. China has suspended exports of refined oil. The Indian rag trade is facing nylon and polyester shortages, because they’re made from Gulf petrochemicals. We’ve been shielded, because at the start of the war a record amount of oil was at sea, heading for Europe. It won’t last.

It’s not just Trump who has “no idea what to do”. Much of the world, including our government, is “sticking its fingers in its ears, shutting its eyes tight and loudly singing ‘la la la’”.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long held himself as a champion of nature and the outdoors, first through his decades of conservation work and now as part of President Donald Trump’s MAGA administration. At times, however, Kennedy’s fascination with the natural world has resulted in eye-opening episodes that blur for many observers the line between respectful curiosity and bizarre desecration of the very fauna he claims to revere. From ursine carcass pranks to whale-oriented road trips, these are Robert F. Kennedy’s most notable animal experiences.

Bear

The 2014 appearance of a bear carcass in Manhattan’s Central Park had remained a mystery for more than a decade until 2024, when Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, admitted in a campaign video with comedian Roseanne Barr that he was behind the bizarre episode. In the video, Kennedy claimed he’d watched a driver ahead of him hit and kill a small bear on the roadside and decided to put the carcass “in his own vehicle, intending to skin it and eat the meat,” The Associated Press said. “But the day got away from him.”

Kennedy had preexisting travel plans and “did not want to leave the dead bear in his car,” Politico said. Instead, he “planted it in the park with an old bicycle” because it would “fit a narrative about a series of bike accidents in the city.” The incident ultimately “died after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade,” Kennedy said in the clip, until The New Yorker “somehow found out about it” during the 2024 race.

Dog (?)

Allegations that RFK had eaten dog stemmed from a text to a friend featuring a photograph that “showed him pantomiming eating a cooked animal carcass,” said CNN. In the message, Kennedy allegedly “recommended the friend try eating dog while traveling in Korea,” although he has since denied eating one himself.

The picture is “me in a campfire in Patagonia on the Futaleufu River eating a goat,” Kennedy said in a Fox News interview in 2024, “which is what we eat down there.” Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul,” the text’s initial recipient said to Vanity Fair. He was “certainly representing that this was a dog and not a goat,” they added, calling the whole affair “grotesque.”

Mice

RFK Jr. is a “predator” about whom the previous generation of storied Kennedys “would be disgusted,” said former First Daughter and onetime U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy in a scathing letter to Congress denouncing her cousin’s then-nomination process in early 2025. While largely focused on RFK’s potential impact on national health, Kennedy, in a shocking paragraph, said her cousin, in his younger years, “enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.”

The effect, Kennedy said, was often a “perverse scene of despair and violence.” The allegations describe a “power play to those forced to watch” and show signs of RFK being a “terrible bird handler,” said The Independent. “Who feeds a hawk puréed food?”

Raccoon

In her “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise” biography of the secretary, investigative journalist Isabel Vincent drew on “dozens of sources, both new and old, including journals updated daily by Kennedy between 1999 and 2001,” said People. In one such entry, Kennedy “boasts of cutting the penis from a dead raccoon he found on the side of a highway, while his kids waited in the car,” The New York Times said.

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road-killed raccoon,” Kennedy said, “thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be.” Kennedy “wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid,” said Vincent to People. He has a “great love and interest in animals” and a “freezer full of roadkill, I'm sure, where he studies it.”

Whale

When RFK’s daughter Kick Kennedy was six years old, “word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port,” said Town & Country in a 2012 feature on Kennedy and her infamous family. The elder Kennedy drove to the site, “cut off the whale’s head” with a chainsaw and then “bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco,” the outlet said.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car,” Kick said to T&C. “It was the rankest thing on the planet.” After the episode resurfaced during the 2024 election, Kennedy said at an Arizona rally that he was being investigated for “collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago.” He also “implied without evidence” that the investigation was itself “tied to his endorsement” of Donald Trump, The Associated Press said. In October, 2024, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration announced in a statement to The Hill that it had closed an investigation into the decades-old claim, having “determined the allegation to be unfounded.”

Worm

In a 2012 deposition, RFK Jr. described a period several years earlier when, feeling fatigued and mentally hazy, he’d scheduled a procedure to treat what he’d been told was a brain tumor. But, while “packing for the trip,” he was contacted by a second doctor with a “different opinion,” The New York Times said.

Kennedy, the doctor believed, “had a dead parasite in his head.” The parasite had “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Kennedy said in the deposition, as reviewed by the Times. “The issue was resolved more than 10 years ago,” Kennedy’s then-presidential campaign said in a statement to CNN during the 2024 presidential race. The candidate is in “robust physical and mental health.” Kennedy himself made light of his cranial condition in a post on X in May 2024. “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms,” Kennedy said, “and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.”

It is “one of the strangest conundrums in modern zoological history”, said The Guardian: “what to do with the descendants of Pablo Escobar’s hippos?”

The animals, which the drug kingpin imported into Colombia, were left to “roam free” and multiply after Escobar was killed in 1993. Now the “feral” pack has become “such an environmental blight, they are facing a mass extermination”.

But they may have found “an unlikely stay of execution”: Anant Ambani, son of the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has once again offered them shelter.

Narco-pets

In the 1980s, the infamous Colombian drug lord illegally imported a plethora of exotic animals to fill his private zoo, including four hippopotamuses – dubbed the “cocaine hippos”, said The Independent. After Escobar’s death, most of the menagerie were relocated, but the enormous hippos were “left behind because they were difficult to move”.

They were abandoned to “go feral on the cocaine baron’s vast private Naples estate”, said The Times. But they multiplied, and spread “far beyond” the hacienda to “the lush river banks of Colombia’s Magdalena River”. An estimated 200 are now “roaming the muddy basin, attacking fishermen and steadily devastating the fragile ecosystem”.

Colombia made various attempts to control the population, including castration, but “to no avail”, said the BBC. The dearth of predators in the “fertile and swampy Antioquia region” provided “the perfect conditions” for them to thrive. Experts say the hippos, believed to be the biggest herd outside Africa, constitute “an invasive species”.

In 2023, the local authority proposed relocating 60 to Ambani’s private animal sanctuary, Vantara, in the Indian state of Gujarat. But “the logistical problems of capturing and moving the hippos” – who weigh up to two tonnes each – stymied the plan, said The Guardian. Taking them to their natural habitat in Africa isn’t feasible, given their limited gene pool and chance of carrying diseases.

After warnings that numbers could swell to more than 1,000 in the next few years, Colombia announced this month that the herd would “begin to be formally hunted and culled”.

‘Living, sentient beings’

Ambani, the son of a telecoms tycoon (and India’s richest man), said this week he’d appealed to the Colombian government to reconsider its decision, and allow the “safe, scientifically led translocation” of nearly half the herd to his private zoo.

“These 80 hippos did not choose where they were born, nor did they create the circumstances they now face,” Ambani wrote in a letter published on the zoo’s Instagram. “They are living, sentient beings, and if we have the ability to save them through a safe and humane solution, we have a responsibility to try.”

Colombia has not commented on the offer. But Vantara, which describes itself as “the world’s largest wildlife rescue centre”, has been the subject of repeated controversy.

