Achieve

Director of Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli celebrated for defining Australian culture and ‘global influence on craft, form and storytelling’Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastPeter Weir, the director of Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli, was presented with the inaugural lifetime achievement award from the Australian Film Television and Radio School on Wednesday night.At an event hosted by Sydney film festival, the AFTRS council chair, Rachel Perkins, called the now-retired 81-year-old director and screenwriter “the greatest film-maker this country has produced”. Continue reading...

• Boy George, the lead singer of Culture Club, received a lifetime achievement award at the British LGBT Awards in central London. • The honor was presented as a surprise by renowned French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier. • Organizers granted the accolade to recognize Boy George's significant and lasting contributions to British musical culture.

US president said he and Chinese leader ‘settled a lot of different problems’ but gave little detail on solutionsTrump China visit live – latest updatesDonald Trump’s whirlwind trip to Beijing – the first US presidential visit in nearly a decade – wrapped up with much fanfare but little clarity about what was actually achieved.Trump said on Friday that he and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, “settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to solve”. But he didn’t provide much detail on what those solutions were. Continue reading...

• A Politico analysis of data from Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reveals the administration saved less than 5 percent of its claimed savings through nearly 10,100 contract terminations. • DOGE, led by efficiency advocates, was tasked with reducing government waste and cutting unnecessary spending across federal agencies. • The significant gap between claimed and actual savings raises questions about the effectiveness of the administration's cost-reduction strategy and the accuracy of reported figures.

• Chime reported Q1 2026 revenue growth of 25% year-over-year, exceeding guidance and marking its first quarter of GAAP profitability since going public. • Strong top-line momentum prompted raised full-year guidance and new $200 million share repurchase authorization announced May 6. • Results from San Francisco-based fintech highlight accelerating adoption in digital banking amid competitive US market.

• Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won West Bengal for the first time in its 46-year history, securing 207 out of 294 seats in recent state elections on May 8, 2026. • The BJP retained control of Assam and, with coalition partners, the federal territory of Puducherry, now governing 21 of India's 28 states and 72% of its 1.4 billion population. • Al Jazeera described the West Bengal victory as the Hindu nationalist party's most consequential win since Modi took power in 2014, driven by anti-incumbency against Mamata Banerjee and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

• Krutrim successfully pivoted to AI cloud services, achieving profitability and igniting a rally in India's tech sector as of May 5, 2026. • The shift validates India's domestic AI infrastructure development, positively impacting stocks like TCS, Infosys, and RIL. • This milestone signals a growth runway for Indian IT giants, reshaping competition against global players.

• The Newsmakers Achievers Awards 2026 celebrated lifetime achievements of renowned Indian entertainers and public figures including Usha Mangeshkar, Hariharan, Dilip Joshi, and Sanjeev Kapoor. • The Governor presided over the ceremony, recognizing contributions from distinguished personalities including Atul Tiwari, Pooja Bedi, and cultural figures across multiple domains. • The awards ceremony highlighted India's recognition of artistic excellence and public service across entertainment, culinary arts, social work, and education sectors.

• The sequel to The Devil Wears Prada earned USD 233 million globally in its opening weekend, with USD 77 million from the US and Canada and USD 156.6 million internationally. • Michael Jackson biopic Michael took second place with USD 54 million in its second North American weekend, pushing its worldwide total to USD 423.9 million on 3,955 screens. • The film's success, driven largely by female audiences, marks Hollywood's second-biggest opening weekend of 2026, surpassing Project Hail Mary at USD 141 million.

• Researchers introduced GAME, a suite of AI algorithms that improve accuracy in tracking cosmic changes by 95% for derivatives and 20% overall. • Published on arXiv in February, GAME enhances astrophysical modeling of the universe's dynamic behavior. • The technique sharpens AI's ability to reconstruct test functions, revealing potential flaws in current cosmological understanding.

• Google DeepMind released AlphaFold 4 on April 25, 2026, predicting protein structures with 98.5% accuracy, including dynamics for drug discovery. • Model simulates folding pathways in seconds for proteins up to 5,000 residues, licensed to 200 US biotech firms. • Advances could accelerate FDA approvals for 50+ new therapies, valued at $100 billion market impact.

• An international team including University of Oxford, University of Michigan, and others used the Gemini laser and plasma to compress light, creating the most powerful light ever in a lab. • The technique acts as a 'quantum magnifying glass' by focusing light waves, enabling direct study of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) interactions with the quantum vacuum. • Published in Nature on April 22, 2026, it bridges a 20-year gap between theory and observation, per Prof. Brendan Romey of Queen's University Belfast.

