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United States · Page 2 of 5

United States pages collect Washington policy and agencies, courts and states, Wall Street and Silicon Valley moves, and security reporting when America is the primary actor or setting—even if the headline is global.

232 Newsorga stories on United States, published from 2026-01-08 through 2026-05-22. Most of this coverage sits in World, Politics, Automobile, Business, and Entertainment. Newest first below.

232 stories in this view · page 2 of 5

26 stories

World

Day-two split: Zelenskyy says air strikes have paused, Russia logs 1,000 violations

On day two of the three-day Victory Day truce that U.S. President Donald Trump brokered between Moscow and Kyiv to run from Saturday, May 9, 2026 through Monday, May 11, 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly acknowledged that Russia has stopped large-scale air and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities and that Kyiv has held back its own long-range strikes 'in mirrorlike' restraint, while at the same time accusing the Russian side of 'not even trying' to honour the ceasefire along the front line — where Ukraine's General Staff recorded 147 battlefield clashes in 24 hours and regional governors reported three civilians killed in Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson; in parallel, Russia's Defence Ministry told state media in its Sunday briefing that it had logged 'more than 1,000' Ukrainian ceasefire violations across Crimea, Belgorod, Kursk, Kaluga, Rostov and Krasnodar, shot down 57 Ukrainian drones and 'responded in kind,' as Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov flagged an imminent Moscow visit by U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

8 min read

Politics

Musk after DOGE: money, media and firms still shape US policy debate

Elon Musk formally stepped back from his Trump-administration role leading the Department of Government Efficiency initiative by late May 2025 — hitting the statutory limit on his term as a special government employee and later trading public barbs with President Donald Trump over the administration's domestic spending bill — yet his footprint on American politics and policy did not vanish with the badge: federal campaign-finance filings show tens of millions of dollars flowing through his America PAC and headline gifts to Republican Senate and House leadership PACs in mid-2025, NBC News documented roughly $45.3 million routed into America PAC in the first half of that year alone with America PAC spending $47.3 million in the same window, Musk's companies Tesla SpaceX and X remain tightly woven into regulation export controls spectrum licensing and transportation rulemaking, and the narrative megaphone of X continues to shape how elected officials and agencies react to tech energy and national-security questions — making Musk a case study in how private wealth platforms and industrial holdings substitute for formal office when measuring influence on US policy after departure from government.

9 min read

Culture

Miami-Dade narcotics officers sue Affleck and Damon over Netflix's 'The Rip'

Detective Jonathan Santana and his supervisor Jason Smith — the two Miami-Dade narcotics officers who led the June 29, 2016 raid on a Miami Lakes home that uncovered $21,970,411 in cash hidden in orange buckets behind a false drywall, the largest cash seizure in Miami-Dade Police Department history — have filed a federal defamation lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida against Artists Equity, the Ben Affleck and Matt Damon production company, and its single-purpose co-producer Falco Pictures, alleging that director Joe Carnahan's January 2026 Netflix thriller 'The Rip' (in which Affleck and Damon co-star as the lead detectives on a near-identical bust) wraps unmistakable real-case details around fictionalised plot points depicting the officers stealing seized cash, lying to suspects, dealing with the cartel and killing a DEA agent; the plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages on three counts — defamation, defamation by implication, and intentional infliction of emotional distress — and say they sent a cease-and-desist over the trailer in December 2025 before release.

7 min read

World

BA172 vape passenger convicted of assaulting US woman after JFK-Heathrow flight

Louis Gaston, a 31-year-old from Lambeth in south London, has been convicted at Uxbridge Magistrates' Court of two counts of assault by beating, one count of smoking in an aircraft and one count of failing to obey the lawful commands of a pilot, after District Judge Kathryn Verghis ruled on May 5, 2026 that Gaston had been vaping in the lavatory of the six-hour overnight British Airways flight BA172 from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to London Heathrow on November 23, 2025 — admitting to having smoked a spliff in New York before boarding and to drinking two or three gin and tonics plus vodka in flight — before threatening American couple Zachary Lowry and Laurel Dillon as the aircraft sat for about an hour awaiting buses on the Heathrow tarmac, ultimately shoving Ms Dillon by the arm and hip into her seat with enough force to leave bruising; sentencing is set for June 2026.