The sprawling complex is home to 150,000 animals of 2,000 species, including elephants, tigers, lions and bears – but no hippos. Conservationists say the zoo is unsuitable for some species given the climate; temperatures in the Jamnagar region can soar above 40C. Vantara has also been accused of illegally acquiring and mistreating animals. Last year India’s Supreme Court ordered an investigation into the allegations, and claims that the sanctuary was “being used as a ‘private vanity project’,” said The Telegraph.

President Donald Trump has long understood the power of a brand name — specifically his. And as world leaders flatter and impress upon him the merits of their prospective partnerships, his very name has become a global currency for appealing to his ego. From crucial transportation corridors to wholesale swaths of European countryside, these are the international Trump-titled pitches.

‘Donnyland’ in Ukraine

A growing push to name Ukraine’s embattled Donbas region after the president may be the “most improbable instance” of Trump’s name being “lent to a geopolitical flashpoint,” said The New York Times. Ukrainian officials have reportedly pitched renaming an approximately 2,000 square mile section of the Donetsk area of the Donbas as “Donnyland.”

The idea was “raised partly in jest but also as a diplomatic gesture,” The Kyiv Independent said. The “appeal to Trump’s vanity” has yet to be reflected in “official documents” from the ongoing Ukrainian peace negotiations, however. What’s important is that the Donbas’ various regions “remain Ukraine,” said Zelenskyy to reporters. “As long as it’s not ‘Putinland.’ That is the most important thing.”

Still, it could be in Ukraine’s long-term interests to apply Trump’s branding to their territory, said RAND Corporation Political Scientist Samuel Charap at the Times. Ukraine would likely see having a “Trump imprimatur on a free economic zone” as “something of a deterrent” against Russian aggression.

‘Fort Trump’ in Poland

First pitched publicly by Polish then-President Andrzej Duda during a 2018 White House visit, plans for a $2 billion Fort Trump military base ultimately fizzled before they were resurrected in the first year of Trump’s second term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “talked about the fact that I hope that Fort Trump, which we talked about” during Trump’s first term, will “really be established,” Duda said to The Associated Press after a series of Warsaw meetings with American officials in 2025.

The proposal returned as Polish officials work to “preserve the U.S. commitment to NATO” over “growing” fears of Russian aggression, the AP said. Polish lawmakers are “convinced” that a strong U.S. alliance and a “high level of spending on defense will help its cause.”

The plans were initially met with public skepticism in Poland when first raised in 2018. Critics “castigated” Duda for what they framed as his “craven behavior,” said The New York Times. “What an embarrassment in front of the entire world,” said Polish lawmaker Tomasz Siemoniak on X, per the Times. “Even leaders of banana republics had more respect for themselves” than Duda.

‘Trump Heights’ in Israel

As thanks for Trump’s 2019 presidential recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the contested Golan Heights, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that he would “bring to the government a resolution calling for a new community on the Golan Heights” to be named on Trump’s behalf. Despite a high-profile groundbreaking ceremony, a “large-scale influx of new residents never materialized,” said The Times of Israel. Still, after Trump’s 2024 reelection, residents hoped their namesake’s victory would “breathe new life into this tiny, remote community.”

‘Trump National Golf Course’ in Syria

When a group of wealthy Syrian investors seeking sanction relief for a luxury rebuilding project for their war-torn nation turned to Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) for advice, his message was simple. “I know how to get the president’s attention,” Wilson said during a meeting with the group. “Make it a Trump National Golf Course in Syria.”

The group, however, was “way ahead of the congressman,” with one member bragging that he “already planned to propose a Trump-branded resort,” said MS NOW. This type of “mixing of personal and diplomatic affairs” has “long been the norm in Middle Eastern nations,” said The New York Times, which first reported the meeting. The blending has “become the way Washington operates in Mr. Trump’s second term too.”

‘Trump Park’ in Israel

Trump “took a brave and unprecedented step that none of his predecessors were willing to take,” Mayor David Even Tzur of the Israeli city of Kiryat Yam said, per Arutz Sheva, after Trump’s 2017 declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. “We must honor him for it.”

Kiryat Yam subsequently invested $1.4 million in a nearly two-acre Trump Park that borders an “existing science park in the center of the city,” said The Times of Israel. “I am grateful for your gesture,” said Trump in a letter to Tzur, according to The Forward. Trump was “moved to know that the people of Israel are encouraged by my decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”

‘Trump Promenade’ in Israel

Donald Trump is “Israel’s best friend ever,” said Netanyahu at a 2025 groundbreaking ceremony for a seaside promenade in the president’s honor in the central Israeli city of Bat Yam. The concept of this “President Donald Trump Promenade,” said The Jerusalem Post, “originated from Trump’s idea to turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront property.” Israel has “wonderful beachside properties here,” Netanyahu said Trump had told him, clarifying that Trump had been “talking about one that’s a bit to the south here, in Gaza.”

“This is so great,” Trump said in a “personal note” to Netanyahu following the naming ceremony. The message was written on a printout of a post Netanyahu made on X showing the groundbreaking ceremony, the Post said.

‘Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity’ between Azerbaijan and Armenia

A key feature of a fragile brokered peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity “promises to become a vital connectivity link between Europe and Asia” that “could go down as” one of Trump’s “most impressive foreign policy achievements” since reelection, said the Atlantic Council. The project’s name was a “concession” sure to “delight Trump,” CNN said, as the president sought to “brand himself in his first six months in office as a global peacemaker.”

Though the project’s stakeholders “share the ambition” that the rail portion of the route “can be completed by 2028 and the end of Trump’s presidency,” the peace process is “still at an early stage,” said the Carnegie Russia Urasia Center. Local groups in the region are also “far less engaged in it than the leaders are.” The plan has elicited a minimal response from Russia, which is “cautious not to antagonize a U.S. administration led by Trump, whose name is tied to the project.”

The U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has had a tangible effect on the economy in the Middle East, and the conflict is also making things more expensive for Americans at home. Increasing oil prices resulting from the war have cascading consequences, and while things like gasoline are most obviously affected, other products are also getting pricier.

Clothes

Supply chain issues with crude oil are raising the cost of the oil’s building blocks, called petrochemicals. Six of these petrochemicals are the “major foundations of plastics and synthetic materials like nylon and polyesters,” said The Associated Press. When petrochemicals become more expensive, it is often accompanied by a spike in clothing prices.

To make a button-down shirt, for example, the “materials account for 27%-30% of the cost a manufacturer incurs,” Andrew Walberer, a partner at the global strategy and management consultancy Kearney, told the AP. Experts are “warning consumers to budget for price increases of 10 to 15%” in clothing if the petrochemicals’ costs continue to rise, said the South China Morning Post.

Condoms

People may not assume safe sex would be impacted by the war, but the world’s largest condom manufacturer, Karex, is planning to “raise prices by 20% to 30% and possibly further if supply chain disruptions drag on due to the Iran war,” said The Guardian. Karex, a Malaysian company, supplies more than 5 billion condoms annually to global manufacturers, including major brands sold in the U.S. like Trojan and Durex.

Karex is being forced to raise its prices because the company “has seen a cost increase for synthetic rubber, nitrile, ‌aluminum foil and silicone oil,” said Inc. magazine. While still seeing high demand, the company is “currently faced with rising freight costs and shipping delays, leading to its customers carrying lower stockpiles” of Karex’s products.

