World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
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A suspected Ebola case has sparked concern in Austria amid fears the deadly disease may have already spread to Europe. Health officials in Austria said the patient became ill shortly after returning from Uganda, where they are believed to have contracted the newly identified Bundibugyo strain.
It comes as the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is hampering the Ebola outbreak response. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Ituri province in the east of the country was at the centre of a “catastrophic collision of disease and conflict”. In a statement posted on X, Tedros said the WHO could not “build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling”.
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DUBAI: Iran’s state TV said Tehran had obtained a draft of an initial, unofficial framework for a memorandum of understanding with the United States on ending their conflict.
Under the framework, Iran would restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to pre-war levels within a month, while the US would withdraw military forces from Iran’s vicinity and lift a naval blockade.
State TV said on Wednesday (May 27) the framework, which excludes military vessels and envisages Iran managing ship traffic through the strait in cooperation with Oman, was not yet finalised and that Tehran would take no steps without “tangible verification”.
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A number of South Carolina Republicans in the state Senate joined Democrats on Tuesday to defeat a procedural vote needed to advance a congressional redistricting plan. The effort sought to redraw the state’s seven U.S. House districts ahead of the 2026 elections, with the aim of creating a map that would favor Republican candidates in all seven seats and draw out the lone Democrat-controlled district under the current map.
The proposal stemmed from a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that altered interpretations of the Voting Rights Act regarding congressional districts on the basis of race. In response to the landmark ruling, a number of Republican-controlled states in the South moved to draw out districts that were drawn in order to be majority black under prior criteria.
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A federal court is trying to pull a judicial mulligan after the Supreme Court gave Alabama another shot at using its GOP-backed congressional map.
The Supreme Court threw out a lower-court order barring Alabama from using the congressional map the state adopted in 2023 and sent the dispute back to the lower court for another look. But a three-judge federal panel again blocked Alabama from using that map for the 2026 midterms.
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There is a chance this will not pass. The left does not want to let go of this.
Wisconsin voters to decide constitutional amendment banning DEI discrimination
A Wisconsin ballot initiative this fall would amend the state constitution to ban discriminatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at government entities, including public universities.
Under Assembly Joint Resolution 102, government entities would be prohibited from “discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration.”
Before Wisconsin legislators can send a resolution to voters, the resolution must receive approval in two legislative years. Lawmakers first approved the proposed amendment during the 2023–24 session, then gave it second approval this January, sending it to voters this fall.
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A U.S. judge on Thursday declined to immediately block President Donald Trump’s executive order tightening rules on mail-in voting, but left the door open for the Democratic Party to challenge it again after the administration takes further steps to implement the measure.
Washington-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols wrote that the Democrats’ request for a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s March 31 order, which directed his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state, was premature. The decision did not address whether Trump’s executive order was lawful.
Two major AI security flaws have been revealed; corporations aren’t building safeguards into their AIs and there is a security vulnerability in the code itself.
President Trump is seeking to protect his administration from criminal leaks to the press that have occurred since he first became President. The Office of Personal Management (OPM) is proposing a rule from the Trump administration that would create a blanket NDA for all 2 million Federal workers.
NY Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unveiled a $22 billion housing plan he says will build and/or preserve 400,000 “affordable homes.” As part of the plan, all work done to make it possible will have to be done with explicit approval and by the terms of the unions.
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Supporters of the measure have reached the number of necessary signatures, putting it one step closer to being on the November ballot.
A petition initiative in Oregon that supporters are seeking to have put on the November ballot would make it illegal to kill or injure animals in the state, a move that opponents say would effectively ban hunting and fishing in the state.
The proposed initiative, called the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act, makes it a crime of animal abuse in the first degree if the person “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” causes the death of an animal. The initiative also includes a provision extending sexual abuse of animals to include artificial insemination used on farm animals.
Per KATU2, supporters of the measure have reached the number of necessary signatures, putting it one step closer to being on the November ballot. The Secretary of State’s Office now has to verify the signatures.
