A weekly briefingfor Pavel.
Ten beats, read for you, written by a friend with the patience of an editor and the eye of a foreign correspondent.
From the editor
Pavel, the week reads like a series of long-deferred moments arriving on the same calendar page. A black hole at J1007+3540 wakes from a hundred-million-year silence; Intel posts its biggest day since 1987; Falcon Heavy returns after eighteen months; Tim Cook hands a fifteen-year tenure to John Ternus; Bulgaria gives a single party its first parliamentary majority since 1997.
Underneath, the slower work. Curiosity drills a clay-rich rock at Gale crater and recovers the building blocks of life. Cochrane issues a quietly devastating verdict on five years of anti-amyloid antibodies. Forty years after Reactor 4 blew, Zelensky walks Chornobyl with Sandu and Grossi. An unusual share of the week's weight is the weight of waiting having ended.
Section · 01Amsterdam A weekend of explosions in Slotervaart hardens the city's tone, while Halsema readies a record handhaving operation for Koningsdag and the first keys turn at Strandeiland.
“Het is hier hartstikke druk”It's terribly crowded here — what locals mutter as Koningsdag arrivals swell the centre.
- 01Amsterdam
Halsema shutters a Slotervaart youth centre after two explosions in four days
Photo: AT5 The corner of the Johan Jongkindstraat and Jan Tooropstraat now wears a blackened facade and a plywood window. After a first blast on 19 April left a brief fire, the gemeente bolted surveillance cameras onto the building; on 23 April a second device went off anyway. On 24 April mayor Femke Halsema ordered the centre closed for six months. "A closure provides peace for the area and residents and gives police time to investigate what is happening," she said. The pattern — repeated bombings of low-threshold youth spaces in Nieuw-West — is what Halsema has been calling Amsterdam's most stubborn security file. Watch whether the police trace a commissioning network rather than the teenage couriers usually picked up at the scene.
AT5 - 02Amsterdam
A record 250 handhavers, twelve heads to a boat: the city tightens Koningsdag
Twelve passengers plus a skipper. That is the new ceiling on the canals on 27 April, alongside 250 enforcement officers — Amsterdam's largest Koningsdag deployment to date — backed by extra police and faster crackdowns on illegal alcohol sellers and pop-up street parties. Halsema framed it bluntly on AT5: "If there is constant drinking and drug use, really high-risk situations can develop. Then it's no longer a party, just misbehaviour." Around 200,000 visitors are expected by train alone, with Museumplein, Vondelpark and the Jordaan as the pinch points. The test is operational: whether the gemeente can close streets early when capacity tips, without the chaos of last year's late evacuations.
AT5 - 03Amsterdam
First keys turn on Strandeiland: 349 residents, 8 buildings, 15-year shelf life
The Makerskade on the new IJburg island handed over keys to its first 349 residents this month — flex housing assembled from factory-built modules across eight buildings in the Makersquartier. Roughly 105 units go to young Amsterdammers and another 105 to status holders, with the rest spread across other priority groups. The buildings are designed to stand for fifteen years before being lifted and relocated. Built by de Alliantie, Stadgenoot and Ymere, this is the first inhabited corner of what the gemeente plans as a 20,000-resident district. Worth tracking: how the buurthub mobility model — almost no private cars, shared electric fleets at the kade — survives contact with actual commuting Amsterdammers.
Gemeente Amsterdam - 04Amsterdam
Eye Filmmuseum maps a leaner 2026 after a 3.2 million euro hole
Cash reserves at Eye fell from 2 million euros to 400,000 last autumn, with a 3.2 million euro loss for 2025 leaving the national filmmuseum on the IJ technically bankrupt. The board's response, defended in writing this week against Het Parool's reporting, is now in motion: roughly 30 fte gone, the museum closed on Mondays outside school holidays, screenings cut by about 15 percent, and only two temporary exhibitions per year instead of three. Catering has been handed to Vermaat. Director Bregtje van der Haak and chair Marc van Warmerdam have stepped down. Eye projects a near-neutral 2026; the question is whether a slimmer programme keeps the building's pull on a tourist-saturated north bank.
Eye Filmmuseum - 05Amsterdam
Lintjesregen at the Concertgebouw: 38 honours, from Dolly Bellefleur to a music-education champion
On Friday 24 April Halsema pinned royal decorations on 32 Amsterdammers and 6 Weespers at the Concertgebouw. Among them: Ruud Douma, better known as drag persona Dolly Bellefleur, recognised for more than three decades of satire and advocacy in the rainbow community; and Jantien Westerveld, who ran Méér Muziek in de Klas from 2015 to 2025 and pushed structural music lessons into Dutch primary schools. The Lintjesregen is largely ceremonial, but it is also one of the few moments each year when the city's quiet civic infrastructure — caregivers, volunteers, neighbourhood organisers — is read aloud by name in a single room.
Gemeente Amsterdam
⁂Section · 02Amsterdam West & De Baarsjes Trees finally arrive on the Witte de Withplein after a six-year campaign, a 350-tonne bridge deck sails through the Kostverlorenvaart by night, and a daylight shooting on the Admiraal de Ruijterweg.
“Hoe gaat het in de buurt?”How are things in the neighbourhood? — the warm, slightly nosy greeting between people who actually know each other on the street.