Cosmetics

The war in Iran is even “seeping into the cosmetics supply chain, pushing up the cost of everything from plastic jars and ​lipstick tubes to transport, and reminding the beauty industry that even a tub of face cream depends on fragile ‌global trade routes,” said Reuters. The most notable sector being affected is the Korean beauty industry, which has a large following in the United States.

Due to the unstable cost and raw material prices of petrochemicals, the “unit prices of most products will inevitably be increased,” cosmetics company Luxepack Korea said in a press release, per The Washington Post. Many similar cosmetic brands “aren’t sure how much longer they can absorb rising production costs.”

Gasoline

This one is probably the most obvious: spiking oil prices are causing costs at the pump to skyrocket. On April 29, gas prices “hit a fresh record since the start of the war with Iran, rising to an average nationwide of $4.23 per gallon,” said NBC News, citing data from AAA. The price of Brent crude, the benchmark for international petroleum, also “stands at $114.60, up nearly 25% from the recent low seen April 17.”

It may be unlikely that gas prices will come down anytime soon. President Donald Trump has “told aides to prepare for a long blockade to throttle Iran’s economy by blocking Iranian oil shipments,” said The Guardian. The number of ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz is “now at its lowest level since the start of the war.”

Toys

Like clothes, many stuffed plush toys are “made with polyester and acrylic, synthetic fibers derived from petroleum,” said the AP, so rising prices could similarly impact the toy industry. Suppliers in China have notified Aleni Brands, the company behind popular plush lines like Bizzikins, that “getting the materials already was costing them 10% to 15% more.”

Notable production hurdles are also being experienced by a “cluster of manufacturers in Shantou, a city located 190 miles northeast of Hong Kong, which produces a third of the world’s toys,” said The New York Times. Other child-adjacent products, including crayons, are additionally facing shortages due to petrochemical supply chain issues.

President Donald Trump is, by his own repeated admissions, first and foremost a businessman. Even after entering the rarified echelons of hegemonic decision-making, he often touts his track record as a corporate wheeler-dealer as proof he's prepared for the pressures of managing a geopolitical superpower. Now, as commander in chief, Trump has seemingly merged the political with the profitable. From teasing tariffs to raking in royalties, the president has used the Oval Office for his own financial interests in many ways. (edited)

Cryptocurrency

Of all the various Trump-linked business projects operating concurrently with the president’s administration, “none” pose a conflict of interest that can “compare to those that have emerged since the birth” of cryptocurrency firm World Liberty Financial, said The New York Times. Trump is now “not only a major crypto dealer” but one of the industry’s “top policy makers,” whose family-owned foray into digital currency is “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy.”

During the first year of his second term, Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, thereby establishing federal regulations that the “industry had sought around stablecoins, a kind of cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar,” said Time. “Earlier that year,” Trump launched USD1, “his own stablecoin business.”

World Liberty also offers “governance tokens,” which can be purchased to offer owners “certain voting rights in its business, though not equity stakes,” The Associated Press said. The result? “Hundreds of millions of dollars” for Trump and his family from his World Liberty ownership and a “separate side deal allowing them a cut of these sales.”

Real estate development

You can take the president out of the cutthroat world of elite property deals, but you can’t take the elite property deals out of the president. At least that is how Trump seems to have operated since taking office, with his geopolitical responsibilities in office often overlapping with international development deals being pursued in his corporate name.

While the eponymous Trump Organization “did zero deals in foreign countries” during the first Trump term, it has done at least eight in his second, “all ostensibly complying with the Trump Organization’s self-imposed rule not to do business directly with foreign governments,” said the AP. But “authoritarian” and one-party states “rarely take a hands-off approach” when it comes to big business deals — “especially when the business belongs to a sitting president.”

The president “continues to profit” from his partnership with a “major Saudi developer with a history of close ties to the royal family,” said The New Yorker. This past winter, the Trump organization began “licensing its name” for the development of a “new golf club, a luxury hotel and a number of mansions in Diriyah, near Riyadh.” It has also “sold the use of the president’s name for a Trump Plaza development in Jeddah.”

Tariffs

In his second term, Trump has centered tariffs as a load-bearing policy of his entire administration. But to “truly understand why Donald Trump likes tariffs so much,” said Jen Psaki on MS NOW, “you have to look at the Trump International real estate development” project moving forward in Vietnam.

Trump’s threat to slap the Vietnamese government with exorbitantly high tariffs on the self-titled “liberation day” came amid a push for luxury developments in and around the country. Hanoi was facing “intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs,” said The New York Times. That pressure prompted Vietnamese officials to request support from the top levels of government, as the project was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally,” per a letter obtained by the Times.

Trump’s “freewheeling use of tariffs as a tool of American power” has seen him apply the economic measure toward “national security goals, as well as the interests of individual companies,” The Washington Post said. Tariffs are a “tool the president enjoys because it’s personal power,” former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said at HuffPo.

With tariffs, Trump doesn’t “have to go through Congress” and can “exercise personal power” instead. Tariffs, to Trump, are a “potent and unilateral mechanism for reintroducing systematic corruption into the economy,” said Mother Jones. Controlling tariffs allows the White House to “grant waivers and exemptions,” which forces “people, corporations, localities and even nations and foreign actors to come seeking reprieve on bended knee.”

Tchotchkes and royalties

The first year of Trump’s second term in office was a “lucrative” one when it came to “royalty payments for the various goods that are sold featuring his name and likeness,” said NBC News. Per his 2025 financial disclosure forms, Trump that year earned more than $1 million from sales of his “45 guitar, which features Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ phrase inlaid in ‘authentic pearl’ on the neck of the guitar, as well as the “number ‘45’ on the headstock, referring to his time as the 45th president of the United States,” said Fox Business.

The disclosure forms also list him as earning $2.5 million in royalties from “Trump Sneakers and Fragrances” and an additional $1.3 million from the “Greenwood Bible,” inspired by singer Lee Greenwood — a frequent Trump supporter — and his “God Bless the U.S.A.” anthem. “Besides a King James Version translation,” Trump’s bible contains “the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as a handwritten chorus of the famous Greenwood song,” The Associated Press said.

Trump’s licensing and merchandise windfalls come after he “launched a number of new licensing deals” in late 2024, a “couple of weeks before taking the oath of office,” Time said.

Settlements and suit threats

Since returning to office, the famously litigious Trump has raked in at least $90 million in lawsuit settlements from tech and media juggernauts, including X, Meta and Paramount, The New York Times said, even as many of Trump’s suits weren’t “justified on the merits.” Several of those high-profile settlements were then used to “help fund the creation of Donald Trump’s presidential library,” The New Republic said.

The Miami-based site, which, in a “perfect Trumpian twist may also double as a hotel,” has earned congressional notice for its unique funding origins. “Not one” of the companies whose settlement funds are being applied “can say with any clarity where their multimillion-dollar donations to Donald Trump’s library slush fund are or where they will go,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said to The New Republic.