The U.S. Fertility Rate for 2025 fell from the previous low in 2024 of 53.8 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 44 to 53.1 births. The U.S. birthrate fell below replacement levels shortly after the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing pre-born human termination, or abortion, as it is commonly called.
Texas A&M Scientists have developed a nasal spray that reduces inflammation in the brain. The spray is being heralded as a potential effective treatment for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. Research leader Dr. Ashok Shetty said, “Brain age-related diseases like dementia are a major health concern worldwide. What we’re showing is brain aging can be reversed, to help people stay mentally sharp, socially engaged and free from age-related decline.”
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China now requires people working in AI at private firms to secure travel approval before leaving the country. According to Bloomberg, the restrictions apply to individuals working in state-owned firms, startup founders, and those employed by private companies, as the central government considers them important strategic assets. China has already been limiting international travel for key individuals such as senior researchers at public educational institutions, nuclear scientists, and even top executives of government-owned companies, but extending the restriction to private firms and individuals is an uncommon move, even for Beijing.
There’s no official guidance yet on which roles, expertise, or seniority will be included in the travel ban. However, Bloomberg sources say that the individuals added to the list were assessed based on their impact on China’s AI ambitions, not just where they work or their position within their company. This move is an expansion of a former government directive wherein some AI engineers had mandatory reporting of any overseas travel plan, although they were still free to go abroad as needed.
This shows that Beijing considers AI as a strategic advantage and that the people leading the industry are considered crucial for the country’s advancement. This news comes months after Meta’s surprise purchase of Manus AI, which China wants to unwind to prevent the U.S. from acquiring Chinese AI talent and intellectual property. Although the two aren’t directly related, the report says that the new policy is designed to protect against the leaking of key technologies, such as the one being developed by the Chinese startup that moved to Singapore.
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Millions of AI agents and tools around the world have been imperiled by a critical vulnerability that can allow hackers to breach the servers running them and make off with sensitive data and credentials to third-party accounts, a security researcher is warning.
The vulnerability is present in Starlette, an open source framework that its developer says receives 325 million downloads per week. Thousands of other open source projects are also vulnerable because they require Starlette to work. The framework is an implementation of the ASGI (asynchronous server gateway interface), which allows large numbers of requests to be efficiently processed simultaneously. Starlette is the base of FastAPI and other widely used frameworks for building services in Python apps, as well as many others.
ASGI, and by extension Starlette, have access to servers running the MCP (model context protocol), which allows AI agents from major providers to access external sources, including user data bases, email and calendar accounts, and all manner of other resources. To connect with these external systems, MCP servers store credentials for each one, making them especially valuable storehouses for attackers to breach.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and under the name BadHost, is trivial to exploit and works against most systems that aren’t behind a properly configured firewall. Besides FastAPI, other widely used packages—including vLLM, and LiteLLM—are also affected. BadHost affects Starlette versions prior to 1.0.1, which was released Friday.
“A single character injected into the HTTP Host header bypasses path-based authorization in Starlette, the routing core of FastAPI,” researchers from Secwest wrote. “Through FastAPI, this primitive (now tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and branded BadHost by the discoverers) reaches a large segment of the Python AI tooling ecosystem: vLLM (where the bug was discovered), LiteLLM, Text Generation Inference, most OpenAI-shim proxies, MCP servers, agent harnesses, eval dashboards, and model-management UIs.”
BadHost carries a severity rating of 7 out of 10. Secwest said the classification “materially understates” the threat it poses to people using other apps that depend on Starlette. X41 D-Sec, the security firm that discovered it, described it as having “critical severity.” X41 D-Sec partnered with fellow security firm Nemesis to create an online scanner that can check if a given server is vulnerable.
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Members of the Iranian security forces stand guard under a large portrait of Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, during a memorial to mark the 40th day since his father, Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, was killed in US-Israeli joint strikes.
