Oil at $141 and a bridge in ruins — the Iran war grinds into its sixth week with no exit in sight, while a small German trial delivers the first placebo-controlled evidence that Long COVID fatigue can be treated.

Iran’s Largest Bridge Destroyed; Oil Hits $141

The US destroyed Iran’s largest bridge near Karaj, killing at least eight. Trump warned the “assault on infrastructure hasn’t even started.” Brent crude surged to $141/barrel — the highest since 2008 — as the energy crisis deepens: American households face $857 in extra gasoline costs, airline tickets are up 20%, and War on the Rocks argues the West failed to learn anything from the 2022 Ukraine energy shock. Iran’s Pasteur medical research centre was heavily damaged. Two major steel plants shut down. The IRGC struck back at Oracle and Amazon cloud facilities in the Gulf, and hit US jets in Jordan. Estimated damage to 13 US bases now tops $800 million, with 40,000 troops relocated to hotels.

The Guardian · CNBC · War on the Rocks · The New Republic · Telegraph

Rovunaptabin: First Drug to Beat Long COVID Fatigue in a Controlled Trial

The reCOVer Phase IIa trial — double-blind, placebo-controlled, 30 patients — found that rovunaptabin, a DNA aptamer targeting GPCR autoantibodies, significantly improved fatigue across all four primary endpoints. Effect sizes were large (up to 6.65 on SF-36 Vitality). The drug neutralized autoantibodies in every patient. Published in eClinicalMedicine (Lancet family). Separately, LDN was shown to fully restore TRPM3 ion channel function in NK cells from Long COVID patients, providing a concrete mechanism ahead of planned pivotal trials. (More in Health)

eClinicalMedicine · Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences

NATO Unravels — or Tightens?

Trump said he is “strongly considering” pulling the US out of NATO. Former envoy Kellogg proposed replacing it with a new alliance including Ukraine, Japan, and Australia. But Politico reports the threats are having the opposite effect: binding European allies together against Washington. Macron, speaking in Seoul, told Trump to “be serious.” Austria denied US airspace. Over 40 countries joined UK-led Hormuz talks. The first French ship crossed the strait via Iran’s corridor. Trump threatened to halt Ukraine weapons unless Europe helps open Hormuz — and Zelenskyy offered Ukraine’s maritime expertise instead.

Politico · The Guardian · The Guardian · Le Marin

Markets

Indicator	Value	Change
S&P 500	—	+0.1%
Gold	—	−1.9%
Oil	~$141/bbl	+11.1%
EUR/USD	1.0843	—
USD/NOK	10.82	—
VIX	24.51	—
BTC	$66,941	—

Oil +11.1% — Brent at $141, highest since 2008
Gold −1.9% — possible margin-call liquidation despite peak geopolitical risk
Oracle +0.8% — muted reaction to IRGC strike on Dubai data center

Iranian Red Crescent workers at a strike site. Day 35 of the US-Israeli campaign.

Kharg Island — Iran’s main oil export terminal and the war’s most debated target.

World

Trump fires Attorney General Pam Bondi; names his former defense lawyer acting AG

Trump removed Bondi, whose tenure was overshadowed by her handling of the Epstein files. Deputy AG Todd Blanche — Trump’s former hush-money defense lawyer — takes over as acting attorney general.

NPR · Al Jazeera

100% tariff on pharma imports; Australia refuses to budge

Trump announced a 100% tariff on pharmaceutical imports. Australia’s health minister said the government is “not negotiating” on removing drug price protections.

The Guardian

ICE detentions: mosque president arrested, record death pace, Canadian mother released

The president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque was detained by ICE while driving — accused of being targeted for criticizing Israel. ICE detention deaths are at a record pace; inspectors found 49 violations at one Texas facility. A Canadian mother and daughter were released after three weeks, fitted with ankle monitors.

NPR · The Guardian · Al Jazeera

US begins third-country deportations to Uganda and Costa Rica

A deportation flight landed in Uganda under a new third-country agreement. Costa Rica agreed to receive up to 25 deportees per week. Legal groups condemned both arrangements as “dehumanising.”

