Weekend Edition.
Al Qaeda is back.
1. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump were rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington by Secret Service agents on Saturday night after a man opened fire on security personnel nearby. The man fired a shotgun at a Secret Service agent at a checkpoint in the Washington Hilton hotel before being tackled and arrested. Trump told reporters at a hastily arranged briefing at the White House later that the officer was saved by his bulletproof vest and was in "good shape." U.S. Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi confirmed the officer had been released from hospital. (Source: reuters.com)
2. The suspect arrested in the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting on Saturday was identified by a law enforcement official as Cole Tomas Allen, a Los Angeles-area man who appears from social media sites to be a Caltech graduate working as a part-time teacher and game developer. Mr. Allen, approximately 31 years of age, is a resident of Torrance, California, a coastal town that is part of the South Bay area adjacent to Los Angeles abutting Santa Monica Bay. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2017, and a master’s degree in computer science from California State University at Dominguez Hills in 2025, according to a social media profile. Caltech said in a statement that a person of that name graduated in 2017. (Source: reuters.com)
3. President Trump scrapped a trip by U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan for talks with Iran, leaving himself tough choices over how to force Iran to make concessions the White House wants to strike a deal. Trump said on Saturday that he had decided to cancel the trip after receiving an offer from Iran that fell short of the White House’s expectations. “We’re not going to spend 15 hours in airplanes all the time, going back and forth, to be given a document that was not good enough,” he said. He added that the Iranians had sent a much better offer 10 minutes after he canceled the trip, saying it involved Iran not having a nuclear weapon as part of a deal. (Source: wsj.com)
4. Prospects for meaningful US-Iran negotiations remain low as Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Ahmad Vahidi and his inner circle continue to dominate Iran’s decision-making and oppose compromise. ISW-CTP assessed that in recent days, the IRGC has sidelined civilian officials and that Iran’s negotiating team lacks the authority to make independent decisions, which helps explain continued inflexibility and the absence of tangible progress. (Source: understandingwar.org)
5. Only Iran knows how many mines it has placed in the Strait of Hormuz. But even the possibility that it has littered the narrow waterway with the deadly weapons is forcing the US to begin preparing to scour the seabed for them. It could take weeks to complete such a painstaking mission and for the route to be declared safe from mines, which may be camouflaged to look like rocks and can burrow into the sands, according to experts. It would be even longer if the fragile ceasefire between Tehran and Washington collapses and the mission has to be attempted under fire. (Source: ft.com)
6. NBC News:
American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair, according to three U.S. officials, two congressional aides and another person familiar with the damage.
The Iranian regime swiftly retaliated after the Trump administration attacked on Feb. 28, hitting dozens of targets across U.S. military bases in seven Middle East countries. Those attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft, according to the U.S. officials and an assessment by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
In the initial days of the war, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet bombed the U.S. base Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the base having air defenses, a rare breach that marked the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years, according to two of the U.S. officials.
The U.S. bases that came under attack are home to thousands of American troops, and in some cases their families, though they were largely cleared out in the days and hours before the U.S. and Israeli went to war with Iran. (Source: nbcnews.com)
7. The Washington Post:
President Vladimir Putin is facing rising discontent across Russian society as the war against Ukraine drags on, the economy flounders and public dissatisfaction mounts over government restrictions on internet access. Russia’s biggest state-owned pollster, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, on Friday recorded that Putin’s approval rating fell to 65.6 percent, its lowest level since before the beginning of the war and a drop of 12.2 percentage points since the start of the year.
Gauging genuine public opinion is difficult under an authoritarian regime that exiles, imprisons or even kills political opponents and where criticism of the war is illegal, but compared to Putin’s historical ratings — as high as 88 percent — the falling poll numbers signal growing weariness with the war now in its fifth year, and with negotiations to end it largely stalled as the Trump administration focuses on Iran….
