The News

Federal law has let the State Department revoke a passport over unpaid child support since 1996. For nearly three decades, the department only acted when someone applied to renew or asked for consular help. On Thursday, that changed.

Updated 8 hours ago

Results from the May 7 Super Thursday elections arrived through Friday, May 8, matching and in places exceeding the poll-predicted losses for Labour. Reform UK gained more than 500 English council seats, taking control of at least four authorities (Newcastle-under-Lyme, Havering, Sunderland, and Essex) having previously controlled none. Labour lost more than 300 seats and surrendered Exeter, Southampton, Bolton, and other councils it had held for years. In Scotland, counting pointed to a fifth consecutive SNP government at Holyrood, but short of an outright majority. In Wales, partial Senedd results showed Labour reduced to single figures in seat count, and First Minister Eluned Morgan lost her own seat in Ceredigion Penfro.

Updated 10 hours ago

The ceasefires declared by both sides collapsed completely as May 9 arrived. Russia's Defense Ministry reported shooting down 347 Ukrainian drones across 20 regions overnight on May 8, the second-largest aerial barrage Ukraine has launched since the 2022 invasion, while Russian forces fired more than 140 strikes and 850 combat drones at Ukrainian positions during the same window Russia had declared off-limits. Ukraine separately struck an oil facility in Yaroslavl, roughly 250 km northeast of Moscow. Russia cut mobile internet across the capital and massed air defenses around Red Square ahead of the parade.

Updated 10 hours ago

Donald Trump and Ursula von der Leyen shook hands on a US-EU trade framework in Scotland last July. Ten months later, the deal still isn't ratified. On Thursday, Trump told reporters Brussels has until July 4 to finish the job, or face tariffs higher than the 25% he just put on European cars and trucks.

Updated 11 hours ago

Canvas is the homework portal and gradebook for millions of students. On May 7, 2026, during finals week, students at dozens of universities logged in and found a ransom note instead of their coursework. ShinyHunters, a criminal extortion group, claims it stole records on roughly 275 million students, teachers, and staff from about 8,809 schools. James Madison University moved Friday exams to May 13. The University of Illinois suspended final exams and assignments. Instructure, the company that runs Canvas, restored access by May 8 and confirmed it notified the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Updated 19 hours ago

Kalshi closed a $1 billion funding round on May 7 at a $22 billion valuation, led by Coatue Management with Morgan Stanley, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, IVP, and ARK Invest. Annualized trading volume reached $178 billion, up from $52 billion six months earlier, and Kalshi now accounts for more than 90% of U.S. prediction market activity.

Updated 19 hours ago

In February 2026, SpaceX bought Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI for $250 billion, the largest acquisition in corporate history. The deal looked very different three months later. In March, Musk stated publicly that xAI 'was not built right first time around' and was being rebuilt from scratch, a disclosure that came weeks after Tesla had committed $2 billion to the company and after the merger had already closed. By May 7, 2026, Musk dissolved xAI as an independent company, folding its products (including the Grok chatbot) into SpaceX under a new sub-brand called SpaceXAI. Of the 12 co-founders who started xAI with Musk in 2023, only two remain.

Updated Yesterday

For two decades, lowering LDL cholesterol meant statins—daily pills that work for most but leave roughly one in five patients with muscle pain or liver enzyme changes severe enough to quit. On May 1, researchers at the University of Barcelona and Oregon Health & Science University published results on a short, engineered DNA molecule that silences the gene controlling how the liver clears LDL, cutting cholesterol by nearly 50 percent in mice after a single injection.

Updated Yesterday

Congressional maps are normally redrawn once a decade, after the Census. In August 2025, Texas broke that convention at President Trump's urging—redrawing its map to target five Democratic-held seats. The move triggered a chain reaction. Then, on April 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court's 6–3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—the main federal tool used to block racially discriminatory maps—removing a key legal shield that had constrained Republican legislatures for decades. Within days, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new congressional map targeting four incumbent Democrats, Alabama's governor called a special redistricting session, Louisiana suspended its upcoming primaries to allow a full map redraw, and Tennessee's House passed a bill splitting Memphis into three Republican-leaning districts.