7 min read

Climate

Max Road Fire hits 5,000 acres in Broward Everglades; smoke reaches Pembroke Pines

The Max Road Fire, which ignited in the western Broward County Everglades on Sunday afternoon May 10, 2026 and exploded from roughly 80 acres to more than 4,800 acres in a single afternoon under triple-digit heat indices, extreme-drought dew points of 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit and a heavy mat of dry sawgrass and melaleuca fuels, was at approximately 5,000 acres and just 20 percent containment by the morning of Monday May 11 according to the Florida Forest Service, with thick plumes sending ash and smoke into the Holly Lake area of Pembroke Pines along US-27 and Pines Boulevard while Pembroke Pines Police and Fire-Rescue set up a perimeter watch, the separately tracked 172nd Avenue Fire burned about 210 acres at 30 percent containment near Florida City in south Miami-Dade with Card Sound Road temporarily closed, and the Highway 41 Fire inside Everglades National Park grew toward roughly 6,700 acres at zero percent containment threatening at least eight structures — three of the 61 active wildfires the Florida Forest Service was tracking across the state.

9 min read

Business

India scraps urea shipment on bulk carrier Infinity over Iran-link sanctions risk

An India-bound cargo of roughly thirty thousand deadweight tonnes of urea aboard the bulk carrier Infinity has been pulled from a 2.5-million-tonne tender awarded by Indian Potash Limited on April 15, 2026 after officials raised concerns over the ship's possible Iran-linked origins under continuing United States sanctions exposure, with seller Aditya Birla Global Trading (Singapore) Pte. withdrawing the cargo and offering a replacement while a second smaller-volume shipment from another supplier was also pulled — a decision driven by the Infinity's transponder going dark for more than a month off Oman's Sohar before reappearing in the Gulf of Oman with erratic geometric movements that maritime analysts treat as classic indicators of Automatic Identification System manipulation, and one that lands at a moment when the Hormuz-closure-driven doubling of urea prices to roughly $935-$959 per tonne is already pressing the world's largest urea importer ahead of the June kharif planting season.

10 min read

Health

Two more MV Hondius passengers test positive for Andes hantavirus amid global repatriation

As orchestrated waves of evacuations began from the MV Hondius after it docked at Granadilla de Abona on Tenerife on Sunday May 10, 2026, authorities reported at least two additional laboratory-linked positives among passengers already in motion toward home countries — one American evacuated with the United States charter whose PCR result United States officials classified as a mildly positive Andes-strain detection and one French woman whose symptoms escalated during her repatriation flight to Paris and who tested positive after landing at Le Bourget in care now overseen by French Health Minister Stéphanie Rist — while Spanish Health Ministry officials continued to dispute Washington's interpretation of the weak-positive United States case as inconclusive by European laboratory standards, and while the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control's snapshot as of 14:00 Central European Time on May 10 still listed eight outbreak-associated cases — six confirmed and two probable — across the Dutch-flagged expedition vessel whose passengers and crew represented twenty-three countries.

9 min read

Business

Jane Street books record $10.3bn Q1 profit on $16.1bn trading revenue

Jane Street Group, the privately held electronic market maker headquartered at One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, generated $16.1 billion of net trading revenue and $10.3 billion of net income in the three months to March 31, 2026 — both records for the firm, both roughly double the year-earlier figures, and both materially larger on a quarterly basis than what JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs reported from their own markets businesses for the same period — according to people familiar with the privately held firm's bondholder disclosures cited by Bloomberg's Katherine Doherty and Paula Seligson on May 8, 2026 and by the Financial Times on the same evening, with the windfall driven by an Iran-conflict energy shock that pushed Brent crude into double-digit daily moves and four-year highs, AI-driven dislocation across software and semiconductor names, and Jane Street's algorithmic edge across more than 1,000 instruments on more than 200 trading venues, plus mark-to-market gains on stakes in Anthropic and CoreWeave.

