Top Stories — Tuesday, April 7, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- JD Vance heads to Hungary to support Viktor Orbán ahead of high-stakes election — CNBC
- Hermeus raises $350M to build autonomous hypersonic fighters — TechCrunch
- Iran war upends spring housing market. Here's what real estate agents are seeing — CNBC
JD Vance heads to Hungary to support Viktor Orbán ahead of high-stakes election
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/7/2026, 6:02:11 PM
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has U.S. President Donald Trump's "complete and total support" — but is on course to lose the country's elections, which are shaping up to be one of the most important and contentious in Europe this year.
On Tuesday, U.S. Vice President JD Vance touched down in Hungary to offer Orbán his support and address an election rally at a soccer stadium in Budapest ahead of Sunday's elections. While other European leaders have aligned themselves unambiguously with Ukraine in its war against Russia, Orbán has maintained comparatively close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. He even said on the campaign trail that the EU was a greater threat to Hungary than Russia.
The latest polls show Orbán and his Fidesz party are set to lose to their main challenger, the pro-European opposition party Tisza, with its leader, Peter Magyar, on course to replace Orbán after 16 years in power.
It would be a significant change in a country where discussions are dominated by concerns over migration, vulnerability to higher energy prices, corruption and breaches of the rule of law.
Those breaches have led the European Commission to suspend EU funds for the country — roughly 17 billion euros worth of funds are still frozen.
Magyar said unlocking funds would be his "top priority" and has signalled he would be open to pursuing closer ties with the EU, including on a potential adoption of the Euro.
In an interview with the Associated Press over the weekend, Magyar said "reaching compromise" was an "art."
He added: "The world seems to be passing by Europe. Europe has lost its competitiveness. Europe does not have enough strong leaders. There are no leaders with vision, and Europe is lagging behind."
An analysis by the German Marshall Fund said that Magyar's premiership could mean a departure from the confrontational foreign policy pursued by Orbán — and could also bring Budapest closer to its Western allies on other issues, such as unity against Russia.
But a potential Magyar government would not represent a clean break from Orbán-era policies.
Migration remains a contentious issue — and so does support for Ukraine. Tisza has taken a cautious stance on Ukraine's EU ambitions — and has even supported Orbán's government in the European Parliament by voting against sending troops or weapons to the frontline.
Energy also remains a thorny issue. Hungary is currently locked in a dispute with Ukraine over oil deliveries via the Druzhba pipeline, which led Budapest to veto a 90 billion euro loan from the EU.
In recent weeks, Orbán has focused on addressing fears of an energy price shock, stemming from the war in Iran. He accused Magyar of conspiring with the EU and Ukraine to cut Hungary off from cheap Russian oil.
The election campaign has also been closely watched for any possible outside interference from Russia, with reports of misinformation on social media particularly in focus.
Hermeus raises $350M to build autonomous hypersonic fighters
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 4/7/2026, 6:00:00 PM
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Defense startup Hermeus has raised $350 million to keep developing what it calls the “fastest unmanned aircraft,” in a funding round that has pushed its valuation to $1 billion.
The Los Angeles-based startup said Tuesday that it has raised $200 million in equity financing, led by Khosla Ventures. Existing investors Canaan Partners, Founders Fund, In-Q-Tel, and RTX Ventures also participated. New outside money is coming from the venture fund of media conglomerate Cox Enterprises, the publicly-traded closed-end management investment company Destiny Tech100, and others.
The remaining $150 million comes in the form of debt, which Hermeus co-founder and CEO AJ Piplica told TechCrunch will help the startup and its growing cap table maintain some control.
“We build a lot of hardware, we’re expanding our manufacturing capabilities, and if we can finance a large portion of our spend non-dilutively, it’s absolutely the way to do it,” he said in an interview.
Hermeus’s raise comes at a time when venture and corporate investors are flooding money into defense startups. VC investment in defense tech crossed $9 billion over 265 rounds globally last year, according to PitchBook, with corporate investors contributing $2 billion across 28 rounds.
But for Hermeus, it’s not just about good timing.
Piplica attributes at least some of the fundraising success to a change Hermeus made on the technical side a few years ago. The startup had spent time and money developing its own engine, partially out of necessity, he said. After Hermeus courted RTX Ventures — the venture arm of RTX Corporation, the defense contractor formerly known as Raytheon — a new opportunity arose.
This put Hermeus on a faster track with a proven and functional engine, making it easier to test and iterate while lining up new contracts with the U.S. government along the way. Instead of aiming at one big goal of building a Mach 5 aircraft, Hermeus was now able to diversify, according to president Zach Shore.
“This accelerates us to Mach 5, and also reinforces the economics of the business while satisfying near term demand from the from the Department of Defense,” he said. “I think in that way, you have a number of concentric circles overlapping simultaneously that reinforce the business, that reinforce the customer, and that, you know, reinforce the technology maturation.”
Last month, Hermeus flew a demonstrator version of its technology that was the size of an F-16 fighter aircraft. The startup has said it’s aiming to make the next iteration of that aircraft go supersonic. A third aircraft is in the works as well, Piplica said.