“The overall mood is that’s enough already; you’ve been fighting for long enough,” said one Russian official speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “It seems to everyone that it’s been going on for longer than World War II, the Great Patriotic War — and at the same time we can’t even take one region,” the official said referring to Russia’s failed effort since the full-scale invasion in 2022 to take full control of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
8. Russian forces conducted a massive drone and missile strike consisting of 666 drones and missiles against Ukraine overnight on April 24 into April 25, primarily targeting Dnipro City, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, killing at least six civilians and injuring at least 47. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched 47 missiles and 619 drones against Ukraine overnight — the fourth Russian strike of over 500 strike vehicles in April 2026. (Source: understandingwar.org)
9. Europeans have to step up and defend their own interests because the U.S., China and Russia are now all “dead against” them, French President Emmanuel Macron warned on Friday. “We should not underestimate that this is a unique moment where a U.S. president, a Russian president, a Chinese president are dead against the Europeans. So, this is the right moment for us to wake up,” Macron said in a discussion with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis organized by the Kathimerini newspaper in Athens. “We have to be a little bit self-confident and deliver an agenda,” he added. (Source: politico.eu)
10. Al Qaeda-linked militants launched coordinated attacks across Mali on Saturday, claiming to have seized two major cities while simultaneously striking the heart of the capital, Bamako, in what observers described as a major, unprecedented offensive. The group, JNIM, attacked several cities at the same time and hit the country’s military headquarters just outside Bamako, where the home of the defense minister was destroyed, according to experts who monitor the region. In a statement, JNIM claimed to have captured the northern city of Kidal and the central city of Mopti, as well as military bases in nearby Sevaré and in Gao. It named the Azawad Liberation Front, an armed separatist movement of the Tuareg ethnic minority, as its partner in the attacks. The offensive follows an evolution of the group from a rural insurgency into a formidable force that uses blockades to starve major cities and launches conventional-style battles against the Malian army. (Source: nytimes.com)
11. A severe shortage of computing power is forcing major Chinese artificial intelligence model developers and cloud service providers to throttle services, ration access and hike prices as demand outstrips chip supply. The computing power crunch underscores the growing mismatch between surging demand for AI applications — particularly resource-intensive coding assistants — and constrained semiconductor supply chains, threatening to throttle the industry’s rapid expansion. (Source: caixinglobal.com)
12. Chinese scientists have developed a method to generate electricity and achieve higher energy efficiency than conventional burning, while producing zero carbon dioxide emissions, by placing coal inside a “battery”. “Coal-fired power” conjures images of heavy pollution, steep carbon footprints and modest efficiency. But a novel, direct coal power technology challenges that stereotype by eliminating combustion entirely and sidestepping the CO₂ emissions that have long defined coal use. A team led by Xie Heping, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with Shenzhen University, has for the first time built what they call a zero-carbon-emission direct coal fuel cell, or ZC-DCFC. (Sources: scmp.com, zgcforum.com)
13. The Justice Department said it would end its criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, an attempt to clear the obstacle that has stalled Kevin Warsh’s confirmation as his successor. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced the move Friday, saying her office is closing an inquiry into Powell’s testimony to Congress about cost overruns on the renovation of two historic Fed buildings. A federal judge had already ruled that the grand jury subpoenas served on the Fed in January were improper and found “essentially zero evidence” of criminal wrongdoing. (Sources: wsj.com, nbcnews.com)
14. The Wall Street Journal:
Two big loans that were made during the post-pandemic boom in private-equity buyouts are defaulting, whacking some private-credit funds and ratcheting up losses in the already troubled corner of Wall Street.
Software maker Medallia—a poster child for the intersection of investor concerns between technology and private capital—can no longer repay about $3 billion of loans from firms including Blackstone, KKR and Apollo Global Management. The lenders are negotiating to take control from private-equity owner Thoma Bravo, which will likely lose $5.1 billion it invested in the company in 2021, people familiar with the matter said.
At the same time, Blackstone, KKR and others are restructuring a $1.4 billion loan they made to help Harvest Partners and other private-equity backers pay for a 2021 buyout of dental-services company Affordable Care, the people said.
The losses are a small slice of the now $2 trillion in loans that private-credit funds have made to companies, but they are intensifying investor angst about the underlying health of these giant lenders on Wall Street. (Source: wsj.com)
Quick Links: This is well done: How the energy crisis is spreading across the world. Indonesia suggests charging a toll to transit the Malacca Strait. Vladimir Putin’s regime turns on book publishers. Bolsonaro’s son runs for president with a mission: Get dad out of prison. You’ve read it before, you’ll read it again (and again): Trump’s war, redistricting setbacks fan GOP midterm angst. Might Donald Trump try to rig the midterms? Google to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic. The U.S. government needs Anthropic more than Anthropic needs the U.S. government.