Fdd's overnight brief

Israel

Doctors Without Borders suspended all noncritical services at one of Gaza’s largest hospitals, the group said, alleging that the facility was being used by armed men, some masked, to intimidate and arrest patients and potentially move weapons. – Wall Street Journal

Israel’s cabinet on Sunday approved further measures to tighten Israel’s control over the occupied West Bank and make it easier for settlers to buy land, a move Palestinians called a “de-facto annexation”. – Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he told U.S. President Donald Trump last week that any U.S. deal with Iran must include the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, not just stopping the enrichment process. – Reuters

Israel fired airstrikes across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing at least 11 Palestinians, Palestinian officials said, in what the military called a response to ceasefire violations by Palestinian militant group Hamas. – Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza. – Reuters

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar will attend U.S. President Donald Trump’s first formal Board of Peace meeting on February 19, two Israeli officials said on Saturday. – Reuters

A U.N. human rights spokesperson expressed concern on Friday about attacks on independent U.N. experts after several European governments criticised the organisation’s special rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, and called for her resignation. – Reuters

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed at a White House meeting on Wednesday that the U.S. would work to reduce Iran’s oil exports to China, Axios reported, citing two U.S. officials briefed on the issue. – Reuters

Israeli prosecutors said Monday that they plan to charge a settler in the killing of a Palestinian activist during a confrontation that was caught on video, opening a rare prosecution of violence by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. – Associated Press

Indonesia has begun training a contingent of up to 8,000 soldiers it plans to send as part of an international peacekeeping force to Gaza, the first firm commitment to a critical element of U.S. President Donald Trump’s postwar reconstruction plan. – Associated Press

As Indonesia emerges as the first nation to openly announce its preparations to contribute troops to a new peacekeeping mission established under President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war in Gaza, a senior Hamas official has revealed to Newsweek the group’s conditions for accepting foreign troops on Palestinian soil. – Newsweek

Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas called on Saturday for the removal of “all obstacles” he said Israel has imposed on the implementation of phase two of the Gaza ceasefire. – Times of Israel

The IDF found a weapons cache belonging to Hamas’s Rafah brigade during operational activity in the area of the Yellow Line in southern Gaza on Monday, the IDF announced. – Jerusalem Post

Israeli company Autonomous Guard has secured its first foothold in the Indian security market through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) valued at approximately $1.9 million, the company announced on Monday. – Jerusalem Post

NGOs with an anti-Israel bias have been waiting for an opportunity to label Israel with terms such as ‘genocide’ for over 20 years, and the Gaza war finally gave them the opportunity, Dr. Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. – Jerusalem Post

A wave of recent reporting and newly released documents detailing the relationship between former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein has reignited claims that Epstein worked for Israel’s Mossad, a theory Israeli intelligence sources and senior political leaders are forcefully rejecting. – Fox News

Senior Hamas official Basem Naim has told the far-left American outlet Drop Site that the terrorist organization will not agree to unilateral disarmament demands. – Arutz Sheva

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday condemned the Israeli government, after it approved the initiation of the process of land registration in Judea and Samaria, for the first time since 1967. – Arutz Sheva

The Rada’a force, part of Hamas’s “resistance security” branch, reported that several Palestinian Arabs, referred to as “Israeli agents,” surrendered themselves during the day. – Arutz Sheva

The IDF estimates that the code name for launching the October 7 massacre was a sequence of emojis sent by Hamas’s military wing to its operatives. The assessment emerged from an analysis of phones belonging to Nukhba terrorists that were seized on the day of the attack. – Arutz Sheva

The terrorists targeted in the strikes had recently been operating to reestablish the military capabilities of the terror organizations in the Gaza Strip and to advance terrorist attacks against IDF troops and the State of Israel. During one of the strikes, the IDF eliminated the terrorist Ahmad Bayouk, who infiltrated the Reim base during the October 7th massacre. – Arutz Sheva

Bassem Naim, a senior official in the Hamas terrorist organization, sharply criticized Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ initiative to advance approval of a “temporary constitution of the State of Palestine.” – Arutz Sheva

Rabbi Yair Hoffman writes: The PA’s draft constitution is not merely a political document. It is an act of historical warfare-an attempt to establish, in constitutional stone, the erasure of Jewish connection to Jerusalem. It claims to protect the city’s “religious character” while deliberately excluding the oldest and deepest religious connection to the city. It invokes “international law” while violating its most fundamental principles. – Arutz Sheva