- 01Amsterdam West & De Baarsjes
Trees on the Witte de Withplein, after six years of asking
Photo: De Westkrant On the 9,500-stone Witte de Withplein, the first plant pits have been dug: six Judas trees and seven Chinese hackberries, plus five magnolia beds along the facades. Residents had been requesting greenery since 2020; an agreement with artist Hans van Houwelingen, whose work Wending 666/999 sits on the square, kept the design frozen until 2028. On summer days the felt temperature on the bricks climbed past forty degrees. Work should be finished by the end of April — an unusually quick tail to a famously slow file.
De Westkrant - 02Amsterdam West & De Baarsjes
350 tonnes of steel sails through the Kostverlorenvaart by night
Photo: De Westkrant On the evening of Tuesday 28 April, around 22:00, a pontoon will leave the Oude Houthaven carrying a bridge deck of 26 by 21 metres, built in Sumar, Friesland. Destination: the Kop van Jut by the Jan van Galenstraat, and ultimately the widening of the Schinkelbrug in the A10 Zuid. The Overtoomse Sluis has been closed to traffic since Friday; the convoy passes roughly ten city bridges via the Staande Mastroute through the Westerkanaal and the Kostverlorenvaart. From the kade it is simply visible to anyone awake; Zuidasdok is running a livecam.
De Westkrant - 03Amsterdam West & De Baarsjes
Daylight shooting on the Admiraal de Ruijterweg, gunman fled toward the A10
On Friday 24 April around 15:00 a 23-year-old Amsterdammer was shot on the Admiraal de Ruijterweg, near the junction with the Haarlemmerweg. Bystanders drove him to hospital themselves before police arrived; the gunman fled toward the A10. The recherche is asking for witnesses and camera footage from the area. It is the latest firearm incident on a busy West axis, and the case remains open.
De Westkrant - 04Amsterdam West & De Baarsjes
Koningsdag in West: vrijmarkten at six, salsa at the Erasmuspark by noon
Photo: De Westkrant On 27 April the children's vrijmarkten in West open at 06:00 on Bellamyplein, in Bilderdijkpark, Erasmuspark and Westerpark; selling continues until 20:00 and only children up to sixteen get a reserved spot. At Terrasmus, in Erasmuspark, Setonic plays from 12:00, Chicas del Barrio bring salsa at 13:30, and a salsa-bachata-reggaeton mix runs from 16:00. Bring a blanket; the terras handles the rest, writes De Westkrant.
De Westkrant - 05Amsterdam West & De Baarsjes
A gilded frame around seventeen years of vacancy in the Kinkerbuurt
On the corner of the J.P. Heijestraat and the Borgerstraat, artist Adriaan von der Assche unveiled on 24 April a cut-out in the construction fence framed in gold leaf, opening straight onto the bare lot behind it. The work is called Blik op incompetentie and is dedicated to the neighbourhood; nothing has stood here since 2009, while a developer presses for hotel apartments and the buurt asks for affordable housing. Just outside De Baarsjes proper — but the pattern, of legal limbo leaving a hole, is a familiar one across West.
De Westkrant
⁂Section · 03Artificial Intelligence A six-week sprint between OpenAI, DeepSeek and Google reset the frontier, while Anthropic spent its energy locking down power, chips and bodies.
- 01Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 just six weeks after its last model
GPT-5.5, codenamed Spud, landed on Thursday 23 April for Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers, with API access held back a day for additional safeguards. OpenAI says claims from the model are 23% more likely to be factually correct than GPT-5.4, and the model topped Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index at 60, breaking a ceiling that had held since Gemini 3.1 Pro in February. The cadence is the story: chief scientist Jakub Pachocki told reporters the past two years felt "surprisingly slow", and president Greg Brockman framed the release as a step toward "more agentic and intuitive computing". Watch for the promised "super app" bundling ChatGPT, Codex and an AI browser into one enterprise surface.
TechCrunch - 02Artificial Intelligence
DeepSeek V4 lands at one-sixth the price of the frontier
On 24 April, DeepSeek released V4-Pro (1.6 trillion total / 49 billion active parameters) and V4-Flash (284B / 13B), both with a one-million-token context window now standard across its services. V4-Pro charges $1.74 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output, against roughly $25 to $30 at Anthropic and OpenAI for comparable output. The weights are on Hugging Face under an open licence, the API is wire-compatible with OpenAI and Anthropic's, and the architecture leans on a hybrid of Compressed Sparse Attention and Heavily Compressed Attention to make the long context affordable. The economic pressure on closed-model providers is the point; the open-weights frontier is now within shouting distance.
DeepSeek API Docs - 03Artificial Intelligence
Amazon adds $25 billion to Anthropic and pledges 5 GW of compute
On Monday 20 April, Anthropic and AWS expanded their pact to up to five gigawatts of new compute, with $5bn going in immediately and another $20bn tied to commercial milestones — on top of the $8bn Amazon has already committed. In return, Anthropic agreed to spend more than $100bn on AWS over the next decade, almost entirely on current and future Trainium chips, and will bring nearly 1 GW of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity online before year-end. The company candidly acknowledged a "sharp rise" in consumer use and "inevitable strain" on reliability — context for why Claude Opus 4.5 has felt patchy. Days later, reports surfaced of a separate $40bn Google investment, leaving Anthropic uniquely dependent on two competing hyperscalers at once.