Scrutiny over Trump’s settlement-funded library comes as the White House is “engaged in discussions’ with the president’s IRS and Treasury Departments to “resolve” a $10 billion lawsuit filed this past winter that accuses the agencies of an “unauthorized leak of his tax information during his first administration,” CNN said. Trump filed that suit “personally, not in his official capacity as president,” although any monetary settlement would see “Trump’s own administration paying him and his family.”

Like father, like sons

For as much as Trump has expanded the horizons of potential presidential profiteering, so too have his eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric, done the same for the Trump dynasty. Last spring, the pair “contributed their family name — and nothing else of obvious value — to a complicated series of transactions” to take a significant stake in the cryptocurrency mining firm American Bitcoin, said The New Yorker. Had their father lost in 2024, “surely” they wouldn’t have been granted “such a large stake in a business that they had virtually no experience in and to which they had contributed so little.”

As the pair’s “new drone company seeks Pentagon contracts,” other government contracting companies in which at least one brother owns an ownership stake “are taking in tens of millions of dollars of new taxpayer money,” the AP said. Still, the notion that Donald Jr. should “cease living his life and making a living to provide for his five kids” simply because of his father is “quite frankly, a laughable and ridiculous standard,” said a family spokesperson to the outlet.

The case of an “off-grid” Anglo-Australian couple whose children were removed by authorities has divided Italy. Nathan Trevallion, a British former chef, and Australian ex-horse trainer Catherine Birmingham were raising three children in a stone farmhouse in the woods of the mountainous Abruzzo region. But the children were taken into care last year, when the family ended up in hospital after eating poisonous foraged mushrooms.

The couple have been battling to get their children back, filing an appeal with the court in regional capital L’Aquila. In the meantime, the family has become a cause célèbre for the far-right, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressing her “alarm” and declaring that “children are not of the state”.

Remote ‘paradise’

The couple moved to a two-room cottage in Abruzzo’s “remote woodland” in 2021, said The Times. They hoped to “build an off-grid paradise”, growing their own food and homeschooling their daughter, Utopia Rose, now eight, and twins Bluebell and Galorian, seven.

The family would “draw water from a well” and “produce electricity from solar panels”, said The Telegraph. Their house is surrounded by wildlife, including wolves. They slept in one room and used a lavatory in a wooden outhouse, but had a car for shopping in the nearby village of Palmoli, as well as a computer and mobile phones.

But in 2025, when the entire family was hospitalised after eating poisonous mushrooms, their “woodland existence” became known to authorities. Police officers who inspected their home reported the family to social services, who described the farmhouse as “a dilapidated ruin” that was unacceptable for young children. The family “fled to Spain”, then to Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, before returning to their “little patch of wilderness”.

Five months ago, a juvenile court in L’Aquila ordered that the children be put into care. Prosecutors said the children were being raised in “challenging and harmful” environment, without sanitation, formal education or medical supervision. Their mother was initially allowed to live in a room in the same building as her children. But she was “ejected in March”, said The Times, “accused of turning them against staff”.

Cause célèbre

The decision to remove the children “sparked a fierce debate in the country over alternative lifestyles”, said The Guardian. Both parents have given interviews “generating support from thousands” who want the family kept together, and backlash against the magistrate who ordered the children’s removal.

“We live outside of the system, this is what they’re accusing us of,” Trevallion told La Repubblica. “They are ruining the life of a happy family.” Birmingham told a press conference: “This has been by far the cruellest thing I have experienced and personally seen done to children in my life.”

The Italian far-right has “seized upon the case in the name of educational freedom”, said Le Monde, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini likening the case to a kidnapping. Trevallion and Birmingham, “foreigners without clear professional activity, not integrated into Italian society and living in informal housing”, have become improbable “victims to be defended” by a faction that is usually “less sympathetic to such profiles”. But, for Salvini's party, which is linked to Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson, the “forest family” has become “a top priority”, used to “fuel its anti-judge rhetoric, portraying magistrates as enemies of family liberties”.

The couple are currently renovating the farmhouse, adding running water and electricity to comply with social services’ requirements. They are also considering moving into an apartment on the edge of the woods that was offered free by the mayor, as a temporary solution. A decision on whether they can have their children back is possible as soon as next month.

“Dying people in California could soon get support from a familiar face,” said The Times. Nicole Kidman has revealed she is training to become a death doula following the painful loss of her mother, Janelle, who died in 2024 aged 84.

The Oscar-winning actor admitted her new venture “sounds a little weird”. But she told an audience at the University of San Francisco she had discovered there was “only so much the family could provide” as her mother approached the end of her life. “That’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.’”

Bridging the gap

A death doula works in a “similar capacity” to a birth doula, said PhD candidate Syman Braun Freck on The Conversation. Instead of assisting a mother during pregnancy and childbirth, a death doula is a “community partner offering support to the dying”. They act as a “neutral third party”, inhabiting a space between family, medical professionals and funeral directors.

Death used to be a “sacred communal process” that took place within the “comfort” of the family home. But during the late 19th and early 20th century dying became “institutionalised” and “medicalised”, and loved ones were “pushed to the wayside”.

This gap in end-of-life care opened a space for a “host of paraprofessionals” and led in the early 2000s to the re-emergence of the “ancient practice” of death doulas.

These individuals aren’t medically trained. They provide practical, spiritual and emotional support for clients, helping them “navigate fear and uncertainty about death and what might come after it”, said The New York Times. Death doulas also assist people expressing their wishes for end-of-life care, help to facilitate “meaningful conversations with their families”, and provide guidance for loved ones left behind.

Meaningful ends

There has been a “rapid” rise in the number of people training to become death doulas in recent years, Dr Emma Clare, chief executive of End of Life Doula UK, told The Times. The charity has around 450 members, after more than 100 joined last year. And it’s not just those with a terminal illness who are using the service; since the pandemic, more “healthy 30-somethings” have also been seeking death doulas to plan a meaningful end to life. The NHS has started to recognise this work, in some cases commissioning doulas to provide additional palliative care for people dying at home.

“I wasn’t surprised” that Nicole Kidman chose to embark on her new venture after losing her mother, said death doula Anna Lyons in The Times. “People often enter into this line of work following grief. You suddenly understand what kind of support is needed.”

I work with people from diagnosis until they die, and support their families after they’re gone. “My role is primarily to listen” and “be a witness to the end of their life”, ensuring they don’t have to go through it alone. There is something “very beautiful about being able to help somebody” in this way. “It is a privilege.”

It is a “lovely thing that everybody should have the opportunity to utilise”, said Eva Wiseman in The Observer. And the “true benefit” of a celebrity doula could lie not in helping you to find peace in your final days, but instead in bringing “distraction from it”. To spend your last moments “holding the manicured hand of a person you loved (in “Moulin Rouge” and “The Others”) would not only add some sparkle to the painful mundanity of death but also, surely, provide meaning when we need it most”.

“Samantha Niblett’s Summer of Sex.” It sounds like something the police would have shut down in the “grubbiest era of Soho peep shows”, said Madeline Grant in The Spectator. But it is, in fact – “just as the world teeters on the brink of geopolitical collapse” – an “actual initiative” announced by a Labour MP last week.

