World

Khamenei Defiant: The Strait Stays Under Tehran’s Control

Iran’s supreme leader broke his silence with a vow to “eliminate the enemy’s abuses” of the Strait of Hormuz and a pledge to guard Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Iran warned the only place for the US in the Gulf is “at the bottom of its waters.” Three weeks into a nominal ceasefire, Trump has shifted to an “economic fury” strategy — a naval blockade with intensified sanctions — while Iran defers nuclear talks entirely and the Economist warns oil markets are “still in La La Land.” The Guardian · War on the Rocks · Economist

Israel Strikes Lebanon, Killing Nine Including Children

Israeli forces struck southern Lebanon, killing at least nine including two children — continuing operations despite a ceasefire agreement. Over 2,586 killed and 8,000 wounded in Lebanon since March 2. Separately, Israel rushed a laser missile defense system to the UAE during the active Iran conflict — the first known deployment of Israeli directed-energy technology to an Arab state, a significant threshold in Abraham Accords security cooperation. BBC · FT: Laser system

Shadow Grain Fleet Under Pressure

Israel turned away a Russian grain ship carrying stolen Ukrainian grain after direct Ukrainian pressure — Ukraine’s foreign minister warned: “Do not buy stolen Ukrainian grain. Do not become part of this crime.” Sweden confiscated the bulk carrier Caffa on similar grounds. Ukraine is building a dedicated counter-fleet system with partners to tighten sanctions enforcement. (Also in Ukraine) Jerusalem Post · Guardian · r/ukraine

UK Raises Terror Threat to “Severe”

Britain raised its national terror threat level to “severe” — indicating an attack is considered highly likely. The elevation comes as a man was charged with attempted murder after stabbing two Jewish men in Golders Green. Community organizations describe record levels of antisemitic incidents, with many British Jews questioning their future in the country. LBC · The Guardian

Zambia: Open Minerals or Lose HIV Support

The US gave Zambia a deadline — open mineral resources to American companies or face termination of HIV programs covering 1.3 million people. Meanwhile, Yara’s CEO warned the Iran war could cause “dramatic consequences” for African food security by triggering a global fertilizer auction that prices out the poorest countries. China moved to fill the vacuum, granting zero tariffs for nearly all African nations. IBTimes · The Guardian: Yara · BBC: China

Belgium Nationalizes Nuclear, Reverses Phase-Out

Belgium halted its nuclear decommissioning and will nationalize its power plants. PM De Wever framed the reversal as reducing dependence on fossil fuel imports amid the Iran-driven oil shock — part of a broader European reassessment of nuclear energy. BBC · HN

Venice Biennale Jury Quits Over Russia’s Return

The five-member international jury resigned days before the opening, protesting Italy’s decision to readmit Russia for the first time since the full-scale invasion. The jury had moved to bar prizes for countries accused of crimes against humanity — drawing pushback from both Rome and the European Commission. BBC · NPR

Ukraine

Deep Strikes at Four-Month Peak

Ukraine pushed strikes on Russian oil infrastructure to a four-month high. The Perm refinery complex was hit for a second consecutive day — this time knocking out the AVT-4 crude processing unit at Lukoil-Permnaftoorgsintez, rendering it inoperable. The Tuapse maritime terminal was struck for the fourth time in two weeks; satellite imagery confirms six fuel reservoirs destroyed. Ukrainian drones also hit the Sverdlov military-industrial plant in Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast — a new target at depth. One Russian town reported “oil literally falling from the sky.” ISW assesses Ukraine is systematically exploiting weakened Russian air defenses. Kyiv Independent: Perm · Militarnyi: Tuapse · BBC

Putin’s May 9 Ceasefire Meets Kremlin Maximalism

Putin proposed a ceasefire beginning May 9 — Victory Day — which Zelenskyy said he was seeking details on. But the day after Trump’s call, Medvedev publicly rejected US mediation and framed the war as existential, lasting “more than a generation.” Lavrov reiterated maximalist preconditions. ISW reads this as deliberate good-cop/bad-cop positioning. In Washington, Zelenskyy accused Vance of “helping Russians” after Vance expressed pride in halting aid, and senators confronted Hegseth for falsely claiming Biden had given Ukraine JASSM and Tomahawk — weapons Ukraine never received. NPR · ISW · Kyiv Independent: Vance

Back-to-Back 200+ Drone Campaigns

Russia launched 206 drones on April 29–30 (172 downed), knocking out power across seven oblasts and injuring 20 in Odesa. The following night: 210 drones, 190 downed — strikes hitting residential buildings in Odesa, petrol stations in Kharkiv, energy infrastructure in Mykolaiv, and killing a civilian in Kherson. Ukrainska Pravda: 210 drones · Ukrainska Pravda: Kharkiv

138 Clashes; Gains at Kostyantynivka

Ukraine made confirmed advances in eastern Kostyantynivka and south of Kolodyazi in the Slovyansk direction. 138 combat clashes in the past day, heaviest at Pokrovsk, Huliaipole, and Kostyantynivka. At Kupyansk, Russian forces infiltrate via underground gas pipelines despite reportedly taking up to 70% casualties per assault. Ukrainska Pravda · ISW