11 min read

Health

17 Americans begin 42-day hantavirus monitoring at UNMC after MV Hondius outbreak

A US government charter flight carrying seventeen American citizens and one British national who lives in the United States — all of them previously aboard the MV Hondius expedition cruise ship caught up in the World Health Organization-coordinated Andes hantavirus outbreak that has killed three passengers since April 11 and produced six laboratory-confirmed and two probable cases — landed at Omaha's Eppley Airfield shortly before 2:30 a.m. local time on Monday May 11, 2026, with one passenger who tested 'mildly' positive for the virus transported directly to the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit and the rest moved to the only federally funded National Quarantine Unit in the United States at the University of Nebraska Medical Center for assessment and onward 42-day daily health monitoring, in a federal response that NIH director and acting CDC chief Dr. Jay Bhattacharya described as 'following the safety protocols previously used successfully during a 2018 outbreak of the same hantavirus strain' and that WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has framed as 'not another Covid-19.'

9 min read

Markets

AI valuations: bubble debate sharpens as $650bn of capex meets $50-70bn AI revenue

Are today's AI company valuations justified or are markets repeating the 1999-2000 dotcom mistake? Newsorga analyses the numbers that frame the May 2026 debate: OpenAI's $852 billion implied valuation, Anthropic's $380 billion mark, the combined $650-700 billion of 2026 capex that the four major US hyperscalers — Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta — are committing against an estimated $50-70 billion of AI-attributable revenue, the Bank for International Settlements' warning that equity prices have 'run far ahead of debt market pricing,' Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok's documentation of S&P 500 concentration at levels exceeding the dotcom peak, the circular financing web linking Nvidia, OpenAI and Microsoft, and the asymmetric ways the answer to 'is this a bubble?' could play out for retail investors, pension savers and the broader US-led capital-markets system.

14 min read

Business

VW, BMW, Mercedes and Stellantis flag €8bn in Trump tariff costs as Bernstein warns of €2.6bn more at 25%

European car manufacturers have absorbed more than €8 billion in cumulative tariff-related losses since the United States raised import duties on EU-made vehicles from 2.5% to 27.5% on April 3, 2025, according to a Financial Times tally of Q1 2026 disclosures and senior-executive statements at Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis and Volvo Cars; Volkswagen has reported the largest single hit at €3.6 billion, followed by BMW at €2.1 billion, Mercedes-Benz at €1.3 billion and Stellantis at €1.2 billion, while Bernstein analysts have warned that the German trio alone could face an additional €2.6 billion of losses in 2026 if President Donald Trump follows through on his May 1, 2026 threat to lift the duty to 25% after accusing Brussels of failing to honour the August 2025 trade deal that had reduced the rate to 15%.

9 min read

World

Modi calls for less fuel, return to work-from-home and one-year curbs on gold and foreign travel to protect forex as West Asia energy shock strains India

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a 30-minute public address on Sunday, May 10, 2026, at Parade Grounds in Secunderabad, Telangana, asked Indians to use petrol and diesel 'sparingly,' revive pandemic-era work-from-home, online meetings and video conferences to cut commuting, postpone non-essential foreign travel and destination weddings abroad for at least a year, and avoid discretionary gold purchases for a year to ease pressure on foreign exchange reserves, framing the choices as 'nationally responsible' and an act of patriotism during elevated global crude prices and the US-Iran war's disruption of West Asian energy and supply chains; he also renewed the 'Vocal for Local' push, quoted the line that 'how can the nation progress if we depend on imports for everything,' urged cutting edible oil consumption, asked farmers to reduce chemical fertiliser use by up to half, and listed metros, car-pooling, rail freight and electric vehicles as transport levers, after virtually inaugurating Telangana projects worth about ₹9,400 crore across roads, rail, petroleum and textiles.

