Israel struck at the heart of Iran’s nuclear, missile and military complex early Friday, in an unprecedented attack that reportedly killed two of Iran’s top military commanders and plunges the wider Middle East into dangerous new territory.
The strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and senior military leaders could be a turning point in the long-running conflict, as Israel braced for a major Iranian retaliation – with the threat of a wider regional war breaking out now a real risk.
Moviemaking icon Mel Brooks and Amazon MGM Studios have published a teaser trailer to announce that Spaceballs 2 is moving full steam ahead with plans to premiere in 2027 – and it sounds like Rick Moranis is coming back as Dark Helmet, too.
Like all sponsors of science programs, NASA has had its ups and downs. What makes it unique is that its achievements and failures almost always happen in public.
Triumphs like the moon landings and the deep-space images from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes were great popular successes; the string of exploding rockets in its early days and the shuttle explosions cast lasting shadows over its work.
But the agency may never have had to confront a challenge like the one it faces now: a Trump administration budget plan that would cut funding for NASA’s science programs by nearly 50% and its overall spending by about 24%.
An Air India plane with over 242 passengers onboard crashed near Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad on Thursday.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which was headed to UK, crashed at 1.39 pm while taking off, sending huge billows of smoke emanating near Meghaninagar.
More than 700 Marines based out of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in California have been mobilized to respond to the protests in Los Angeles, and the troops will join the thousands of National Guard members who were activated by President Donald Trump over the weekend without the consent of California’s governor or LA’s mayor.
The deployment of the full Marine battalion marks a significant escalation in Trump’s use of the military as a show of force against protesters, but it is still unclear what their specific task will be once in LA, sources told CNN. Like the National Guard troops, they are prohibited from conducting law enforcement activity such as making arrests unless Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, which permits the president to use the military to end an insurrection or rebellion of federal power.
Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
An escalating feud between President Trump and Elon Musk June 5 included threats to cancel SpaceX contracts and decommission spacecraft, although those words have yet to become actions.
Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn have started blocking French users in protest against a new law requiring adult websites to verify the age of their visitors.
Ukraine said on Tuesday that it had hit the bridge connecting Russia and the occupied Crimean Peninsula with explosives planted underwater, in its third attack on the vital supply line for Moscow’s forces since the full-scale war began in 2022.
Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, said on Telegram that its agents had mined the piers of the road and rail Crimean Bridge, also called the Kerch Bridge, and detonated the first explosive at 4.44 a.m. Tuesday. The whole operation took several months, it added.
The agency said it had used 1,100 kilograms of explosives which “severely damaged” the underwater pillars supporting the bridge.
Traffic on the bridge was suspended early Tuesday morning, then again mid-afternoon, before resuming shortly before 6 p.m. local time. Although the scale of the damage was not immediately clear, Tuesday’s attack is the latest example of the SBU’s attempts to blindside Moscow and demonstrate that there are costs to continuing its war.
An operation by Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) using first-person-view (FPV) drones smuggled deep inside Russian and hidden inside trucks has hit 41 Russian heavy bombers at four airfields across the country, a source in the agency told the Kyiv Independent on June 1.
The operation — codenamed "Spider web" and a year-and-a-half in the planning — appears to have dealt a major blow to the aircraft Moscow uses to launch long-range missile attacks on Ukraine's cities.
Europe’s equities have emerged clear winners worldwide as the region’s economic outlook brightens at a time when President Donald Trump’s trade war hobbles US financial markets.
Five months into the year, eight of the world’s 10 best-performing stock markets are in Europe, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That list features Germany’s DAX Index with a rally of more than 30% in dollar terms, as well as peripheral markets such as Slovenia, Poland, Greece and Hungary.
Fake photographs have been around as long as photographs have been around. A widely circulated picture of Abraham Lincoln taken during the presidential campaign of 1860 was subtly altered by the photographer, Mathew Brady, to make the candidate appear more attractive. Brady enlarged Lincoln’s shirt collar, for instance, to hide his bony neck and bulging Adam’s apple.
In a photographic portrait made to memorialize the president after his assassination, the artist Thomas Hicks transposed Lincoln’s head onto a more muscular man’s body to make the fallen president look heroic. (The body Hicks chose, perversely enough, was that of the proslavery zealot John C. Calhoun.)