Updated Yesterday

BioCardia's campaign to win the first FDA clearance for a catheter that injects cell and gene therapies directly into heart muscle cleared a pivotal regulatory hurdle in March 2026. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration accepted the company's pre-submission package for the Helix Transendocardial Delivery Catheter, confirming it contains all the necessary elements for substantive review and scheduling a formal meeting for the second quarter of 2026. The Helix device, backed by safety and efficacy data from fifteen clinical trials, uses a small helical needle that anchors within the beating heart to precisely deliver therapeutic agents to damaged muscle tissue. CDRH will lead the review in consultation with CBER.

Updated Yesterday

For a century, the cancer diagnosis that decides a patient's treatment has come from a pathologist staring at a tumor slide through a microscope. Software is now doing that reading—and the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs are buying the companies that built the software. On May 7, Roche agreed to pay up to $1.05 billion for PathAI, the largest independent AI pathology firm in the United States.

Updated Yesterday

Coinbase, the largest US-listed cryptocurrency exchange, posted Q1 2026 revenue of roughly $1.5 billion on May 7—down about 26% from a year earlier. Two days before the print, Chief Executive Brian Armstrong confirmed the company is eliminating roughly 700 jobs, or 14% of staff, citing lower trading volumes and softer token prices through the quarter.

Updated Yesterday

Boys born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy typically lose the ability to walk before their teens and rarely live past 30. The first drugs designed to slow that decline reached the market in 2016, but they restore less than 1% of normal dystrophin, the muscle protein patients are missing. A decade later, a new wave of biotech companies is trying to deliver far more of that protein into muscle cells using engineered molecular shuttles.

Updated Yesterday

For 35 years, Arm Holdings sold blueprints, not chips. Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Amazon paid Arm to license its processor designs, then made the silicon themselves. On May 6, 2026, Arm formalized a different future: a $15 billion direct chip-sales business by fiscal 2031, anchored by an in-house data center processor called the Arm AGI CPU. Customer demand for the chip has already doubled to more than $2 billion for fiscal years 2027–2028 since the March 24 launch, and an IBM collaboration announced in April extended the AGI CPU's reach toward enterprise mainframes.

Updated Yesterday

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on April 29, 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the main federal tool minority voters have used for four decades to challenge racially discriminatory maps—now requires plaintiffs to prove intentional discrimination before courts can order a remedy. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion; Justice Elena Kagan dissented for the three liberal justices, writing that the ruling makes Section 2 'all but a dead letter' and marks 'the latest chapter in the majority's now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.' On May 4, the Court ordered its judgment to take effect immediately, bypassing the usual 25-day window for rehearing requests; on May 6, it denied civil rights plaintiffs' motion to recall the ruling, making the decision final and operative.

Updated Yesterday

Eleven days after Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) rebels and al-Qaeda affiliate Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) struck five Malian cities simultaneously on April 25, 2026, President Assimi Goïta is governing without either a functioning intelligence service or an independent defence ministry. On May 4 he resolved the latter vacancy by assuming the defence portfolio himself by presidential decree — naming Army Chief of Staff General Oumar Diarra as minister delegate — more than a week after the car-bomb assassination of predecessor Sadio Camara. Simultaneously, a military tribunal opened a criminal probe into the April 25 attacks and identified five suspects, including three active-duty soldiers, while also accusing exiled politician Oumar Mariko of involvement in the planning. In the days that followed, security forces abducted several critics and lawyers — including prominent Bamako lawyer Mountaga Tall, seized from his home by hooded men on May 2 — prompting Amnesty International to call for his immediate release and the UN human rights office to warn of 'gravely concerning' reports of extrajudicial killings by Malian security forces.

Updated 2 days ago

Quantum computing has spent four decades as a physics experiment with a marketing team. On May 6, 2026, IonQ reported $50 million in quarterly revenue — up roughly 556% from a year earlier — and reaffirmed full-year guidance of $225 to $245 million, putting one of the field's leading pure-play companies on track for a quarter-billion-dollar year.

Updated 2 days ago

India's largest renewable power producer just told investors something the country's grid operators have been signaling quietly for months: there is nowhere for the electricity to go. ReNew Energy Global disclosed on May 6 that it is curbing solar output and absorbing profitability hits because the National Load Dispatch Centre cannot clear room on the grid during mid-day generation peaks.

Updated 2 days ago

For more than two decades, China has refined nearly every rare earth element that goes into a smartphone, fighter jet, electric motor, or wind turbine. On May 4, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committed up to A$1.3 billion (about US$937 million) to mining and processing projects designed to give Japan a non-Chinese source for gallium, nickel, graphite, rare earths, and fluorite.

Updated 4 days ago