The local elections are under way across England, Scotland and Wales — roughly 5,000 council seats and six mayoral contests in England, plus Holyrood and Senedd votes in the devolved nations. Results will start coming through overnight into Friday. The outcome matters for Labour’s read of its mid-term standing and for how much oxygen Reform and the Conservatives can claim heading into 2027.

Shell posted Q1 profits of $6.92bn, sharply ahead of expectations, with the Iran war driving oil prices and gas revenues higher. The company did flag lower gas production going forward after damage to Gulf facilities — so the windfall has a structural cost attached. Separately, the FT notes that Exxon and Chevron have benefited considerably less than their European peers from the conflict, which is worth bearing in mind if you’re comparing integrated oil positioning across the Atlantic.

Oil has since pulled back below $100 on hopes of a deal. Iran is formally reviewing a US proposal delivered via Pakistan, and Trump said the war will be “over quickly.” The US military also fired on an Iranian-flagged tanker attempting to breach the blockade of Iranian ports, disabling its rudder — so the situation remains kinetic even as diplomacy moves. The gap between the headline optimism and what’s actually happening on the water is worth watching.

On the HSBC private credit story: the FT’s piece on how the bank took a $400m hit on collapsed mortgage lender MFS without directly lending to it is worth reading in full if you have structured credit exposure. The leverage-on-leverage dynamic it describes is a clean illustration of how losses travel through the private credit stack in ways that aren’t obvious from headline counterparty lists.

Anthropic has raised usage limits on Claude Code and credited a new commercial deal with SpaceX as part of the rationale. It follows enterprise agreements with Microsoft and Amazon. The pattern of frontier AI labs locking in large anchor customers ahead of any potential capital events is becoming a theme — each deal also narrows the window for competitors to sign the same names.

The Snap-Perplexity integration, announced only last November as a $400m deal, has been quietly unwound. Both sides described it as an “amicable” end. It’s a small data point but it adds to the picture of AI search partnerships proving harder to execute commercially than they look at signing.

The Guardian has published documents from a consortium of journalists detailing Russia’s use of Bauman Moscow State Technical University as a training ground for GRU-linked operatives in hacking and election interference. The operational detail in the reporting is specific enough to be relevant to anyone thinking about cyber risk or the integrity of electoral infrastructure ahead of the UK and European election cycles.

UK local election results are expected through Friday morning, with the mayoral contests — particularly in areas where Reform has been polling strongly — likely to set the political tone for the weekend.

Sources

Guardian, BBC News, Al Jazeera, FT, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Politico, The Economist — 2026-05-07