Tinder is leaning into dating apps’ reputation for superficiality with the launch of a new feature that lets paid subscribers add their height preferences to their profiles.
After a Reddit user posted a photo of the new height setting in the Tinder app, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the discovery setting has been launched as a global test.
Tinder Gold and Premium subscribers in the test group will have access to the feature, but not free users, we’re told. In addition, the setting will indicate a preference, rather than functioning as a “hard filter,” the company says. That means it won’t actually block or exclude profiles but instead inform recommendations.
The vast majority of President Donald Trump’s global tariffs were deemed illegal and blocked by the US trade court, dealing a major blow to a pillar of his economic agenda.
Elon Musk is leaving his government role as a top adviser to President Donald Trump after spearheading efforts to reduce and overhaul the federal bureaucracy.
His departure, announced Wednesday evening, marks the end of a turbulent chapter that included thousands of layoffs, the evisceration of government agencies and reams of litigation. Despite the upheaval, the billionaire entrepreneur struggled in the unfamiliar environment of Washington, and he accomplished far less than he hoped.
He dramatically reduced his target for cutting spending — from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion — and increasingly expressed frustration about resistance to his goals. Sometimes he clashed with other top members of Trump’s administration, who chafed at the newcomer’s efforts to reshape their departments, and he faced fierce political blowback for his efforts.
The southeast of France experienced a second major blackout just 24 hours after the Saturday outage in Cannes, which disrupted the closing ceremony of the renowned Cannes Film Festival. In the early hours of Sunday, Nice became the target of another apparent sabotage, with a fire at a local electrical transformer cutting power to approximately 45,000 homes, according to electricity operator Enedis.
The fire broke out around 2:00 AM at a substation in the Moulins district, west of Nice. The city’s mayor, Christian Estrosi, publicly denounced the incident as a “malicious act.” The outage extended to nearby towns, including Saint-Laurent-du-Var and Cagnes-sur-Mer. Enedis confirmed that power was fully restored by 6:00 AM.
The Trump administration is weighing requiring all foreign students applying to study in the United States to undergo social media vetting — a significant expansion of previous such efforts, according to a cable obtained by POLITICO.
In preparation for such required vetting, the administration is ordering U.S. Embassies and consular sections to pause scheduling new interviews for such student visa applicants, according to the cable, dated Tuesday and signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Germany's foreign minister threatened unspecified measures against Israel on Tuesday and said Berlin would not export weapons used to break humanitarian law, as he and Chancellor Friedrich Merz delivered their most severe rebuke yet over Gaza.
Germany, along with the United States, had long remained in support of Israel's conduct since the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, even as Israel became increasingly isolated internationally.
Its about-turn comes as the European Union is reviewing its Israel policy and Britain, France and Canada also threatened "concrete actions" over Gaza.
After a pair of Block 2 Ship failures and an extended downtime between flights, SpaceX is set to fly Starship’s ninth flight test and attempt to fly a Ship past second stage engine cutoff. Booster 14 will fly a second time, marking the first reuse of a Super Heavy booster in the Starship program.
Liftoff of Ship 35 and Booster 14 is scheduled for 6:30 PM CDT (23:30 UTC) on Tuesday, May 27, from Orbital Launch Pad A (OLP-A) at SpaceX’s launch facility in Starbase, Texas. SpaceX is targeting the opening of the window for launch, with the window extending to 8:00 PM CDT (01:00 UTC on May 28). Starship will fly on an eastern trajectory out of Starbase.
The police arrived at Maxie Allen’s door at midday on January 29th. None of the six officers seemed to know much about why they were there, recalls Mr Allen.
But they read out a list of charges and searched the house, before arresting him and his partner and taking them to the police station, where they were held for eight hours. The couple’s alleged crime? Disparaging emails and WhatsApp messages about their daughter’s primary school.
Denmark will raise its retirement age to 70 by 2040, the highest in Europe, after a controversial vote in parliament.
The increase in retirement age was approved in the country’s legislature, with 81 votes in favour and 21 against.
The age of retirement has been tied to life expectancy in Denmark – currently 81.7 years – since 2006, with the government raising the threshold every five years.