Awash with sex

Niblett, the “dignity-phobic” member for South Derbyshire, said she wants to encourage “open, inclusive, lifelong sex education”, and have a “national conversation” about pleasure, including the benefits of masturbation. As part of her “Summer of Sex” scheme (launched with the appallingly ungrammatical tagline: “Yes Sex Please, We’re British!”) she has teamed up with Cindy Gallop, the founder of an adult website. Together, they’re planning a series of events, including a sex toy exhibition in Parliament. Really? Is there “literally no area of life” that’s safe from “government intervention”?

Fifty-odd years ago, when people thought you could “lose your virginity by riding a bicycle”, this sort of campaign might have had its place, said Shane Watson in The Times. “But, my goodness, where have you been, Niblett?” You can’t move for people talking about sex these days: the world is awash with porn and sex toys; it’s hard to switch on the TV without seeing a sex scene.

Noble stand

Maybe so, said Rowan Pelling in The Daily Telegraph, but I still think Niblett is taking a “noble stand”. She believes, surely rightly, that issues such as consent and sexual abuse are still not well enough understood. And she and Gallop are in fact campaigning against the warping effects of hardcore porn. (Gallop’s website is called Make Love Not Porn.)

I agree that people’s attitudes need a reset, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times: the rising prevalence of choking, hair-pulling and “other abusive behaviours that porn dresses up as sexy” proves this. But Britain doesn’t need more sexual liberation, sex toys or online porn, even if it’s “ethical” porn.

Niblett should be teaching people – especially those who grew up with internet porn – that sex shouldn’t be degrading; it’s about intimacy and understanding other people. Understand that, and they will have “many happy summers – and years – of sex”.

Apple founder Steve Jobs created the iPhone and cultivated a rockstar reputation for innovation. His successor, Tim Cook, turned the company into a globe-spanning colossus of profit. What will the next CEO, John Ternus, do to build on their legacies?

The 51-year-old Ternus “knows Apple at its core” after a quarter-century at the company, said CNN. As a senior executive since 2021, Ternus “led the hardware engineering behind Apple’s most recognizable products” like the iPhone and iPad and was “essential” in developing the new mid-price MacBook Neo.

His promotion to CEO “isn’t much of a surprise,” given that he had been seen as a front-runner to succeed Cook “for at least the last year,” CNN said. His task is to position the company for further success in the age of artificial intelligence. Ternus faces pressure to “produce success out of the gates,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note.

An ‘Apple lifer’

Ternus is a “safe choice in a dangerous moment” for Apple, said Semafor. Cook replaced Jobs when Apple was at the “height of its influence” and built it into the first company with a $1 million market cap. The company is “still a financial juggernaut” though it does not command its former cultural cachet. Ternus is an “Apple lifer” unlikely to take Apple in a “radical new direction” that would “squander its lucrative business.” But his ascension comes as AI transforms the “entire concept of computing and technology.”

The “defining challenge” for Ternus is “fixing the company’s AI strategy,” said CNBC. Apple has so far avoided “hefty capital expenditures” on AI data centers and “punted” on its own AI model. Instead, Apple has bet that consumers will use its iPhones and other products to run AI. Choosing Ternus as CEO signals the company’s belief that the “future of AI will run through tightly integrated devices, not just software,” the University of Notre Dame’s Timothy Hubbard said to CNBC.

Apple faces an “existential challenge” figuring out “what comes after the iPhone,” said Axios. Cook “executed masterfully” to maximize iPhone’s success but “largely sputtered” with new products like the Vision Pro and a failed attempt at building autonomous cars. Companies like Meta and Google are pushing smart glasses, and former Apple design guru Jony Ive is designing hardware for OpenAI. A new leadership era opens with Apple “chasing its next hit” product. Cook demonstrated that Apple can grow. Ternus instead “must prove that it can still innovate.”

Making ‘first-rate physical things’

Apple has put the “hardware guy in charge,” said The Wall Street Journal, and is betting on itself as a “maker of first-rate physical things” in an AI-dominated world. That means navigating “complex geopolitics threatening Apple’s supply chain” and countless “regulatory battles around the world.”

Ternus is expected to “bring back Jobs-era decisiveness” to Apple’s CEO suite, said Bloomberg. Cook was known for “incrementalism” in moving the company’s product line forward, Forrester Research’s Dipanjan Chatterjee said in a note. Ternus “must define Apple’s future as ferociously as he defends its past.”

The FBI and a congressional committee are investigating the mysterious cases of 10 missing or dead scientists and staff who worked at sensitive nuclear or space technology laboratories.

Social media has “lit up” with theories about the disappearances and deaths, said CBS News, as speculation has “swirled” about whether they are part of an effort to “harm” US nuclear or space programmes.

‘Sinister connection’

William Neil McCasland, a retired US air force general now director of technology at an aerospace defence firm, went missing from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 27 February.

Investigators soon became aware of other aerospace and nuclear officials and researchers who have gone missing or died in mysterious circumstances. These cases included a nuclear physicist and MIT professor who was fatally shot outside his Massachusetts home, an aerospace engineer who went missing during a hike in Los Angeles, and two scientists working on nuclear fusion and astrophysics who were murdered in their homes.

“The similar circumstances of some of the disappearances” and the subjects’ involvement in sensitive and secret research have “fuelled speculation about whether coordinated foul play or foreign espionage may be involved”, said The Hill.

The FBI confirmed it is “spearheading the effort to look for connections” between the 10 cases that have come to light and the Republican-led House Oversight Committee said it will examine “questions about a possible sinister connection”. In a post on X, Nasa said that it was cooperating with the investigations, but “at this time, nothing related to Nasa indicates a national security threat”.

The speculation has drawn in the US president. “I hope it’s random, but we’re going to know in the next week and a half,” Donald Trump told reporters, confirming that an investigation was under way. It is “pretty serious stuff” but “hopefully a coincidence, or whatever you want to call it”.

‘People do just die’

People familiar with the cases said that what “underlies” these deaths and disappearances is “not a spy-thriller plot”, but “something more personal and tragic”, said CBS News.

McCasland’s wife said in a Facebook post that it “seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets”, pointing out that her husband retired from the air force more than 12 years ago.

Julia Hicks, the daughter of Michael David Hicks, a scientist who worked at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and died in 2023, told CNN there is “no train of logic” connecting her father’s death to that of other scientists. “I can’t help but laugh about it, but at the same time, it’s getting serious,” she said.

The cases are “scattered across several years at different and only loosely affiliated organisations”, said Joseph Rodgers, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If all of the scientists were working on one project or weapons system, then I’d be more suspicious,” he said.

A former US Department of Energy official was more succinct. “People do just die,” they said.

Allbirds is making a complete heel turn after the shoe brand announced its pivot to AI. And many are skeptical that the footwear company will succeed in making such a big switch to the convoluted tech space. But Allbirds is just the latest in a list of companies that got their start in one industry, then changed to something quite different.

Android

Android cellphones have become as ubiquitous as iPhones in modern years, but the company didn’t start out in the phone game. The brand was launched in 2003, originally “conceived as an operating system for digital cameras,” said software development company Velvetech. By the time Android got up and running, the “market for digital cameras significantly fell,” whereas the “mobile device market was constantly growing.”

The company was forced to pivot to stay alive and began producing an operating system with more widespread uses. It is now used “primarily for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other wearable devices,” said IT brand Spiceworks.

