03 World

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Iran’s Tasnim News Agency, which has affiliations with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported that a potential memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Iran and the United States has not been finalized.

According to Tasnim, Iran has not notified the Pakistani mediator involved in the talks that any agreement text has been completed. The agency indicated that Iranian officials would inform both the mediator and the public once an MOU is ready.

This statement came in response to earlier reports on the same day from outlets such as Reuters and Axios, which described negotiators as having reached a draft MOU. Reuters reported that U.S. and Iranian negotiators had reached a memorandum of understanding concerning a 60-day extension of the existing ceasefire and the initiation of talks on Iran’s nuclear program.

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A Russian drone struck an apartment building in NATO-member Romania, its defence ministry said on Friday, wounding two people in a city near the Ukrainian border.

“During the night of May 28–29, the Russian Federation resumed drone attacks on civilian and infrastructure targets in Ukraine, near the river border with Romania,” the Romanian defence ministry said, condemning an “irresponsible escalation”.

“One of these drones entered Romanian airspace, was tracked by radar as far as the southern part of the city of Galati, and crashed onto the roof of an apartment building, with the impact triggering a fire,” it said.

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On April 15, technology podcaster Dwarkesh Patel published a two-hour interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. For roughly forty minutes, Patel asked one question six different ways. The question was this: If American-made compute trains AI models with the serious cyber-offensive capabilities Anthropic’s Mythos Preview demonstrated — and that compute is sold to a strategic adversary — what responsibility does the seller bear?

Huang’s answers hovered a safe distance away from the question. AI is a “five-layer cake,” he told Patel, and ceding any layer to China would be industrial suicide. The Chinese, he argued, already have enough compute to do whatever they intend to do, so marginal sales do not change the strategic balance. By the end, Patel was visibly worn down. Huang accused him of arguing from extremes and of thinking in absolutes.

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The United States and Iran reached an agreement on Thursday to extend their ceasefire and lift restrictions on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sources told Reuters, though U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to approve it and Iranian state media said it had not been finalized.

According to four sources familiar with the matter, the agreement would extend the truce for another 60 days and allow traffic to flow through the strategic waterway while negotiators tackle difficult issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.

If approved by leadership in Washington and Tehran, it would amount to the biggest step towards peace since the conflict began on February 28. News of the possible agreement came after a round of tit-for-tat attacks between the two countries, the latest such incident since the ceasefire took effect in early April.

Trump has not yet approved the deal, the sources said. The White House declined to comment, and Iran has yet to comment on news of the proposed deal, which was first reported by Axios.

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Iran has claimed that it has deployed a new air defence system to take down a United States MQ-9 Reaper drone near the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week. Iran’s state-sponsored media said the American drone– that costs between $16 million and $30 million per unit– was brought down near Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz using a locally developed system called Arash-e-Kamangir.

If the claim is correct, the interception marked the first combat use of the defence system named after the legendary Iranian character Arash-the-Archer. It would mean Tehran has retained its military capacity to repel US and Israeli attacks despite months of war in the Middle East.

Iranian media claimed the drone was brought down over regional waters during an operation to protect the country’s airspace and maritime borders. “This operation, which was carried out using a system with hidden capabilities, is a clear and decisive message from Iran,” Iran’s Fars news agency quoted unnamed officials as saying.

However, so far, no independent source has corroborated the Iranian claim of a new interception system.

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The US will continue to ramp up economic pressure on the island, sources have told the outlet

US President Donald Trump is set to escalate Washington’s economic pressure campaign on Cuba in an attempt to force regime change, Axios reported on Friday, citing sources. The island is already enduring near-total fuel starvation and daily blackouts stretching up to 20 hours.

The US has thus far opted for a phased campaign designed to choke Havana, but which avoids a direct military invasion, several unnamed officials told the outlet.

“The best way to describe it is ‘accelerationism,’” one senior official said, referring to the philosophy of hastening societal collapse. “But we don’t want to kill off the regime just yet. There’s a method to this. It’s in stages.”

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On Thursday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Katie Pavlich Tonight,” Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Leiter said that Iran has “1,700 centrifuges” capable of producing enriched material imminently, and those “have to be dismantled as well or at least completely taken out of the ability to be reconstituted.”

Leiter said, “[T]he best case scenario would be that they actually open it up as a result of any deal and turn it over, by inspectors that would come in, experts that would come in and assess that all of it has been removed. But it’s important to point out, they have 1,700 centrifuges that can produce nuclear weapons tomorrow — enriched material, I should say, tomorrow. So those have to be dismantled as well or at least completely taken out of the ability to be reconstituted.”