Under the Danish system, the retirement age will rise from 67 to 68 in 2030, and then 69 in 2035, and finally to 70 in 2040. The retirement age of 70 will only apply to Danes born after Dec 31, 1970.
Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere, as organizers respond to researchers’ growing fears over the country’s immigration crackdown.
Organizers of these meetings say that tougher rules around visas and border control — alongside other policies introduced by US President Donald Trump’s administration — are discouraging international scholars from attending events on US soil. In response, they are moving the conferences to countries such as Canada, in a bid to boost attendance.
The British government is to rollout the use of medication to suppress the sex drive of sex offenders, as part of a package of measures to reduce the risk of reoffending and alleviate the pressures on the prison system, which is running out of space.
In a statement to Parliament Thursday following the release of an independent sentencing review, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said so-called chemical castration would be used in 20 prisons in two regions and that she was considering making it mandatory.
A UK Special Forces officer personally rejected 1,585 resettlement applications from Afghans with credible links to special forces, newly released documents say.
The files, disclosed by the Ministry of Defence in court on Thursday, show the unnamed UKSF officer rejected every application referred to him in the summer of 2023, in what was described as a "sprint".
The MoD told the court that the officer may have been connected to the ongoing inquiry into alleged war crimes committed by the SAS.
The admission comes after the BBC revealed last week that the UKSF officer – who previously served in Afghanistan - rejected applications from Afghans who may have witnessed the alleged crimes.
The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.
Treasury debt continued its wild ride on Wednesday, with yields soaring amid concerns about the U.S. government’s unsustainable deficit spending.
The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond surged as high as 5.1%, its highest level since November 2023, on Wednesday after a surprisingly weak 20-year Treasury note auction. The 10-year Treasury yield, which influences interest rates on all kinds of consumer and commercial loans, climbed to about 4.61%, its highest level since February.
BYD Co. sold more electric vehicles in Europe than Tesla Inc. for the first time, overtaking the American brand that long led the continent’s EV segment.
China’s top automaker registered 7,231 new battery-electric vehicles in April, according to market researcher Jato Dynamics. That was up 169% from a year earlier, vaulting BYD into the top 10 brands by EV sales. Tesla placed one spot back as its registrations plunged 49%.
OpenAI will acquire the AI device startup co-founded by Apple Inc. veteran Jony Ive in a nearly $6.5 billion all-stock deal, joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware.
The purchase — the largest in OpenAI’s history — will provide the company with a dedicated unit for developing AI-powered devices. Acquiring the secretive startup, named io, also will secure the services of Ive and other former Apple designers who were behind iconic products such as the iPhone.
In February, the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. As a result, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan has no access to the emails on his Microsoft account. The incident once again demonstrates the risks of dependence on US IT services.
To make matters worse, Khan’s bank accounts have also been frozen, according to the Associated Press. If he takes a flight to the US, he will likely be arrested upon arrival. According to the Associated Press, the ICC has been paralyzed by the forced Microsoft blockade.
The conflict between the ICC and the US arose in November, when the former issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This incident tells bystanders more than just how applicable it is to this specific situation. Anyone who does not want to follow the geopolitical stance of the US exactly must have a plan B when it comes to software.
“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams said on Monday morning that he expects to die soon from prostate cancer, the same disease former President Joe Biden announced he is battling.
Adams made the jarring revelation during the latest episode of “Coffee With Scott Adams,” the Rumble show he hosts during weekday mornings.
“I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said. “So my life expectancy is maybe this summer. I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”
Having shut down its last remaining nuclear plant Saturday, Taiwan is working to secure new imports of natural gas.
The Maanshan nuclear plant closed following the expiration of its 40-year operating license, fulfilling a promise by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of a “nuclear-free” Taiwan. Analysts say the move will make the country more reliant on imported fossil fuels and more exposed to spikes in the price of gas.
Already Taiwan is struggling to generate enough electricity, leading to recurrent blackouts and brownouts in recent years. To service its booming semiconductor industry, Taiwan will add 5 gigawatts of gas power to the grid this year, the equivalent of five nuclear reactors.
Acting President of Romania Ilie Bolojan has signed a law expanding its armed forces’ powers, allowing troops to shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are unlawfully in the country’s airspace.
