Iran fired roughly ten missiles at northern Israel late Sunday night, the first such strike since a US-brokered ceasefire ended the brief war between Washington and Tehran in early April. Tehran said the launch answered an Israeli airstrike hours earlier on the headquarters of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group Iran backs, in a Beirut suburb that killed two people and wounded twenty. Israel's military intercepted the missiles and reported no casualties, though sirens sent residents into shelters across the north. Iran's Revolutionary Guard warned that further Israeli attacks would draw a wider response against "American and Zionist targets" across the region. President Trump told reporters the exchange was "certainly not going to help" ceasefire talks and said he would press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate, comparing an open-ended cycle of strikes to "the last 3,000 years" of conflict in the region. Iraq and Syria briefly closed their airspace as a precaution.
The US and Iran reached a ceasefire in April after a brief war, but Israel has continued separate strikes on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, accusing it of rearming. Sunday's exchange marked the first time Iran has struck Israel directly since that truce took hold.
Asian markets opened Monday to a rout that erased weeks of gains in chip and AI shares. South Korea's Kospi index plunged as much as 8.8 percent within minutes of the open, forcing the exchange to halt trading for twenty minutes under its circuit-breaker rules; memory-chip makers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each lost roughly ten percent of their value. Japan's Nikkei 225 fell nearly four percent, its steepest drop in three months, as SoftBank and other chip-linked stocks slid. Three forces collided to trigger the slide. Broadcom, a major supplier of AI chips, told investors its sales next quarter would fall more than a billion dollars short of Wall Street's forecast, and its own stock dropped over twelve percent. A stronger-than-expected US jobs report raised bets that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates later this year, making future profits look less valuable today. Oil prices climbed too, after Iran and Israel traded strikes for the first time since their ceasefire, reviving fears that wider conflict could push up inflation.
Asian tech stocks had rallied for weeks on optimism about AI chip demand before Monday's reversal. A circuit breaker is an automatic trading halt that exchanges trigger when prices fall too fast, meant to give investors time to reassess rather than panic-sell. The Fed funds rate shapes borrowing costs across the US economy.
Xi Jinping landed in North Korea on Monday for his first visit to the country in seven years, a trip Beijing is treating as a priority even at a tense moment for its own diplomacy. It is Xi's first trip abroad this year, and it follows weeks in which he hosted both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin for separate summits in Beijing. The visit aims to shore up China's hold on a relationship that has grown more complicated: North Korea has deepened military ties with Russia, reportedly sending troops to fight in Ukraine, while talks between Pyongyang and Washington over North Korea's nuclear weapons program remain stalled. In a commentary published in North Korean state media ahead of his arrival, Xi promised "unwavering" friendship and pledged to deepen cooperation with Kim Jong Un's government, including in the military sphere. Analysts see the trip as Beijing's bid to keep its unpredictable neighbor inside China's orbit rather than Russia's.
China has backed North Korea since the Korean War and remains its largest trading partner and source of aid, though the relationship has cooled at times over Pyongyang's nuclear tests. Xi's last visit, in 2019, was the first by a Chinese leader to North Korea in fourteen years.
via Science (AAAS), New England Journal of Medicine
An experimental drug has let a meaningful share of people with chronic hepatitis B stop treatment for good and stay virus-free, according to results published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at a major European liver conference. Hepatitis B infects the liver and currently traps roughly 250 million people worldwide on daily antiviral pills they must take for life, since the pills suppress the virus but rarely clear it. The new drug, bepirovirsen, works like a pair of molecular scissors: a short synthetic strand that latches onto the virus's genetic instructions and cuts them apart before the virus can multiply or hide from the immune system. In two trials of nearly 1,900 patients who added a six-month course of bepirovirsen to their usual pills, about 19 percent saw the virus vanish from their blood and stay gone for at least six months after stopping every treatment - something no patient given a placebo achieved. US regulators have fast-tracked the drug for review, with a decision expected by October.
Hepatitis B spreads through blood and bodily fluids and can cause liver failure or cancer decades after infection. Current pills, like tenofovir, hold the virus in check but almost never eliminate it, so patients typically stay on medication indefinitely. A "functional cure" means the virus becomes undetectable without ongoing drugs.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met Sunday in London with the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany, and the four issued a joint statement on what it would take to end Russia's war on Ukraine. At the center of it: Vladimir Putin must agree to an immediate, full ceasefire using today's front line as the starting point for talks, rather than fighting on for more ground first. Beyond that, the leaders said Ukraine needs real protection against future attacks, including an international force on the ground once a truce holds; Russia's frozen overseas assets should stay locked up until Moscow pays for the damage it caused; and any deal must respect the say of Ukraine's European neighbors, with the EU and NATO each holding a veto over terms touching their own security. The meeting came days after Putin rejected face-to-face talks and instead demanded Ukraine cede the Donetsk region, and as Zelensky grows anxious that President Trump's focus has drifted toward Iran.
The 'E3' - Britain, France, and Germany - have coordinated Ukraine policy since Russia's 2022 invasion. Zelensky has pushed for a ceasefire along the current front line, while Putin has demanded Ukraine withdraw entirely from four regions Russia claims to have annexed, including Donetsk.
