World

The Iran War

Twenty-Five Billion and Counting

The US war on Iran has cost roughly $25 billion over two months, with Pentagon officials unable to give Congress a precise accounting. Iran has declared the Strait of Hormuz a “vast operational area” far wider than before the war, pushing oil above $100 per barrel — a level analysts expect through year-end. The disruption cascades deep into consumer supply chains: one snack manufacturer switched to black-and-white packaging due to ink shortages traced to Iranian petrochemical cuts. A Bahrain-led UN resolution calling for free navigation has won backing from 112 nations, and Australia has pledged to join an international reopening mission.

The Guardian (live) · Al Jazeera · BBC (oil) · BBC (packaging)

Thirty of Thirty-Three

Classified US intelligence shows Iran retains operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz — directly contradicting Trump’s repeated claims of fatal degradation. The finding explains Iran’s sustained pressure on the Strait and underpins the widening gap between the administration’s public narrative and the military reality on the ground.

NYT · r/geopolitics

The Mediator Who Hid the Jets

While positioning itself as a neutral conduit between Washington and Tehran, Pakistan allowed Iran to park a military reconnaissance aircraft at Nur Khan Air Force Base near Rawalpindi — potentially shielding it from US strikes. Trump publicly endorsed Pakistan as a mediator in the same week; Senator Lindsey Graham immediately rejected the idea. With 80% of its arms imports from China, Pakistan’s claim to neutrality was always constrained — but actively concealing Iranian military assets stretches the definition beyond recognition.

CBS News · NDTV · Al Jazeera

Tehran Against Itself

Iran’s ultra-conservative Paydari Front is threatening street protests if nuclear negotiations produce anything resembling the 2015 JCPOA, framing diplomacy as revolutionary betrayal. Pragmatists inside the regime fear economic collapse without a deal; hardliners treat negotiations as an existential threat. The government’s traditional ability to suppress factional conflict is visibly eroding — complicating any diplomatic path forward.

Iran News Wire · r/geopolitics

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Israel Creates Death-Penalty Tribunal for October 7

The Knesset approved legislation creating a special military tribunal with authority to sentence to death Palestinians convicted of participating in the October 7, 2023 attack. Livestreamed trials are planned, drawing comparisons to the 1962 Eichmann proceedings. Simultaneously, the most comprehensive Israeli investigation to date documented that Hamas’s use of sexual violence was “systematic” and “weaponized” — meeting the threshold for prosecution as a war crime.

The Guardian · BBC · Jerusalem Post

Two Hundred and Sixty-Nine

A Pakistani airstrike on March 16 struck a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul, killing 269 Afghan civilians — a toll the UN says may be even higher. Pakistan claimed it targeted terrorist infrastructure; both the UN and victims’ families rejected that characterization. International pressure is growing for an independent war crimes investigation into one of the deadliest single strikes on Afghan civilians in recent memory.

BBC · BBC (video)

Bosnia Unravels

The UN’s high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina is being forced to resign following a policy clash with the United States, which has aligned more closely with the Russia-backed Republika Srpska entity. Christian Schmidt warned the multi-ethnic state may “fall apart” — with Washington and Moscow now effectively united in undermining the Dayton Accords framework that has held the country together since 1995.

The Guardian

The CIA in Mexico

US media allege the CIA “directly participated” in deadly anti-cartel operations inside Mexico — well beyond the agency’s traditional intelligence-sharing role. Both the Mexican government and the CIA denied the reports. If confirmed, the operations would represent a major expansion of US covert activity on Mexican soil and risk a severe diplomatic rupture.

CNN · Al Jazeera

Hantavirus Reaches Europe and the Pacific

The outbreak that began aboard the MV Hondius polar expedition ship has grown to 11 confirmed cases, spreading well beyond the vessel: a French passenger is on a ventilator in Paris, a contact case has been quarantined on Pitcairn Island, and Spain confirmed another passenger case. WHO Director-General Tedros called on all countries to prepare, though there is no confirmed person-to-person transmission.

BBC · The Guardian · AP · RNZ

Ukraine

April’s Reversal

Russia’s spring-summer offensive has failed to produce significant advances since mid-March. April marked the first net Russian territorial loss since the 2024 Kursk incursion — driven by counterattacks that recaptured Kupyansk, over 400 km² in the south, and most recently several Zaporizhzhia settlements. Ukraine’s 475th Regiment pushed Russian forces back up to 15 km on parts of the Zaporizhzhia front. On May 12, Ukraine recorded 210 clashes — heaviest on Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka (32 and 31 repelled assaults). Russian recruitment has fallen below its casualty replacement rate for the first time in the war.

ISW, May 12 · Ukrainska Pravda · r/ukraine

Orenburg, 1,200 Kilometers

Ukrainian drones struck the JSC Strela Production Association in Orenburg — roughly 1,200 km from the front — a key manufacturer of supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles and fighter jet components. Fires were also reported at pipeline operations in Perm and a chemical plant in Bryansk. The sustained campaign against Russian oil infrastructure is contributing to recurring domestic gasoline shortages. AI-guided drone interdiction is now expanding to Russian supply routes toward Mariupol, drawing alarm from Russian milbloggers.