This rapid prototyping approach is hard to come by in aviation, Piplica said. He points to SpaceX as the industry standard for being willing to build, test, fail, learn, and repeat until it gets a vehicle right. That’s why the hardest challenge Hermeus faces is cultivating or developing talent, Piplica said.
“There’s nowhere in the world where companies are building new full-scale aircraft on an annual basis, clean sheet or otherwise,” he said. “People used to do that, but they’re all dead, which means you have to go make those people in one way or another.”
The new funding round will also help Hermeus continue to build out its staff, which is already approaching 300 employees.
Hermeus has now had two successful test flights (it flew a demonstrator last year that was three times smaller). But Piplica stressed the need for Hermeus to be ready for some kind of failure — which, again, he sees as part of the rapid prototyping proccess.
“The challenge is, how do you pick the right kind of chunks of risk to take on and apply your capital to over time,” he said. “Like, yeah, we could crash an airplane, and I expect it’ll happen at some point in our development program. We’re set up to do that very safely. But this is also why, like, building more aircraft is super important. If you don’t build a lot, it takes you a lot longer, because you’re gonna go baby things. You know, we wonder why it takes us 20, 25, years to develop a new aircraft?”
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
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Read the full story at TechCrunch.
Iran war upends spring housing market. Here's what real estate agents are seeing
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/7/2026, 5:56:18 PM
A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
The all-important spring housing market is well underway, but expectations are falling short due to the war in Iran and its impact on both the U.S. economy and consumer sentiment.
Mortgage rates, which were previously forecast to be far lower this spring than last, are now much higher, and concerns over employment and inflation are throwing cold water on pent-up homebuyer demand.
Buyers in the first quarter of this year were more concerned about the economy and mortgage rates than they were about home prices, according to real estate agents who participated in the quarterly CNBC Housing Market Survey.
"They're fearful of the war, they're fearful of gas prices, [for] their job security," said Faith Harmer, an agent in the Las Vegas metropolitan area.
The CNBC Housing Market Survey is a national inquiry of real estate agents selected randomly across the United States. Responses for the first-quarter survey were collected between March 24 and March 30. This quarter, 70 agents shared their insights.
When asked about their buyers' primary concern, about one-third of agents said the economy, while another third said mortgage rates. The latter marked a big jump from just 26% in the fourth quarter.
Only 9% of agents in the first-quarter survey said prices were their buyers' biggest concern, down from 18% in the previous period.
This should come as no surprise, as the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage hit a low of 5.99% the day before the Iran war started and then began to climb. It's now hovering around 6.5%.
Still, while most agents said prices were either flat or falling, nearly twice as many agents, 29%, reported home prices rising during the first quarter than did in the previous quarter. Price dynamics can vary widely depending on the market and region of the country.
But affordability is not improving as much as most experts had forecast. When asked how affordability was hitting buyers, 19% of agents said it was causing them to get out of the market. That was up from just 11% at the end of last year.
More than half of agents reported at least one contract cancellation.
"Buyers that were on the fence and deciding to buy are now on the fence and going the other direction, saying, 'I'm not going to buy,'" said Eric Bramlett, an agent in Austin, Texas.
As buyer demand drops, homes are sitting on the market longer. In the first quarter, 31% of agents reported that their listings were on the market for more than six weeks, compared with 26% in the fourth quarter.
"We just had one recently where they wanted what they wanted, and they wouldn't come down to a price that the market could bear," Harmer, the agent in Las Vegas, said. "So, in the end, they just pulled it off the market."
Sellers are now more worried about that wait time. Fully 37% of responding agents said time on the market was their sellers' top concern, compared with 30% at the end of last year.
That took share from price as sellers' top concern, falling from nearly half of agents ranking it first to 39%.
Still, fewer agents reported price cuts than the previous quarter, but that may be the result of seasonal dynamics and the impact of lower mortgage rates in the middle of the first quarter, which gave buyers more purchasing power.
That may also be why fewer agents said they had to delist homes compared with the fourth quarter, when agents reported a slower-than-usual fall market with more frustrated sellers.
Even as concerns over the economy and interest rates rise, agents in the first quarter still said the market was either in the buyer's favor or balanced. The share that called it a buyer's market did drop quarter to quarter, from 42% to 36%, likely due to those new buyer headwinds – higher mortgage rates, the war and a weaker job market. And sellers are taking note.
"We've had two sellers who were planning on listing in May already decide, 'Let's hold, let's search later in the summer for our next home to buy, and then we'll try and list in the fall,'" said Dana Bull, an agent in the Boston area. "So they originally thought that the spring would be perfect for them, because it just felt like it was going to be the best time, and now they don't feel as confident, and they want to wait and see."
Just over half of agents surveyed said they expect the market to improve as the spring goes on, but that share is way down from the end of last year, when there was no war in the picture.
A higher share of agents said they expect the market to stay the same as last quarter, which is significant, given that the market is going from the historically slowest season for housing to the usually busiest.
CNBC's Property Play with Diana Olick covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, delivered weekly to your inbox.
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