Amine Ayoub writes: Critics will argue that this violates international norms. On the contrary, it restores them. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which handles every other refugee group on the planet, prioritizes local integration and resettlement. UNRWA is the only agency whose mandate is to prevent integration. By applying the “Symmetry” logic, Israel is simply demanding that the same standards applied to Jewish refugees from Egypt and Yemen be applied to the residents of Gaza and Jenin. It is an act of administrative justice that levels the historical playing field. In the halls of the Knesset and the corridors of the U.S. Congress, this must be the new litmus test for aid. We must stop asking “How do we reform UNRWA?” and start asking “How do we sunset it?” The answer lies in the 1948 Symmetry Act. – Arutz Sheva

Zineb Riboua writes: The central challenge facing the United States is constructing an international economic order capable of outperforming authoritarian alternatives over time. The US-Israel relationship demonstrates what that order looks like when it matures: integrated innovation, institutional trust, and resilience verified under stress. Alliances built on codevelopment and shared industrial capacity generate compounding returns. The United States possesses one that works. Washington now needs to protect it and scale it as part of a broader allied economic architecture for the next generation. – Hudson Institute

Tsiporah Fried writes: Recognizing Somaliland could be part of a broader and more coherent European strategic posture against this interference. Ties with Somaliland would help construct a robust anti-Islamist coalition anchored both on the Continent and along key strategic corridors, sending a powerful political signal. […] Furthermore, recognition could help the US diversify basing options (it already operates Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti), reduce its dependence on a single host country, provide a more reliable counterterrorism partner against al-Shabaab, and maintain a way to shape the Red Sea’s security architecture. The question, therefore, is not whether recognition of Somaliland is legitimate, but how much longer Western nations will look the other way at the cost of their strategic credibility. – Hudson Institute

Russia and Ukraine

Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was almost certainly killed by a poison derived from a rare frog toxin in an Arctic prison colony two years ago, several European governments said Saturday. – Wall Street Journal

Ukrainian authorities opened a criminal case against the country’s former energy minister German Galushchenko one day after he was caught at the border trying to flee the country — the latest charges in a $100 million corruption probe that has ensnared some of Ukraine’s highest-ranking officials and shaken the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky. – Washington Post

Ukrainian and Russian officials planned to meet on Tuesday in Switzerland for a new round of U.S.-brokered peace talks, but hopes of a breakthrough to end the war were low. – New York Times

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday that Ukrainian intelligence showed more Russian attacks on energy targets lay ahead and that such strikes made it more difficult to reach an agreement on ending the nearly four-year war. – Reuters

The Kremlin on Monday flatly rejected accusations from five European countries that the Russian state had killed Alexei Navalny two years ago using toxin from poison dart frogs, but his widow said the truth had finally been proven. – Reuters

The Kremlin said on Monday that what it called the “main issues”, including sensitive questions of territory, would be discussed in peace talks on Ukraine due to be held in Geneva this week. – Reuters

Russia’s defence ministry said on Monday that it had downed 345 Ukrainian drones in the past 24 hours and taken control of two settlements, state media reported. – Reuters

Ukraine has agreed new energy and military support packages with European allies ahead of the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday. – Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday called “troubling” a report by five European allies blaming Russia for killing late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny using toxin from poison dart frogs, adding that Washington had no reason to question it. – Reuters

Russia’s Black Sea port of Taman, which handles oil products, grain, coal and commodities, has been damaged by a Ukrainian drone attack, the governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region said on Sunday. – Reuters

Russia is suffering “crazy losses” in Ukraine, tallying around 65,000 soldiers over the last two months, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference. – Reuters

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday he had visited a joint Ukrainian-German drone production facility and received the first jointly made attack drone. – Reuters

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he held a meeting with Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah and a prominent voice in the opposition, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday. – Reuters

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on Friday that he had invited his Chinese counterpart to visit Ukraine, adding that Beijing could help to end the four-year war with Russia. – Reuters

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Sunday she felt that EU governments were not ready to give Ukraine a date for membership despite a demand to do so from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. – Reuters

China offered new humanitarian energy assistance to Ukraine — even as a senior U.S. official said Beijing has the power to stop Russia’s invasion and has chosen not to. – Fox News