Earlier, he said that “we’re very confident, at the end of the day

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SAN FRANCISCO: Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Thursday (May 28) it had raised US$65 billion in a new funding round that values the Claude maker at US$965 billion, more than its archrival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

The latest fundraising round confirms Anthropic’s place as one of the most significant players in AI, with the startup led by Dario Amodei having drawn fans for its coding powers and state-of-the-art models.

Anthropic’s rise came by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users, the path initially chosen by archrival OpenAI.

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President Donald Trump will meet with his Cabinet on Wednesday after Iran’s Mizan news agency reported the framework of a deal is in place.

As he prepares to talk with his top aides, Trump has been projecting confidence that he’s closing in on a deal that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and provide him a credible argument that Iran’s nuclear capability has been diminished enough to declare victory, winding down a conflict that’s been politically unpopular for Republicans.

Details over a nuclear agreement though remain unclear.

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OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said mass white-collar layoffs have not materialized, while Anthropic has warned of major disruption

The heads of two leading artificial intelligence companies have offered sharply different forecasts on whether the technology will trigger mass job losses. The split comes as as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech giants continue large-scale layoffs tied to AI restructuring.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday that AI is unlikely to trigger a global “jobs apocalypse,” admitting that he had been wrong about how quickly the technology would eliminate white-collar jobs.

“I’m delighted to ⁠be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened,” Altman told Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn.

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Google’s AI boss, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind is in a real mood to make science-fiction come alive, and he’s in a hurry to do it. After dropping a bombshell last week about AGI or Artificial General Intelligence (a type of AI that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks), the Google AI boss is now on record saying that this feat is just 3-4 years away. So by 2029-2030 humanity may find itself at even stranger crossroads than now as it grapples with automation and serious job loss fears.

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KYIV, Ukraine — A Russian drone that was part of an overnight attack on Ukraine crashed into an apartment building in eastern Romania, injuring two people, Romanian authorities said Friday.

In response to the crash, NATO member Romania asked the alliance for a faster transfer of anti-drone capabilities, the Foreign Ministry said, calling the drone’s flight a serious violation of international law.

Ukrainian forces shot down 217 drones overnight on Friday according to the country’s air force. In total, Russia attacked with 232 drones and one ballistic missile. Hits were recorded in 14 areas, the air force said.

The drone was tracked by radar in Romanian airspace and crashed onto the roof of a

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The rivalry between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has officially reached the Moon. NASA announced on Tuesday that it had selected Bezos’s Blue Origin to carry out the first in a planned series of three uncrewed lunar missions aimed at preparing for a future Moon base, handing the company a contract worth about $230M. The mission, expected no earlier than fall 2026, will use Blue Origin’s Blue Moon cargo lander to transport scientific payloads and test technologies near the Moon’s south pole. While SpaceX remains deeply involved in NASA’s Artemis programme, the decision marks a symbolic win for Bezos in the increasingly intense billionaire battle shaping the future of space exploration.

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin takes centre stage in NASA’s Moon base ambitions

For years, NASA’s idea of building a long-term human presence on the Moon existed mostly as an ambition tied to the Artemis programme. Tuesday’s announcement showed the agency is now moving into the practical phase.NASA administrator and entrepreneur Jared Isaacman said the first three uncrewed missions will help test landers, rovers, cargo systems and survival technologies needed to support astronauts on the lunar surface in the future. More than a dozen additional missions are expected later as the agency works towards creating an operational Moon base sometime in the next decade.The first mission will target the Shackleton de Gerlache Ridge region near the lunar south pole, an area scientists believe may contain water ice. NASA sees the region as critical because future explorers could potentially use the ice for drinking water, oxygen production and rocket fuel.

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Anti-government protests demanding the resignation of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz have continued as the country remains mired in crisis, local media reported.

Demonstrators have set up roadblocks and blocked highways at 59 locations across the country’s nine administrative regions.

Based on the latest road map published by the Bolivian Highway Administration, transportation has been disrupted in the Andean regions of La Paz, Oruro and Potosi, as well as in the central regions of Chuquisaca and Cochabamba and the eastern region of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

Attempts by security forces to reopen the 227-kilometre highway between La Paz and Oruro as part of an operation called the White Flag Humanitarian Corridor were met with fierce resistance from protesters, who reportedly threw dynamite sticks and stones at police.

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Inflation continued to hit consumer wallets in April, likely keeping the Federal Reserve on the sidelines until the current wave subsides, fresh pricing data released Thursday showed.