The Guardian · Al Jazeera

Supreme Court leans toward upholding birthright citizenship

A majority appeared inclined to rule against the Trump administration’s challenge — a significant defeat for the immigration agenda if the ruling holds.

Myanmar’s coup leader elected president

General Min Aung Hlaing, who seized power in 2021, was formally elected president by a pro-military parliament, cementing military control despite ongoing armed resistance.

Al Jazeera

Cuba releases 2,010 prisoners; Russia ships more oil

Cuba announced the releases as a “humanitarian gesture” tied to Holy Week, without mentioning US pressure. Russia is sending a second oil tanker as the blockade continues. Trump said he “doesn’t mind.”

Al Jazeera

US lifts sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez

The move signals warming ties with Caracas under the post-Maduro arrangement, at a time when Washington faces energy supply pressures from the Iran conflict.

The Guardian · AP News

Also today

Hegseth asked the Army’s top general to step down; signed a memo allowing personal firearms on military bases — BBC
At least 43 killed in ADF attack in northeast DR Congo — Al Jazeera
Burkina Faso junta linked to over 1,800 killings since seizing power — BBC
Quebec bans street prayers and prayer rooms in universities — CTV News
Everest guides allegedly poisoned climbers in $20M insurance fraud scheme — Yahoo News
Pakistan-Afghanistan peace talks begin in China — NPR
Ancient Romanian gold helmet recovered after Dutch museum heist — The Guardian
Artemis II crew cleared Earth orbit — first humans beyond since 1972 — BBC

Min Aung Hlaing presides over a military parade. Myanmar’s coup leader is now formally president.

Iran War — Investigations

The war you’re not allowed to see: UAE systematically covers up Iranian drone strikes

Bellingcat documents at least six incidents where UAE authorities mischaracterized successful Iranian strikes. At Fujairah oil port, officials claimed “debris following a successful interception” — but video showed an intact drone and satellite imagery revealed three storage tanks destroyed. The Burj Al Arab fire was called “limited shrapnel damage”; footage showed 30-meter flames across eight floors. Dubai airport’s closure was attributed to “safety protocols” with no mention of a drone. A coordinated information strategy includes influencer campaigns and police warnings against contradicting official statements.

Bellingcat

Why seizing Kharg Island won’t end the Iran war

Bilal Saab argues in War on the Rocks that capturing Iran’s main oil terminal would be strategically counterproductive. Iran retains long-range artillery, SAMs, and precision weapons from the mainland. A single mass-casualty strike could force an impossible choice between mission creep and humiliating withdrawal. The regime views this as existential and believes it’s currently winning.

Iran skeptical about diplomacy; wars beginning to overlap

US intelligence says Iran remains deeply skeptical about diplomatic off-ramps. The Guardian reports the Ukraine and Iran wars are starting to overlap as a strategic dynamic — Russia is expanding intelligence-sharing with Tehran, creating a linked theater. Saudi Arabia is preparing military contingencies alongside its diplomatic track.

The Guardian · CSM

Orbán’s son unmasked in secret African military mission

Direkt36 and Le Monde identified Gáspár Orbán as a participant in covert Hungarian military delegations to Chad and Niger. Facial recognition confirmed his presence across at least six meetings in 2023–24. He actively avoided detection — pulling on a surgical mask when cameras appeared — and was eventually acknowledged as a liaison officer practicing “family diplomacy” by connecting with the sons of African heads of state.

Trump firm sells drone interceptors to Gulf states under US protection

A drone-maker backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. is trying to sell drone interceptors to Gulf countries currently under attack by Iran and dependent on US military protection led by their father.

Israel to destroy all houses near Lebanon border

Israel’s defense minister announced plans to demolish all houses near the Lebanese border — systematic infrastructure destruction beyond targeted military operations.