• Researchers have developed a compact CRISPR system capable of achieving up to 90% efficiency in targeted in-body gene editing applications. • The breakthrough addresses previous limitations of CRISPR technology, enabling more precise genetic modifications for therapeutic purposes. • This advancement could significantly improve treatment options for genetic disorders and certain cancers by allowing safer, more effective gene therapy interventions.

Experts say our preoccupation with net overseas migration figures has distracted from a more meaningful discussion on the ‘scale of temporariness’Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAustralia should set immigration targets to achieve a “stable temporary population” to address the ballooning number of nonpermanent residents that has stretched the country’s public services and housing, a new report argues.Temporary migrants as a share of the total population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, from 2.7% in 2010, to more than 6%. Continue reading...

• The Artemis II crew completes its historic lunar flyby mission, with crew members returning to Earth on April 10 after traveling farther from Earth than any humans in decades. • During the mission, the crew captured unprecedented photographs of Earth passing behind the Moon and observed portions of the lunar surface never previously seen by human eyes. • The mission marks a major milestone in NASA's Artemis program, re-inspiring public interest in space exploration through iconic imagery showing Earth's perspective from unprecedented distances.

Donald Trump’s threat to target Iran’s bridges and power plants follows a similar playbook to recent conflictsDuring Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israeli jets bombed the Jiyeh power station north of the coastal city of Sidon. The blaze could be seen for miles, a towering column of black smoke. Sand was turned to glass.The plant’s damaged storage tanks leaked an estimated 15,000 tonnes of oil into the eastern Mediterranean, the largest spill in that sea. Continue reading...

• NASA's Artemis II mission surpassed the Apollo 13 record on April 6, 2026, at 1:57 p.m. EDT, reaching beyond 248,655 miles (400,171 km) from Earth as the Orion capsule 'Integrity' looped around the moon's far side. • The mission will peak at 252,760 miles (406,777 km), breaking the prior record by 4,100 miles (6,600 km) during its six-hour lunar flyby, marking the first crewed deep-space mission since Apollo. • This milestone validates life-support systems, navigation, and thermal protection for humans, paving the way for sustained lunar presence under the US Artemis program.

• A new study in Big Earth Data introduces CA-MTransUNet, a Cloud-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Linear Transformer U-Net for forest burned area (FBA) detection using Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical data. • The model attains the highest mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 87.00% with an inference speed of 6.26 ms, outperforming benchmarks despite cloud contamination. • This breakthrough addresses computational complexity in segmentation models, enhancing post-fire environmental monitoring critical for climate studies.

• Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other Gulf allies are privately urging President Trump to prosecute the U.S.-led war against Iran longer, arguing Tehran remains insufficiently weakened after a month of bombings. • Allies shifted from initial complaints over lack of notice to viewing the conflict as a historic chance to cripple Iran's clerical rule, per U.S., Gulf, and Israeli officials. • Secretary of State Marco Rubio affirmed alignment with Gulf partners, stating on 'Good Morning America' that Iran's 'religious zealots' must never possess nuclear weapons due to their apocalyptic vision.

• Researchers made a major breakthrough in solving the mystery of static electricity, explaining how it causes hair to stand on end and related phenomena. • The findings elucidate the physics behind volcanic lightning and other electrostatic events, providing new insights into charge separation mechanisms. • This peer-reviewed discovery advances fundamental physics knowledge with potential applications in materials science and atmospheric studies.

• The United States saw a record amount of new clean power capacity come online in 2025, according to a report released today by the Environmental Defense Fund. • Despite the record deployment, the renewable energy sector faced significant headwinds including project delays and cancellations that threatened to slow progress. • The achievement underscores continued momentum in U.S. transition toward clean electricity despite policy uncertainties and regulatory challenges.

• Researchers created pure hexagonal diamond (lonsdaleite) by compressing organized graphite at 20 gigapascals and 1,300-1,900°C for 10 hours, confirmed via structural analyses and simulations. • The material, rarer than cubic diamond, was identified in Arizona's Barringer Crater meteorite and offers superior hardness for tools and electronics. • Study provides definitive evidence of hexagonal diamond's existence, countering past skepticism about meteorite samples.

• Researchers at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston broke the longstanding record for high-temperature superconductivity, reaching a transition temperature of 151 Kelvin under ambient pressure. • The breakthrough by physicists Ching-Wu Chu and Liangzi Deng, published March 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, enables potential advances in efficient energy generation, transmission, and storage. • This record surpasses all prior ambient-pressure superconductors since 1911, bringing room-temperature superconductivity—a century-old holy grail—closer by narrowing the gap to about 140 degrees Celsius.