World

US-Israel War on Iran

• Trump says US may strike Kharg Island again “just for fun,” rejects deal with Iran (The Guardian) | NBC News — Trump told NBC the “terms aren’t good enough” for a deal and dismissed Kharg Island as already “decimated,” while calling on the UK, China, France, Japan and South Korea to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz. Japan says dispatching ships faces high hurdles.

• US-Israeli strikes kill 15 at Isfahan factory; Iran’s Space Research Centre severely damaged (Al Jazeera) — Continued bombardment of central Iran. Video shows significant damage to Tehran’s Space Research Centre. Iran held a funeral for Ali Shamkhani, the country’s most influential defence figure. Six US service members killed in an aircraft crash over Iraq have been identified.

• Israel running critically low on interceptors, US officials say (Semafor) — A critical vulnerability as Iran continues launching missile salvoes at Israeli targets. Cars burned and overturned by shrapnel in Tel Aviv after an Iranian barrage. Reddit discussion

• Iran threatens to escalate — targeting US facilities in region and threatening Ukraine (The Guardian) — Tehran says it will target any facility in the region with US ties if its energy sites are struck again. Iran also threatened Ukraine over alleged drone assistance to Israel; Kyiv responded firmly. (Also covered in Ukraine) Hamas urged Iran to halt attacks on Gulf states, while affirming Tehran’s right to self-defence.

• ‘Worst nightmare’: Gulf states bear brunt of war they did not start (The Guardian) — Growing resentment in the Gulf as Hormuz closure hammers regional economies. Drones attacked one of the UAE’s largest oil terminals. F1 has cancelled the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia GPs on safety grounds — the Bahrain circuit is only 20 miles from a targeted US base.

• Former CIA chief reveals US attacked Iran to scuttle its ability to defend against Israel (Al Jazeera) — David Petraeus says the US had early knowledge of Israeli attack plans.

• FCC chair threatens to throttle news broadcasts over ‘hoaxes’ about Iran war (The Guardian) — Brendan Carr warned he may cancel spectrum permits of broadcasters pushing what he called “misleading” coverage of the war. Prediction markets have hosted millions of dollars in “gruesome” war bets, fuelling calls for a crackdown.

• Israeli strike kills 12 healthcare workers in southern Lebanon (The Guardian) — Brings the toll of medical staff killed to 31 in the past 12 days. A relative of civilians killed in a separate strike told the BBC those hit were not Hezbollah operatives.

Rest of the World

• Jürgen Habermas, philosopher and sociologist, dies aged 96 (The Guardian) | BBC — One of the most influential thinkers in postwar Germany. His theory of communicative action argued that the formation of public opinion is vital for democracies to survive.

• Cuban protesters ransack Communist party office as energy crisis deepens (BBC World) | The Guardian — Rare public protest over rolling blackouts and shortages of food, fuel and medicine, exacerbated by the US blockade. Five arrested after the protest “degenerated into vandalism.”

• Pakistan strikes Afghan base after Taliban drones hit Pakistani territory (Al Jazeera) — Islamabad hit a Kandahar facility after Taliban drones struck civilian areas and military sites, a sharp escalation in the Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict.

• Explosion at Amsterdam Jewish school ‘a deliberate attack,’ says mayor (BBC World) — Security had already been increased at Jewish institutions following an earlier incident in Rotterdam.

• Pentagon tightens controls over Stars and Stripes after calling it “woke” (NPR) — New restrictions on the independent military newspaper are the Defense Department’s latest effort to constrain journalists covering the agency.

• UK needs nuclear deterrent independent from US, Ed Davey to say (The Guardian) — The Lib Dem leader will tell his party’s spring conference that Britain can no longer rely on the US while Trump is president.

