The municipality, for once, did not have to issue its mid-day plea to stay away. By daylight on 27 April the canals looked thinner than usual — Mayor Femke Halsema's new 12-plus-skipper limit on private boats was being enforced for the first time, with overfilled vessels stopped at the edge of the ring before they could enter. A gemeente spokesperson credited the rule with the manageability on the water. Then evening arrived. An unauthorised street party on the Reestraat in the Jordaan grew dense enough that police asked the DJ to cut the music; on Leidseplein, an emergency order cleared the square and trams stood still for ten minutes. Two people were stabbed at the Kingsland festival at the Olympisch Stadion, with one arrest. The day's verdict, from City Hall: rustiger dan normaal — quieter than usual — but only on its own terms.

On 30 April Halsema joined the mayors of Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Nicosia and fifteen other European cities in a hearing room across from the Berlaymont, presenting the European Commission with a single, awkward figure: the EU is building 1.6 million homes a year and needs 650,000 more annually for the next decade. Vice-President Teresa Ribera, who holds the competition and Green Deal portfolios, called the rent rises of the past eleven years — over sixty per cent — "truly staggering." Commissioner Dan Jørgensen promised an Affordable Housing Plan. The Amsterdam pitch, repeatedly: give cities the legal room to police speculation and short-term rentals without being sued under the EU services directive. Halsema returned to a city where 11,000 residents are homeless and an estimated 22,000 homes sit empty.

From 21:00 on Monday 27 April until 05:00 on Tuesday 5 May, Amsterdam Zuid station handled no Intercity or Sprinter traffic at all — only the metro kept running. Crews are sinking foundation piles for the excavation pit that will eventually replace the existing passenger tunnel, part of the long Zuidasdok widening of the A10. Rijkswaterstaat warned of journey times up to an hour longer on the southern ring; NS rerouted travellers via Sloterdijk and Bijlmer Arena. Trains return on Liberation Day, when the southern ring reopens just in time for the city to start celebrating freedom on a working motorway.

Roughly 2,000 reels of colonial-era footage from Indonesia and Suriname sit in Eye Filmmuseum's vaults across the IJ. On 3 April, with the show running through 6 September, those reels became the prompt for Eye(s) Open, an exhibition curated by Hicham Khalidi of the Jan van Eyck Academie in which eleven artists — among them Jakarta's Riar Rizaldi, the Dutch-American duo Jongsma + O'Neill, and Jamaica's Esther Figueroa — produce ten new works that examine what the camera was for. Rizaldi's Tropenkolder gives the show its campaign image: five figures asleep on rail tracks in lush green, a tableau that refuses to be picturesque. The accompanying programme of films and talks runs through the summer.

At 18:00 on Monday 4 May the silent march leaves Museumplein, winding past the Dokwerker, the Names Monument and the Shadow Quay through the old Jewish quarter to the Dam. At 20:00 the city stops for two minutes; the King and Queen lay a wreath. The next afternoon at 14:00, the Bevrijdingsdans Festival on the same Museumplein opens the rest of the day to free music, with a Freedom Meal in the Rijksmuseum garden and DJs Rafi and Kasanoba closing the square at 21:00. The choreography is fixed; the audience changes each year. This year it does so against the backdrop of a city that has just spent a week reminding itself, on the canals and in Brussels, what it means to share space.

On 2 May, Postjesweg 1 served its last Michelin-starred dinner. Six days later, on 8 May, chef-eigenaar Dennis Huwaë reopens the same waterfront room as BRONS — tosti's, smashburgers, eggs benedict, fluffy pancakes, a dagschotel, and pâtisserie at prices meant to lower the threshold rather than guard it. The starred Daalder will return to its old Jordaan address at Lindengracht 90, leaving De Baarsjes with the more relaxed neighbourhood spot Huwaë says he has wanted for years.

Owner Jan van Eijk died in February at 82, and with him went the verbal promise that kept the shop on the corner of Hasebroekstraat and Nicolaas Beetsstraat going. On 28 April, neighbours, volunteers and friends launched a petition asking landlord Stadgenoot to let the boekhandel return at an acceptable social rent after this summer's foundation works — the agreement Van Eijk himself had been given, but which lapsed at his death. For now, the shop runs on volunteer hours.