The law on use of national airspace was initiated after several incidents in which Russian attack drones targeting southern Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast entered Romanian airspace.
The legislation was finally approved by Parliament in February 2025.
Romania’s far-right parties challenged the law in the Constitutional Court but lost the case.
In March, Romania confirmed another case of a Russian drone crashing on its territory, in the border area near the Ukrainian settlement of Reni.
Stakes have never been this high in Romania's post-communist history, as Romanians voted in a crucial and polarised presidential election runoff on Sunday, in which centrist Nicușor Dan faced nationalist George Simion.
Pro-Western independent candidate Nicusor Dan staged a dramatic comeback on Sunday to win the Romanian presidential elections with a firm 54% of the votes.
His contender, hard-right candidate George Simion, with 46% of votes, at first refused to concede in an unprecedented political thriller which transfixed and polarised the country on NATO’s eastern flank, but then relented, congratulating Dan on his victory late on Sunday night.
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it actually comes from a lab in Maryland.
In 2018, Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, devised a way to turn ordinary wood into a material stronger than steel. It seemed like yet another headline-grabbing discovery that wouldn’t make it out of the lab.
“All these people came to him,” said Alex Lau, CEO of InventWood, “He’s like, OK, this is amazing, but I’m a university professor. I don’t know quite what to do about it.”
Rather than give up, Hu spent the next few years refining the technology, reducing the time it took to make the material from more than a week to a few hours. Soon, it was ready to commercialize, and he licensed the technology to InventWood.
Now, the startup’s first batches of Superwood will be produced starting this summer.
U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.
Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers.
The N-of-1 accomplishment provides a template for swift, personalized genetic therapies.
News broke yesterday that researchers in Philadelphia appear to have successfully treated a 6-month-old baby boy, called KJ, with a personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy. The treatment corrects an ultra-rare mutation in KJ that breaks a liver enzyme. That enzyme is required to convert ammonia, a byproduct of metabolism, to urea, a waste product released in urine. Without treatment, ammonia would build up to dangerous levels in KJ—and he would have a 50 percent chance of dying in infancy.
Moody’s has stripped the US of its top-notch triple-A credit rating as it warned about rising levels of government debt and a widening budget deficit in the world’s biggest economy.
The agency on Friday afternoon cut its credit rating on the US by one notch to Aa1 from Aaa, while its outlook was changed to stable from negative. Fitch and S&P, the other main agencies, had previously removed the US’s pristine rating.
The move by Moody’s comes as investors are growing increasingly concerned about the US’s fiscal trajectory. President Donald Trump’s Republican party is pursuing a budget bill that is widely expected to increase debt significantly over the next decade.
Something was very wrong with Kyle and Nicole Muldoon’s baby.
The doctors speculated. Maybe it was meningitis? Maybe sepsis?
They got an answer when KJ was only a week old. He had a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, that affects just one in 1.3 million babies. If he survived, he would have severe mental and developmental delays and would eventually need a liver transplant. But half of all babies with the disorder die in the first week of life.
Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered the Muldoons comfort care for their baby, a chance to forgo aggressive treatments in the face of a grim prognosis.
“We loved him, and we didn’t want him to be suffering,” Ms. Muldoon said. But she and her husband decided to give KJ a chance.
Instead, KJ has made medical history. The baby, now 9 ½ months old, became the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment, according to his doctors. He received an infusion made just for him and designed to fix his precise mutation.
Denmark is reconsidering its 40-year ban on nuclear power in a major policy shift for the renewables-heavy country.
The Danish government will analyse the potential benefits of a new generation of nuclear power technologies after banning traditional nuclear reactors in 1985, its energy minister said.
Companies with higher levels of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic saw more of their employees launch startups, economists have found. They argue this entrepreneurial spillover is a factor policymakers and firms should weigh when shaping remote work policies.
In a research paper titled, "Entrepreneurial Spawning From Remote Work," authors Alan Kwan (Hong Kong University), Ben Matthies (University of Notre Dame), Richard R. Townsend (University of California, San Diego), and Ting Xu (University of Toronto) describe how they analyzed IP address data in conjunction with LinkedIn data to cross-reference those working from home with those who formed new businesses.