Also

3D printing quietly revolutionizing asymmetric warfare — Myanmar provides first battlefield validation of 3D-printed firearms — War on the Rocks
China’s AI models surged from 1% to 30% of global workloads in one year; DeepSeek complied with 94% of malicious requests vs 8% for US models — War on the Rocks

Satellite imagery of Fujairah oil port showing destroyed storage tanks. UAE said the interception was successful.

Gáspár Orbán, identified in photos from a Hungarian military delegation to Chad.

Ukraine

Russia’s advance stalls for first time in over two years

France 24 reports Russia’s military campaign has stalled for the first time since early 2024. Ukraine’s General Staff counted 230 combat engagements on 2–3 April, with nearly 100 concentrated on the Pokrovsk and Huliaipole fronts. Russia lost an estimated 1,230 soldiers in 24 hours along with 65 artillery systems. A failed Ukrainian mechanized counterattack near Pokrovsk sparked rare public debate over assault tactics.

Ukrainska Pravda · Kyiv Independent

Kharkiv endures 25+ hours of continuous strikes

Ballistic missiles hit Kharkiv’s Kyivskyi district overnight, injuring multiple people including an infant — capping more than 25 consecutive hours of drone and missile attacks. Across Ukraine: seven injured in a Kherson minibus strike, nine in Druzhkivka, one killed in Shostka, and FPV drones filmed hunting civilian cars in Nikopol.

Ukrainska Pravda · r/ukraine

Deep strikes cut Russian oil export capacity by 20%

Ukrainian long-range drones are inflicting serious damage on Russian energy infrastructure. Reuters reports export capacity peaked at 40% reduction in March and remains down 20%. Key targets include the Baltic ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk (the latter losing 40%+ storage capacity) and a refinery in Ufa — 1,400 km from Ukraine. Russia’s Naftogaz facilities were attacked 129 times during the heating season alone. Reuters assesses a production reduction is now “inevitable.”

Kyiv Independent

FPV drones destroy aircraft and Orion UAV base at Crimean airfield

Ukraine’s 1st UAS Center and GUR struck Kirovske airfield in occupied Crimea, destroying an An-72P maritime patrol aircraft, four Orion heavy reconnaissance UAVs (~$5M), their ground control station, and a radar system — effectively eliminating a significant Russian heavy drone base.

Kyiv Independent

Russian general among 29 killed in An-26 crash in Crimea

Lt. Gen. Alexander Otroshchenko, commander of the Northern Fleet’s composite aviation corps, was the 14th Russian general killed since the full-scale invasion began. The military An-26 crashed in Crimea on 31 March; Russia attributed it to a technical malfunction.

Ukrainska Pravda

Defense & Diplomacy

Ukraine developing 850 km ballistic missiles (FP-9), deployment targeted mid-2026 — 20–30 simultaneous launches possible — United24 Media
Foreign Affairs: Ukraine’s wartime defense industry is the arsenal Europe needs but hasn’t leveraged — Foreign Affairs
India’s defense exports surged 62% to $4.1B — Reuters
US-Ukraine minerals deal evaluated: more constructive than “neocolonialism” critics claim — War on the Rocks
Apple disabled all payments in Russia — MacRumors
Russia ordering companies to nominate 2–5 employees for military service — Euromaidan Press

Firefighters after a Russian ballistic missile strike on Kharkiv.

Tech

An attacker social-engineered the lead axios maintainer through a Microsoft Teams exploit, installing a RAT. Two malicious versions were published with a cross-platform backdoor connecting to a C2 server. The window was ~3 hours before detection. Despite legitimate releases having OIDC provenance attestations, npm has no option to restrict packages to OIDC-only publication — the attacker simply published via npm CLI from the compromised machine, bypassing 2FA.

Hacker News

Ben Hoyt: every dependency is a supply chain attack surface

Pairing well with the axios incident: automatic dependency updates (Dependabot, etc.) are the real attack vector because updates get rubber-stamped. Advice: turn off Dependabot, minimize dependencies, copy small code over adding a dep — “a little copying is better than a little dependency.”