De Inheemse Plantenwinkel opened its doors on Saturday 11 April inside MidWest, the cultural complex on Cabralstraat 1 that fills the old Andreasschool block. The shop sells only organically grown garden plants, sourced from small Dutch nurseries, with a heavy emphasis on inheemse — native — species that feed bees, butterflies and other insects the city is otherwise losing. Open Wednesday to Saturday, 12:00–17:00. The launch weekend included free lectures and tours of MidWest's two interior gardens, where frogs and salamanders quietly live.

The neighbourhood remembrance starts at 18:30 in Nieuw Vredenburgh, Postjesweg 123, with archival film of wartime stories from the buurt. Pianist Misaki Yamada plays; pupils from the Joop en Willy Westerweelschool — named for the resistance couple — read poetry. A silent procession leaves at 19:15 for the Columbusplein monument; the ceremony begins at 19:40. The next afternoon, a 14:00 walk from Buurtkamer Corantijn (Corantijnstraat 25) traces Stolpersteine and resistance sites across De Baarsjes, ending at OBA Mercatorplein for a freedom meal.

The 1910 brick monument at Admiraal de Ruijterweg 56, with the name Senefelder still cut into its corner roofline and a stone portrait of lithography's inventor Alois Senefelder set into its front, will be turned into 29 rental apartments — 63 to 94 m², asking €2,250 to €3,775 a month. The Aldi on the ground floor stays. Closed since plans were filed: Club 8, the snooker hall above. The municipality listed the building in 2013; the project preserves the façade while gutting the interior. Works begin late May.

On 30 April Bloomberg confirmed what had been whispered through Washington for a fortnight: the NSA is using Anthropic's withheld Mythos model to probe Microsoft software for vulnerabilities, while the White House publicly opposes the company's plan to extend access to roughly 70 outside organisations. Mythos was previewed on 7 April but never released — Anthropic deemed its talent for finding software flaws too dangerous to ship — and the access list (AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, JPMorgan, the Linux Foundation, Nvidia among them) is now itself contested terrain. Bloomberg also reported that an unauthorised group on a private forum had already obtained the model. The episode marks the first time a frontier lab's restraint, rather than a release, has produced a diplomatic incident.

On 27 April the two companies announced an amended agreement that runs to 2032 and quietly removes most of the terms that defined the partnership's first chapter. Microsoft's IP licence to OpenAI's models continues but is no longer exclusive; OpenAI may now serve any cloud, with Azure retaining first-look rights only on capabilities Microsoft chooses to support. Revenue share to Microsoft will continue through 2030 but is subject to a total cap. Most strikingly, the AGI clause — under which OpenAI's board could unilaterally declare it had achieved general intelligence and revoke Microsoft's access — has been retired. Microsoft remains a major shareholder. CNBC noted the same week that OpenAI's expanded AWS deal makes its Codex agents available inside Amazon Bedrock; the open relationship is now official.

Google DeepMind unveiled its AI co-clinician on 30 April — a multimodal Gemini-based system designed to take patient histories, watch gait and breathing on video, and reason through preliminary diagnoses under a physician's authority. In an evidence-synthesis evaluation against widely used physician tools, attending doctors recorded zero critical errors in 97 of 98 realistic primary-care queries; in randomised telemedical simulations the system performed comparably to or better than primary-care physicians on 68 of 140 assessed dimensions. The architecture is dual-agent: a 'Talker' speaks with patients while a 'Planner' silently audits whether the conversation stays within clinical bounds. DeepMind frames the model as 'triadic care' — patient, doctor, and supervised AI — rather than autonomous diagnosis.

On 27 April Ineffable Intelligence — founded by David Silver, the DeepMind reinforcement-learning lead behind AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar — emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed at a $5.1 billion valuation, the largest seed round Europe has ever recorded. Sequoia and Lightspeed co-led, with Nvidia, DST Global, Index, Google and the UK Sovereign AI Fund participating. The London-based lab is pursuing a 'superlearner' that acquires skills without human-generated training data, leaning on reinforcement learning from raw experience rather than internet scrape. Silver, also a UCL professor, said any personal proceeds would be donated to high-impact charities. The round arrived two weeks after Demis Hassabis was in Seoul courting Samsung and SK Group for memory supply.

