China to Host Putin Days After Trump’s Beijing Summit

Vladimir Putin will visit China just days after Trump’s landmark summit with Xi Jinping. The back-to-back visits underscore Beijing’s strategic positioning: maintaining functional ties with Washington while preserving its deep partnership with Moscow, navigating the Iran war and Ukraine conflict simultaneously from a position of maximum leverage.

US Arrests Alleged Iraqi Commander of Iran-Backed Militia

US authorities arrested Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an alleged Iraqi commander of an Iranian-backed militia accused of orchestrating 18 terrorist attacks across the UK, Europe, and beyond. The Guardian notes the arrest is ‘astonishing but not surprising’ given Iran’s long history of using proxy networks for destabilization. Separately, Iraq installed new prime minister Ali al-Zaidi in Baghdad, pledging reforms amid ongoing regional instability.

50+ Schoolchildren Including Toddlers Kidnapped in Northeastern Nigeria

More than 50 schoolchildren, including toddlers, were kidnapped in Mussa town, Borno state. No group has claimed responsibility, though the region has long been targeted by Boko Haram and ISWAP mass abductions.

13 Victims of US Military Boat Strikes Identified

The identities of 13 men killed by US military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific have been released, putting human faces on a controversial use of lethal force. Advocates described the victims as ‘flesh-and-blood people,’ raising accountability questions about rules of engagement in ongoing maritime interdiction operations.

Tens of Thousands Join Tommy Robinson-Led Far-Right Rally in London

Tens of thousands marched through central London in a far-right rally led by Tommy Robinson — one of the largest such demonstrations in recent UK history. Counter-activists from Led By Donkeys managed to project pro-immigration messages from a large screen inside the event.

Bolivia Deploys 3,500 Troops to Crush 11-Day Protest Blockades

Bolivia’s government deployed approximately 3,500 soldiers and police to clear road blockades maintained for 11 days by demonstrators demanding President Rodrigo Paz’s resignation. Protesters were arrested and tear gas deployed as the government moved to restore access to the capital amid a deepening political and fuel crisis.

Bulgaria Wins Eurovision 2026; Five Countries Boycott Over Israel

Bulgaria’s Dara won the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna with ‘Bangaranga’ — the country’s first-ever victory. Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Slovenia, and the Netherlands boycotted over Israel’s participation amid the Gaza war, thousands protested outside the venue, and Ukraine set a record for the longest note ever sung at Eurovision.

Ukraine Puts 100+ Drones Over Moscow; Russia Counters With 300-Drone Wave

Ukraine launched over 100 drones at Moscow and surrounding oblasts overnight May 16–17, sparking fires at a technology park, forcing flight restrictions at multiple airports, and killing at least 3 in the Moscow region. The Ryazan oil refinery was also struck the same night. The night prior, Ukraine hit the Nevinnomyssk Azot chemical plant in Stavropol Krai — Russia’s largest nitrogen fertilizer and ammonia producer, ~540 km from the front — a facility producing the ammonium nitrate used in explosives.

Russia countered with approximately 300 drones against Ukraine, striking Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Dnipro, and Odesa — cutting power to 22,000 subscribers. Clearly-marked UN vehicles were struck by drones in Ukrainian territory. A new poll shows that for the first time since 2022, Russians worry more about strikes at home than events at the front.

France announced readiness to co-develop a ballistic missile defense system with Ukraine — Zelensky called it ‘an important step’ distinct from existing air defense cooperation. The US separately allowed its sanctions exemption for purchases of Russian oil to expire without renewal.

Russia Passes Extraterritorial Military Force Law, Accelerates Transnistria Passportization

The State Duma passed legislation granting Putin explicit authority for military operations outside Russia to protect Russian citizens abroad — the same pretext used to justify the 2022 invasion. Simultaneously, Putin signed a decree fast-tracking Russian citizenship for Transnistrian residents in Moldova, where 59% already hold Russian passports. Zelensky called it a territorial claim and instructed officials to coordinate with Chisinau; Moldova’s president rejected Moscow’s framing. ISW frames the moves as replicating the passportization-then-intervention playbook used in Ukraine, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia.

Grafana Labs Internal Source Code Accessed in Security Breach

Grafana Labs disclosed that an attacker accessed internal source code repositories. Given Grafana’s widespread deployment as monitoring infrastructure across the industry, the breach is worth tracking — particularly for downstream supply-chain or trust implications.

Smart Doorbell: Fleet-Wide Account Takeover With Two HTTP Requests

A teardown of the Smart Doorbell X3 exposes a full-stack failure: any device can be silently reassigned to an attacker’s account using two forged HTTP requests with a hardcoded, non-secret SHA1 hash. Sequential enumerable device IDs, a persistent relay password leakable via a single signed request, and WiFi credentials printed in plaintext over UART during boot. The vendor response was minimal after responsible disclosure.

Halt and Catch Fire: The Real CPU-Killing Opcode

A deep history of the “Halt and Catch Fire” instruction — from programmer in-joke to literal silicon behavior. In the Motorola 6800, opcodes $9D and $DD turned the address bus into a 16-bit counter that scanned memory endlessly until reset; Motorola kept the behavior and repurposed it for manufacturing RAM scans. The piece traces the pattern through 6502 illegal opcodes, the Pentium F00F bug, and modern x86 fuzzing — hardware quirks becoming accidental infrastructure.

Bun’s Rust Rewrite: What the Shift From Zig Means

An essay engaging seriously with Bun’s rewrite from Zig to Rust — examining the trade-offs around performance, memory safety, ecosystem maturity, and language ergonomics for systems-level JavaScript tooling. Relevant context as Bun competes with Node and Deno for the runtime space.

Julia Evans Drops Tailwind, Finds Vanilla CSS Workable

Julia Evans documents migrating away from Tailwind after 8 years, concluding that modern CSS — grid-template-areas, auto-fit, component-based organization — handles most of what she needed it for. She rebuilt Tailwind’s underlying systems (reset, color palette, font scale, utilities) in vanilla CSS and found it more maintainable. A careful counterpoint to the “CSS is too hard” narrative, with practical notes on what to actually adopt from Tailwind’s discipline.

Jane Street’s Incremental: Self-Adjusting Computation for OCaml

Jane Street introduces Incremental, an OCaml library for computations that efficiently propagate changes when inputs update — minimizing unnecessary recomputation. Used internally in latency-sensitive trading systems, it sits between reactive programming and explicit caching. Notable for the care taken in making the incremental graph itself efficient.

LLM Activation Steering Becomes Practically Interesting

With DeepSeek-V4-Flash competitive with low-end frontier models and runnable locally, activation steering — directly manipulating model hidden states to guide behavior — is newly accessible to regular engineers. The author is skeptical most use cases won’t be outcompeted by prompting or fine-tuning, but notes steering’s specific advantage for concepts ‘trained in’ and resistant to prompting, like refusal behaviors.

Thinking in States: Declarative State in Prolog and Haskell

A comprehensive guide to declarative state management covering puzzle solving, program interpretation, compilation, and VM execution. The core principle: describe relations between states rather than destructively mutating variables, producing programs that are more general, testable, and bidirectional. Practical and thorough.