Cursor 3: ground-up rebuild as agent-first workspace

Cursor rebuilt from an IDE-centric VS Code extension into an agent-first workspace. The new architecture centers on multi-agent management with a unified sidebar showing local and cloud agents launched from desktop, mobile, web, Slack, GitHub, or Linear. Includes environment handoff, cloud agents with screenshot verification, integrated diff/PR workflow, and a plugin marketplace.

Hacker News

Qwen3.6-Plus: Alibaba’s agent-focused flagship

1M token context, 65K output tokens, always-on chain-of-thought, native function calling. Significant coding upgrade from frontend to repo-level problem solving.

Hacker News

Gemma 4: dramatic benchmark gains across four model sizes

Google released Gemma 4 in E2B/E4B (edge/mobile), 26B (MoE, 4B active), and 31B (dense) variants — all with native multimodal, agentic function calling, and 256K context. AIME math jumped from 20.8% to 89.2%. Modular claims 15% throughput over vLLM on Blackwell from a single cross-vendor GPU stack.

Hacker News · Modular

landdown: Landlock-based sandboxing for shell scripts

A lightweight Linux sandboxing tool using Landlock LSM. Add a shebang and an allowlist of permitted filesystem/network access to the top of your script; everything else is blocked. No root, no containers. Exactly the kind of tool that should exist.

Lobsters

Packaging 128 languages with Nix for quine-relay

Of 128 languages in quine-relay, 95 were in nixpkgs and 33 needed manual packaging. Gambas3 (hardcoded /usr/lib/ paths, solved via buildFHSEnv) and Modula-2 (enabled within gcc via overrideAttrs) were the trickiest. A co-contributor independently submitted a near-identical PR days before completion.

Lobsters

Offensive cybersecurity time horizons: AI now solves 3-hour human tasks

Frontier models (GPT-5.3 Codex, Opus 4.6) now solve offensive security tasks that take human experts ~3.2 hours, with capability roughly doubling every 6–10 months. However, benchmarks cover bounded tactical subtasks, not strategic reasoning.

Lobsters

Former Azure engineer: 173 unaccounted management agents on every node

A scathing insider account: Microsoft tried to port a massive Windows management stack onto a tiny ARM SoC, and 173 unaccounted-for management agents were discovered running on Azure nodes. The author argues these decisions lost OpenAI, Anthropic, and US government trust.

Hacker News

Also

Cascade: 30,000-line CSS engine in OCaml with typed eDSL and structural diffing — Lobsters
Mintlify replaced per-session containers with a virtual filesystem over a vector DB — startup dropped from 46s to 100ms — Lobsters
jj v0.40.0: revset diff filtering, improved jj arrange TUI — GitHub
1SubML: ML-like language with first-class modules, structural subtyping, and polynomial-time type checking — GitHub
Validating Hare’s sort via symbolic execution — exhaustively proved correctness across 4,683 paths — Lobsters
Reverse engineering Crazy Taxi’s GameCube file formats for noclip.website — Lobsters
nginx proxy_max_temp_file_size default filled disk on launch day — two-line fix — Lobsters
OpenAI acquires tech media show TBPN for hundreds of millions — Hacker News
LinkedIn covertly scanning 6,000+ browser extensions on every page visit — Browsergate

AI & Automation

The Claude Code ecosystem this week

A busy week for Claude Code tooling. A practical case was made for CLIs over MCP servers — fewer auth issues, easier debugging, better composability. Superpowers adds a structured six-stage workflow replacing “jump straight to coding.” AgentPeek provides real-time observability dashboards for multi-agent sessions. A three-agent team pattern (Architect + Builder + Reviewer) reports better results than single-agent coding. ai-codex pre-indexes codebases to save ~50K tokens per conversation. Someone bridged Voice Mode to Claude Code via Apple Reminders — hacky but functional. And Anthropic’s Boris Cherny announced NO_FLICKER mode for the terminal renderer (CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1).

Anthropic on usage limits: peak-hour throttling and 1M-context sessions

Anthropic posted a follow-up after community complaints. Peak-hour limits are tighter and 1M-context sessions consume significantly more capacity — together explaining most of what users are feeling. Several bugs were fixed along the way.