Anthropic - 04Artificial Intelligence
Google's Deep Research Max turns Gemini 3.1 Pro into a research agent
Google launched Deep Research and Deep Research Max in public preview on 21 April, both built on Gemini 3.1 Pro and accessible via the Gemini API. The interesting bit is plumbing: the agents speak Model Context Protocol, accept PDFs, CSVs, audio and video as grounding, and stream charts and infographics inline as HTML or via Nano Banana. Google has signed FactSet, S&P Global and PitchBook for MCP servers covering financial data — a deliberate move to outflank ChatGPT's deep research feature in the corner of the market that pays best. Lukas Haas, the product manager at DeepMind, called it "unprecedented analytical quality to long-horizon research workflows". Pair this with DeepMind's Aletheia, a Deep Think agent that solved six of ten unpublished research-grade maths problems in the FirstProof challenge and refused to hallucinate the rest.
Google Blog - 05Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic and NEC plan Japan's largest AI engineering corps
Announced 24 April, the Anthropic-NEC partnership aims to assemble what both companies call Japan's largest AI engineering workforce, training NEC engineers on Claude tooling and embedding agents into NEC's enterprise customers. The deal pairs with the Claude Managed Agents launch earlier this month — eight cents per agent runtime hour on top of model usage, already running at Notion, Rakuten and Asana — and signals where the commercial centre of gravity is shifting: away from chat, toward agent fleets billed by the hour. Japan is a deliberate choice. NEC has the integrator relationships with banks, insurers and ministries that Anthropic, an English-language Silicon Valley shop, simply does not.
Anthropic
⁂Section · 04Space Travel & Astronomy Curiosity dissolves a Martian rock and finds DNA-adjacent chemistry, JWST sees water-ice clouds on a super-Jupiter, and a black hole wakes after 100 million years.
- 01Space Travel & Astronomy
Curiosity tastes Mars and finds the building blocks of life
On 21 April, a team led by Amy Williams at the University of Florida published in Nature Communications the most diverse haul of organic molecules yet recovered on Mars. Curiosity drilled a clay-rich rock nicknamed Mary Anning, in the Glen Torridon region of Gale crater, dropped the powder into a chemical solvent, and let the rover's onboard SAM instrument sort the soup. Twenty-plus compounds came back, including benzothiophene and, for the first time at Mars, a nitrogen-bearing molecule structurally close to the precursors of DNA. The chemistry has, the team argues, sat preserved in those clays for 3.5 billion years. It is the first "wet chemistry" experiment ever run on another planet, and the rover still has eight more cups of solvent to spend.
Phys.org - 02Space Travel & Astronomy
JWST finds water-ice clouds on a super-Jupiter twelve light-years away
Epsilon Indi Ab, a 7.6-Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a star just 12 light-years from Earth, has clouds of water ice. That is the conclusion of a paper led by Elisabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, published 22 April in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Using Webb's MIRI instrument to image the planet directly, the team measured a temperature between roughly 200 and 300 kelvin and far less ammonia than atmospheric models predicted; the missing ammonia, they think, is hiding beneath thick, patchy ice cloud decks. It is the first detection of water-ice clouds on a planet outside the solar system, and a rehearsal for the harder problem of reading the atmospheres of Earth-sized worlds.
- 03Space Travel & Astronomy
A supermassive black hole wakes up after 100 million years
In a paper out this month in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Shobha Kumari of Midnapore City College and colleagues report that the black hole at the centre of the galaxy J1007+3540 has restarted its jets after roughly 100 million years of silence. Combining data from the European LOFAR array and India's upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, they trace fresh outflows being crumpled by the surrounding cluster gas and a faint, million-light-year tail of older plasma drifting southwest, the relic of a previous eruption. It is one of the cleanest examples yet of an episodic active galactic nucleus, and a useful reminder that the giant black holes at the centres of galaxies are not steady engines but creatures that doze and wake.
- 04Space Travel & Astronomy
NASA rolls the Artemis III core stage out of Michoud
Photo: NASA On 20 April, NASA workers wheeled the top four-fifths of the Space Launch System core stage that will fly Artemis III out of the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and onto the Pegasus barge bound for Kennedy. The piece, comprising the liquid hydrogen and oxygen tanks, the intertank and the forward skirt, will be mated in Florida to four RS-25 engines and to the boosters now being stacked for the first crewed lunar landing of the programme, currently targeted for 2027. The rollout came just nine days after Artemis II's crew capsule, Integrity, splashed down off San Diego on 11 April, ending the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since 1972.
- 05Space Travel & Astronomy
Falcon Heavy returns from an 18-month pause
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy lifted off from Kennedy's pad 39A at 10:21 EDT on 27 April carrying ViaSat-3 F3, a 6.6-tonne broadband satellite for the Asia-Pacific region. It was the rocket's first flight since hurling NASA's Europa Clipper toward Jupiter in October 2024, and its twelfth overall. The two side boosters were due back at Cape Canaveral roughly eight minutes after launch; the centre core was expended into the Atlantic to give the satellite the energetic toss it needed for a five-hour climb to geostationary transfer orbit. With Vulcan and New Glenn now in the same heavy-lift weight class, Falcon Heavy is no longer the only adult in the room, but at 5.1 million pounds of thrust it remains the second-most powerful rocket flying.
