The prime minister faces a standards investigation over Mandelson affair and testimony from Morgan McSweeneyKeir Starmer has told Labour MPs to “stick together and fight together” as ministers launched a massive operation to shore up his fragile position before a critical day for his premiership.The prime minister faces the double threat of a standards investigation into his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US and a potentially damaging testimony from Morgan McSweeney, his former chief of staff. Continue reading...
• U.S. stock futures fell late Sunday with Dow Jones Industrial Average futures down 130 points or 0.3%, S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq-100 futures also declining after record highs on Friday.
• West Texas Intermediate crude futures rose 2% above $96 per barrel following collapsed U.S.-Iran talks announced Saturday.
• The Federal Reserve's interest-rate committee meets Tuesday-Wednesday, with Chair Jerome Powell's likely final press conference anticipated amid market highs.
• Microsoft issued Patch Tuesday on April 25, 2026, fixing CVE-2026-1234 zero-day in Windows Kernel exploited by Chinese state actors against 15 US agencies.
• Vulnerability allowed remote code execution with 9.8 CVSS score, affecting Windows 11 and Server 2025 in 40% of federal endpoints.
• CISA urges immediate patching, citing 'active exploitation' in ongoing incident response.
At least 17 people hurt after incident involving two local services north of Denmark’s capitalTwo local trains have collided head-on in Denmark, injuring at least 17 people, four of whom are in a critical condition, according to emergency services.The public broadcaster DR showed images of two yellow and grey trains, both with damage to the front, facing each other in a wooded area. Continue reading...
Member states meet this morning to discuss loan after longstanding disagreement between Kyiv and outgoing Hungarian PM Viktor OrbánAfter four months of very public disagreements between Ukraine and Hungary, today could be the day when the EU finally signs off (for the second time) on the critical €90bn loan for Kyiv.Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed yesterday that the Druzhba pipeline, carrying Russian oil imports to Hungary and Slovakia, has been repaired and is ready to be used again. EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said yesterday she expected “a positive decision” within the next 24 hours. Continue reading...
Experts say Muslims and other minorities have been disproportionately deleted from the electoral roll ahead of the West Bengal elections this weekMillions of people in the Indian state of West Bengal have been stripped of their vote ahead of a critical state election this week, after a controversial electoral revision described by critics as a “bloodless political genocide” and mass disenfranchisement of minorities.In West Bengal, a total of 9.1 million names have been deleted from the register, more than 10% of the electorate. While many were dead or duplicates, about 2.7 million people have challenged their expulsions, but still been removed. Continue reading...
• Cybersecurity researchers warn that Mythos AI can autonomously identify vulnerabilities and plan multi-step attack chains without human intervention.
• The system uncovered a previously unknown 16-year-old FFmpeg bug, demonstrating its capability to discover longstanding security flaws across legacy software.
• The discovery highlights growing concerns about autonomous AI agents executing complex security tasks, raising new governance and control questions for enterprise deployments.
Purple state which recently elected a Democratic governor will now choose whether to replace existing voting maps with ones that favor DemocratsNearly three months to the day after his term as Virginia’s governor ended, Republican Glenn Youngkin stood in an unshaded corner of an office parking lot to warn dozens of conservative activists that they were in the midst of “the most important election” in the commonwealth’s 237-year history.The question before the voters casting ballots at an early voting precinct a few yards away in the city of Leesburg ahead of Tuesday’s special election was whether to temporarily set aside Virginia’s congressional maps intended to advantage neither party and replace them with a new version that could allow Democrats to win all but one seat in the 11-member delegation in the November midterm elections. Continue reading...
• A fragile US-Iran ceasefire is set to expire on April 22, 2026, with diplomatic talks stalled and tensions escalating over competing demands and military posturing.
• Iran's spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei criticized the US position as unrealistic, while Tehran condemned Washington's naval blockade as provocative and a potential trigger for ceasefire violations.
• Pakistan continues mediating indirect talks between the two nations, though no date has been set for the next round of negotiations as fears of renewed escalation mount.