Kyiv Independent · ISW · Forbes · NV Ukraine (gasoline) · NV Ukraine (milbloggers)

355 Drones in Two Nights

Two consecutive Russian overnight waves hit Ukraine: 216 drones on May 11–12 (4 killed, 23 injured) and 139 on May 12–13, confirmed at 13 locations. Daytime attacks killed 8 in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and 2 in Kryvyi Rih, where a 9-month-old baby lost a leg. A Poltava electrical substation was hit, leaving 7,000 without power. Industrial facilities in Odesa and residential areas in Kharkiv and Kherson also took damage.

Ukrainska Pravda (139 drones) · Ukrainska Pravda (Dnipropetrovsk) · Ukrainska Pravda (Kryvyi Rih) · Ukrainska Pravda (Poltava) · Ukrainska Pravda (Odesa)

Satan II, Take Five

Putin celebrated a Sarmat ICBM test launch, calling it “the most powerful missile in the world,” and announced combat deployment by end of 2026 — the same promise Russia made in 2021, 2022, and 2023, ahead of a likely failed test in November 2024. ISW assesses the posturing as damage control: it mirrors the earlier Oreshnik playbook, designed to project strength after the embarrassment of needing Ukrainian cooperation to secure a safe Victory Day parade and the stalling of the spring offensive.

Al Jazeera · CBS · ISW

The Bucharest Signal

The Bucharest Nine Summit opened in Romania with Zelensky alongside NATO Secretary General Rutte. The EU proposed using its Satellite Centre to monitor any future ceasefire — a concrete planning step. Ukraine and the US are nearing a deal to test Ukrainian drones on American soil, formalizing a defense relationship driven by battlefield necessity: Ukraine plans over 3 million FPV drones for 2026 versus 300,000 by the US in 2025, with Ukrainian firms having developed GPS-independent guidance to defeat jamming. European countries are separately moving to develop their own missiles to replace Trump-backed weapons. The $400M US aid package remains on track, and a drone supply deal with Canada is in advanced stages. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Russia’s weakened military presents an “opportunity” to end the war on Ukraine’s terms.

Ukrainska Pravda (B9) · Ukrainska Pravda (EU satellite) · FT · CBS (drone deal) · Ukrainska Pravda ($400M) · Global News (Canada) · The Guardian (EU missiles) · Al-Ahram (Kallas)

Tech

Claude Code Gets a Dashboard and a Finish Line

Claude Code 2.1.139 ships two major workflow changes. The claude agents command (or left-arrow shortcut) opens a unified session dashboard showing every session’s status — running, blocked, or done — with inline reply and peek/attach controls. The new /goal command sets a completion condition and Claude keeps working across turns until it’s met, tracking elapsed time, turns, and tokens. Background sessions launch via claude --bg. Also: hook exec form as args: string[] eliminates shell-quoting bugs, MCP stdio servers now receive CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR, and context compaction preserves CLAUDE.md directives through compression. A follow-up v2.1.140 adds explicit self-modification guardrails — agents can no longer modify .claude/settings*.json or CLAUDE.md — and discourages short-interval polling loops.

Anthropic blog · r/ClaudeAI (Agent View) · r/ClaudeAI (/goal) · v2.1.140 diff

When Idle Isn’t Idle

Cloudflare engineers traced a QUIC connection stall to a semantic mismatch when porting Linux’s CUBIC congestion control into quiche: the kernel measures idle from the last ACK received, but the port measured from the last packet sent. At minimum congestion window, the recovery boundary chased forward one RTT per cycle, trapping connections in a “death spiral” — the window stayed pinned at two packets and never recovered. A sharp example of how subtle semantic differences between layers create catastrophic emergent behavior.

Cloudflare Blog · HN

Any Android App Can Bypass Your VPN

Mullvad found that Android 16’s registerQuicConnectionClosePayload API — meant for graceful QUIC teardown — doesn’t enforce VPN routing. Any app can send traffic outside the tunnel, exposing the device’s real IP, even with “Always-On VPN” and “Block connections without VPN” both enabled. Affects all recent Android versions.

Mullvad · Lobsters

The Social Contract, Revoked

Bambu Lab has blocked OrcaSlicer — a community fork of their own open-source slicer — from accessing BambuNetwork cloud services, forcing users onto official Bambu Studio. Jeff Geerling argues this violates the implicit social contract: Bambu built its ecosystem on community open-source work but is now using network lock-in to claw back control. A community fork is attempting to restore full cloud support.

Jeff Geerling · Lobsters · HN (fork)

Every Byte, Every Interpretation

Elevator is a new static binary translator that converts x86-64 executables to AArch64 without source code, debug symbols, or runtime fallbacks. Rather than guessing which bytes are code and which are data, it considers every feasible interpretation of every byte and produces a translation for each — yielding self-contained binaries that can be tested and cryptographically signed. Performance matches or beats QEMU.

arXiv · HN

Six CVEs for dnsmasq

CERT is releasing six serious CVEs for dnsmasq — the DNS forwarder and DHCP server in routers, embedded devices, and homelabs everywhere. Patch promptly if you run it.

dnsmasq-discuss · HN