On 28 April the second trilogue between Parliament, Council and Commission collapsed after roughly twelve hours, unable to agree on the Digital Omnibus that would have deferred the AI Act's high-risk obligations from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027. The sticking point was technical but consequential: how to reconcile AI Act conformity assessments with existing sectoral safety law for machinery and medical devices. A further trilogue is set for 13 May. If nothing passes by August, the original Act applies as written — and from 2 August the Commission also gains direct enforcement powers over general-purpose model providers, with fines reaching €35 million or 7% of global turnover for prohibited practices. Brussels has, for now, accidentally chosen the strictest path by failing to choose a softer one.

Drilling at Knockfarrill Hill in the Glen Torridon region of Gale crater, NASA's Curiosity rover ran the first off-Earth wet-chemistry experiment using tetramethylammonium hydroxide and turned up 21 organic molecules — among them benzothiophene, methyl benzoate, and, most provocatively, a nitrogen-bearing heterocycle structurally akin to the precursors of RNA and DNA. The work, published in Nature Communications on 21 April by Amy Williams (University of Florida) and Jennifer Eigenbrode (NASA Goddard), can't say whether the chemistry is biological, geological, or meteoritic. It does say the surface of Mars is capable of preserving complex organics for three and a half billion years, which reframes what Mars Sample Return, when it eventually flies, might bring home.

Sixteen years after Spitzer first detected C60 fullerenes in space, Jan Cami's team at Western University pointed JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument at the same target — planetary nebula Tc 1, roughly 10,000 light-years away in Ara — using nine MIRI filters from 5.6 to 25.5 microns. The buckyballs concentrate in a thin spherical shell hugging the dying central star; outside that shell sit wispy filaments and, near the heart of the nebula, an unexplained structure shaped like an upside-down question mark. "We had only scratched the surface," Cami said. The image is a reminder that the soccer-ball carbon molecule chemists synthesise in milligrams at room temperature is, in space, a thermodynamically natural product of stellar death.

From Concordia Station, 1,200 km inland on a 3.2-km-thick glacier, the ASTEP facility joined NASA's TESS to characterise TOI-201 — three very unequal bodies orbiting a star slightly larger than the Sun. Innermost is a six-Earth-mass super-Earth on a 5.8-day orbit; then TOI-201b, a half-Jupiter on a 53-day orbit; and outermost a 16-Jupiter-mass companion on a tilted, eccentric 7.9-year loop that is yanking the inner planets' transits visibly out of alignment. The orbits are evolving fast enough that, within about 200 years, the planets will stop crossing the star's face altogether. Lead author Ismael Mireles (University of New Mexico) and colleagues published in Science on 15 April; the elongated outer orbit means TOI-201b may eventually be directly imaged in the residual heat of its formation.

On 28 April the top four-fifths of the SLS core stage destined for Artemis III was offloaded from the Pegasus barge and walked into the Vehicle Assembly Building's transfer aisle, alongside the first shipment of solid-rocket-booster motor segments. Fully assembled, the core stands 212 feet tall and will hold more than 733,000 gallons of propellant for its four RS-25 engines; the twin boosters will provide over 75% of liftoff thrust. The arrival comes just weeks after the Orion capsule from Artemis II — which carried Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen around the Moon — returned to Kennedy's Multi-Payload Processing Facility for de-servicing. Hardware, in other words, is moving in both directions at once.

At 05:57 local time on 30 April, an Ariane 64 — the four-booster variant — left ELA-4 in Kourou carrying 32 satellites for Amazon's Leo constellation (formerly Project Kuiper), the seventh flight of the European heavy-lifter and the second of its most powerful version. Separation of the last spacecraft came 114 minutes after liftoff. With four P120C strap-ons, the rocket can place roughly 21.6 tonnes in low Earth orbit, more than double the 10.3 tonnes available to the two-booster A62. Mission VA268 is the second of 18 Ariane 6 launches Arianespace has been contracted to fly for Amazon's broadband network — Europe's most concrete answer yet to the question of how to compete with Falcon 9 cadence on commercial constellation deployment.

Revenue of $111.2 billion for the March quarter, up 17% year on year — well above the 13–16% Apple itself had guided. iPhone alone delivered $57 billion (up 21.7%), Services hit an all-time high of $31 billion, and gross margin widened to 49.3% from 47.1%. Greater China, written off by analysts barely a year ago, grew 28.1% to $20.5 billion. Tim Cook attributed the upside to 'extraordinary demand' for the iPhone 17 lineup and a 99% customer satisfaction reading he called 'unheard of'. The standout subtext: supply constraints have shifted from displays and modems to advanced-node chips for the Mac line — a quiet acknowledgement that even Apple is being squeezed by the same TSMC capacity Nvidia has pre-booked for Rubin.