George F. Will writes: Writing in Foreign Affairs (“Russia’s Descent Into Tyranny”), Nina Khrushcheva of the New School reports that in 2023, “1984,” George Orwell’s dystopian novel about a regime resting on mass surveillance and incessant propaganda, was, according to a Russian bookstore chain, its most stolen book. In the first half of 2025, the most stolen item was the Russian constitution, which guarantees free speech and forbids censorship. Hence, a Russian joke: “We read Orwell for his reflection of reality, and the constitution as a beautiful utopia.” Negotiate accordingly. – Washington Post

Natalie Gumenyuk writes: At a pipe plant in Nikopol, a city across the Dnipro River and less than five miles from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which Russia controls, I asked a crane operator, Yevhen Bilousov, when he thought the war might end. The factory was ringed with antidrone nets, its windows covered by metal sheets perforated by shrapnel holes, but the work carried on. The question itself was meaningless, he told me, “because everything depends not on when but on how the war ends.” – New York Times

Michael Kofman writes: Wars are contests of will and endurance as much as they are contests of systems. Washington is visibly impatient, seeking a settlement by the summer, but an artificial timetable cannot easily be imposed on this conflict. This is not, and was never, simply about land. Moscow aims to impose its will on Ukraine and destroy it as an independent state with a distinct national identity. Ukraine suffers from exhaustion, but not desperation. Although Ukraine faces challenges, time is less and less on Russia’s side, however much Moscow portrays the situation otherwise. Moscow cannot wish away the fundamental mismatch between the military means it has available and the political aims it seeks to achieve. – Foreign Affairs

Maksym Beznosiuk and William Dixon write: But the real challenge is not technical or even financial, but political. Europe must treat Ukraine’s electricity grid as strategic military infrastructure, equivalent in importance to command centers or ammunition depots. This will require a reordering of priorities and recognition that every day Russia operates without cost is a day the Kremlin believes it can wait out European resolve. Officials in Brussels and in talks in the UAE must understand clearly that without a functioning Ukrainian energy grid, there is nothing to negotiate. Europe must act as if the outcome depends on it. Because it does. – Center for European Policy Analysis

Michael Kofman writes: Arguably, both countries have evolved from simplistic quantitative calculations at the center of their thinking about nuclear deterrence and relative advantage. If so, this will be tested in the years to come. Admittedly, some nuclear primacy arguments still suffer from more is more thinking, fixation on capability gaps, and unnecessarily onerous assumptions about force requirements that combine Russian and Chinese arsenals. Similarly, arguments that presume an arms race is inevitable in the absence of arms control may run headlong into a scenario where there is no destabilizing arms race at a time when there is no arms control. Ultimately, defense planners in Russia, China, and the United States will have to grapple with DiNanno’s question in Geneva, “How much deterrence is enough?” – War on the Rocks

Peter Rutland writes: It would be unwise to extrapolate from this movie and treat it as evidence that the Russian army is a spent force and unable to continue waging the war. It is hard to say how representative the documentary’s unit is of the Russian army as a whole. Despite their despair and dysfunction, they continue to do their jobs, albeit in a limited capacity. Much of the Red Army, which conquered Berlin in 1945, could well have looked something like this. Every army in the world, to be sure, has units like this. While Ukrainian complaints about the film are understandable, it remains a valuable piece of journalism. Few viewers will come away with a more positive opinion of Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Unfortunately, the film will not be shown in Russia anytime soon. That is the one place where it could have had a real impact. – National Interest

Iraq

An Iraqi-Emirati consortium is planning a $700 million subsea-and-terrestrial data cable linking the United Arab Emirates to Turkey via Iraq, one of the project’s backers said, just over a week after the announcement of a Saudi-backed fibre-optic project in Syria. – Reuters

Iraq is in talks with other countries including Arab and Muslim states to repatriate Islamic State prisoners, its foreign minister said, and the U.S. military said it had completed a mission to transfer thousands of IS detainees to Iraq from Syria. – Reuters

Ab Boskany writes: Ayatollah Khamenei has already issued a fatwa for jihad against the United States and Israel should Iran be attacked. Similar fatwas may follow from Sunni religious figures to unite against their common enemy Israel. The main beneficiary of the aftermath of this war will be Turkey, not Israel. The groups driving this threat are not fringe actors. They form the core of the PMF’s combat power and control key economic and security levers. Their leaders have repeatedly affirmed their allegiance to Iran’s Supreme Leader. When the missiles start flying, these militias will not hesitate to act, and the Iraqi uniform they wear will offer them political protection while they do so.- Times of Israel