Majid Saeedi/Getty Images
Iranian media said on Tuesday that Tehran’s negotiators were seeking the release of around $24 billion in frozen assets abroad as part of a process aimed at ending the war with the United States.
The report by Tasnim news agency came as a top Iranian delegation was in Qatar, and after Tehran said it was finalising a 14-point framework for a deal on ending the war, which began with US-Israeli airstrikes against Iran on 28 February.
“Iran’s frozen assets are to be released during the course of the negotiations, and this amount is estimated at $24 billion in accordance with the 14-point memorandum of understanding,” Tasnim quoted an unnamed source close to the negotiating team as saying.
Around half of that sum “should be made available at the start of the announcement of the memorandum,” it added.
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Israel said on Wednesday it had killed the new head of Hamas’s armed wing in Gaza, Mohammed Odeh, in a strike the day before, after killing his predecessor in a similar attack earlier this month.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a joint statement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the “commander of the armed wing of the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza was eliminated yesterday and sent to meet his associates in the depths of hell.”
Hamas hasn’t commented yet.
“In the Prime Minister’s name and in my own, congratulations to the IDF and the Shin Bet on the brilliant execution,” Katz said.
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Happy Wednesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. The Sine Qua Non Sequitur is spending the day providing sweater vests to disgruntled sociology professors who’ve had previous complaints about Canada.
The alternative universe that the “journalists” at The New York Times and The Washington Post write about is filled with stories about an ever-widening rift in the MAGA movement. Accoding to the fiction, people on the right are becoming disenchanted with President Trump. I keep looking for signs of it in the real world and have not yet been able to find any.
In fact, it looks like Trump’s influence in the Republican Party is stronger than ever. GOP candidates that the president endorsed have been cleaning up in recent primaries and runoff elections. Last week we discussed the Democrats’ excitement about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. Some polling showed Talarico looking good against Republicans Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who were facing each other in a runoff.
I got quite a few emails and comments after that the Republicans simply needed to get the runoff election behind them in order to begin focusing on Talarico. Well, that happened last night, and the contest wasn’t even close. This is from Catherine:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a hardcore MAGA warrior endorsed by President Donald Trump, has won the Republican Senate primary run-off race against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
The biggest race of Primary Election Day 2026 in Texas was between Cornyn and Paxton. After a long period of widespread speculation, Trump finally declared a week ago that he was backing the Texas attorney general to win the Senate primary runoff. “Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to WIN… KEN PAXTON WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” Trump wrote.
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On Tuesday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said that picking up Raul Castro in Cuba wouldn’t be difficult, but he thinks that, due to a desire by Castro to avoid dying in prison, “Raul Castro is going to leave the country, along with his family” “before we pick him up.”
Scott said, “Well, let’s remember, the Cubans were supporting — were defending Maduro, and that took, what, seven minutes to take out Maduro? So, it won’t take much to pick up Raul Castro. And the people of Cuba are already –.”
Co-host Kailey Leinz then cut in to ask, “You expect that to happen?”
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A massive tank of caustic chemicals burst at a Washington paper mill Tuesday morning, killing an unknown number of workers and sending others to hospitals, officials said.
The tank failed around 7:15 a.m. at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. plant on Industrial Way in Longview, the Longview Fire Department (LFD) said in a joint statement with the company. Ten people went to hospitals in the area, including nine plant workers and one firefighter, while some remain unaccouted for, according to KGW. Officials said the identities of the dead and wounded will not be shared until relatives have been informed.
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Over the holiday weekend, New Jersey Democrat politicians gathered outside Newark’s Delaney Hall, which ICE has been using as a detention facility for over a decade. CNN showed video on Tuesday morning’s The Situation Room of several prominent Democrat politicians. Included in their highlight reel was New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, Senator Andy Kim, and Representative Robert Menendez, who spoke to cameras outside the facility amid swarms of protesters performing the modern Democrat’s favorite pastime as they clashed with officers and attempted to block vehicles coming in or out.
