Day: April 30, 2026

In 1980, two US airmen reported an extraordinary encounter near a military base in the east of England. What really happened? In 1996, Nick Pope wrote his first book. Open Skies, Closed Minds was a semi-autobiographical examination of well-known UFO cases mixed with his own research. Pope worked at the ...

He painted sea battles, the labours of Hercules and breathtaking still lifes. But, as a major new exhibition makes clear, it was in his thrilling depictions of the spiritual that the Spanish master showed his true genius Against an impenetrable black ground, the crucified figure looms pale and shining. There’s ...

Fadi Saqr is accused of mass killings of civilians in Tadamon, Damascus, where people say he must face justice A Syrian rights commission is preparing a case accusing Fadi Saqr, a militia leader within the Assad regime, of involvement in crimes against humanity and war crimes, a senior Syrian official ...

Axios reported that US Central Command has prepared a plan for a wave of “short and powerful” strikes on Iran. ...

Over the last six weeks, the Iranian regime has carried out a spate of executions of political prisoners. The Guardian journalist Daniel Boffey reports Iran has hanged 18 political prisoners during the last six weeks. Chief reporter Dan Boffey tells the stories of some of the condemned and their families, ...

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all beat first-quarter earnings expectations on Wednesday, but investors are poised to closely scrutinize their heavy spending on AI. Big Tech has propped up the US stock market — and in many ways, the US economy writ large — in the last year, but investors ...

France announced a plan to phase out fossil fuels completely by 2050. While other legislatures have similarly ambitious aims — the EU and UK both plan to reach net zero by 2050, which functionally requires ending fossil fuels. What is new is the granularity: The roadmap specifically targets an end ...

US President Donald Trump discussed a possible, brief Ukraine ceasefire in a lengthy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. The truce, poised to coincide with Russia’s Victory Day holiday on May 9, would come several weeks after Kyiv and Moscow negotiated a ceasefire around Orthodox Easter, though ...

The price of oil crept back up on Wednesday after US President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s proposal to open the Strait of Hormuz and defended his maritime blockade. Trump met with a group of energy executives on Tuesday to discuss how to minimize impacts from the war as the blockade ...

Goldman Sachs stopped its bankers in Hong Kong from using Anthropic’s AI models, in the latest sign of expanding US-China tech tensions. The American startup’s chatbots are banned in mainland China, and Goldman’s move suggests US AI firms could increasingly treat Hong Kong as off-limits as well, the Financial Times ...