The United States and China have mutually agreed to a 90 day reduction on tariffs implemented in April, marking a significant attempt to de-escalate the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
The deal was hashed out by US and Chinese officials in Geneva over the weekend, and will see the US reducing duties on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent, and China lowering tariffs on US goods to 10 percent, down from 125 percent. This new agreement doesn’t change the removal of the de minimis exception on May 2nd, which closed the tariff loophole that allowed businesses like Temu and Shein to send goods under $800 into the US without any added duties at all.
Russian secret services were behind a massive fire that nearly completely destroyed a Warsaw shopping centre in May 2024, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Sunday after a year of investigation into the case.
"We already know for sure that the large fire on Marywilska was the result of arson ordered by Russian services. The actions were coordinated by a person staying in Russia. Some of the perpetrators are already in custody, the rest have been identified and are being sought," Tusk said on X.
Storing renewable energy sustainably and efficiently is one of the major challenges of our time. A team of German researchers is proposing a revolutionary solution: concrete spheres immersed in the ocean floor. Their potential is such that California is preparing to test a large-scale prototype.
A Simple, Ingenious Concept
The project, called StEnSea (Stored Energy in the Sea), was developed by the Fraunhofer IEE (Institute for Energy Economics and Energy Systems Technology). The idea is relatively simple: hollow concrete spheres are installed at a depth of several hundred metres. Each sphere is fitted with a pump-turbine and a valve system.
Elijah Rios won’t graduate from high school until next year, but he already has a job offer—one that pays $68,000 a year.
Rios, 17 years old, is a junior taking welding classes at Father Judge, a Catholic high school in Philadelphia that works closely with companies looking for workers in the skilled trades. Employers are dealing with a shortage of such workers as baby boomers retire. They have increasingly begun courting high-school students like Rios—a hiring strategy they say is likely to become even more crucial in the coming years.
Another shipping port official voiced concern about the drastic decline in imports as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs.
"I can see it right over my shoulder here, I'm looking out at the Port of Seattle right now, and we currently have no container ships at berth," Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins told CNN on Wednesday.
"That happens every once in a while at normal times, but it's pretty rare," he added. "And so to see it tonight is I think a stark reminder that the impacts of the tariffs have real implications."
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), already battered by White House directives and staff reductions, is plunging into deeper turmoil. According to sources who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight NSF directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced. The current directors and deputy directors will lose their titles and might be reassigned to other positions at the agency or elsewhere in the federal government.
The consolidation appears to be driven in part by President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut the agency’s $4 billion budget by 55% for the 2026 fiscal year that begins on 1 October. NSF’s decision to abolish its divisions could also be part of a larger restructuring of the agency’s grantmaking process that involves adding a new layer of review. NSF watchers fear that a smaller, restructured agency could be more vulnerable to pressure from the White House to fund research that suits its ideological bent.
Pakistan's armed forces launched "multiple attacks" using drones and other munitions along India's entire western border on Thursday night and early Friday, the Indian army said, as conflict between the nuclear-armed neighbours intensified.
The old enemies have been clashing since India struck multiple locations in Pakistan on Wednesday that it said were "terrorist camps", in retaliation for a deadly attack on Hindu tourists in Indian Kashmir last month.
Cardinal Robert Prevost has been elected as the first US-born pontiff and will be known as Pope Leo XIV. Leo made his first remarks as pope from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in front of tens of thousands of onlookers, calling for peace and paying tribute to the late Pope Francis.
A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users.
The verdict, reached Tuesday, comes as a major victory not just for Meta-owned WhatsApp but also for privacy- and security-rights advocates who have long criticized the practices of NSO and other exploit sellers. The jury also awarded WhatsApp $444 million in compensatory damages.
Clickless exploit
WhatsApp sued NSO in 2019 for an attack that targeted roughly 1,400 mobile phones belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials. NSO, which works on behalf of governments and law enforcement authorities in various countries, exploited a critical WhatsApp vulnerability that allowed it to install NSO’s proprietary spyware Pegasus on iOS and Android devices. The clickless exploit worked by placing a call to a target's app. A target did not have to answer the call to be infected.