These particular protests were spurred by unsubstantiated “reports of rough conditions like rotten food and a hunger strike by detainees,” according to co-host Pamela Brown.
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An Ethiopian immigrant in Canada pleaded guilty to several “offences that included assaulting a teenager and smearing fecal matter over her face and mouth,” as well as “sexual assault, assault, and committing an indecent act,” according to the National Post. Because he has been unemployed for years, the judge deemed it an ‘undue hardship’ if he paid the fines imposed by law.
If you are surprised by this soft sentence, you are not paying attention. Clearly, the justice system for our northern neighbors is not what you would call “just.”
The crimes are worse than you could have ever imagined.
Per the National Post:
The judge waived the victim fine surcharge, noting that Zewdu has been unemployed for years and the fine “would be an undue hardship.” The surcharge is generally 15 per cent where a fine has been levied, or between $100 and $200 for each offence.
Court documents released this week outline the troubling nature of the offences. In one, which took place on June 27, 2025, a 17-year-old was walking in a residential area near a SkyTrain station when Zewdu approached her from behind and grabbed her.
“He then smeared fecal matter over her face and mouth while pushing and jamming feces into her face and mouth,” court records state. “Mr. Zewdu was laughing as he held out his phone, causing the victim to believe that Mr. Zewdu was recording the assault. A subsequent search of his phone showed that this was not the case.”
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Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Esmail Baghaei on Tuesday accused the US of committing a “despicable war crime” following a missile strike on a sports hall in Lamerd, Fars Province, that Tehran says killed 24 civilians, including teenage volleyball players and a two-year-old child, while injuring more than 130 people.
In a post on X, Baghaei said he was briefed by the Iranian member of Parliament for Mehr, Mousa Mousavi, about a ” devastating American missile strike” on a residential area and sports hall in the city of Lamerd.
“On the afternoon of Saturday, 9 Esfand 1404 (28 February 2026) the same day students at the Shajareh_Tayyibeh_School in Minab were massacred by Tomahawk missiles–a residential area in Lamerd, including a sports hall, was struck by U.S. Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM),” Baghaei said.
According to the Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, the strike “slaughtered 24 persons, including a 2-year-old girl, several teenage volleyball players”, while “more than 130 persons were injured, many of whom now face permanent disabilities.”
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged the three defendants with assault and intimidation by force.
The Minneapolis family members who have been federally indicted for an alleged attack on Turning Point USA “Frontlines” reporter Savanah Hernandez have been granted temporary restraining orders against the reporter, Hernandez announced on Tuesday.
All three defendants, Chris, DeYanna, and Paige Ostroushko, alleged to the court that they are the victims of “harassment” and “assault” from Hernandez, who was mob assaulted by the defendants while reporting outside the Whipple Federal Building in April. Hernandez, who sustained physical injuries and a concussion, said the Ostroushkos “extensively lied” about her, as well as the events that unfolded that day, in order to receive emergency restraining orders.
Additionally, the defendants petitioned the court to impose a gag order on Hernandez, attempting to prevent the reporter from posting about the attack on social media, according to court filings. Court documents also show that the Ostroushkos are trying to get Hernandez, as well as her family, banned from the vicinity of the ICE facility and the Minnesota county in which they live. Hernandez has not been charged with a crime and is the victim in this case, as evidenced by ample video footage and indictments.
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Starlink Mini is already the version of SpaceX’s internet dish built for on-the-go connectivity. It has found its fans in travelers, campers, vanlifers, and others who live off the grid. But new firmware clues suggest SpaceX may be getting ready to make it even more portable by putting the battery inside the dish itself.
According to a PCMag report, university researcher Jinwei Zhao spotted new Starlink firmware strings that point toward a possible Starlink Mini model with an integrated battery. The key clue is a new DishBatteryStats reference, which appears designed to return battery-specific information rather than simply detect that the dish is plugged into some random external power bank.