US General Confirms Russia Is Aiding Iran Against US Forces

Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine confirmed before the Senate that Russia has supplied intelligence and weaponry to help Iran target US military assets — acknowledging “there’s definitely some action there.” Zelensky warned US leaders are underestimating the Russia-Iran partnership. The confirmation came as Trump requested $1.5 trillion in defense spending for 2027 — while military aid to Ukraine dropped 99% in his first year. Kyiv Independent

Tech

Claude Code Penalizes Users for “openclaw” in Git History

Users discovered that Claude Code disconnects sessions and depletes credits when git history contains the string “openclaw” — Anthropic’s internal metadata schema identifier. The detection is a naive substring match: JSON schemas, variable names, or documentation containing the word all trigger the penalty. Anthropic initially denied refunds, then reversed after public pressure. No documentation of the restriction existed. Twitter/theo · HN

cPanel Authentication Bypass — CVE-2026-41940

watchTowr Labs documented a critical authentication bypass in cPanel and WHM, the dominant web hosting control panel. Given cPanel’s ubiquity in shared hosting, the blast radius is substantial. watchTowr Labs · HN

Supply Chain Attack in PyTorch Lightning

Semgrep discovered malicious code embedded as a dependency in the PyTorch Lightning library, themed after Dune’s sandworm (“Shai-Hulud”). AI training infrastructure is an increasingly attractive supply chain target. Semgrep · HN

Printing Zig Structs: Comptime Reflection in Practice

A practical walkthrough of using Zig’s comptime reflection to print arbitrary struct types at runtime — zero-cost introspection without runtime overhead, showing how Zig’s type system and comptime interact. blog.edwardloveall.com · Lobsters

Game Boy Emulator in F

Building a complete Game Boy emulator in F#: CPU emulation, memory mapping, PPU, timing. A concrete example of where FP strengths and constraints show up in hardware emulation. nickkossolapov.github.io · HN

Porting GPT to Futhark

Porting microgpt to Futhark — a purely functional data-parallel language designed for GPU and SIMD execution. Futhark enforces parallel semantics at the type level, making this an interesting intersection of PL research and practical ML. kmjn.org · Lobsters

AI & Automation

Semble: Code Search MCP Cuts Token Use ~98%

MinishLab released Semble — an open-source local code search MCP server that replaces the grep+read loops Claude Code falls into. Combines Model2Vec embeddings with BM25 lexical matching, fuses via Reciprocal Rank Fusion, then reranks with code-specific signals: definition detection, identifier stemming, file coherence — while penalizing test noise. Indexes a repo in ~250ms, queries in ~1.5ms, CPU only, no API keys. NDCG@10 of 0.854, matching transformer models. Works as MCP for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. GitHub · r/ClaudeAI

Codebase RAG via AST Call Graphs

A retrieval approach for large codebases that abandons text-chunk embeddings: parse each file into a symbol graph, connect by call relationships, then retrieve via graph traversal + BM25. Roughly 20× reduction in context — 5K tokens instead of 100K — without losing coverage of relevant code paths. r/MachineLearning

Anthropic’s 81,000-User Economic Survey

Described as the largest multilingual qualitative AI study ever: 81,000 Claude users across 159 countries in 70 languages. Tasks that take 90 minutes without AI are sped up ~80%. The counterintuitive finding: AI anxiety and AI usage are positively correlated — the roles where Claude does the most work are also the most worried about displacement. Productivity gains come primarily from expanding into new tasks, not accelerating existing ones. Anthropic

Opus 4.7 Regression Reports

Multiple heavy Claude users (Max 20x subscribers with 17+ weeks of maxed usage) report that Opus 4.7 is a meaningful regression from 4.6 — particularly in multi-step reasoning, technical depth, and staying on task during complex projects. Active discussion with corroborating reports. r/ClaudeAI

$40 Claude Code Session on 611 Lines

A developer spent $40.78 — 12.8M input tokens for 611 lines changed. Each tool call re-sends the full accumulated context; without pruning, even simple iterative tasks compound into millions of tokens. Thread surfaced strategies: .claudeignore, targeted /compact, tight task scope per session. r/ClaudeAI

Hackable ML Compiler in 5,000 Lines of Python

A pedagogical ML compiler covering the full pipeline — computation graph to kernel generation — in 5,000 lines, deliberately avoiding TVM’s 500K+ lines. A principled, readable reference for understanding what compilation frameworks actually do. Medium · r/MachineLearning

Health

Sonlicromanol Phase 2 Trial for Post-Exertional Malaise

Dutch Phase 2 RCT (NCT07298005) testing sonlicromanol — a mitochondrial redox modulator — in post-COVID patients with severe PEM, muscle pain, and post-exertional fatigue. Double-blind, placebo-controlled; Khondrion and Amsterdam UMC, ZonMw-funded. The drug modulates mitochondrial function via a triple mode of action targeting redox imbalance, and is already in Phase 3 for primary mitochondrial disease (KHENERFIN). One of the few trials with PEM as a primary endpoint rather than fatigue or cognition. Khondrion · ClinicalTrials