9 min read

World

Iran says Araghchi visit to BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in Delhi 'on the agenda' but Deputy FM Gharibabadi expected to lead delegation as Hormuz safe-passage talks take centre stage

Iran has informed India that Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi's attendance at the May 14-15, 2026 BRICS Foreign Ministers' Meeting in New Delhi is 'on his agenda at this stage,' the Times of India reported, although subsequent reporting from The Print on May 7 and the Economic Times on May 11 indicates Araghchi is now considered unlikely to travel — with Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi expected to lead the Iranian delegation instead — as Tehran weighs the fragility of the US-Iran ceasefire from the late-February-to-early-April war, studies a 14-point US peace proposal routed via Pakistan that would freeze its uranium enrichment for at least 12 years, and prepares for the first face-to-face encounter between Iranian, Emirati and Saudi Arabian senior diplomats since the conflict began; the meeting, chaired by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar under India's 2026 BRICS presidency, will see Hormuz safe-passage talks for 40-50 trapped India-bound tankers held on the sidelines and is a key staging post for the 18th BRICS Summit Delhi is expected to host in September 2026.

11 min read

Markets

Oil rallies and gold slides as Trump's 'totally unacceptable' rejection of Iran pushes Brent past $105 and WTI to $100, with Netanyahu, drone strikes near Qatar and a $4 prompt backwardation backing the move

Updated May 11, 2026: Brent crude extended its rally to $105.55 a barrel at 0626 GMT — up 4.2% from the $101.29 Friday close — and US West Texas Intermediate briefly crossed $100 to $100.06, up 4.9%, after President Donald Trump's Sunday-afternoon Truth Social rejection of Iran's 14-point peace proposal as 'totally unacceptable,' according to Anadolu Agency and NDTV Profit, while Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS that the war 'is not over' until Iran's enriched uranium is removed and a weekend drone strike briefly set a cargo vessel ablaze off Qatar; spot gold slipped 1% to $4,669.82 an ounce by 06:35 GMT on the same news flow, unwinding the prior week's 2% gain as the US dollar firmed (DXY +0.2%) after Friday's strong April payrolls pushed the Fed rate-cut path out, with a Goldman Sachs survey now showing most respondents expect Strait of Hormuz disruption to last well into the second half of the year and Aramco CEO Amin Nasser warning markets may not fully normalise until 2027.

11 min read

Sports

Pistons list Kevin Huerter and Caris LeVert questionable for Game 4 in Cleveland as Detroit defends 2-1 series lead over the Cavaliers

The Detroit Pistons upgraded shooting guard Kevin Huerter (left adductor strain) and downgraded fellow guard Caris LeVert (right heel) to the same 'questionable' designation on the official Sunday night injury report, Field Level Media reported via Reuters at 7:38 p.m. ET on May 10, 2026, leaving No. 1 seed Detroit's backcourt depth in doubt twenty-four hours before an 8 p.m. Eastern tip at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse against the No. 4 seed Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday, May 11, 2026 — Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, with the Pistons leading the best-of-seven series 2-1 after dropping a 116-109 decision in Game 3 on Saturday, May 9 to a Donovan Mitchell 35-point, 10-rebound effort and a 25-second-remaining James Harden step-back triple that buried a Cade Cunningham triple-double in turnovers.

8 min read

Markets

Japan to receive first Caspian crude tanker since Iran war began, with Azerbaijani cargo due Tuesday and INPEX redirecting Kashagan and ACG barrels from Europe

Reuters and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry confirmed on Monday, May 11, 2026 that a tanker carrying Azerbaijani crude oil — drawn from the INPEX-stake Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli complex via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline — will dock in Japan by Tuesday, May 12, 2026, marking the first delivery of so-called Central Asian (Caspian) crude to a Japanese refinery since Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the US-Israel-Iran war that began in late February 2026; the cargo, redirected by INPEX from European spot customers, is the first concrete result of Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa's diversification plan announced on April 4 to bypass Hormuz via Red Sea, Mediterranean and Cape of Good Hope routes, with delivery times of 25 to 55 days versus the normal 20-day Hormuz transit and a parallel push to source crude from Kazakhstan's 430,000-barrel-per-day Kashagan field after KazMunayGas met Tokyo's delegation on May 4.

