🇮🇳 India Asks US for Russian Waiver Extension

India has asked the US to extend its waiver on Russian oil, as the nearly 11-week war in the Persian Gulf disrupts energy supply. The US first provided a green light in March, and then widened that with an authorization that runs until May 16, in an effort to limit rising oil prices with additional barrels.

#BRICS

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⚡️🇺🇸🇨🇺 CIA Chief Ratcliffe Leads US Delegation to Cuba to Urge Talks

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe led a US delegation to Cuba and conveyed to officials there that the administration wished to negotiate with the communist government, but only if it made changes, an agency official said Thursday.

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🇺🇸 House releases amended housing bill text, schedules vote for next week

Senior House lawmakers late Wednesday reached a bipartisan deal on housing affordability legislation and scheduled a floor vote for next week. The final House text would maintain restrictions on Wall Street’s purchase of single-family homes — a priority for President Donald Trump — but would significantly scale back the Senate bill’s limitations on so-called institutional investors in the housing market.

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🇺🇸 Trump EPA Proposes Voiding Wastewater Limits for Coal Plants

The Trump administration is formally proposing to roll back wastewater limits for coal-fired power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency said it wants to replace strict Biden-era caps on wastewater released by coal-fired power plants with new ones that give companies flexibility to set their own limits.

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🤖 Hybrid silicon system keeps electrons hot 25,000 times longer to drive chemical reactions

A team at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) has finally figured out how to catch the lightning before it vanishes. Researchers have developed a hybrid semiconductor-catalyst system that captures high-energy sunlight more efficiently than solar panels or plants.

The system can easily capture high-energy sunlight that would otherwise be wasted as heat. Interestingly, this hybrid material keeps high-energy “hot electrons” alive 25,000 times longer than standard silicon.

“Our work seeks to push the limits of how much energy we can yield from the sun, and the semiconductor-molecular catalyst hybrid system used in this study reveals one possible pathway,” — said Nathan Neale, research scientist at NLR.

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🇺🇸🇨🇳 Elon Musk, Tim Cook Attend Xi's China State Dinner For Trump

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🇯🇵 Takaichi to Visit Korean President’s Hometown to Strengthen Ties

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi will meet in the South Korean city of Andong next week, extending a highly personalized diplomatic exchange at a time of shifting dynamics between the US and China, and mounting uncertainty over regional security.

Takaichi will visit Lee’s hometown region of Andong in North Gyeongsang Province from May 19-20 at Lee’s invitation, according to a written statement from the presidential office. The visit comes after Lee traveled to Nara, Takaichi’s political home turf, earlier this year, marking what Seoul described as the first exchange of visits between the hometown regions of South Korean and Japanese leaders.

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🇺🇸🇨🇳 A lot of good has come of it’: Trump is bullish on China visit

Seated beside the Chinese leader in an ornate meeting room with gold carpet, Trump said he had secured “fantastic” trade deals for both countries and made progress in his effort to enlist Xi’s help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz – though he gave no details.

“This has been an incredible visit,” — he said. “I think a lot of good has come of it.”

#BRICS

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⚡️🇺🇸🇨🇳 Trump on China:

We made a lot of great trade deals, including over 200 planes from Boeing with a promise of 750 planes, which will be by far the largest order ever if they do a good job with the 200, which I'm sure they will.

And that's General Electric also, the engines. So they're buying General Electric.

So it's approximately 400–450 engines and 200 planes and a promise of up to 750 if they do a good job.

#BRICS

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⚡️ G-7 to Discuss Bond Selloff Sending Yields to Multi-Decade Highs

Group of Seven finance chiefs are set to discuss the selloff in government bonds that’s sending yields on some benchmark securities to their highest levels in decades, with at least one member viewing the move as temporary.

Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said Friday the G-7 are expected to talk about developments in bond markets at their May 18-19 gathering in Paris. She spoke a day after her nation’s 30-year government bond yields climbed to the highest since that tenor’s 1999 debut, while rates on 20- and 40-year debt also hit the highest in decades.

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🇨🇳🇷🇺 Putin to Visit Beijing Only Days After Trump Departs, SCMP Says

Russian leader Vladimir Putin will visit Beijing on May 20, the South China Morning Post reported, which would be days after President Xi Jinping’s summit in the Chinese capital with his US counterpart Donald Trump. The one-day trip is seen as a routine part of the Kremlin’s relationship with Beijing.

