Science
FDA Approves AstraZeneca's Baxfendy (Baxdrostat), the First-in-Class Aldosterone Synthase Inhibitor for Hard-to-Treat Hypertension
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on May 18, 2026 granted full approval to AstraZeneca's once-daily oral tablet Baxfendy — generic name baxdrostat — making it the first aldosterone synthase inhibitor ever cleared anywhere in the world. The new mechanism selectively blocks the CYP11B2 enzyme that drives aldosterone synthesis without touching cortisol, and is indicated as add-on therapy for adults with uncontrolled or treatment-resistant hypertension. Approval rests on the 22,000-patient BaxHTN, BaxHTN-OL and BaxResist programme, in which 2 mg of baxdrostat layered on top of standard care lowered seated systolic blood pressure by an additional 9.8 mmHg at twelve weeks versus placebo.
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Entertainment
Cristian Mungiu's Norwegian Drama 'Fjord' Earns a Twelve-Minute Cannes Standing Ovation with Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve in Tears
Cristian Mungiu's English-language debut 'Fjord' world-premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on the night of May 18, 2026, receiving a twelve-minute standing ovation in the Grand Théâtre Lumière — the longest of the festival to date and matching Sunday night's Adèle Exarchopoulos vehicle 'Garance.' Stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve both cried openly during the bow as Mungiu, the 2007 Palme d'Or winner for '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,' bowed alongside cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru and Neon's North American distribution team. Bookmakers immediately moved Fjord to joint second favourite for the Palme d'Or behind Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland.'
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Finance
Federal Jury Throws Out Elon Musk's Lawsuit Against Sam Altman and OpenAI on Statute-of-Limitations Grounds in Under Two Hours
A nine-member advisory jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland deliberated for less than two hours on May 18, 2026 before unanimously concluding that Elon Musk waited too long to sue Sam Altman and OpenAI for allegedly steering the lab away from its founding nonprofit mission. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers adopted the jury's finding and dismissed the case, including parallel claims against Microsoft, on the ground that the three-year California statute of limitations had run before Musk filed in 2024. Musk called the verdict a 'calendar technicality' on X and vowed to appeal.
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World
Federal Prosecutors Seek a 50-Year Sentence for Aimee Bock as the Feeding Our Future Architect Faces Reckoning on May 21
Federal prosecutors in the District of Minnesota filed a sentencing memorandum on May 18, 2026 asking U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel to impose a 50-year prison term on Aimee Bock, the Minneapolis nonprofit founder convicted in March 2026 for orchestrating the nation's largest pandemic-era food-aid fraud — a scheme that diverted roughly $250 million in federal child-nutrition meal reimbursements through more than 200 sham meal sites. Bock's lawyers are asking for time served or no more than 37 months. Sentencing is set for Thursday, May 21 in Minneapolis.
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Science
Twenty-Seven Candidate 'Tatooine' Worlds Detected as UNSW Team Reinvents the Hunt for Circumbinary Planets via Apsidal Precession
A University of New South Wales-led team has reported in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society the detection of twenty-seven new candidate circumbinary planets — worlds that orbit a pair of stars rather than just one — by tracking subtle, planet-induced 'apsidal precession' wobbles in 1,590 eclipsing binary systems observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The result, accepted on 11 March 2026 and trailed at a Star Wars Day briefing on 4 May, is roughly double the prior known catalogue of confirmed circumbinary planets and breaks a long-standing observational bias that has restricted detection almost entirely to coplanar transit geometries.
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Tech
NASA Lunabotics Finals Open at Kennedy Space Center as Ten Student Teams Build Moon-Digging Robots for Artemis Berm Construction
NASA's 2026 Lunabotics Challenge tipped off on Tuesday 19 May at the Astronauts Memorial Foundation's Center for Space Education inside the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, where ten US college teams that survived the May 12-17 qualifying round at the University of Central Florida's Exolith Lab will spend three days running fully autonomous lunar excavators across the Artemis Arena's simulated regolith. Each rover must mine and place enough icy and dry simulant to construct a defensive berm protecting future Artemis surface infrastructure, with the winners walking away with NASA-named hardware grants and direct pipeline visibility into the agency's Marshall and Glenn engineering centres.