Microsoft's fiscal Q3 came in at $82.89 billion in revenue and $4.27 EPS, both ahead of consensus, with Azure and other cloud services up 40%. The number that mattered to the room, though, was forward capex: roughly $190 billion guided for calendar 2026, a 61% jump on 2025 and inflated by an estimated $25 billion of higher component pricing. Meta, reporting the same day, raised its own 2026 capex range to $125–145 billion from $115–135 billion; only Alphabet — whose stock closed out its best month since 2004 — convinced the market the spending is being matched by revenue. Read together, the four hyperscalers have effectively turned their P&Ls inside out: AI infrastructure is no longer a line item, it is the company.

On 28 April the European Commission delivered the long-awaited first review of the Digital Markets Act (COM(2026) 178 final), concluding that the regulation is 'fit for purpose' and does not need amending — a deliberate refusal to expand its scope to generative AI for now. The Commission will instead lean on existing categories: 'virtual assistants' may yet be designated, and the November 2025 market investigations into Microsoft Azure and AWS as cloud gatekeepers continue, with designations due by November 2026 and the broader cloud probe landing in May 2027. For Apple, Meta, Google and the rest of the named gatekeepers it is a reprieve in form only: the Commission spent more pages discussing enforcement intensity than expansion, and stakeholder feedback was openly canvassed for areas where the existing obligations bite harder.

The April Pixel feature drop, rolled out from 5 April across devices on Android 16, is unusually small after March's headline-grabbing Magic Cue and Circle to Search update — and that is the point. It patches a crash in the games sandbox specific to the Pixel 10 family, repairs Quick Share file transfers on the Pixel 9 Pro, restores a Backup option that had silently vanished from Settings, and resolves third-party banking app crashes. The interesting tell is operational: with Pixel 10 having shipped late last year on Tensor G5, Google is now in the unglamorous phase of stabilising a flagship while preparing for I/O later in May, where the next stack of Gemini-on-device features will get most of the oxygen.

The Jorgensen group's three-year follow-up of NOTION-2, published in Circulation, tracked 370 low-risk patients aged 60 to 75 (mean STS score 1.2%) randomised one-to-one between TAVR and surgical replacement. Across the whole cohort the primary composite endpoint of death, stroke or valve-related hospitalisation hit 16.1% with TAVR versus 12.6% with surgery — a difference that did not reach significance. But split by valve morphology, the bicuspid subgroup told a sharper story: 20.4% of TAVR patients met the endpoint against 7.8% of surgical patients, with an absolute stroke-risk gap of roughly 3.8% that persisted through year three. Structural deterioration (4.5% vs 5.2%) and bioprosthetic failure (1.6% vs 2.9%) were comparable, leaving the question for a 65-year-old with a bicuspid valve uncomfortably open.

A monocentric phase II trial of the MEK inhibitor trametinib in ten adults with severe extracranial AVMs — eight facial, one auricular, one in the foot — reported 80% clinical improvement after twelve months of oral therapy. Every symptomatic patient saw pain alleviation, deformation improved in 55%, ulceration healed in 20%, and imaging showed nidus disappearance in two cases. The signal is biologically coherent: most sporadic extracranial AVMs harbour somatic MAP2K1 or KRAS mutations that drive endothelial proliferation through the RAS/MAPK pathway. Toxicity remained the brake — acneiform rash in 100% of patients (two grade 3 cases forced discontinuation) and severe mucosal bleeding ended treatment in two patients with mucosal lesions. Together with parallel mouse data showing trametinib reduced intracerebral haemorrhage in KRAS-G12V-induced brain AVMs (Stroke, 2025), the case for pathway-directed therapy in vascular malformations grows steadily firmer.