Hallucinated citations polluting the scientific literature at scale

Nature finds tens of thousands of 2025 publications may contain AI-generated invalid references. GPTZero found 50+ hallucinated citations in papers under review at ICLR 2026, each missed by 3–5 peer reviewers. Hallucinated citations that function as data may constitute research misconduct.

Honest assessment: AI agents break constantly in practice

A developer who spent months building with agent tools shares a frank assessment: agents look impressive for structured tasks and demos but require extensive babysitting, retries, and manual corrections. Most “look what my agent did” posts omit the hard parts.

Research

Weight norm clipping accelerates grokking by 39–249x across algebraic tasks — r/MachineLearning
Autoresearch (Claude-driven) outperforms Optuna for hyperparameter tuning — r/MachineLearning
PhAIL benchmark: best robot AI model achieves 5% of human throughput, needs intervention every 4 min — phail.ai
EVoC: purpose-built clustering for embedding vectors, multi-granularity, handles quantized vectors — GitHub
SPORE: skeleton-based clustering for nonconvex, high-dimensional data — r/MachineLearning
Solving the Jane Street Dormant LLM Challenge: systematic backdoor discovery — r/MachineLearning

Health

reCOVer Phase IIa: rovunaptabin significantly improves fatigue in GPCR-autoantibody-positive patients

The peer-reviewed results of the reCOVer Phase IIa trial are published in eClinicalMedicine (Lancet family). In a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover RCT of 30 patients at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, rovunaptabin — a DNA aptamer that neutralizes GPCR-targeting autoantibodies — showed significant improvements across all primary fatigue endpoints: FACIT Fatigue (effect size 2.10), Bell score (3.64, p=0.0004), Fatigue Severity Scale (−2.66), and SF-36 Vitality (6.65, p=0.0001). The drug achieved autoantibody neutralization in all 30 patients. All participants tested 100% positive for β2-adrenergic and M2-muscarinic autoantibodies at baseline. Two IV infusions of 1350 mg, 42 days apart. No drug-related serious adverse events.

This is the first placebo-controlled evidence that directly targeting GPCR autoantibodies produces clinical improvement in post-COVID fatigue.

PMC full text · PubMed

LDN restores TRPM3 ion channel function in Long COVID NK cells

First mechanistic evidence for low-dose naltrexone in Long COVID. In 27 participants (9 untreated LC, 9 LDN-treated at 3–4.5 mg/day, 9 healthy controls), LDN-treated patients showed fully restored TRPM3 ion channel function in NK cells — no meaningful differences from healthy controls. Untreated patients showed significant TRPM3 dysfunction. TRPM3 regulates calcium influx critical for NK cell cytotoxicity. This provides a concrete biological mechanism and supports the rationale for the upcoming RECOVER-TLC pivotal LDN trial.

RECOVER-AUTONOMIC: ivabradine fails to improve POTS

Ivabradine did not significantly improve orthostatic intolerance compared to placebo in 181 Long COVID POTS patients over 12 weeks. Both arms received coordinated non-pharmacologic care. A notable negative result — ivabradine is commonly prescribed off-label for post-COVID POTS and this is the first large RCT.

Radcliffe Cardiology

Nature Immunology: distinct monocyte state linked to Long COVID fatigue

Single-cell multiomics identified “LC-Mo,” a distinct monocyte transcriptional state prevalent in Long COVID patients that correlates with fatigue severity. The state was most common in patients whose initial COVID was mild to moderate — consistent with severe acute illness not being a prerequisite.

ScienceDaily

RECOVER-TLC trials

Pivotal LDN trial (ages 6–25) and semaglutide trial planned for summer 2026 enrollment. The LDN trial is designed large enough to support an FDA approval pathway. Criticized for slow timelines — enrollment nearly two years after program launch.

FNIH · The Sick Times

cd ~/repos/ratatosk && claude --resume fa53840a-1c9b-460a-9533-4ff954998e99