⁂Section · 05Technology Apple lines up its first CEO change in fifteen years, TSMC tells ASML its newest machines are too expensive, and Intel quietly stages its loudest quarter since the 1980s.
- 01Technology
Cook hands the keys to a hardware engineer
Photo: 9to5Mac On 20 April Apple confirmed what Cupertino-watchers had been whispering for months: Tim Cook, 65, will step aside on 31 August after fifteen years as chief executive. His successor, taking the chair on 1 September, is John Ternus, the 51-year-old senior vice president of hardware engineering who joined Apple in 2001 from a small VR outfit called Virtual Research Systems. Ternus has shipped almost every iPad, AirPod and recent iPhone of consequence; he is, in other words, an operator from the product side rather than the supply-chain or services side. Cook will stay on as executive chairman, with Arthur Levinson moving to lead independent director. "It has been the greatest privilege of my life," Cook said in the announcement. The choice signals that Apple's next chapter, foldable iPhone and smart-home hub included, will be steered by someone whose instincts are forged in titanium and silicon rather than spreadsheets.
TechCrunch - 02Technology
TSMC tells ASML thanks, but no thanks
At its North America Technology Symposium in Santa Clara on 22 April, TSMC unveiled a roadmap that quietly amounts to a snub of its most important supplier. The Taiwanese foundry will use two new processes, A13 (a 6% logic-density shrink of A14, headed for production in 2029) and N2U (a cheaper 2028 node aimed at phones, laptops and lower-end AI silicon), without buying ASML's High-NA EUV scanners. Each of those machines carries a sticker of roughly $400 million, double the previous generation, and TSMC has decided its existing EUV fleet, run harder, can do the job through the end of the decade. The bet is partly financial and partly schedule-driven: A16 production has been pushed from 2026 into 2027. Investors approved, sending TSMC's ADRs up more than 5% on the day. ASML's order book for its newest tool, by contrast, just got noticeably thinner.
Tom's Hardware - 03Technology
Intel posts its best day since 1987
Intel's first-quarter earnings, reported after the bell on 23 April, were the kind of result the company has been promising for the better part of a decade and rarely delivered. Revenue of $13.6 billion beat the Street's $12.4 billion; adjusted earnings per share landed at 29 cents against a consensus of one cent. Data Center and AI revenue rose 22% to $5.1 billion, driven, somewhat unfashionably, by demand for general-purpose Xeon CPUs to host AI workloads rather than for accelerators. Guidance for the second quarter — $13.8 to $14.8 billion in revenue — was also well clear of analyst models. Shares jumped roughly 24% the next session, the stock's largest one-day move since October 1987, and lifted Nvidia past a $5 trillion market capitalisation in sympathy. After the September deal that brought a $5 billion Nvidia investment and an x86-plus-RTX chiplet partnership, Intel finally has a quarter to match the narrative.
Intel Investor Relations - 04Technology
The UK's app-store remedies arrive without fanfare
Britain's Competition and Markets Authority began enforcing its first concrete commitments under the new digital markets regime on 1 April; this past week brought the first round of compliance reporting from Apple and Google. Both firms were designated with strategic market status last October across mobile operating systems, app stores, browsers and browser engines, and the new package obliges them to publish clearer review criteria, allow developers to appeal rejections to a named human, and, in Apple's case, give third parties standardised access to iOS interoperability features. The CMA's Will Hayter notes the UK app economy is worth roughly 1.5% of GDP and supports about 400,000 jobs. The remedies are deliberately narrower than Brussels' Digital Markets Act, which has so far produced 700 million euros in fines, but they are likely to be more durable: they were negotiated, not litigated, and start with the hard part already finished.
Kennedys Law - 05Technology
Block donates Goose, and MCP becomes plumbing
The Linux Foundation this week formally took ownership of Goose, the Rust-based coding agent that Block (formerly Square) had been running internally; the project is now a foundation member with a neutral governance structure, multi-LLM backends and a default ability to run fully on a developer's laptop. The donation is small in dollar terms but symbolically large: it confirms that Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, which Goose uses to talk to external tools, has crossed from interesting standard into invisible plumbing. There are now official MCP SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Java, C#, Go, Swift and Kotlin, and roughly 2,000 community-built MCP servers on GitHub. The shape of developer tooling in 2026 is becoming clearer: a handful of agents in the terminal, a long tail of MCP connectors to everything else, and the orchestration logic increasingly written in open code rather than locked inside a vendor's product.
GitHub Blog
⁂Section · 06Healthcare Karolinska traces bicuspid valves to fetal regulatory DNA, a Cochrane review knocks the wind out of anti-amyloid drugs, and a Waterloo lab pairs antibodies with curcumin.
- 01Healthcare
Karolinska maps the fetal origins of bicuspid valves
Eight people with bicuspid aortic valves, eight without — the cohort is small, but the readout is striking. Artemy Zhigulev and Pelin Sahlén at KTH and Karolinska Institutet used HiCap, a 3D genome-mapping technique, to trace which stretches of regulatory DNA were disrupted in adult valve tissue. Writing in Nature Communications on 18 April, they identify nearly thirty times more candidate genes than the protein-coding catalogue had previously offered, with each patient carrying a different mutation that nonetheless converged on the same mesenchymal programmes that shape the endocardial cushions before birth. "Rare mutations in the regulatory parts of DNA are likely to play a major role in causing BAV," Sahlén told the institute's news service. The implication: traces of what went wrong in the fetal heart remain detectable in adult cells, decades later.