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Ukraine

Russia launched its largest combined strike in over a week overnight March 13–14: 430 drones (including ~250 Shaheds), two Zirkon hypersonics, 13 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 25 Kalibr and 24 Kh-101 cruise missiles. Ukrainian air defenses intercepted the vast majority — 402 drones, all Kalibrs and Kh-101s, seven of 13 Iskanders — but six missiles and 28 drones struck targets across 11 locations, killing at least five in Kyiv Oblast and injuring 22, disrupting power in seven oblasts. A follow-up wave of 97 drones on the night of March 14–15 saw 90 intercepted. On the ground, Russian forces attacked across every axis — Sumy, Vovchansk, Kupyansk, Slovyansk, Kostyantynivka, Pokrovsk, Hulyaipole, western Zaporizhia — without confirmed advances anywhere. A Ukrainian brigade reported Russian frontline troops in the Slovyansk direction are nearly exhausted, with logistics units sent into assaults. In Kupyansk, Russian forces hold a precarious corridor only 500 meters wide, unable to resupply on foot or by vehicle. DeepState recorded a minor Russian advance near Horikhove in Donetsk Oblast — the only confirmed territorial change.

Ukraine’s deep and mid-range strike campaign is intensifying sharply. Overnight strikes destroyed the main refining unit at the Afipsky oil refinery in Krasnodar Krai, damaged port infrastructure at Kavkaz, and disabled the Slavyanin railway ferry and damaged the Avangard cargo ship — both key to Russian logistics across the Kerch Strait. Ukrainian forces struck the Khanskaya Airfield at Maykop (500 km inside Russia) and an air defense missile depot in Dovzhansk, Luhansk Oblast, which reportedly detonated. At operational depth, Ukrainian SOF struck Iskander-M launchers preparing to fire from Crimea, a Nebo-U radar station, five Pantsir-S1 air defense systems near Belgorod, an S-300 depot in Donetsk Oblast, and disabled two Russian logistics trains near Tokmak. Moscow itself was attacked by over 60 drones in a single day. Russian milbloggers are increasingly alarmed by Ukrainian drone capabilities — FPV strikes reaching 100 km behind the front, fiber-optic drones, mothership drones, and AI-guided swarms — technologies they say Russia cannot replicate.

• Iran threatens Ukraine as “legitimate target” over alleged drone assistance to Israel; Kyiv dismissed the claim as “absurd.” (Also covered in World — Iran)

• Russia exploiting Iran war, Zelensky says after fresh bombardment (BBC World) — Zelensky raised concerns over air-defence missile supplies and said Russia is supplying Iran with Shahed drones. US ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine are paused due to the Iran war. A Russian strike on the Kyiv region killed 4 and wounded 15.

• Trump rebuffs Ukraine’s drone defense offer — “last person we need help from is Zelensky” — despite Zelensky proposing Ukrainian drone experts help defend US bases in the Middle East. (Kyiv Independent)

• Europe rebukes US for temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian oil (The Guardian) — Zelensky called the 30-day waiver “not the right decision”. EU foreign policy chief Kallas told the FT the US wants to “divide Europe”.

• EU extends Russia sanctions for six months with no removals; eight EU leaders urge visa ban for Russian servicemen. (NV, LRT)

• Belgian PM urges EU to negotiate with Russia directly, saying current efforts have failed to compel Moscow to end the war. (Ukrainska Pravda)

• Hungarian general behind cash convoy seizure found dead under mysterious circumstances; Orbán calls for “Peace March,” accuses Ukraine of pressuring Hungary over oil. (Daily News Hungary, Ukrainska Pravda)

• Ukraine’s UGV army running 7,000 missions/month for logistics and casualty evacuation, though Russian FPV operators are targeting them. (United24)

• Russia’s internet isolation deepening — Silicon Valley pulling the plug while the Kremlin locks doors from inside. (Politico)

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Tech

• Lies I Was Told About Collaborative Editing, Part 2: Why We Don’t Use Yjs | Lobsters — Moment’s team makes a sharp technical case against Yjs/CRDTs for collaborative editing: Yjs destroys and recreates the entire ProseMirror document on every keystroke, breaking node views, cursor positions, and 60fps editing targets. Schema mismatches can silently corrupt and propagate data loss. Their alternative — a centralized authority model with ProseMirror’s collab library — is ~40 lines of code.