Pooled two-year data from the BE MOBILE 1 and BE MOBILE 2 phase 3 programmes (extended into the BE MOVING open-label arm) landed in print this past week, and the dual IL-17A/F inhibitor held its line. Roughly six in ten patients with non-radiographic and radiographic axial spondyloarthritis reached ASDAS low disease activity (<2.1) at week 104, and three in ten hit inactive disease (<1.3). More striking for ankylosing spondylitis specifically: 162 of 190 r-axSpA patients (85.3%) showed no spinal radiographic progression by mSASSS change from baseline, and 92.1% remained below a two-point progression threshold — including 83.1% of those who already carried structural damage at enrolment. Sustained gains in spinal pain, morning stiffness and fatigue tracked alongside, with no new safety signals beyond the expected oral candidiasis bump from IL-17F blockade.

On 30 April the FDA approved Axsome's Auvelity (dextromethorphan-bupropion ER) for agitation associated with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease — the first non-antipsychotic to clear that indication, and the first new mechanism for a symptom that touches roughly half of all moderate-to-severe Alzheimer's patients. Decades of off-label antipsychotic use in this group have come with a black-box mortality warning and well-documented stroke and metabolic risks. The AXS-05 phase 3 ADVANCE-2 programme, which underpinned the breakthrough designation, paired NMDA antagonism with sigma-1 modulation and a CYP2D6 inhibitor to keep dextromethorphan in circulation. Cochrane's April systematic review of the amyloid-clearing antibody class — 17 trials, 20,342 participants — landed in the same week with a more sober verdict, calling clinical effects at 18 months 'trivial', a reminder that symptomatic management still matters while disease-modifying therapy finds its footing.

A national-sample analysis covering 2016 through 2022 — circulating again this week as neurointerventionalists prepare guideline updates — quantifies what many vascular neurosurgeons have suspected since ARUBA: endovascular treatment for unruptured cerebral AVMs has fallen 34.7% (from 1,195 to 780 cases per year), while the share of cAVM admissions presenting already ruptured rose from 13.3% to 34.4% (P<0.001) and in-hospital mortality climbed from 2.0% to 7.6% (P<0.001). The original ARUBA trial (223 patients, 39 sites, 9 countries) found medical management superior to intervention at five years, but its short follow-up and inclusion of low-Spetzler-Martin lesions left the field divided. The new figures suggest the pendulum may have swung too far toward observation — particularly for younger patients with surgically accessible lesions whose lifetime haemorrhage risk compounds annually.

On 28 April, FSB officers visited Ratmir Mavliev's office in Ufa; two days later a court in the Bashkir capital sent him to pre-trial detention until 11 July. Investigators allege the mayor took a 13-million-rouble plot at the 'Raduga' sanatorium, organised a 31-million-rouble fund of 'voluntary donations' from city contractors that paid for a Lexus, and accepted a further 10-million-rouble bribe from a developer in exchange for a construction sign-off. Mavliev denies the charges; his lawyer told local reporters the case is retaliation by 'unscrupulous developers'. Two officials and the sanatorium's director have been detained alongside him. Acting mayor Sergei Kozhevnikov has taken over City Hall — the second senior Bashkir figure in custody this spring, after culture minister Amina Shafikova, whose own arrest was extended in mid-April.

On the morning of 1 May, the dual-system ES105 'Finist' — Russia's first domestically built electric train able to switch between direct and alternating current — left Ufa station bound for Aigir and the steelworks town of Beloretsk. The five-car set runs daily: 07:08 from Ufa, 12:06 into Beloretsk, returning by 22:19. The novelty is technical and quietly emotional: Aigir is the trailhead for the Inzer ridges, the Bashkir Urals' most-walked weekend country, and the new schedule shaves 35 minutes off a route that has long doubled as a hikers' bus. Tickets through to Beloretsk are pegged at 959.40 roubles; the regional carrier BPPK plans two more Finists by year-end.

At noon on 1 May, in Pervomaisky park on the Belaya river, the head of Bashkortostan Radiy Khabirov launched a festival of national cultures pegged to two parallel themes — Russia's federal Year of National Unity and a republican Year of the Big and Friendly Family that he declared the same morning. Stylised podvorye stalls put Bashkir, Tatar, Russian, Mari and Chuvash crafts side by side; folk ensembles played; Khabirov earlier laid flowers at the 'Ufa — City of Labour Valour' stele, a designation conferred during the war years for the city's wartime engine plants. The choreography is familiar — a regional governor framing demography and ethnic harmony as a single national project — but in a republic where over 100 nationalities live, the emphasis on 'family' lands as a soft answer to Khabirov's own warnings, made at a 28 April government meeting, that Bashkortostan's birth rate now requires 'urgent solutions'.