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Entertainment
Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson Earn 5-Minute Cannes Ovation for Quentin Dupieux's Absurd Midnight Comedy 'Full Phil'
Quentin Dupieux's English-language absurdist comedy 'Full Phil' had its world premiere in the Midnight Screenings sidebar of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on Sunday 17 May, drawing a lively five-minute standing ovation for stars Kristen Stewart, Woody Harrelson, Emma Mackey, Charlotte Le Bon, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim despite a mixed critical response to the writer-director's surreal father-and-daughter Paris hatefest. Stewart, playing daughter Madeleine, pulled faces at the camera and waved up to the balcony as the crowd cheered, while Harrelson, who plays American business magnate Philip Doom, locked into the kind of weird-out role Dupieux has built four prior American features on, from 'Rubber' onward.
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Finance
Home Depot Posts Q1 2026 Revenue Surge but Earnings Slip as Pro Outpaces DIY and Mortgage Rates Bite
Home Depot opened its fiscal first-quarter 2026 reporting before the bell on May 19 with net sales rising approximately 4.4% year-on-year to $41.6 billion against a Wall Street consensus, while diluted earnings per share fell 4.2% to roughly $3.41 as elevated U.S. mortgage rates continued to weigh on big-ticket discretionary remodelling and shifted the comp-store mix toward the contractor-driven Pro segment, which outperformed the do-it-yourself customer for a second consecutive quarter. Shares of HD have declined more than 21% over the past twelve months heading into the print, and the call at 9:00 a.m. Eastern with CEO Ted Decker and CFO Richard McPhail is being parsed for any update to full-year guidance.
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World
Sandy Fire Tears Through Simi Valley Brush, Forces Reagan Library to Close and Spreads to 836 Acres
A fast-moving brush blaze named the Sandy Fire broke out near the 600 block of Sandy Avenue in Simi Valley, California, late Monday afternoon and by Tuesday morning had grown to 836 acres at zero containment, prompting evacuation orders across multiple zones in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, the closure of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and a system-wide shutdown of Simi Valley Unified School District schools. Roughly 550 firefighters, three fixed-wing air tankers and five helicopters are attacking the fire from the canyons north of Highway 118, while a temporary evacuation point has opened at Rancho Santa Susana Community Park and a large-animal shelter at the Ventura County Fairgrounds in Ventura.
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Science
Twenty-Two Painted Coffins of 'Amun's Singers' and Eight Sealed Papyri Found in Hidden Luxor Chamber
A joint Egyptian-Egyptian archaeological mission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Zahi Hawass Foundation announced this week the discovery of a sealed cache of 22 polychrome anthropoid wooden coffins of Chanters and Chantresses of Amun, with their mummies still inside, alongside eight intact sealed papyri, in the southwestern corner of the courtyard of the 18th-Dynasty tomb of Djeserkaraseneb (TT38) at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna on the Theban West Bank near Luxor. The coffins, dating to the Third Intermediate Period roughly between 1070 and 945 BC, were stacked in two layers in a 3-by-2-metre chamber accessed via a vertical shaft cut into the courtyard floor; most carry professional titles such as 'Chanter of Amun' or 'Chantress of the Interior of Amun's Temple' rather than personal names.
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Science
Most Complete European Stegosaur Skull Found in a Spanish Crop Field Rewrites the Plated-Dinosaur Family Tree
Paleontologists at the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis announced on May 15, 2026 the description of the most complete stegosaurian skull ever recovered in Europe — a roughly 150-million-year-old specimen of the iconic plated dinosaur Dacentrurus armatus excavated from an Upper Jurassic crop field outside Riodeva in Teruel, Spain. The fossil preserves the frontal, postorbital, squamosal, parietal and supraoccipital bones as well as an associated cervical vertebra that confirmed the identification. Reporting in PLOS One, the team led by Sergio Sánchez-Fenollosa proposes a substantially revised stegosaurian phylogeny anchored on a new clade, Neostegosauria, and announces that the same Sierra de Javalambre site has yielded nearly 200 additional fossils representing at least two Dacentrurus individuals at different growth stages.
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Entertainment
Na Hong-jin's 'Hope' Lights Up Cannes with Fassbender and Vikander as Royal Aliens
Korean auteur Na Hong-jin returned to feature film for the first time in a decade with the world premiere of his 160-minute science-fiction monster epic 'Hope' in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on Sunday evening, May 17, 2026. The screening in the Grand Théâtre Lumière drew a six-minute standing ovation for a cast led by real-life married couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander — playing high-status aliens crash-landed in the South Korean fishing town of Hope Harbor — alongside Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton. Neon had pre-bought North-American rights for an eight-figure sum at last year's American Film Market, and Na confirmed in the press conference that a script for a sequel is already on his desk.