• MCP Is Dead; Long Live MCP | HN — Argues the “MCP is dead, use CLIs” discourse misses the point: MCP over stdio is marginal, but MCP over streamable HTTP is transformative for organizations (centralized auth, telemetry, dynamic tool delivery). HN discussion surfaces good counterpoints — context bloat from loading all tool schemas, and projects like HasMCP and MCPProxy that address this with lazy-loading and query-routed schemas. Anthropic’s “programmatic tool calling” approach (Claude writes Python calling tools in containers) reportedly saves 98.7% of tokens.

• A Most Elegant TCP Hole Punching Algorithm | HN — Describes an algorithm for TCP NAT traversal using equal delta port mapping. Elegant in theory but HN commenters note practical limitations: NAT port randomization on many routers breaks the assumption, and existing standards (NAT-PMP, IPv6) address the underlying problem differently.

• How Kernel Anti-Cheats Work | HN — Technical walkthrough of kernel-level anti-cheat systems: how they hook into the OS, what they monitor, and the security implications of running ring-0 code for game integrity.

• A Gentle Introduction to Mercury | Lobsters — A book-length introduction to Mercury, the logic/functional programming language with a strong type system, typeclasses, purity tracking, and definite clause grammars. Bridges Prolog-style logic programming with modern type safety.

• Postgres with Builtin File Systems | HN — DB9 unifies Postgres with integrated file storage for AI agent workflows: SQL for structured data, file ops for artifacts, with auto-embeddings, vector search, and HTTP calls as native SQL operations. Includes environment branching (clone entire databases for testing) and automatic TypeScript/Python type generation.

• Baochip: What It Is, Why I’m Doing It Now, and How It Came About | Lobsters — bunnie Huang’s open-source RISC-V microcontroller with an MMU — unusual for the embedded space. Built on the Vexriscv core at 22nm, designed to run Xous (a Rust-based OS). All data-processing logic is open-source and inspectable.

• SBCL Fibers — Lightweight Cooperative Threads | HN — Implementation of lightweight cooperative threads (fibers) for SBCL, the high-performance Common Lisp compiler.

• Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI | Lobsters — Batsov argues these editors face real threats from AI-native IDEs (Cursor, Windsurf) but also unique opportunities: AI flattens the learning curve for Elisp/VimScript, terminal-native AI tools compose naturally, and Emacs’s “editor as OS” philosophy suits cross-domain AI integration.

• A Guide to vim.pack (Neovim Built-in Plugin Manager) | Lobsters — Comprehensive guide to Neovim’s built-in package loading system, offering an alternative to third-party plugin managers like lazy.nvim.

• The Compose Key Is Magic | Lobsters — A love letter to the X11/Wayland compose key for typing special characters (é, ñ, em dash, etc.) via intuitive key sequences rather than memorizing Unicode codepoints.

• LotusNotes | Lobsters — computer.rip traces Lotus Notes from its roots in PLATO’s collaborative messaging through its peak at 64% groupware market share to its collapse against Exchange. A case study in how a technically sophisticated but broadly-scoped product with a confusing identity lost to narrowly-focused competitors.

• Ageless Linux — Software for Humans of Indeterminate Age | HN — A Debian derivative created as civil disobedience against California’s AB 1043 (Digital Age Assurance Act). The project demonstrates that a bash script modifying /etc/os-release qualifies as a regulated “operating system provider” under the law, exposing how the legislation functions as a compliance moat for large corporations while being impossible for volunteer-driven distros to satisfy.

• Companies House Vulnerability Enabled Company Hijacking | Lobsters — A security vulnerability in the UK’s Companies House allowed company hijacking through director address manipulation.

• Getting Started with Claude for Software Development | Lobsters — Steve Klabnik’s practical guide to adopting Claude Code: start read-only (code reviews, design feedback), graduate to supervised edits, then expand permissions. Emphasizes the pricing reality — his weekly API costs would have been $1,440 on pay-per-use versus $50 on a plan.

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