Nintendo

Nintendo has always made games but probably not the kind you’re thinking of. The company was started in 1889 when its founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, began producing Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda in Kyoto. By 1902, Yamauchi “started manufacturing the first Western-style playing cards in Japan,” said Nintendo’s website. The company began growing in size throughout the mid-20th century.

By the 1970s, Nintendo realized it had to make a change to keep up with the times, and in 1975 “began the development of its first electronic video game systems,” said BBC News. In 1978, Nintendo “produced a computer game version of the board game Othello” and has since been responsible for producing some of the most iconic video games franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong.

Nokia

Nokia has made perhaps the biggest one-eighty of the companies on this list. While known today for its industrial-strength cellphones, the company started in the 1860s as something wholly different: a wood pulp mill in Finland. This mill was the first step in the mass production of paper. The modern company was eventually formed as a “merger between the Nokia Company (paper), Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works in 1867,” said the Crypto Museum, a Dutch virtual museum.

Prior to its eventual focus on cellphones, Nokia became a bit of an everything brand. It has been “involved in the production of paper, rubber, electricity, car and bicycle tires, footwear, communication cables, television sets, consumer electronics, personal computers, robotics, capacitors, plastics, aluminium, chemicals, mobile phones and last but not least: military communications equipment,” said the Crypto Museum.

Slack

Slack is used today as a business-to-business chat tool by numerous companies and industries. Yet it originated in the 2010s as an “internal communication tool” for the “quirky online multiplayer game Glitch,” said Encyclopedia Britannica. The video game garnered positive reviews, but its “creators found the game to be expensive and unwieldy.” They soon started looking for alternative ways to implement the technology.

This arrived in the form of a rebrand: Slack, a “provider of a messaging tool for facilitating workplace communication, an ‘email killer’ and the ultimate collaboration app,” said TechCrunch. Today, Slack is “used by more than 100,000 organizations, including 77 of the Fortune 100 companies, demonstrating the network effect of a mature and innovative product,” according to the company itself.

Volkswagen

Volkswagen has always sold cars. But in this case, it’s the company’s history that represents a major redirect. The brand is well-known for its associations with the Nazis during World War II: In 1937, Adolf Hitler’s party “founded a state-owned company that was later named Volkswagen, or ‘The People's Car Company,’” said NPR. Volkswagen leadership would eventually disavow its Nazi ties.

The pivot came in modern times, as Volkswagen shifted from supporting antisemitic Nazi Germany to negotiating weapons deals with the state of Israel. In a tinge of irony, Volkswagen, which “produced parts using forced labor for V-1 cruise missiles used by the Wehrmacht during World War II, may soon be manufacturing parts for an Israeli-designed missile defense system,” said Haaretz.

YouTube

YouTube is best known as the video platform where you can watch just about any kind of video. But it was originally started in 2004 by three PayPal employees who had an “idea for a website for users to upload video dating profiles,” said Business Insider. The company was even trademarked on Valentine’s Day. As a dating site, YouTube “attracted little interest, forcing the co-founder to take out ads paying women $20 to upload dating videos.”

Then people began “uploading videos of all kinds to YouTube,” said Business Insider, and the website took off as a general platform. Today, over “20 million videos are uploaded daily” on YouTube, with an estimated 20 billion total videos on the site, the company said.

Before 2000, single fathers by choice were “virtually unheard of”, said The Atlantic. But in the past few years, this population has been growing “notably”.

English law changed in 2019 to give single parents the same rights as couples over surrogate children. Since then, the number of men applying to become sole parents of surrogate babies has tripled, according to data cited in The Times. The number is still “a tiny percentage” of the total applications, but it reflects “a growing trend”.

‘Go it alone’

There aren’t many reliable figures documenting the number of men “deciding to go it alone”, said The Guardian. Most surveys don’t differentiate single fathers by choice from widowers, or separated/divorced men. But according to the Office for National Statistics, about 15% of the UK’s single-parent households are headed by dads.

“We are seeing more men wanting to adopt than in recent years,” said Natalie Gamble, a lawyer specialising in surrogacy law. Since 2019, “the options are opening up. More British surrogates are willing to be matched with fathers.”

Many applying to become single fathers by surrogacy are gay – but not all. Some have either “struggled to find a relationship” or left partners because of “incompatible approaches to having children”, said The Telegraph. This is a “family type that does seem to be on the rise”, said Catherine Jones, a family psychology expert at King’s College London.

The “main hurdle” for surrogacy is “money rather than stigma”, she said. In the UK, it is illegal to advertise for a surrogate, or that you’re willing to become one. Single men often look to Cyprus or Belarus to find surrogate mothers. Many complain that the law in the UK is “yet to catch up with the fact that single men can now much more easily pursue fatherhood in this way”.

The increasing number of single men becoming surrogate parents has caused concern among some campaigners. “The checks on single men undertaking surrogacy are not remotely comparable to those we see in cases of adoption,” said Helen Gibson, from campaign group Surrogacy Concern.

But some single men turn to surrogacy because they were turned down by adoption agencies, said ABC News. “I called five different agencies and every one of them told me that either I would not be considered or that I would be at the bottom of the list because I was a single father,” said Peter Gordon.

“Who is going to give their kid to a 50-year-old bachelor living in SoHo, you know?” said Steven Harris, who was also rejected by adoption agencies. “I wouldn’t.”

The promise of meaning

The trend shouldn’t be surprising given that singlehood has been increasing for years, “more steeply among men than women”, said The Atlantic. The gay community has also recovered from the Aids pandemic; a new generation has “made it through” to adulthood with more financial security and societal acceptance than before.

But the fact that some men are “paying extravagantly for egg donation and surrogacy” might suggest “just how important fatherhood is” for many today. Multiple professionals described the pandemic as a “turning point for a lot of single fathers by choice”. Men came out of the pandemic wanting to “spend those moments with their loved ones before it was too late”.

And in a moment when “many of the traditional trappings of manhood” are no longer guaranteed, fatherhood can be “an answer” to questions of identity. For many single men, fatherhood “dangled a promise of deeper meaning in life”.

But in a society that is “set up to regard women as primary caregivers”, single fatherhood can be alienating, said The Guardian. “Men get questions asking whether it’s Mum’s day off,” said Sophie Zadeh of University College London, who has been researching single fathers by choice. “People assume they can’t parent properly because they are male.”

Her research also suggests men are scrutinised more than women by healthcare visitors, and can be viewed with suspicion. “They’re seen as that bit more unusual.”

With the Russo-Ukrainian War in its fourth year, both sides are dealing with critical troop shortages, and Ukrainian officials think they’ve found a solution. The country has started using remotely controlled robots in combat to account for these shortages and also reduce casualties. But some experts are also downplaying the effect these robots could have on the war.

‘Seize Russian positions solely with automated weapons’

The robots, which often feature mounted machine guns, can “help Ukrainian troops carry gear, lay mines, evacuate the wounded and attack Russian positions,” said Business Insider. At least 280 companies are working to develop these robots, many of which are used to transport ordnance because they can “carry more than roughly 10 servicemen can,” Oleksandr Yabchanka, the head of robotic systems for Ukraine’s Da Vinci Wolves army regiment, told Business Insider.