13 min read

Markets

Apollo in talks to sell $3bn MFIC private-credit BDC after Q1 defaults jump to 5.3% and 11% redemption hit at private vehicle

Apollo Global Management is in discussions to sell MidCap Financial Investment Corp (NASDAQ: MFIC), the publicly listed business development company it externally manages and that holds roughly $2.97 billion of fair-value investments alongside $3.07 billion of total assets, the Wall Street Journal reported May 10–11, 2026, with any deal expected to be share-based rather than cash; the talks follow MFIC's May 6 Q1 2026 print showing net asset value per share of $13.82 (down 2.5% from $14.18 at year-end 2025), a $0.31 dividend cut from $0.38, loan defaults climbing to 5.3% from 3.9% in December, and a share price trading at roughly 85% of NAV — and they come on top of an 11% redemption request hit to Apollo's separate private BDC last quarter and a January 2026 move that already transferred $9 billion of commercial-property mortgages from an Apollo REIT to insurance affiliate Athene as the firm's $1 trillion-plus credit platform repositions through a sector-wide private-credit drawdown.

11 min read

Culture

Michael Pennington, the RSC Hamlet who turned down Meryl Streep and became Star Wars' Moff Jerjerrod, dies at 82

Michael Vivian Fyfe Pennington — the Cambridge-born English actor, director and writer who co-founded the English Shakespeare Company with Michael Bogdanov in 1986, played Hamlet, Henry V, Richard II, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Antony, Lear and a long shelf of leading Shakespearean roles across six decades at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and on the West End, who famously turned down the male lead opposite Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1980 because he 'couldn't let Hamlet go,' and who reached a global mass audience in a single 1983 film appearance as Death Star commander Moff Tiaan Jerjerrod in Return of the Jedi — died on Sunday, May 10, 2026, at the age of 82, his death confirmed by The Telegraph and reported through Variety, TheWrap and TMZ; he had been living in his later years at Denville Hall, the Northwood care home for retired actors.

14 min read

Business

US adds 115,000 jobs in April as unemployment holds at 4.3%, beating a 55,000 forecast and giving the Fed cover to stay on hold

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' April 2026 employment situation report, released Friday May 8, 2026 in Washington, said total nonfarm payrolls rose by 115,000 — roughly double the 55,000-65,000 economist consensus — while the unemployment rate held at 4.3% and average hourly earnings rose 0.2% month-over-month and 3.6% year-over-year, both below forecasts; March was revised up by 7,000 to +185,000 but February was revised 23,000 deeper into negative territory at -156,000, leaving a three-month average of about 48,000 jobs per month in a labour market that Chicago Fed president Austan Goolsbee called 'stable without being good.'

8 min read

World

China confirms Trump's May 13-15 Beijing visit as MFA messaging stresses equality, respect and mutual benefit with the US

Chinese state media reported Monday May 11, 2026 that U.S. President Donald Trump will pay a state visit to China from May 13 to 15 at President Xi Jinping's invitation; ahead of the summit, Beijing's public vocabulary on ties with Washington continues to pair cooperation with difference-management, including Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun's March formulation that economic issues should be settled through consultation on the basis of equality, respect and mutual benefit, and Xi's February phone remark that if both sides work in the spirit of equality, respect and mutual benefit they can find ways to address concerns while enhancing dialogue and expanding practical cooperation.