Nature Communications - 02Healthcare
Cochrane delivers an unsentimental verdict on anti-amyloid antibodies
On 15 April, Cochrane published its first systematic review of amyloid-beta-targeting monoclonal antibodies for mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer's: 17 trials, more than 20,000 participants, seven drugs including lecanemab and donanemab. Lead author Francesco Nonino and colleagues conclude that the effect on cognition and dementia severity at 18 months is "trivial", with at-best small gains in functional ability — set against probable increases in brain swelling and microhaemorrhages. Alzheimer's Society and several investigators pushed back, noting the review pooled the two regulator-approved agents with five failed first-generation antibodies. Richard Oakley, the society's research director, urged caution: "It's not the case that all amyloid-targeting drugs are ineffective." Either way, the bar for the next generation — Roche's brain-shuttle trontinemab, Eisai's etalanetug — has just risen.
Cochrane Library - 03Healthcare
Waterloo pharmacists pair anti-amyloid antibodies with resveratrol and curcumin
While Cochrane was tempering expectations of monotherapy, a group at the University of Waterloo's School of Pharmacy proposed a workaround. In ACS Chemical Neuroscience on 11 April, Praveen Nekkar Rao's lab reports that anti-amyloid antibodies combined with small molecules derived from resveratrol (grapes, berries, peanuts) and curcumin (turmeric) clear toxic amyloid aggregates more efficiently than antibodies alone. The point is not dietary — therapeutic brain levels would require unsafe quantities of food — but rather that the polyphenols may permit lower antibody doses, with proportionally lower rates of ARIA-related swelling and bleeding. The next step is medicinal-chemistry work to design brain-penetrant analogues.
Medical Xpress - 04Healthcare
J&J's posdinemab joins the long list of failed tau antibodies
Coverage this week of the AD/PD 2026 readouts confirmed Johnson & Johnson's discontinuation of posdinemab, an anti-phosphorylated-tau monoclonal antibody, after its Phase IIb Autonomy trial in early Alzheimer's missed every cognitive and functional endpoint at 104 weeks. Tau PET told a more interesting story: the high dose did slow the accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles in regions already affected, but did nothing to halt tau spreading to new ones. The reading among neurodegeneration researchers is that simply reducing tau where it sits may be insufficient — what matters is interrupting the seed-and-spread mechanism. Biogen's antisense oligonucleotide BIIB080 and Eisai's etalanetug, both targeting earlier in the cascade, are now the field's principal tau hopes, with mid-stage data expected later this year.
Clinical Trials Arena - 05Healthcare
Bimekizumab's two-year axSpA data hold up, with a caveat on symptom duration
A new analysis from UCB's BE MOBILE programme, published this month in Arthritis Research & Therapy, looked at how the duration of symptoms before treatment shapes bimekizumab's performance in axial spondyloarthritis. At 104 weeks, more than half of randomised patients hit ASAS40, around 60% reached ASDAS low disease activity, and over 30% achieved ASDAS inactive disease — with MRI remission in 57%. The wrinkle: response was generally better in patients with shorter symptom duration, sharpening the case for treating earlier rather than waiting for radiographic damage to declare itself. No new safety signals; the usual nasopharyngitis and mucocutaneous candidiasis risks remain.
Arthritis Research & Therapy
⁂Section · 07Ufa & Russia Ufa scrubs its courtyards while Moscow trims rates and Brussels lengthens its sanctions list — a week of small pageantry and large arithmetic.
“Яҙ килде”Bashkir for "spring has come" — the phrase you hear around fountain switch-ons and tree plantings; literally, spring arrived.
- 01Ufa & Russia
Fountains on, leaves up: Ufa's choreographed spring
Photo: Bashinform On 25 April Ufa turned the city's fountains back on under a programme called Мелодии весны (Melodies of Spring), staggered across seven squares — Sovetskaya at noon, the Seven Maidens fountain in Teatralny skver at 13:00, the Clocks fountain on Lenin Square at 15:00, the Mosaic Fountain in skver Ilyicha at 16:00, finally Kashkadan park at 21:00. The pageant overlapped with two civic exertions: an all-Russia subbotnik that drew 50,000 people in Ufa alone (95,000 across the republic, 2,500 cubic metres of refuse hauled away, per Bashinform), and the spring leg of Зелёная Башкирия, which set a target of 4,500 mature trees and 62,000 saplings, with the showcase planting at Baygildino in Nurimanovsky district — a Forest of Heroes of 8,000 pines, lindens and ash.
Bashinform - 02Ufa & Russia
A drone strike still echoes from Sterlitamak
The week's local news read calmly because the loudest event came just before it: on 15 April, Ukrainian Лютый drones reached Sterlitamak — about 1,500 km from the border — and struck the petrochemical complex, killing the driver of a plant fire brigade. Universities moved students into corridors; Radiy Khabirov, the head of Bashkortostan, called the attack terrorist. By the 21st he was back to ceremonial duties, congratulating municipal staff on Local Self-Government Day and the women's hockey team Агидель on winning the WHL. The contrast — a refinery in flames one week, ribbon-cuttings the next — is now the rhythm of regional governance.
