Saturday, May 23, 2026
The DRC Ebola outbreak has reached nearly 750 suspected cases and 177 deaths, making it the third largest in recorded history and prompting officials to raise the risk level as it spreads rapidly toward the Uganda border. Health authorities have intensified screening and containment measures at the DRC-Uganda crossing, drawing on hard lessons from the 2014-16 West Africa epidemic that killed over 11,000 people.
The Trump administration has closed a longstanding pathway that allowed visa holders already living in the US to adjust their status to permanent residency without leaving the country. The USCIS policy memo, effective immediately, forces applicants to return to their home countries and apply through the State Department — a move immigration attorneys warn will strand hundreds of thousands of people mid-process.
SpaceX's 12th Starship test flight lifted off from Boca Chica, Texas, debuting a fully redesigned version of the mega-rocket that NASA is counting on to land astronauts on the Moon. The launch came two days after CEO Elon Musk announced SpaceX's IPO, with the vehicle carrying 20 mock Starlink satellites as a demonstration payload.
Authorities in Orange County ordered 40,000 residents to evacuate after a storage tank of methyl methacrylate — a highly flammable industrial chemical — began dangerously off-gassing and threatened to explode at a GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove. The tank has been described as "actively in crisis," and residents within the evacuation zone have been urged to leave immediately.
Researchers used AI to reconstruct the voices of pilots killed in crashes by processing spectrogram images from cockpit voice recorder transcripts — raising immediate ethical and legal questions about the use of crash investigation materials. The National Transportation Safety Board temporarily shut down public access to its entire docket system in response to the incident.