The robots are a key part of Ukraine’s fight because of their offensive capabilities. One video during combat, filmed last summer, showed several Ukrainian robots that “each carried 66 pounds of explosives,” said The New York Times. One of these robots drove into a Russian stronghold and “blew itself up, while the others held back, monitoring the position.” Several Russian soldiers surrendered, and these kinds of attacks show “that the Ukrainian military can now seize Russian positions solely with automated weapons.”

Of course, human soldiers remain the key demographic on the battlefield, but Ukraine is “eager to highlight its advances to show Western partners that its outnumbered army can stay in the fight,” said the Times, while also promoting the country’s “homegrown defense industry.” During the first three months of 2026, Ukraine’s ground robots “carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front lines,” said Business Insider, citing data from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

‘The reality is more nuanced and far less futuristic’

There are drawbacks to using robots, as they “can still fall prey to enemy drones and also face challenges in traversing battle-scarred landscapes,” said Ars Technica. Though they may be good for frontline combat, at least one Ukrainian battalion reported that robots “attempting to evacuate wounded soldiers failed to reach the positions in four out of five cases due to complicating factors.” Ukraine’s efforts are also in “competition with the Russian military, which has similarly increased its use of robots on the frontlines.”

The narrative has largely been that Ukrainian robots will eventually supersede most of the country’s soldiers, but the “reality is more nuanced and far less futuristic,” said the Kyiv Post. The expansion of these battlefield robots is mostly part of an effort to “support troops not replace them.” And even though the stories of killer robots dominate the headlines, much of the “work performed by these robots remains logistical,” encompassing the delivery of “supplies, including food, ammunition, water and equipment, to frontline positions.”

But even non-offensive missions using robots “can save lives, as they replace tasks that would otherwise require soldiers to move on foot under fire,” a senior operator of ground robotic systems from Ukraine’s 13th Brigade told the Kyiv Post. It remains “far better to send a robot on a mission. If it is destroyed, you lose equipment. But if you send two or three soldiers and they are killed, it is a much greater loss, both emotionally and for the unit’s combat capability.”

President Lee Jae Myung warned earlier this month that the conflict in Iran represented a “war-like situation” for South Koreans. As oil reserves continue to dwindle, even if normal service in the Strait of Hormuz were to resume, it would take a long time for supplies to catch up.

The war is “serving as a significant turning point” for South Korea to shift to renewable energy, South Korea’s Minister of Climate, Energy and Environment Kim Sung-hwan told CNBC. We must undergo a “fundamental energy transition” and “turn this challenge into a blessing in disguise”.

Rising oil prices, and the weakening of the won against the dollar, are “dealing a double blow” to the Korean economy, said The New York Times. But reliance on oil has also highlighted the domestic tussle for green energy action in a divided South Korean system.

‘Draconian’ measures

The “brightly illuminated” satellite images of South Korea at night, compared to the “sea of blackness” in the North, have long been seen as a “wider triumph of capitalism and democracy”, said Christopher Jasper, transport industry editor, in The Telegraph. However, due to the Iran war, these lights could be extinguished “in a matter of weeks”.

Compared to fellow developed countries, South Korea is “almost uniquely lacking in natural resources”, relying on imports to meet “90% of its energy needs”. Around 70% of its crude oil shipments, in addition to 20% natural gas, come from the Gulf. The country has seen fuel prices increase by a fifth, a ban on driving one weekday in five for individuals, and calls to reduce shower times and to charge electric cars and phones only in the daytime. Much more “draconian” measures could be just weeks away.

South Korea must face a “difficult home truth”, said David Fickling in Bloomberg. Behind the “sleek modern society” is an “insatiable appetite for fossil fuels that’s undermining its economy”. But this appetite presents a climate and “strategic” threat. State utility Korea Electric Power Corporation’s (Kepco) “huge” generation plants provide “tempting targets for rocket attacks”, and its proximity to North Korea and China leaves the South exposed to mine threats, should the conflict expand.

A ‘catalyst’ for energy reform?

The fossil-fuel vulnerability highlighted by the war in Iran could be the “catalyst for a faster clean energy system”, said The Guardian. South Korea’s energy targets long predate the current war, aiming to generate 20% of electricity from renewables by 2030 and phase out coal by 2040.

As with most renewable energy, there must be the infrastructure to support it. The power generated by new energy is “colliding” with the grid’s capacity, meaning it is “in effect going to waste”. There is hope in the form of Kepco building high-voltage transmission lines to Seoul, but a decade-long wait and “resistance” from locals are taking the shine off the progress.

On top of the energy opportunities, this is a “fresh opportunity” to “strengthen Seoul’s hand” against North Korea, said Jenni Marsh in Bloomberg. According to Finance Minister Koo Yun Cheol, Middle Eastern countries are “lining up” to buy Korea’s missiles, with their 90% success rate and “affordable price tag” an attractive proposition for buyers. The crisis has also fuelled government investment into nuclear-reactor restarts to “maintain grid stability”. As North Korea’s Kim Jong Un “plays hard to get” with the US, and “refuses talks” with Lee, improving defence capabilities “looks like an increasingly smart option”.

President Lee’s “catnip” calls to transition to renewables due to the war in Iran have “no chance of being met”, said Fickling in the same outlet. For instance, Kepco has “effectively banned” all new generators in the “renewables-rich” east until 2032, all because its “crumbling grid is supposedly incapable of accepting new connections”. Decisions such as these will do “nothing to advance South Korea’s energy transition”. Society as a whole needs to fight against those who have kept them “hooked on polluting power”.

Former Bulgarian President Rumen Radev will soon have a new title, and with it a whole lot of new power. Radev won Bulgaria’s parliamentary elections on Sunday and will become the country’s next prime minister. But while the election victory by Radev’s newly created Progressive Bulgaria party could represent a fresh beginning for a nation fraught with political strife, some people are concerned about Radev’s ties to Russia.

Radev’s beginnings

Radev, 62, was born in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, and his early career was dedicated to military service. He is an ex-fighter pilot and former commander in the Bulgarian Air Force, and received several military merits before turning his attention to politics. Radev has often used his “daredevil flying skills to build his political brand,” said Politico. When he first ran for president in 2016, the Bulgarian Air Force “heavily promoted his loop-the-loops in a high-profile air show.”

Upon winning the ceremonial role of the presidency in 2017, Radev “quickly made up for his lack of political experience, capitalizing on his military background to cultivate the persona of a fearless patriot uncorrupted by party politics,” said Politico. In January 2026, after anti-corruption protests toppled the government, he became the first Bulgarian head of state to step down from the presidency and announced his candidacy for prime minister. During his campaign, Radev “cast himself as an opponent of the country’s entrenched mafia and its ties to high-ranking politicians,” said The Associated Press.

‘A more pro-Russian stance’

Radev has largely “positioned himself as the populist standard-bearer for anti-corruption protests that brought down the government in December,” said The Washington Post. But many in Europe are concerned about his potential friendliness with the Kremlin. During his campaign, Radev made it clear his government will take a “more pro-Russian stance, consistently opposing aid to Ukraine and saying he wanted to restore relations with Moscow.”