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Finance
NextEra to Buy Dominion in $67 Billion All-Stock Deal Built Around AI Data-Centre Power
NextEra Energy on Monday, May 18, 2026 announced an all-stock agreement to acquire Dominion Energy in a transaction valued at nearly $67 billion, creating the largest regulated electric utility in the world by market capitalisation. The deal pairs Florida-based NextEra — the leading US renewables and battery-storage developer — with Richmond-based Dominion, the utility that powers the Northern Virginia data-centre cluster that already consumes about 25 per cent of all US data-centre electricity. NextEra shareholders will own 74.5 per cent of the combined company, Dominion holders 25.5 per cent, and CEO John Ketchum will lead the merged group while Dominion CEO Robert Blue takes over its regulated utilities and a board seat.
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World
Long Island Rail Road Strike Cripples New York Commute on First Walkout in 32 Years
Five unions representing about 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, May 16, 2026, shutting down the busiest commuter railroad in the United States and leaving nearly 300,000 daily passengers without service for a third straight day. Governor Kathy Hochul urged employers to allow remote work on Monday, May 18, while the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the union coalition — led by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen — returned to the bargaining table at MTA headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The dispute centres on the first general pay rise sought by LIRR crews since 2022 and on rising healthcare premiums; it is the first walkout on the 191-year-old railroad since the 11-day stoppage of June 1994.
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Science
61 New Rove-Beetle Species Hiding in Plain Sight Highlight the Vast 'Linnean Shortfall'
A team at the Natural History Museum of Denmark led by entomologist Aslak Kappel Hansen has formally described 61 new species in the rove-beetle genus Platydracus from China — more than doubling the previously catalogued Chinese diversity of the group in a single paper — in the May 15, 2026 issue of Insect Systematics and Diversity. The integrative taxonomic revision combined museum-collection morphology with COI-barcode sequencing of 412 specimens drawn from holdings going back to the 1880s and from recent fieldwork in Yunnan, Sichuan and the Hengduan Mountains. Many of the new species are several centimetres long and strikingly coloured, dramatising the so-called 'Linnean shortfall' — the gap between the roughly two million catalogued species and the estimated total in nature, which for rove beetles alone may exceed three hundred thousand.
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Tech
Cambridge Team Cracks the 'Impossible LED' by Electrically Powering Insulating Nanoparticles
A University of Cambridge group led by Akshay Rao at the Cavendish Laboratory and Optoelectronics Group has reported in Nature on May 18, 2026 the first electrically driven light-emitting diodes built from lanthanide-doped insulating nanoparticles, a class of material previously thought impossible to operate as an LED because charge carriers cannot move through their crystalline framework. The team attached custom organic 'molecular antennas' to the nanoparticle surface that capture electrical energy and shuttle it to the embedded lanthanide ions through a triplet-state hand-off with greater than 98 per cent efficiency. The resulting 'LnLEDs' operate at roughly 5 volts and produce exceptionally narrow-band light in the second near-infrared window (NIR-II), where biological tissue is most transparent, opening a clear path to injectable and wearable deep-tissue medical-imaging devices.
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Entertainment
YouTuber's $1 Million Horror Film 'Obsession' Earns 16 Times Its Budget in Opening Weekend
'Obsession', the supernatural horror feature debut of YouTuber Curry Barker acquired by Focus Features for a reported $14 million out of Blumhouse, opened to roughly $16.1 million across 2,615 North American screens during the May 15–17, 2026 weekend, finishing third behind holdovers 'Michael' and 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' and earning an A- CinemaScore plus a 94% Rotten Tomatoes audience score. The picture, shot for under $1 million in 21 days in Sacramento, multiplied its production budget more than 16-fold in three days, the strongest opening-weekend budget multiple of any wide release so far in 2026 and the best for a horror title since 'M3GAN' in 2023. Worldwide grosses reached $23.1 million by Sunday night.
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Finance
Anthropic in Talks to Raise $30 Billion at a $900 Billion Valuation, Eclipsing OpenAI
Bloomberg reported on May 12, 2026 that Claude-maker Anthropic is negotiating a $30 billion funding round that would push its post-money valuation north of $900 billion — more than double the $380 billion mark it set only three months earlier and ahead of OpenAI's most recent $852 billion private valuation. The round, in talks for several weeks and now expected to close by month-end, is supported by an annualised revenue run-rate that has climbed from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $30 billion in April 2026 and is on pace to clear $45 billion by mid-summer. The fundraise comes alongside an enlarged enterprise alliance with PwC announced on May 14, under which the Big-Four firm is rolling out Claude Code and Cowork to its global workforce and certifying 30,000 US professionals on Anthropic's models.