By 30 April, the Black Sea oil port of Tuapse had been struck by Ukrainian long-range drones four times in two weeks — 16, 20 and 28 April, plus a fresh wave on 1 May — and the question in southern Russia had shifted from military to ecological. CNN, citing local residents and verified satellite imagery, reported black rain coating cars and streets and an oil slick stretching at least 50 km from the coast into the sea; Russian environmental monitors logged benzene, xylene and soot at three times safe levels. The Tuapse refinery is one of Rosneft's largest export-oriented plants. April's cumulative damage forced Russian crude output down by an estimated 300,000–400,000 barrels a day from the first quarter — the sharpest single-month fall in roughly six years — and pulled the Druzhba pipeline's deliveries to Hungary and Slovakia offline.

On the eve of 1 May, the Kremlin floated a unilateral ceasefire to bracket Russia's 9 May Victory Day parade — a proposal Vladimir Putin first raised in a phone call with Donald Trump in late April, and which spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said remained for the president to fix in detail. Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking in Kyiv on 1 May, said he was 'seeking the details' and reminded reporters that Ukraine's standing offer is a 30-day pause, not 72 hours. The Russian president has separately said he agrees 'in principle' with the U.S. 30-day proposal but wants assurances Ukraine would not use the lull to rearm. The April fighting offered its own commentary: by Russia Matters' tally, Russian forces lost a net seven square miles of held territory in the week to 28 April, while air defences claimed 186 Ukrainian drones overnight on the same date.

Between Friday night and Saturday morning on 25 April, Russia launched 47 missiles and 619 drones at Ukraine — the densest single salvo of 2026 so far. Eight of the ten dead were in Dnipro, where a four-storey residential block was partially destroyed and several enterprises burned. Strikes also reached Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Odesa and Kyiv oblasts. Ukrainian air defences brought down 580 drones and 30 missiles; 13 missiles and 36 drones got through. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia's tactics 'remain unchanged — attack drones, cruise missiles, and a significant number of ballistic missiles' aimed at civilian infrastructure, and renewed his call on allies to reinforce Ukraine's air-defence umbrella.

Ukraine's drone forces struck the Rosneft-owned Tuapse refinery on Russia's Black Sea coast for the fourth time in a month on 1 May, igniting storage tanks and sending up what the Kyiv Independent described as 'a column of black smoke'. In a separate operation Ukrainian unmanned units damaged four Russian fighter jets at an airfield roughly 1,700 km from the front line. Speaking on Telegram the same day, Zelensky put the cumulative cost to Russia's oil sector since January at $7 billion, calling April a 'new level' for range, intensity and impact. Russian air defences were busy in the other direction too: Ukraine intercepted 388 of 409 incoming drones overnight, while a daytime drone attack on Ternopil injured at least twelve civilians.

From June, an infantryman's monthly pay will sit between Hr 250,000 and Hr 400,000 (about $5,600–$9,000), with rear-echelon roles guaranteed at least Hr 30,000 (~$750). Zelensky framed the package, announced on 1 May, as the largest restructuring of military service terms since full-scale invasion — recruitment rules and contract lengths are being rewritten alongside the pay rise. The president was less generous about Vladimir Putin's offer, relayed via aide Yuri Ushakov after a call with Donald Trump, of a ceasefire around Russia's 9 May Victory Day: Zelensky called it 'manipulative', warning Moscow may try to exchange a brief pause for partial sanctions relief, including renewed SWIFT access for Russian banks.

On 25 April Zelensky landed in Azerbaijan for his first visit since February 2022, meeting Ilham Aliyev in Gabala and signing six bilateral documents weighted heavily toward defence-industrial co-production. Ukrainian drone specialists are already working on the ground in Azerbaijan, and the two leaders set a target of pushing bilateral trade above $500 million; Zelensky also told Aliyev Ukraine would accept trilateral talks with Russia hosted in Baku if Moscow agreed. The diplomatic week closes in Yerevan, where Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has confirmed the Ukrainian president's attendance at the European Political Community summit on 4 May — the gathering of roughly fifty European leaders, EU and non-EU, that was created in 2022 in direct response to the invasion.

