Music: Janne Mark with Arve Henriksen — ‘Kingsfold’
Iran war puts global energy markets on the brink of a worst-case scenario
Wired reports: On Thursday, Israel launched a series of strikes on various oil and gas facilities in the region, most notably the South Pars gas field, the world’s biggest natural gas field, which is jointly controlled by Iran and Qatar. Iran retaliated with counterstrikes, including on the world’s largest oil export facility in Qatar. Oil prices temporarily shot up to nearly $120 a barrel. These strikes appear to have damaged infrastructure that’s crucial to the world’s fossil fuel supply. Qatar…
Putin offers to stop sharing intel with Iran if U.S. cuts off Ukraine
Politico reports: Moscow proposed a quid pro quo to the U.S. under which the Kremlin would stop sharing intelligence information with Iran, such as the precise coordinates of U.S. military assets in the Middle East, if Washington ceased supplying Ukraine with intel about Russia. Two people familiar with the U.S.-Russia negotiations said that such a proposal was made by Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev to Trump administration envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during their meeting last week in Miami. The…
Russia may test Trump’s blockade of Cuba with oil tankers crossing Atlantic
The Hill reports: Two vessels carrying Russian oil are reportedly heading for Cuba in the coming days in a move that could test President Trump’s longstanding blockade, according to the Financial Times, citing maritime intelligence companies. One of the tankers making its way to the Caribbean island is Sea Horse, a Hong Kong-flagged ship estimated to be carrying approximately 190,000 barrels of gasoil from Russia, according to tracking from maritime AI company Windward. The Associated Press reported Thursday that another…
Cesar Chavez can no longer be called heroic. But the movement he led can be
Geraldo L. Cadava writes: For many Latinos, Cesar Chavez seemed like a saint. There have in fact been efforts to canonize him. I lived in Los Angeles for a summer when I was an undergraduate, and I frequently drove down Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Just about every institution I’ve belonged to has named something after him. In Tucson, I’ve met with University of Arizona professors in the Cesar E. Chavez Building. At Northwestern, where I am now a professor, a…
New data shows where ICE has been most active this year
The New York Times reports: The pace of ICE arrests nationwide has topped 1,100 per day on average in 2026, far higher than the rate last spring of roughly 600 arrests per day, despite a slight dip in recent weeks. New data analyzed by The New York Times reveals that the pace of these arrests has varied across the country in sometimes surprising ways. Some places that did not have high-profile ICE operations this year, such as Florida and San…
China could be the world’s biggest public funder of science within two years
Nature reports: China is on the cusp of becoming the world’s biggest public funder of research, according to a forecast by US academics, as stalled growth in government investment in the United States coincides with consistent rises in spending by the Chinese authorities. The analysis — produced exclusively for Nature Index — was the work of researchers from Frontiers in Science and Innovation Policy (FSIP), a programme at the University of California, San Diego, that studies the US research and…
New study challenges theories about when people may have arrived in the Americas
Science reports: Three decades ago, most archaeologists were certain that people first arrived in the Americas no earlier than about 13,000 years ago. The evidence came from well-dated spearheads with characteristic fluted bases known as Clovis points, named for the city in New Mexico near the archaeological site where they were first identified in 1929. But the so-called “Clovis first” hypothesis appeared to crack for good in 1997, when a cadre of archaeologists visited a site called Monte Verde in…
Music: Shakti — ‘La Danse Du Bonheur’
Iran attacks wipe out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says
Reuters reports: Iranian attacks have knocked out 17% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and Asia, QatarEnergy’s CEO and state minister for energy affairs told Reuters on Thursday. Saad al-Kaabi said two of Qatar’s 14 LNG trains and one of its two gas-to-liquids (GTL) facilities were damaged in the unprecedented strikes. The repairs will sideline 12.8 million tons per year of LNG for three…
West Point analysis warns that Strait of Hormuz blockade will strangle U.S. defense industry
The Guardian reports: The closure of the strait of Hormuz is causing a “paralyzing, real-time problem” for any prospective manufacturing surge in the US defense industrial base, and even for the repair of defense equipment damaged by Iranian attacks, according to analysis published by West Point’s Modern War Institute. In particular sulphur, a vital upstream input in the extraction of critical minerals including copper and cobalt, has seen a “near total” disruption of seaborne trade in the straits, which makes…
How the rest of the world is struggling with the economic crisis that Trump and Netanyahu triggered
The Washington Post reports: As the United States wages war with no clear endgame, large swaths of the globe are suffering worse than Americans from the economic fallout, weathering gasoline shortages, falling currencies and more severe energy shocks. Iran’s retaliatory attacks have largely blocked the Strait of Hormuz, turning the transit point for one-fifth of the world’s crude into a trial by fire for cargo ships and sending oil prices soaring. That is triggering hikes at the pump — on…
Israel’s role in instigating war on Iran
Michelle Goldberg writes: Some Jewish leaders, alarmed by the backlash to the war, are trying to rule any discussion of Israel’s role in instigating it out of bounds. In a speech on Monday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, denounced those who “pointed fingers at the Israelis who — they claimed — whispered a few too many times in President Trump’s ear.” Greenblatt’s heavy-handed attempt to police the discourse is bound to fail, because it’s asking people to…
Some DHS contractors told White House officials they were asked to pay Corey Lewandowski
NBC News reports: More than a year ago, The GEO Group founder George Zoley asked for a meeting with Corey Lewandowski, a close ally of President Donald Trump who had just started a powerful position as a top adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. As a titan of the private prison industry, GEO Group stood to benefit from Trump’s mass deportation agenda, which would require the federal government to spend tens of billions of dollars to transport, detain, monitor…
Twin Cities residents to receive Profile in Courage Award from John F. Kennedy Library Foundation
MPR News reports: The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced Thursday that it’s awarding one of its 2026 Profile in Courage Awards to the “people of the Twin Cities of Minnesota” for their actions during the federal immigration enforcement surge. The foundation said it chose to honor Twin Cities residents “for risking their lives to protect their neighbors and immigrant community members from an unprecedented federal law enforcement operation, peacefully defending the human rights and values that serve as the…
Dopamine: How neuroscience is rethinking the ‘feel-good’ chemical
Nature reports: When neuroscientists gather in the Spanish city of Seville in May for the annual Dopamine Society meeting, one discussion could be unusually lively. Session 31 will feature a debate between researchers who fundamentally disagree about the role dopamine has in the brain. Dopamine is one of the most extensively studied neurotransmitters, chemicals that convey signals from cell to cell. It’s the one with the highest profile outside neuroscience: often known as the ‘pleasure chemical’, it’s depicted as the…