President Trump on Monday called on Gulf allies to join the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, while the US and Iran negotiate an extension of the Middle East ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The push targets Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies that have so far held back from formal ties with Israel. The administration sees the diplomatic moment as an opportunity to expand the Accords, which began under Trump's first term, and to reshape regional alliances. The simultaneous Iran talks complicate the pitch: Gulf states remain wary of Tehran's influence and may demand security guarantees before normalizing relations with Israel. The White House hopes that progress on both fronts can lock in a broader realignment that isolates Iran and deepens economic integration between Israel and the Arab world.
The Abraham Accords, brokered in 2020, normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Saudi Arabia has resisted joining without progress on Palestinian statehood. The current US-Iran talks aim to extend a ceasefire that halted months of hostilities involving Iran-backed groups.
Pope Leo XIV released his first major papal document on Monday, a 42,000-word encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas that calls for new legal and ethical frameworks to govern artificial intelligence. The letter warns against the “idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak” and compares the current AI era to the Tower of Babel. It addresses job displacement, AI-powered warfare, children's exposure to AI, and algorithmic decision-making in hiring and services. The pope urges “prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI,” and insists that humans, not opaque systems, must control lethal force. He chose his papal name partly in reference to Pope Leo XIII, who issued a landmark encyclical on workers' rights during the industrial revolution. Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah attended the presentation.
Pope Leo XIV, elected in 2025, has made technology ethics a central theme. His predecessor's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum defended workers amid industrialization. The new document does not reject AI outright but demands “disarming” its military and economic concentration.
Li Jiaying, a 43-year-old Hong Kong police officer and mother of three, became the first astronaut from Hong Kong to reach space on Sunday night, launching aboard China's Shenzhou-23 mission to the Tiangong space station. She serves as the payload scientist in a three-person crew that includes space engineer Zhu Yangzhu and former pilot Zhang Zhiyuan. The mission includes a year-long stay for at least one crew member to study microgravity effects on the human body, one of the longest orbital stays in history. The launch from the Gobi Desert drew crowds waving Chinese flags, and Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee called it a “historic” moment. The mission advances China's goal of a crewed lunar landing by 2030, amid a space race with the US, which targets 2028.
China's Tiangong space station has been continuously occupied since 2021. The Shenzhou-23 mission is the latest in a series of six-month rotations. Li's selection is seen as a boost to patriotism in Hong Kong, a former British colony that returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
Dutch financial crime investigators arrested two men on May 18 and seized over 800 servers in an operation targeting hosting companies that allegedly provided infrastructure for Russian cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns across the EU. The suspects, a 57-year-old from Amsterdam and a 39-year-old Russian native from The Hague, ran MIRhosting and WorkTitans BV, which authorities say took over the network of Stark Industries Solutions after that entity was sanctioned by the EU. Stark Industries, a hosting provider that appeared just before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, became a hub for DDoS attacks and proxy services used by Russian intelligence-linked groups. The arrests follow a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity investigation that traced Stark's remaining internet connectivity to the Dutch firms. Data reviewed by de Volkskrant showed the networks were the most-used in pro-Russian attacks on Danish government bodies during the country's November 2025 municipal elections.
The EU sanctioned Stark Industries Solutions in 2024 for facilitating Russian hybrid warfare. After sanctions, its assets moved to PQHosting (Moldovan) and later to Dutch-controlled entities. The latest arrests target the final link in that chain.
The US Department of Education released final regulations last week detailing how short-term programs can qualify for the new Workforce Pell program, which opens federal grants to programs as short as eight weeks. The rule sets state-level approval processes and student-outcome standards. Meanwhile, the department faces two lawsuits over its new definition of professional degrees, which limits higher federal loan caps to only 11 graduate fields. A coalition of more than 20 states and a group of education associations argue the narrow definition unfairly restricts access to other graduate programs. Separately, the department said it will fund workforce and AI initiatives using discretionary money originally intended for minority-serving institutions, a move the Trump administration defends after arguing that race-focused grants are illegal.
Workforce Pell was created by federal legislation last year to extend Pell Grants to short-term training programs. The new rules are part of a broader Trump-era push to reshape higher education funding and accreditation, including efforts to lower barriers for new accreditors and promote “intellectual diversity.”