Researchers at Stanford, Chapman, and Northeastern universities have published the largest audit yet of AI hiring tools, and it found that the algorithms many employers rely on to screen resumes systematically steer Black and Asian applicants toward jobs where they are less likely to get hired. The team examined more than four million job applications from three million people across 156 employers, all of whom used screening software from the same vendor, a platform called Pymetrics. They found that 26 percent of applications from Black candidates, and 15 percent from Asian candidates, were funneled toward positions where the algorithm's pattern of recommendations crosses a threshold that triggers federal scrutiny for discrimination. The researchers call this an "algorithmic monoculture": because so many companies now lean on the same handful of vendors, one tool's blind spot does not just cost a candidate a single job, it can quietly close doors at every employer that uses it. More than nine in ten US employers now use some form of hiring algorithm.
Hiring algorithms typically score candidates on traits like personality and cognitive ability inferred from games or video interviews, then recommend whom to call back. Federal guidelines flag a tool as potentially discriminatory if one group is selected at less than four-fifths the rate of another - the threshold this study found many Black and Asian applicants crossing.
Hundreds of people abducted by Boko Haram fighters in northeastern Nigeria three months ago have been freed from a hideout deep in the Mandara Mountains, near the country's border with Cameroon. The captives, who include many women and children, were seized in March from Ngoshe, a mostly Muslim farming community that came under attack from the militant group. Nigeria's army says the release followed an intelligence-led operation, weeks in the planning, that caught the Islamist fighters by surprise; a local civic group, the Borno South Youth Initiative, instead credits its own negotiators with brokering what it calls an unconditional release, and puts the number freed even higher than the roughly 360 the military has counted. Either way, the captives were held by JAS, a Boko Haram faction that has run a long insurgency across Nigeria's northeast, and their release marks one of the larger mass rescues from the group in recent years.
Boko Haram has waged an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria since 2009, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions, often through mass kidnappings of villagers and schoolchildren. JAS is one of two main factions the group has split into; both still control pockets of territory in the remote Mandara Mountains along the Cameroon border.
University faculty are falling behind financially even as the people who run their institutions pull further ahead, according to a new analysis from the Chronicle of Higher Education built on the American Association of University Professors' annual compensation survey. The survey, which covers nearly 780 colleges and universities and roughly half a million faculty members, found that average faculty salaries rose just 2.3 percent over the past year, which after accounting for inflation amounts to a small pay cut in real terms. University presidents have fared far better: median base pay for presidents at doctoral-granting institutions climbed 27 percent between 2019 and 2023, compared with 10 percent for full professors over that same stretch. Researchers point to a mix of causes, including states cutting funding for public universities, falling enrollment at many schools, and a steady rise in spending on administration and debt service rather than instruction.
The AAUP, a faculty advocacy group, has tracked professor pay for decades and increasingly highlights a widening gap with administrative compensation. Critics argue the trend reflects universities run more like corporations, with growing layers of management, while defenders say complex modern campuses need professional administrators to run them.
Engineers at MIT have found a way to keep the chips inside next-generation wireless devices from cooking themselves: gluing them directly onto a wafer-thin layer of synthetic diamond. The chips use gallium nitride, a material that lets radios and radar pack more power into less space than older silicon chips can, but that power creates intense heat in tiny hot spots that degrade performance over time. Diamond conducts heat better than nearly any other known material, so the team, led by graduate student Pradyot Yadav with professors Tomás Palacios and Ruonan Han, used an ultra-precise pulsed laser to cut the chips into small tiles and carve matching pockets into a diamond wafer, then bonded the two with a heat-conducting film thin enough not to disturb the chips' electrical signals. The resulting prototype amplifier, the team reports, beats any comparable device they know of on power, efficiency, and gain together - a combination that could sharpen 6G networks, satellite links, and radar systems.
Gallium nitride (GaN) transistors have become standard in high-power radio and radar equipment because they handle far more voltage than silicon, but cramming them closer together to boost performance runs into a wall: the hotter they run, the less reliable and efficient they become.
A software engineer with ten years in financial technology described, in a widely discussed essay, watching the three things that used to make their career valuable quietly stop mattering. First went specialized domain knowledge: the kind of payments and finance expertise that once took years to build is now something an AI assistant can supply on request. Then went the hardest debugging work - the author says coding tools like Claude Code have gone from solving roughly six in ten gnarly bugs to about nine in ten, including the race conditions and third-party integration failures that used to eat entire days. Finally, even code quality and architecture, the things senior engineers took pride in, are waved off as teams accept messier codebases on the theory that code is now written for AI tools to read, not for humans. Job postings have shifted too, from specific titles like "Software Engineer - Payments" toward generic "Software Engineer." The essay ends on an open question: if specialization stops paying off, what does a career here look like now?
Race conditions are bugs that occur when different parts of a program run at slightly different speeds and interfere with each other - notoriously hard to reproduce and diagnose. The essay set off a wide debate among engineers about whether specialized technical skill is still a safe bet for a career.