- 03Ufa & Russia
The Central Bank keeps cutting, cautiously
On 24 April the Bank of Russia trimmed the key rate by 50 basis points to 14.5%, the eighth consecutive cut from last summer's 21% peak. Annual inflation as of 20 April was 5.7%; the regulator still projects 4.5–5.5% by year-end and a return to the 4% target in 2027. GDP growth guidance stayed at 0.5–1.5%, and Elvira Nabiullina hinted the easing cycle is closer to its end than its middle. The MOEX index slipped 0.6% on the news — markets had priced the cut and wanted more dovish language than they got.
- 04Ufa & Russia
Brussels signs the twentieth package
On 23 April EU member states adopted the 20th sanctions package: 120 new individual listings (the largest in two years), a transaction ban on a further 20 Russian banks, 46 more shadow-fleet tankers (taking the total to 632), 36 designations across Russian oil's upstream and downstream, and 58 firms and individuals tied to drone production. For the first time the bloc applied its anti-circumvention tool from the 11th package, and it sanctioned a Kyrgyz operator of the state-backed stablecoin A7A5 — a quiet acknowledgement that the front line of evasion has moved from Dubai shell companies to crypto rails. The same day Hungary and Slovakia dropped their vetoes on a €90bn loan to Ukraine.
- 05Ufa & Russia
A bleaker mood, measured
Two long pieces this weekend — in The Washington Post and on CNN's Europe desk — read the room: independent and Kremlin-adjacent pollsters alike now record a majority leaning toward negotiations, the share expecting a quick end to the war shrinking, and inflation cited as the household indicator that has shifted sentiment fastest. Witkoff and Kushner continue to shuttle; Donbas territorial questions remain the gridlock. Worth noting alongside the mood music: the FSB Academy in Moscow was rededicated to Felix Dzerzhinsky, and a memorial to victims of Soviet secret police in Tomsk was dismantled, drawing formal protests from Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
⁂Section · 08Kyiv & Ukraine Forty years after Chornobyl, Kyiv hosted Maia Sandu, traded 193 prisoners, fired two frontline commanders, and quietly fielded a half-serious proposal to rename a slice of Donetsk after Donald Trump.
“Дивитися правді у вічі”Ukrainian for "to look truth in the eye" — a phrase that surfaced repeatedly this week, from Chornobyl liquidators returning to the reactor to the wives whose photographs of emaciated soldiers on the Oskil forced a command shake-up.
- 01Kyiv & Ukraine
Forty years after the reactor blew
Photo: Getty Images via The Kyiv Independent On 26 April, the anniversary of the 1986 explosion at Reactor 4, Volodymyr Zelensky walked the site with IAEA chief Rafael Grossi and Moldovan president Maia Sandu, who had flown in for the day. A small group of liquidators from Poltava region, the men who shovelled graphite in cotton uniforms in the spring of 1986, came back to look. Zelensky used the moment to call Russia's strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure "nuclear terrorism no less devastating than Chornobyl." Greenpeace noted that the New Safe Confinement, the steel arch over the reactor, still cannot be properly repaired so long as the war continues.
The Kyiv Independent - 02Kyiv & Ukraine
Sandu in Kyiv, EU clusters in view
Sandu's visit was not only ceremonial. At a joint press conference she and Zelensky said both countries are pushing to open six EU accession clusters together — Moldova received candidate status in 2022 and began negotiations in 2024. "Disasters know no borders — neither should solidarity," she said. The subtext: roughly 1,000 to 1,500 Russian troops still sit in Transnistria, and Chișinău wants Ukraine's accession train moving on the same track as its own.
- 03Kyiv & Ukraine
Brussels writes a billion-euro cheque
At the EU–Ukraine Business Summit on 22–23 April, institutions and investment banks signed deals worth more than €1 billion: €161 million in guarantees unlocking €400 million for defence-tech startups, over €500 million from the European Investment Bank for reconstruction, and €360 million through the EBRD aimed at small and medium firms. France's Shark Robotics linked up with Ukrainian Tencore; Denmark's Gomspace partnered with Stetman on satellites. EU enlargement official Gert-Jan Koopman called it support "for industries vital for security" — language unimaginable from Brussels three years ago.
- 04Kyiv & Ukraine
The Oskil scandal
Photographs posted by a soldier's wife showed men of the 14th Mechanised Brigade, dug in east of Kupiansk on the Oskil's far bank, who had gone up to seventeen days without food and were drinking rainwater. Some had dropped from 90kg to 50kg. On 24 April the General Staff sacked the commanders of the brigade and the 10th Corps for, in the official phrasing, "concealing the true situation." Russian shelling of the river crossings has made conventional resupply nearly impossible; FPV drones now ferry rations across, when they can. Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi ordered a full inspection.
- 05Kyiv & Ukraine
"Donnyland" and a 73rd swap
Ukrainian negotiators floated a darkly funny idea, first reported by The New York Times: rename a 2,000-square-mile sliver of northwestern Donetsk Oblast "Donnyland" to flatter Donald Trump and harden Washington against Russia's territorial demands. One official went so far as to make a ChatGPT-generated flag and anthem. Asked about it on 22 April, Zelensky was dry: "The main thing is that Donetsk Oblast and Luhansk Oblast remain Ukraine — as long as it's not Putinland." Two days later, in a US- and UAE-brokered swap, 193 Ukrainian servicemen came home — the 73rd exchange of the war, the youngest 24, the eldest 60, many held in Chechnya on fabricated charges.