The new prime minister has also criticized the European Union and “called for a new security architecture in Europe, echoing a key Kremlin drive,” said the Post. If tensions were to continue rising between Bulgaria’s new government and the EU, it could cause financial strain in the country, as “Bulgaria’s economy is heavily dependent on EU funding.” Radev’s easy victory in the election could also “strengthen his hand in opposing a proposed EU ban on imported Russian energy supplies.”

Other analysts believe that Radev’s Russian coziness is more of a political tactic. Radev will probably be “unlikely to seek to be disruptive in relations within the European Union,” Vessela Tcherneva, the deputy director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said to The New York Times. In the “coming economic crisis, he would not risk the freezing of EU funds.” Radev’s EU criticism, particularly “regarding financial and military support for Ukraine or sanctions against Russia,” will be “aimed primarily at the domestic audience” and may not translate into action, Maria Simeonova of the European Council on Foreign Relations told the Times.

Some pro-democracy activists feel that Radev’s win could give Bulgaria its “best chance in recent history to do away with the stranglehold of corruption and the weak, unstable governments that have plagued it for decades,” said the Times. Radev’s 44% margin of victory may allow him to create a strong coalition, which could “enact structural and constitutional reforms to tackle the corruption that has stymied Bulgaria’s institutions.”

Former fighter pilot Rumen Radev led his party into Bulgaria’s parliamentary election promising to take on the “corrupt officials, conspirators and extremists” he claimed had run the country into the ground.

Voters responded on Sunday by handing his newly formed Progressive Bulgaria (PB) coalition the “single biggest vote haul in a ‌generation”, which “paves the way for greater political stability after eight elections in five years”, said Reuters.

“This is a victory of hope over mistrust, a victory of freedom over fear,” the 62-year-old Radev said after his landslide victory. Bulgarians had “rejected the complacency and arrogance of the old parties and did not succumb to lies and manipulation”.

Corruption crusader

Radev rose through the ranks of the Bulgarian air force to become a major general and finally head of the service. A relative latecomer to politics, he was elected to the largely ceremonial role of president in 2016. He held the position for nine years, keeping himself above the chaos and corruption scandals that have dominated Bulgarian politics in recent years.

In January he resigned, forming his new PB movement to run in the election after massive anti-corruption protests brought down the previous government. On Sunday he won just under 45% of the vote, giving Bulgaria its first parliamentary majority in nearly 30 years.

The “main factors” driving Radev’s victory were “deep frustration over years of futile anti-corruption efforts, concern over rising prices… and a potent mix of pro-Russian sentiment”, said Atanas Rusev, from the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia. “Radev played astutely on all these anxieties.”

The result “raises expectations of an end to the country’s cycle of short-lived coalition governments”, said Deutsche Welle. Radev had pledged to “crack down on corruption, tackle inflation and pursue a more independent foreign policy within the EU – one that does not exclude dialogue with Russia”.

EU tightrope

A Radev-led government is “bad news for Ukraine and would represent a significant win for Russia”, said Jan Surotchak on the Atlantic Council think tank. In the short term, his victory will “likely mean an end to Bulgarian ammunition supplies to Ukraine, forcing Nato to seek other sources”. The US-backed northern corridor for energy supplies to Eastern Europe could also “lose out in favour of Turk Stream, the last major energy pipeline bringing Russian gas to Europe”.

Radev’s winning message has been a “cocktail of anti-corruption pledges, Euro-scepticism and pledges to rebuild ties with Moscow, spooking some EU and Nato diplomats”, said the Financial Times. But “while his outreach to Russia may be symbolically valuable to the Kremlin, it is likely to be far less consequential in practice” than the recently deposed Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who “routinely vetoed EU decisions in order to benefit Moscow”.

“Unlike in Hungary the political cleavage here between the anti-corruption platform and the anti-Russia platform is wide, so those two messages won’t reinforce each other in quite the same seismic way,” said Vessela Tcherneva, from the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Maintaining a strategic ambiguity towards Russia and the EU” while focusing on his anti-corruption message helped Radev secure an absolute majority, winning votes from both the far-right and progressives, said The Guardian. This may bring the country “political stability” but “leave it walking a tightrope on EU issues”.

From ordering groceries online to using AI to write emails, technology is making life exponentially easier. But while that may be appealing, it has also become a crutch, and constantly outsourcing our thinking can be detrimental in the long term, according to experts. A new trend called friction maxxing seeks to reintroduce discordance into our lives.

‘Building up tolerance for inconvenience’

Tech companies are succeeding in “making us think of life itself as inconvenient” and an endeavor we should be “continuously escaping” from into “digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands,” sociologist ​​Kathryn Jezer-Morton said at The Cut. The businesses have invested “as much money as possible in friction-elimination tools that effectively dehumanize users.”

It is a method that is “especially evil” because our “love of escaping is one of humanity’s most poetically problematic tendencies, and now it’s being used against us,” said Jezer-Morton. Enter “friction maxxing,” which isn’t “simply a matter of reducing your screen time.” Rather, it requires “building up tolerance for inconvenience” and then “reaching toward enjoyment.”

Friction-maxxing practices could include navigating by road signs instead of Google Maps or arranging to meet up with friends without sharing your location. Or it could mean eschewing ChatGPT for information that could be gleaned from a book or asking other people. Each of these acts may seem insignificant, but an “orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape,” said Jezer-Morton.

Friction maxxing may “play a valuable role in reorienting yourself away from tech dependency” and back toward “embracing the effort that makes people feel genuinely alive and fulfilled,” Mashable said. No one needs to optimize their life in “pursuit of a proverbial gold star.”

The effect of frictionless living

Despite how easy technology advancements have made simple tasks, “living a frictionless life may not be the best for your cognitive function over time,” said The Washington Post. It is basically “having a personal trainer lift the weights for you,” neuroscientist Lila Landowski said to the Post.

Over time, frictionless living could be detrimental because brain functions like learning, memory and focused attention are “use it or lose it,” brain health researcher Marc Milstein, the author of “The Age-Proof Brain,” said to the Post. You need to practice these skills to maintain them. If you’re not regularly challenging your brain, those skills can erode, he said.

And the benefit of friction maxxing isn’t just in boosting cognitive abilities. It also helps to create a more meaningful life said, Emily Falk, a professor and author of “What We Value,” to the Post. If you value building social skills, for example, the ease of writing an email with AI may not align with your values and may make life feel less meaningful. When we “make choices that seem immediately rewarding but don’t take a step back to ask if those choices are compatible with big-picture goals and values, we can get in trouble.”

Many of our decisions about convenience are driven by “short-term emotions,” said Forbes. It feels good to order delivery “because you remove the worry of your kids messing up the ingredients you need to cook.” It feels good to scroll “because you know getting into a challenging book will feel lousy (at least initially).” On the other hand, if you can “learn to grapple with these pesky emotions head-on, the long-term benefits are big.”

Our comfort with friction is “under attack,” and we “bear the responsibility of keeping friction intact as part of our families’ lives” and should “notice the ways that it’s being sanded away for profit,” Jezer-Morton said. Perhaps this is an opportunity to “think more clearly than we ever have about what is interesting and essential about being human.” We have never before “had a chance to see our own humanity so clearly,” but now, with “tech innovation bearing down on us so hard, we can’t take it for granted anymore.”