6 min read

World

Netanyahu's 60 Minutes interview with Major Garrett: full timeline, controversies and what was actually said

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down on Saturday with CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett for a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, May 10, 2026 — his first U.S. broadcast since the U.S.-Israel-Iran war began on February 28, 2026 and now in its 11th week — and used the on-camera time to call the Iran war 'not over' until enriched uranium is physically removed from Iranian soil, to confirm Donald Trump told him 'I want to go in there', to reject parts of a New York Times account of a February 11 Situation Room conversation, to announce a decade-long plan to draw U.S. military aid down to 'zero' from the current $3.8 billion a year, to attribute Israel's reputational decline (Pew now puts unfavorable U.S. views of Israel at 60 percent, up nearly 20 points in four years) almost entirely to social media as the 'eighth front' of the war, and to push back on a personal characterisation he said reduces him to a man with a 'hunger for conflict'.

12 min read

World

Six people found dead inside Union Pacific boxcar at Laredo railyard

Six people were found dead Sunday afternoon, May 10, 2026, inside a railroad trailer boxcar at the edge of Laredo, Texas — around the 12000 block of Jim Young Way — after a Union Pacific employee reported multiple casualties to police who responded about 3 p.m.; the Laredo Police Department confirmed six deceased at the scene, did not release identities or cause of death while the investigation remained active on Mother's Day amid temperatures in the upper 90s Fahrenheit, and Union Pacific said it was working closely with law enforcement while withholding operational detail.

10 min read

Culture

Gehry, five months on: how Philip Kennicott's December column reads now — and what the post-Bilbao 'starchitect' era leaves behind

Frank Gehry, the Toronto-born Pritzker laureate who reshaped late-20th-century architecture with the 1997 titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the 2014 Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, died at his home in Santa Monica on Friday, December 5, 2025, at the age of 96 after a brief respiratory illness; Washington Post architecture critic Philip Kennicott published a same-day appreciation under the headline 'Frank Gehry made us care about architecture. Even if you hated his buildings' that has become the most-cited single piece of writing in the legacy discussion since — and read again on May 11, 2026, five months later, Kennicott's argument continues to define how the 'Bilbao effect,' the 'starchitect' generation, and the durability of a body of work the critics once called 'a pile of broken crockery' and 'a fortune cookie gone berserk' are being settled into history.

11 min read

Markets

Michael Burry doubles AI-bubble short: $1.1bn of Nvidia, Palantir, SOXX, QQQ puts and a new Palantir outright short

Michael Burry, the investor whose pre-2008 mortgage short was made famous by The Big Short, disclosed on his Substack on May 4, 2026 that he had doubled his bet against the AI trade since Q3 2025 — the notional value of his put-option book on Nvidia and Palantir now reaches roughly $1.1 billion (about 80% of his portfolio), built from a one-million-share Nvidia put position struck at $110 and expiring in 2027, a dual-strike Palantir put structure ($100 expiring December 2026 and $50 expiring June 2027), plus a new outright short on Palantir; he also bought fresh bearish puts on the iShares Semiconductor ETF SOXX, the Invesco QQQ Trust and Oracle, exited his entire GameStop position citing the failed 'Instant Berkshire' thesis after Ryan Cohen's $56bn eBay offer, and wrote on his 'Cassandra Unchained' Substack that the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index melt-up looks like 'the final months of the 1999–2000 bubble' — the disclosure follows the October 27, 2025 wind-down of Scion Asset Management, whose SEC registration was terminated on November 10, 2025, meaning the new positions sit in Burry's personal book rather than a regulated fund.

11 min read

Business

390 new billionaires on Forbes 2026 list: Beyoncé, Dr. Dre, Federer, Surya Midha and the 86 AI fortunes behind it

The Forbes 40th annual World's Billionaires List, published March 10, 2026 using net worth figures as of March 1, 2026, recorded a record 3,428 billionaires worldwide and 390 newcomers — the second-best year for billionaire creation after 2021's 493 — with combined wealth jumping four trillion dollars to a record $20.1 trillion; the newcomer class is collectively worth $755 billion at an average of $1.9 billion per person, hails from 40 countries and territories, and is led by 38-year-old Surge AI founder Edwin Chen at $18 billion, while 22-year-old Mercor cofounder Surya Midha becomes the youngest self-made billionaire ever to make the list, AI accounts for 42 of the 390 new fortunes, and the celebrity entrants include Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Dr. Dre, Roger Federer, Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Greg Abel and Elon Musk's younger brother Kimbal.