⁂Section · 09Finance Equities punched into the 7,000 era as the Iran ceasefire held; central banks meet this week with the Fed, ECB and BOJ all expected to sit still.
- 01Finance
S&P 500 closes the week at a record 7,165 as the ceasefire rally extends
The S&P 500 finished Friday 24 April at 7,165.08, its third consecutive weekly gain and the longest winning streak since last October. The benchmark, which entered April down nearly 7% on the year as the Iran war and oil shock spread through every sector, has now erased those losses and printed three fresh all-time highs in a single week. Technology has done the heavy lifting, the sector up roughly 11% in April. The 10-year Treasury eased two basis points to 4.31% on Friday; the 2-year sat at 3.78%, the 30-year at 4.91% — a curve that suggests bond traders, unlike equity ones, are unwilling to call the all-clear.
Advisor Perspectives - 02Finance
Three central banks, three holds: Fed, ECB and BOJ line up for next week
Markets are pricing a 99.5% chance the Federal Reserve leaves the federal funds target at 3.50%–3.75% on Wednesday 29 April, per the CME FedWatch tool — the last decision before Jerome Powell's term ends and, if confirmed, Kevin Warsh takes over. The ECB follows on 30 April with the deposit rate expected to stay at 2.00%, though traders increasingly look through the meeting to a possible June hike: the majority now see the key rate at 2.50% or higher by year-end as the Iran shock pushes through energy bills and core inflation. The Bank of Japan, also meeting next week, is leaning toward holding at 0.75% — its highest since 1995 — while it watches the war and the spring wage round.
CNBC - 03Finance
Goldman prints a record on equities; JPMorgan trims its NII guide
Goldman Sachs reported Q1 EPS of $17.55 on revenue of $17.23 billion, with equities trading revenue at a record $5.33 billion and investment banking fees up 48% year on year — a rare front-running of the bank earnings season. JPMorgan Chase followed on 14 April with EPS of $5.94 versus $5.45 expected and revenue of $50.54 billion; fixed income trading rose 21% on commodities, credit, FX and emerging-market activity. The catch sat in the outlook: JPMorgan cut full-year 2026 net interest income guidance by roughly $1.5 billion to about $103 billion, a quiet acknowledgement that lower forward rates and tighter loan spreads are starting to bite the franchise that has, for two years, been the envy of Wall Street.
CNBC - 04Finance
Strategy passes BlackRock as the largest bitcoin holder after a $2.54bn buy
Michael Saylor's Strategy disclosed on 21 April it had bought 34,164 bitcoin for about $2.54 billion at an average $74,395, taking its treasury to 815,061 BTC — enough to overtake BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust as the world's largest institutional holder for the first time since Q2 2024. The purchase, the firm's biggest since 2024, was funded by issuing 21.79m STRC preferred shares for $2.18bn and 2.165m MSTR common for $366m. Bitcoin pushed from $75,300 on Monday to above $78,000 by Wednesday, helped also by President Trump's extension of the Iran ceasefire, and was holding around $78,085 by Sunday — up more than 13% in April.
CoinDesk - 05Finance
Tesla beats on EPS, then loses it on capex
Tesla reported adjusted Q1 EPS of 41 cents on $22.39 billion of revenue late on 22 April, beating the 37-cent estimate while missing the $22.64 billion revenue line. Shares jumped 4% after-hours, then reversed sharply when Elon Musk told the call that 2026 capex would top $25 billion — $5 billion above prior guidance. By midday Thursday the stock was down 3.7% at $373, leaving it 17% lower year to date, even as the broader market notched records. The yen drifted to a high of 159.80 against the dollar on 24 April and the euro slipped toward 1.168, both pressed by oil-linked import bills the US, as a net energy exporter, has so far been spared.
Fortune
⁂Section · 10World News Mali's defence chief is killed in a stunning multi-city assault, Bulgaria hands Rumen Radev a rare outright majority, the US-Iran standoff drifts into a dual blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and the world's arms bill hits a record $2.89 trillion.
- 01World News
Mali's defence minister killed as JNIM and Tuareg rebels storm five cities in coordinated attack
Shortly before dawn on Saturday 25 April, twin explosions tore through Kati, the garrison town outside Bamako that houses junta leader Assimi Goïta. By 06:00 GMT, gunfire was rolling through Gao, Sevare, Kidal and Mopti, and around the perimeter of Modibo Keita International Airport. A suicide car bomb at the residence of defence minister Gen. Sadio Camara killed him along with his second wife and two grandchildren, the army later confirmed, reversing earlier government claims that he was safe. Two groups claimed the offensive jointly: the al-Qaeda-linked Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Tuareg-led Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), which said it now controlled Kidal and parts of Gao. Al Jazeera's Nicolas Haque, on the ground in Bamako, called the scale "apparently unprecedented"; Chatham House's Alex Vines said government forces were "caught off guard". The first time JNIM and the FLA have openly cooperated, the assault marks the deepest crisis yet for the junta that took power in 2020 and expelled French and UN forces.