The personal consumption expenditures price index increased a seasonally adjusted 0.4% for the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 3.8%, the Commerce Department reported. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for respective readings of 0.5% and 3.8%.

Excluding food and energy, core prices rose 0.2% for the month and 3.3% for the year, against estimates of 0.3% and 3.3%.

While the annual rates were in line with forecasts, the soft monthly readings could provide some hope that the burst in prices over the previous month had begun to ease.

The Fed takes in a wide dashboard of indicators, but uses the PCE measures as its prime forecasting and policy tool. Officials generally consider core a better indicator of long-term inflation trends as it excludes the volatile gas and groceries components.

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Chad’s President Mahamat Idriss Déby attends a working lunch on reforming the international financial architecture at the Africa Forward summit in Nairobi on 12 May.

Rather than learning from Chad’s history of coups and deadly conflicts, current leaders seem determined to repeat the cycle, writes Remadji Hoinathy in ISS Today.


Just two weeks after eight opposition leaders were arrested for planning a march against Chad’s governance problems, they were sentenced to eight years in prison without parole. Their Political Actors Consultation Group (GCAP) had scheduled the demonstration for 2 May.

A day before their sentencing on 8 May, the Supreme Court announced that the GCAP – the country’s main political opposition coalition – had been dissolved. The jailed leaders join key opposition figure Succès Masra, head of The Transformers party, who was imprisoned for 20 years in August 2025 for ‘incitement to hatred.’

South Africa and Afrikaners reject US claims of humanitarian crisis for white people www.euronews.com
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The South African government and advocacy groups for the country’s Afrikaner white minority rejected on Wednesday the Trump administration’s position that there’s a humanitarian emergency affecting white people in South Africa.

The argument served as the administration’s rationale for raising the US refugee cap, but only for white Afrikaners.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it will admit an additional 10,000 white South Africans into the US as refugees this year, increasing its annual quota, but blocking people from other countries from entering through the programme.

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The Pentagon has reportedly spent months putting key military assets into position near Cuba, fueling speculation that the Trump administration is laying the groundwork for potential military action against the communist-led island nation.

U.S. military planners have quietly expanded naval deployments, surveillance operations and regional force positioning in the Caribbean as tensions between Washington and Havana continue to intensify according to a recent report from Politico.

The developments come after President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this year labeling Cuba an “extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. The administration has accused the Cuban government of strengthening ties with hostile foreign actors, including Russia, China, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, while allegedly allowing foreign intelligence operations to target the United States from just 90 miles off the Florida coast.

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As the left discusses increasing diversity and acceptance, violence is escalating across Germany. Today on the streets of Berlin, four Turkish-Kurdish gangs are fighting for dominance in the drug trade, and

According to Manuel Ostermann, federal chairman of the DPolG Federal Police Union, these gangs are extremely well-connected and structured, maintain global financial networks, and know no bounds in their fight for power.

“They don’t hesitate for a second to use firearms or explosives. They have no inhibitions,” he tells Bild. “This is certainly not the end of the escalation. Today, it’s no longer just brawls, but open gun violence and hand grenades.”

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Canadian researchers are calling for a more coordinated response by G7 countries to counter “systemic” Chinese foreign interference, particularly as technology and tactics evolve and Beijing’s agents embed themselves further into societies.

Wednesday’s report by the Montreal Institute for Global Security comes a day before Canada is set to welcome China’s foreign minister to Ottawa for the first time in a decade.

Speaking alongside the report’s authors on Parliament Hill, former member of Parliament John McKay urged Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand to raise the issue of foreign interference with her counterpart Wang Yi during his visit.

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TORONTO — Canada will buy early warning radar planes built by Sweden’s Saab and Canada’s Bombardier over two American options, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Wednesday.

Carney said his government has entered negotiations to procure Saab’s Airborne Early Warning & Control Aircraft, which is built on the Canadian-manufactured Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft and will support domestic production.

Carney also noted it is made with 20% U.S. content. The federal government has previously said it’s in the market for six radar aircraft.

Carney has made a point of diversifying its military spending away from the United States.

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JOHANNEBURG — The first group of around 300 Ghanaian nationals flew to their country on Wednesday as their government started a voluntary repatriation program for its citizens in response to anti-immigration tensions in South Africa.

Families and travelers gathered at the Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg with their luggage as officials and police coordinated the departure process.

The repatriation follows renewed demonstrations over illegal immigration in parts of South Africa, where frustrations over unemployment, crime and access to services have fueled tensions.