11 min read

World

California's May heatwave to hit 111°F in Death Valley as Fresno tracks toward earliest 102° on record

A National Weather Service cluster of extreme-heat warnings and watches has California tipping into a roughly 60-hour stretch of triple-digit afternoons across the state's desert and Central Valley belts from Sunday morning into Tuesday evening: Fresno is forecast to reach 102°F on Monday, which would be the earliest the city has ever hit that mark in modern records, alongside 108°F in Palm Springs, 111°F in Death Valley, and 105 to 112°F across Imperial County, the Salton Sea, the Coachella Valley, San Diego County deserts and the San Gorgonio Pass — areas that together hold roughly 450,000 residents newly under the NWS's highest-tier extreme-heat warning, while the Bay Area and Los Angeles coastal strip stay 10 to 30 degrees cooler and fire-weather red-flag risk climbs across the Mojave and the Central Coast counties.

10 min read

24 stories

Markets

Brent crude tops $104 as US–Iran talks collapse and Hormuz stays closed; oil up $3 a barrel

Asia's Monday open on May 11, 2026 saw oil prices jump roughly $3 a barrel after Washington and Tehran failed to agree on the US 14-point peace proposal and the Strait of Hormuz stayed largely closed: Brent crude futures climbed $3.21 or 3.17 percent to $104.50 a barrel by 22:03 GMT and US West Texas Intermediate rose $3.06 or 3.21 percent to $98.48 a barrel, almost fully erasing the previous week's six-percent loss that traders had taken on the hope a deal was close, and putting JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon's April warning of stickier oil-and-commodity price shocks and a longer central-bank rate path squarely back into the 2026 market frame.

10 min read

Technology

Verne's Zagreb robotaxi service one month in: 10 Pony.ai cars, 4,000 waitlist, €1.99 a ride

Croatia's Verne, the autonomous-mobility spin-out of hypercar maker Rimac, has been running what it calls Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb since April 8, 2026 — a fleet of 10 Arcfox Alpha T5 electric vehicles fitted with Pony.ai's seventh-generation autonomous-driving system, booked through the Verne app and soon through Uber, with safety operators still behind the wheel and a stated target of fully driverless rides by the end of the year subject to Croatian regulatory approval.

9 min read

Culture

'Adolescence' sweeps four BAFTAs as Owen Cooper, 16, completes record awards run

Netflix's four-part limited drama 'Adolescence' claimed four prizes at the 2026 BAFTA TV Awards at London's Royal Festival Hall on Sunday — Limited Drama, Leading Actor for Stephen Graham, Supporting Actor for Owen Cooper and Supporting Actress for Christine Tremarco — capping a 14-month awards run that includes nine Emmys, every Golden Globe it was nominated for and a Downing Street meeting between co-writer Jack Thorne and Prime Minister Keir Starmer on online safety and incel culture.

9 min read

World

17 Americans exit MV Hondius for Nebraska as CDC waives mandatory hantavirus quarantine

The first of 17 American passengers from the Dutch expedition ship MV Hondius began disembarking at Tenerife on Sunday and will be flown via Offutt Air Force Base to the University of Nebraska Medical Center — home of the only federally funded quarantine unit in the United States. In a Saturday-morning call with ABC News, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disclosed that, unlike France, Spain or Greece, the US will not impose mandatory quarantine on the returning passengers; each will be offered a choice between Nebraska's National Quarantine Unit and 42-day home monitoring under local-health-department supervision.