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World
Congo Opens Three Ebola Treatment Centres in Ituri as WHO Declares Global Health Emergency
Democratic Republic of Congo Health Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba on Sunday May 17, 2026 announced the opening of three Ebola treatment centres in Ituri Province, hours after the World Health Organization had declared the outbreak in eastern Congo and neighbouring Uganda a 'public health emergency of international concern'. As of Monday May 18 the DRC was reporting 10 laboratory-confirmed and 336 suspected cases with 88 deaths, all caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain of ebolavirus, for which no licensed vaccine or therapeutic exists. A 35-strong WHO advance team has reached Bunia, the provincial capital, with roughly seven tonnes of emergency medical supplies.
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Science
Satellites Reveal 260 Mass Tombs Older Than the Pyramids in Sudan's Atbai Desert
A new study published in the African Archaeological Review on May 15, 2026 reports that researchers with the Atbai Survey Project have mapped 280 previously undocumented stone-built circular and oval burial monuments scattered between the Middle Nile and the Red Sea Hills in eastern Sudan. At least 260 of the structures are large enough — some reaching 80 metres in diameter — to qualify as monumental, and radiocarbon dates from earlier excavations at Wadi Khashab and Bir Asele place the tradition between roughly 4500 and 2000 BC, making it older than Egypt's pyramids. The team, led by University of Naples 'L'Orientale' archaeologist Andrea Manzo, used multispectral satellite imagery to scan a region too dangerous to walk during Sudan's civil war.
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Tech
Figure AI's Humanoid Robot 'Jim' Sorts 101,000 Packages in 81 Autonomous Hours
Figure AI, the Sunnyvale humanoid-robot startup founded by Brett Adcock, has wrapped an 81-hour uninterrupted livestream in which a single bipedal robot named 'Jim' running its proprietary Helix-02 model sorted 101,391 packages on a real conveyor belt in its San Jose logistics hangar — with no teleoperation, no battery swap and no human touch on the box flow. The trial began on May 14, 2026 with a stated 8-hour goal and was still running as of 11 a.m. on May 17, when the company posted the final tally. Adcock told Bloomberg the run is the first 24/7 demonstration of fully autonomous package handling by a humanoid, and analysts say it raises the bar that Amazon Robotics, Apptronik and Tesla's Optimus team will have to clear before the end of the year.
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Entertainment
'Garance' Lands a Wild 12-Minute Standing Ovation at Cannes, the Longest of the 79th Edition
French director Jeanne Herry's competition entry 'Garance', starring Adèle Exarchopoulos as a struggling thirty-something actress fighting alcoholism, family tragedy and a misfiring love life, drew a wild 12-minute standing ovation at its premiere in the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Sunday evening, May 17, 2026 — the longest sustained applause of the 79th Cannes Film Festival so far. Herry, who previously brought 'Park Bench' and 'Pupille' to Cannes, was joined on stage by co-stars Karim Leklou, Anaïs Demoustier and Reda Kateb. Trade press said the picture vaulted overnight to joint second favourite for the Palme d'Or behind Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland'.
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Finance
China Commits to Buying $17 Billion of American Farm Goods a Year After Beijing Summit
The White House on Sunday, May 17, 2026, released a fact sheet stating that China has agreed to purchase at least $17 billion of U.S. agricultural products annually in 2026, 2027 and 2028. The commitments — formally lodged during President Donald Trump's two-day Beijing summit with President Xi Jinping the previous week — also restore market access for U.S. beef by re-listing more than 400 American beef plants, lift the ban on poultry imports, add 200 Boeing aircraft to Chinese carriers' order books, and create twin U.S.–China Boards of Trade and Investment. American soybean and beef futures climbed in overnight trading on the Chicago Board of Trade as farm-state senators welcomed the largest bilateral agricultural understanding since the 2020 Phase One deal.
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World
A House-Sized Asteroid Slips Past Earth Closer Than the Moon on May 18
Asteroid 2026 JH2, a near-Earth space rock between 16 and 35 metres wide, makes its closest approach to our planet at 21:23 UTC on Monday, May 18, 2026, skimming by at just over 90,000 kilometres — less than a quarter of the distance to the Moon. The object was only discovered on May 10 by the Mt. Lemmon Survey in Arizona, and NASA confirms it poses zero risk of impact. The Virtual Telescope Project in Italy is hosting a public livestream from Ceccano, and astronomers say the flyby is a useful real-world test of the planetary-defense detection network.
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