Ukraine's Eurovision entry for 2026 is Viktoria Kornikova — stage name Leléka, the Ukrainian word for 'stork' — a 35-year-old singer with an ethno-jazz background who divides her time between Berlin and Kyiv. Her song 'Ridnym' ('to the loved ones'), written with Adama Cefalu, Jakob Hegner and Yaroslav Dzhus, won February's Vidbir national selection with maximum points from both jury and public vote. Director Illya Dutsyk, whose creative team was confirmed on 1 May, says the staging at the Wiener Stadthalle will trace 'a journey from fragmentation and disconnection toward unity'. Leléka performs twelfth in the second semi-final on 14 May; the grand final follows on 16 May. For a country whose last Eurovision win, Kalush Orchestra's 'Stefania' in 2022, came weeks into the full-scale invasion, the contest remains a soft-power stage that Kyiv takes seriously.

The Federal Open Market Committee left the federal funds target range unchanged at 3.50–3.75% on April 29, the third consecutive hold, with Governor Stephen Miran dissenting in favour of a 25-basis-point cut and Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan dissenting against the easing-bias language. It was the first four-way dissent on a FOMC vote since October 1992. Chair Jerome Powell, presiding over what is likely his penultimate meeting, framed the decision against "a high level of uncertainty" stemming from the Middle East war and inflation that the statement called "elevated, in part reflecting the recent increase in global energy prices." The 10-year Treasury closed the week at 4.40%.

The S&P 500 finished Friday May 1 at an all-time high of 7,230.12, up 0.29% on the day after a 1.02% surge to 7,209.01 the prior session. The index gained 10.4% in April — its best month since November 2020 — as cooler oil prices, blockbuster cloud results from Alphabet (Google Cloud +63% year-on-year to $20.02 billion) and a 6% after-hours pop in Apple shares overrode anxiety over the Iran standoff. The Wednesday session, by contrast, slipped 0.04% to 7,135.95 as Brent flirted with $126.

Christine Lagarde and the Governing Council kept the deposit facility rate at 2.00%, the main refinancing rate at 2.15% and the marginal lending facility at 2.40% on April 30, after Eurostat's flash print showed headline inflation jumping to 3.0% in April on energy. The bank's communiqué warned that "upside risks to inflation and downside risks to growth have intensified" — a near-textbook stagflation framing. Markets are now pricing roughly even odds of a 25-basis-point hike at the June 11 meeting, the first move higher since the 2022–2023 cycle.

Governor Kazuo Ueda's policy board held the short-term rate at 0.75% on April 28, but three members voted to hike — the largest dissenting bloc since the bank exited negative rates in 2024. The BOJ trimmed its FY2026 growth forecast to 0.5% (from 1.0%) and lifted its core CPI forecast to 2.8% (from 1.9%), citing imported energy. The dollar fell roughly 0.5% to ¥158.95 within minutes; OIS markets now imply a 74% probability of a hike at the June 16 meeting, which would take the policy rate to 1.00% for the first time since 1995.

Within an 80-second window on April 29, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon all reported. Microsoft beat with adjusted EPS of $4.27 (consensus $4.06); Alphabet posted $109.9bn in revenue, roughly $3bn ahead of estimates; Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy guided to roughly $200bn in 2026 capex, sending trailing free cash flow down 95% year-on-year to $1.2bn; Meta lifted its 2026 capex guide to $125–145bn but warned Q2 revenue growth would be flat — the stock fell more than 5% after hours. Combined 2026 AI capex across the five US hyperscalers is on track to exceed $650 billion, a figure larger than the GDP of Sweden.

On 27 April the Sudan Doctors Network published the first detailed accounting of who the Rapid Support Forces have been holding since they overran the Darfuri capital last October: 2,397 people across Shalla Prison, a former children's hospital and a row of cargo containers, among them 20 doctors, 426 children and 370 women. The network describes cholera spreading since February, field executions during interrogation and what it calls ethnically motivated killings of Masalit and other non-Arab detainees. The figures put concrete numbers on what UN investigators in February already characterised as a genocidal campaign, and arrive as RSF forces tighten a parallel siege around El-Obeid in North Kordofan.