10 min read

Business

UK, US and Canada top Site Selection's 2026 Global Best to Invest; Saudi Arabia jumps 11 places

Site Selection magazine's May 2026 issue keeps the United Kingdom at No. 1 in its annual Global Best to Invest country ranking, followed by the United States, Canada, Germany and Australia, with London again topping the metro chart ahead of Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai and Amsterdam. Saudi Arabia jumps from 25th to 14th, China climbs to 11th, Japan rises to 13th, and Asia-Pacific markets together claim 10 of the top 25 slots in the index's Kearney input layer—the highest share since 2013.

13 min read

World

Sigma Renew 360 fire: three Henry County plastics buildings total loss, all 8 workers safe

A two-alarm fire that broke out just before noon on Friday, May 8, 2026 at Sigma Renew 360, Inc., the polyethylene-pellet plant at 170 Mark I Drive in Henry, Tennessee, burned for more than 24 hours and destroyed all three buildings on the site — but every one of the eight employees on shift at the fully staffed plant was evacuated safely and no injuries have been reported. The Henry County Emergency Management Agency announced on Saturday morning that the fire was 'close to being fully extinguished' after more than 20 out-of-county fire departments, the Tennessee Air National Guard, state agencies and county EMAs worked through the night; the site has now been turned over to an environmental cleanup contractor.

9 min read

World

'Totally unacceptable': Trump rejects Iran's peace reply as drones hit Gulf shipping

President Donald Trump on Sunday rejected Iran's Pakistan-routed reply to Washington's 14-point ceasefire proposal in a one-line social-media post — 'TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!' — even as US ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told ABC the administration is still giving diplomacy 'every chance we possibly can before going back to hostilities.' The rebuff lands the same day a drone ignited a fire on a vessel near Qatar, the United Arab Emirates shot down two drones over its airspace and blamed Tehran, and Iran's new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei convened military commanders for 'decisive directives' on confronting the West.

11 min read

Business

JPMorgan executive Lorna Hajdini sued by ex-banker Chirayu Rana on April 27, then complaint pulled for 'correction': what is alleged, what is denied, what is unresolved

A lawsuit filed in the New York County Supreme Court accused JPMorgan Chase Leveraged Finance executive director Lorna Hajdini of sexual abuse, racial harassment and professional coercion; within days the complaint was withdrawn for 'correction', the bank said its internal review found no merit, the plaintiff—now identified as Chirayu Rana—was reported to have left his new job weeks before filing, and Hajdini's lawyers said she has never been to the location of the alleged assault.

9 min read

World

Italy's Meloni breaks with Trump over the Iran war and Pope Leo XIV: the Sigonella veto, the energy shock and why 80% of Italians now want distance

After Donald Trump called Pope Leo XIV 'weak' for opposing the US-Israeli war on Iran, Giorgia Meloni called the attack 'unacceptable'—and Trump told Italians she is 'no longer the same person'. Italy has now refused US bombers the use of Sigonella, suspended its Israel defence pact, and seen Marco Rubio fly into Rome on May 8 to try to repair the relationship.

11 min read

Politics

More than 500,000 federal workers and retirees in the IRS's crosshairs: the FERDI crackdown, the $2 billion tax gap and the OPM rule that can now end careers

The IRS's Federal Employee/Retiree Delinquency Initiative has sent LT36 notices to more than half a million current and former federal employees since June 2025; combined unpaid tax debt is now estimated at over $2 billion; and a parallel Office of Personnel Management rule lets agencies fast-track dismissal for unresolved tax debt for the first time.

10 min read

Politics

Mifepristone back at the Supreme Court: Alito's May 4 stay, Louisiana's standing theory and the May 11 cliff edge explained

Justice Samuel Alito's May 4 administrative stay temporarily restored nationwide telehealth and mail access to the abortion pill mifepristone after the 5th Circuit ordered the FDA to revert to in-person dispensing; the full Supreme Court must now decide—by May 11 at 5 p.m. EDT—whether Louisiana has standing to force that change while litigation continues.

11 min read