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🇹🇷 Turkey Floats $1.2 Billion Fuel Pipeline to Eastern NATO Allies

Turkey has proposed building a $1.2 billion (€1 billion) fuel pipeline for military use to help meet the energy needs of allies on NATO’s eastern European flank.

Following a push by the alliance to expand its military pipeline network, Ankara is proposing that the new link be built from Turkey to Romania via Bulgaria. Turkey’s pitch to NATO comes as it prepares to host the alliance’s summit in July.

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👐 OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance, will let you connect bank accounts

On Friday, OpenAI launched a new set of personal finance tools in preview for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the U.S., letting them connect their accounts and ask questions ranging from spending analysis to future financial planning.

OpenAI users can access the tool by selecting “Get started” in the “Finances” option in the sidebar, or typing “@ Finances, connect my accounts” in a ChatGPT conversation. Once users do that, the chatbot will guide them about linking accounts through Plaid. The company said it plans to support Intuit soon, which would enable analysis such as the impact of a stock sale on taxes or the odds of a credit card approval.

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🇮🇳🇦🇪 Indian Prime Minister Modi meets UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi.

#BRICS

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🇻🇪 Venezuela Pitches Oil Contract to Kick Off Talks With Drillers

Venezuela’s national oil company has begun circulating a long-awaited proposed contract to energy companies interested in working in the Latin American nation, a key step toward reviving its crude production.

The document lays out conditions for Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, to work with companies to restart oil wells, drill new ones and market production. The state-owned company began sharing the model contract late last week with oil executives, advisers and others in the industry.

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🇨🇦 Canada Strikes Deal That Sees 2027 Start to Build Oil Pipeline

Canada and Alberta have reached a deal on carbon pricing that would pave the way for construction of a new oil pipeline starting as early as 2027, while scaling back the scope of a carbon capture project that Ottawa has tied to the deal.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced the agreement on Friday, which builds on the memorandum of understanding signed in November that outlined conditions for federal support of a crude pipeline to the west coast to serve Asian markets.

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📱 Musk: Grok V9 Significantly Outperforms V8 with 1.5T Parameters

Elon Musk announced on X that the training run of his latest Grok V9 (1.5T parameters) performed “very well,” and these results have not yet been incorporated into the supplementary training data for Cursor.

The current base model version under internal development is V9, with approximately 1.5 trillion parameters, featuring significant improvements over V8 in data cleaning, training methods, and model scale, and optimized for the Blackwell architecture to enhance computational efficiency.

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🇨🇳🇺🇸 China Allows Exports for 425 US Beef Plants

China has renewed export licenses for 425 US beef plants, making way for a full resumption of trade for the protein between the two countries, according to the US Meat Export Federation.

The Asian country has extended five-year registrations to those facilities, whose licenses had lapsed last year amid trade tensions between the US and China, the trade group said. An additional 77 registrations were added to China’s Food Import Food Establishment system.

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🇺🇸🇯🇵Trump Chats With Japan’s Takaichi on Alliance After Xi Meeting

Donald Trump spoke by phone with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and they affirmed the strength of the two countries’ alliance after the US President’s visit to Beijing, according to the Japanese government.

The two leaders talked for about 15 minutes, and agreed to continue communicating on key matters including developments in the Indo-Pacific region, according to a statement released by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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🌍 Starlink's reliable high-speed internet is enabling healthcare access to underserved rural communities in Bangladesh through Grameen Health telemedicine platform and digitally connected diagnostic centers.

So far over 1.2M patients and 450K teleconsultations have been served. 🙏

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🧑‍⚖️🇧🇷 Rio de Janeiro Fuel Fraud Probe Sweeps Up Head of Refining Group

Brazil's federal police carried out search and seizure warrants against former Rio de Janeiro Governor Claudio Castro and ordered privately owned refinery Refit to halt operations in a tax evasion investigation, a Supreme Court decision showed.

The court ordered Refit's owner, ​businessman Ricardo Magro, who lives in the United States, to be arrested on pre-trial detention. As ​the country's tax authority has carried out investigations into financial crimes over the ⁠past year, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has publicly called on U.S. President Donald Trump ​to arrest Magro.

In the decision, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered Magro to be put ​on Interpol's red notice list, alerting foreign law enforcement agencies to arrest him. The ruling also froze about 52 ​billion reais ($10.3 billion) in assets, most belonging to Refit which is one of Brazil's largest chronic tax debtors, with ‌tens ⁠of billions of reais owed to federal and state authorities.

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