Boston firefighter Robert J. Kilduff Jr., a 24-year veteran and third-generation firefighter, died Saturday night after falling from a third-floor window while battling a three-alarm house fire at 18 Treadway Road in Dorchester. The fire broke out around 8:15 p.m. and spread to all three floors before crews knocked it down about 20 minutes later. A mayday was declared at 8:50 p.m. after Kilduff, assigned to Rescue Company 2, fell. He was transported to Boston Medical Center but did not survive. Mayor Michelle Wu said the city “will always honor his life, his dedication, and his service.” Fire Commissioner Rodney Marshall said the department would posthumously grant Kilduff the highest honors. He is the first Boston firefighter to die in the line of duty since 2014.
The Boston Fire Department last lost a firefighter in the line of duty in 2014, when two firefighters died in a Back Bay brownstone fire. Kilduff's death has prompted an outpouring of support from the community and the firefighters' union.
Two mathematicians have found a way to approximate pi inside Minecraft without building a full computer. Molly Lynch of Hollins University and Michael Weselcouch of Roanoke College used the game's creature mechanics to implement a Monte Carlo darts method: they pitted slimes against zoglins in an enclosed arena and counted how many slimes landed inside a circular boundary versus outside. Because the game's mob spawning and movement are random, the ratio of hits to total attempts converges to π/4, allowing them to estimate pi. The approach, published in 2024, avoids the complexity of wiring up a Turing-complete redstone computer. The researchers aimed to make mathematics appealing to young people by embedding a classic probability technique in a familiar game world.
Minecraft is known to be Turing-complete, meaning any computable function can be implemented with its redstone circuits. Previous in-game computers have run simple programs, but Lynch and Weselcouch sought a simpler, more visual method to demonstrate mathematical constants.
Saudi Arabia is dramatically scaling back the futuristic megaprojects at the heart of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 plan, as oil revenue uncertainty and a lack of foreign investment force a retrenchment. The Line, a 100-mile linear city, is being downsized to something far less ambitious. The Trojena mountain resort, intended to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games, has lost the Games to Kazakhstan after plans for artificial snow and a luxury ski village proved unviable. The Cube, a $50 billion structure that could have held 20 Empire State Buildings, has been scrapped entirely. Even the LIV Golf tour, which cost an estimated $5 billion, is being reassessed as a financial and reputational failure. Analysts say the pattern of splashy announcements followed by quiet downscaling predates MBS and reflects a long-standing Saudi tendency to overpromise.
Vision 2030, launched in 2016, aimed to diversify Saudi Arabia's economy away from oil through tourism, technology, and entertainment. The plan's centerpiece, the $500 billion Neom project, included multiple sub-projects. Falling oil prices before the current Middle East war and the war's uncertainty have strained the kingdom's finances.
President Trump's use of the pardon power has been corrupt and expensive, but his latest move crosses a new line: he is effectively trying to pardon himself, argues Kevin D. Williamson. Trump has already erased about $1.5 billion in fines, restitution, and other obligations owed by convicted criminals, a sum that rivals the $1.8 billion he recently proposed diverting from the Treasury to hand out to political supporters. Williamson contends that the self-pardon attempt, combined with the slush-fund power grab, represents an unprecedented corruption of executive authority. The piece frames these actions not as isolated scandals but as a systematic dismantling of legal accountability, warning that the financial cost is secondary to the constitutional damage. The column connects these moves to a pattern of using government instruments for personal and political benefit, undermining the separation of powers.
The Dispatch is a conservative digital media outlet founded in 2019 by former Weekly Standard and National Review editors. Kevin D. Williamson is a national correspondent known for his libertarian-leaning criticism of both parties. The piece appears in his weekly newsletter Wanderland.
A software engineer has published a formal proof that Atlassian's Jira project-tracking tool is Turing-complete, settling a long-running piece of engineering folklore. The proof implements a Minsky two-counter machine using Jira's automation rules, Epic statuses, and linked issues. Each instruction state maps to an Epic status, and increment/decrement operations are performed by creating or deleting linked issues. Conditional branching is achieved with JQL-conditioned automation rules. The author demonstrates a working addition machine that adds two registers, and a Fibonacci generator that runs until Jira Cloud's chain-depth cap of 10 triggers. The construction shows that Jira's automation language can encode any computable function, given unbounded issue creation and rule execution. The article includes setup instructions and an execution trace recorded on a live Atlassian instance.
Turing-completeness means a system can simulate any Turing machine, making it capable of universal computation. Previous claims that Jira is Turing-complete circulated without proof. The author, a Swiss developer, provides the first published reduction, using a Minsky machine, a minimal model known to be Turing-complete since 1967.