On 30 April, Myanmar state television announced that Aung San Suu Kyi, eighty and in declining health, had been transferred from the Naypyidaw prison compound where she has been held since the 2021 coup to an undisclosed residence to serve out the remaining 18 years and 9 months of her sentence. The order came from Min Aung Hlaing, the general who deposed her and was sworn in as president after January's military-managed election. Her son Kim Aris was unequivocal on Facebook: 'Moving her is not freeing her.' Richard Horsey of the International Crisis Group reads the gesture as a calculated offering to ASEAN and Beijing, both of whom the junta needs to launder the post-vote government's legitimacy.

On 29 April President Trump rejected the proposal his envoys had been weighing for forty-eight hours: Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic, the U.S. Navy would lift its blockade of Iranian ports, and nuclear talks would be deferred. 'The blockade is somewhat more effective than the bombing,' Trump told Axios. 'They are choking like a stuffed pig.' Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned of unspecified 'practical' countermeasures within hours; Brent crude added another two dollars by Wednesday's close. The standoff is in its sixty-first day, and the Strait — through which roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil normally passes — remains effectively closed in both directions.

More than fifty countries gathered in Santa Marta on 28 and 29 April for the first International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, co-hosted by Colombian president Gustavo Petro and the Netherlands. France used the opening day to publish a national roadmap for phasing down oil and gas production; an eighteen-country bloc — including Colombia, Vanuatu, Tuvalu and Ireland — formally called for negotiations on a binding Fossil Fuel Treaty, an importers-exporters club and a global just-transition fund. The U.S., the world's largest oil and gas producer, did not attend. Held outside the UN's COP architecture and against the backdrop of the Hormuz crisis driving petrol prices to multi-year highs, the meeting marks the first time governments have negotiated supply-side phase-out as a discrete diplomatic file.

A crowd had gathered outside Lincoln Park Zoo's rhino enclosure at nine in the morning on Wednesday, 29 April. They were still there at 1:45 p.m. when Hazina, a six-week-old eastern black rhinoceros, finally stepped into the yard behind her mother Kapuki, lured out by a scattering of greens. Her name means "treasure" in Swahili — fitting for the first female calf Kapuki has produced after two males, and for a species with only 57 surviving individuals in North America. Curator Cassy Kutilek says she has begun tasting different foods, though she will continue nursing until age three.

On the evening of Monday, 28 April, a pōwhiri was held in the Beehive to welcome a kiwi into Parliament's grand banquet hall — believed to be the first time a wild specimen of the country's national bird has entered the building. The visit marked the completion of the Capital Kiwi Project's permit to translocate 250 birds back to the Wellington hills, the first to live there in over a century. Of those releases, 90 per cent of chicks have survived, triple the project's 30 per cent target. Founder Paul Ward, surrounded by lawmakers and schoolchildren, called it "beyond our wildest expectations." The bird itself was, as kiwi tend to be, unimpressed.

At around seven in the morning on Thursday, 30 April, an eleven-year-old Bactrian camel named Suria gave birth in the Eurasia Wilds pavilion of the Toronto Zoo. Within two hours her calf — already wearing the white-blonde coat of his ten-year-old father, Zip — was up on his long legs. He is the third calf for the pair, and a small addition to a wild population of fewer than 950. For now, he and Suria share the habitat with a female named Jozy; keepers warn visitors not to expect daily appearances, as the first month is for bonding rather than spectating.

Among the 59,830 runners who crossed the finish line on The Mall on Sunday, 26 April — making this the largest marathon ever recorded by Guinness — was 35-year-old Mark Goulder, tethered to a guide and wearing a blindfold for all 26.2 miles. He set a new world record for the fastest blindfolded tethered marathon, run in honour of his younger brother Bobby, diagnosed with Stargardt's disease, a degenerative eye condition. Beside him in the field of more than 1,900 disabled participants — the most inclusive London Marathon to date — Chelsea Grogan ran a sub-three-hour marathon (2:59:32) to set the women's record for runners with multiple sclerosis. The day raised over £95 million for charity.

A new $43-million Nature Library opened this week in Adams County, just north of Denver — 33,000 square feet devoted not to books but to gear. Visitors can borrow "TryIt Kits" containing fishing poles, tents and backpacks at no cost, drop in for weekly programming with bees and goats, or simply talk to a park ranger on duty. The premise is unfussy: the outdoors is already there; what people often lack is the equipment to step into it. Removing that one obstacle, the library's planners reckon, removes most of them.