Al Jazeera - 02World News
Bulgaria gives Rumen Radev the first parliamentary majority since 1997
Sunday 19 April delivered a result Bulgarian politics has not seen in nearly three decades. Progressive Bulgaria, the left-nationalist movement former president Rumen Radev launched only months ago, took 43.9% of the vote and 130 of the 240 seats in the National Assembly on a 51.2% turnout. Boyko Borissov's centre-right GERB collapsed to 13.4%; the reformist PP-DB alliance to 12.7%; the Turkish-minority DPS recorded its worst showing since 1994, while its splinter APS lost all 19 of its seats. "A victory of hope over distrust, a victory of freedom over fear," Radev told supporters in Sofia, pledging to dismantle what he calls the country's "oligarchic system". Brussels is watching closely: Radev was a vocal sceptic of EU arms deliveries to Ukraine during his presidency, and Bulgaria is due to adopt the euro in 2027.
Al Jazeera - 03World News
A dual blockade settles over the Strait of Hormuz
Thirteen days after the US Navy began intercepting Iran-linked tankers in the Indian Ocean on 13 April, the standoff has hardened into something neither side calls war but neither will end. On Friday 24 April, Tehran said it would reopen the strait; by Saturday it had reimposed restrictions after Washington refused to lift its blockade. Over the past week the IRGC seized the Panamanian-flagged MSC Francesca and the Greek-owned Epaminondas; the Pentagon captured the Iran-linked Majestic X carrying sanctioned crude. President Trump extended the ceasefire on 21 April but kept the naval cordon in place; foreign minister Abbas Araghchi calls blockading Iranian ports "an act of war". The International Chamber of Shipping said both seizures violate international law. Goldman Sachs analysts now describe the equilibrium as "maritime trench warfare", with global oil and fuel shortages possible within two months if neither blockade lifts.
Al Jazeera - 04World News
World military spending hits $2.89 trillion as Europe rearms and Washington pulls back
SIPRI's annual fact sheet, published Monday 27 April, records an eleventh straight year of growth in global arms expenditure: $2,887 billion in 2025, up 2.9% in real terms, with the world's military burden rising to 2.5% of GDP. The story is regional. European spending jumped 14% to $864 billion, the sharpest annual rise in Central and Western Europe since the Cold War; Germany alone surged 24% to $114 billion, overtaking France and Britain. Asia and Oceania climbed 8.1% to $681 billion, with Japan up 9.7% and Taiwan up 14%. Russia spent $190 billion, or 7.5% of GDP; Ukraine $84.1 billion, an extraordinary 40%. The United States, still the world's largest spender at $954 billion, fell 7.5%, principally because Congress approved no new aid for Kyiv during the year. Spending already authorised for 2026 exceeds $1 trillion, and President Trump's draft 2027 budget pushes that figure towards $1.5 trillion.
SIPRI
⁂Section · 11Cute & Kind A 70-year-old pizza driver's three-minute detour, a baby elephant on Earth Day, and 480 ducks rehomed in a single afternoon.
- 01Cute & Kind
Dan the pizza man retires on a $129,000 tip
Photo: Brian Wilson via GoFundMe When Brian Wilson's Domino's order arrived in Boise, Idaho without the Diet Coke he'd asked for, 70-year-old driver Dan Simpson made a three-minute detour to a convenience store on his own dime. Wilson posted the gesture online and started a GoFundMe; by 8 April it had passed $129,000, more than enough to fund Simpson's planned trip to see the redwoods. He still intends to keep a few shifts. The campaign closes on his last delivery day, 30 April.
Good News Network - 02Cute & Kind
Linh Mai meets her public on Earth Day
An Asian elephant calf named Linh Mai, Vietnamese for "spirit blossom", stepped out at the Smithsonian's National Zoo on 22 April, the first calf born there in nearly 25 years. She arrived on 2 February at 308 pounds and is now close to 500, gaining roughly three pounds a day. After her mother Nhi Linh showed signs of aggression, 52-year-old Swarna stepped in as surrogate. Manager Robbie Clark concedes the calf "has a little bit of attitude".
- 03Cute & Kind
480 ducks rehomed in under a day
Photo: CBS News Los Angeles On 14 April, the Riverside County Department of Animal Services took in 480 ducks surrendered from an unlicensed sanctuary in Anza, California, the department's largest single intake in a decade. Adoption fees were waived at the San Jacinto Valley Animal Campus the next morning; every bird was placed within 24 hours. Chief veterinarian Dr Itzel Vizcarra noted vitamin A deficiencies linked to overcrowding, but tests for zoonotic disease came back negative.
CBS News Los Angeles - 04Cute & Kind
A Boston payphone calls a stranger 3,000 miles away
A bright yellow payphone outside Pavement Coffeehouse on Boston University's Commonwealth Avenue rings straight through to a sister handset at a Reno senior living complex marked "Call A Zoomer". Set up by neuroscience start-up Matter, the line connects two demographics surveys consistently rank as the loneliest. One regular at the Reno end, aged 73, told CBS he plans his afternoons around the calls.
CBS News Boston - 05Cute & Kind
Six women take the Green Nobel
The Goldman Environmental Prize was handed to an all-female cohort for the first time in its 36-year history at a ceremony in San Francisco on 20 April. Among the six: Yuvelis Morales Blanco, who stopped commercial fracking in Colombia; Sarah Finch, who beat a UK oil project after a decade of legal battles; and Iroro Tanshi, who trained Nigerian villagers to keep wildfires away from a rare short-tailed roundleaf bat thought to be extinct.
Goldman Environmental Prize