Middle East & North Africa

Tunisian police detained opposition figure Olfa Hamdi as she arrived at the country’s main airport on Sunday, local media reported, in the latest move against a critic of President Kais Saied. – Reuters

Almost one year after he was jailed, Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu has told Reuters that Tayyip Erdogan should call elections “now” and predicted that the president would lose if he ran again. – Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has ended temporary protected status for Yemen, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said on Friday, the latest move targeting immigrants. – Reuters

Morocco, Greece, and Albania are in advanced discussions with the United States to send soldiers as part of the international stabilization force in the Gaza Strip, Kan 11 News reported on Monday evening. – Arutz Sheva

Qatar is considering paying the highest amount for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip as part of the effort established by U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Peace Council,” as reported this evening (Monday) on Kan News. – Arutz Sheva

The past weekend, along the Egypt border, marked by harsh weather conditions and thick haze, was exploited by smuggling networks to flood the border with weapon-laden drones. – Arutz Sheva

China

Beijing’s recent announcement of an investigation into its top general was a bombshell with a mystery at its heart: What pushed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to purge a friend he had entrusted to overhaul the military? – Wall Street Journal

In the lush, misty valleys of southwest China, satellite imagery reveals the country’s accelerating nuclear buildup, a force designed for a new age of superpower rivalry. – New York Times

China’s foreign ministry commissioner’s office in Hong Kong said on Saturday it had summoned the heads of the UK, U.S., Australian and European Union missions over their officials’ negative comments on Jimmy Lai’s sentencing. – Reuters

China is the real threat to security and is hypocritically claiming to uphold U.N. principles of peace, Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung said on Sunday in a rebuff to comments by China’s top diplomat at the Munich Security Conference. – Reuters

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with his Canadian counterpart, Anita Anand, at the Munich Security Conference and praised Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent visit to China as “fruitful”, state news agency Xinhua said on Sunday. – Reuters

Gordon G. Chang writes: After the removal of Zhang and Liu, the seven-member Central Military Commission now has only two members, neither of whom are operational military officers. Those two are Xi Jinping himself and Gen. Zhang Shengmin, a political commissar. […] Conventional wisdom continues to overstate Xi’s power. “In China, the CCP controls the gun,” wrote Joseph DeTrani, a former associate director of National Intelligence, “and Mr. Xi controls the CCP.” That is the way the system is supposed to work, but that’s not the way it is working now. Xi’s continual removals of flag officers have not given him the control he obviously craves. – Newsweek

Asia

The Japanese authorities on Friday night released a Chinese fishing boat captain after seizing his vessel and holding him for more than 30 hours, a move that had threatened to intensify the tensions that have simmered between Japan and China for months. – New York Times

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday his government would not help Australians in a Syrian camp holding families of suspected Islamic State militants return home, with the government open to prosecutions if they make it back. – Reuters

The Philippines takes “strong exception” to a statement by the Chinese Embassy in Manila that the simmering diplomatic spat between the two countries could result in millions of jobs being lost, the foreign ministry said, adding such comments could be seen as coercive. – Reuters

A man accused of opening fire on a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach in an attack that killed 15 people appeared in court for the first time on Monday, Australian media reported. – Reuters

Taiwan’s parliament will prioritise the review of a $40 billion special defence budget when it resumes work after the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, its speaker said on Monday following concern about delays from U.S. lawmakers. – Reuters

Taiwan will strengthen its defence efforts and safeguard the island’s security in the year ahead, President Lai Ching-te said in his Lunar New Year message released on Sunday. – Reuters

Australia said on Sunday it would spend A$3.9 billion ($2.76 billion) to progress construction of a shipyard that will help deliver nuclear-powered submarines under the trilateral AUKUS defence pact with the U.S. and Britain. – Reuters

Vietnam’s government has allowed SpaceX to launch its Starlink satellite internet service in the country, state media reported on Saturday. – Reuters

Japan wants to ship carbon emissions to Malaysia in a first-of-its-kind project in Southeast Asia for carbon capture and storage, a widely debated process that critics say is more symbolic than effective in curbing climate change. – Associated Press

Africa

Ten million people face hunger in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s east, and it isn’t because there is no food to be had. It is largely because people can’t get what food there is. – Wall Street Journal

The first wave of United States military personnel has arrived in Nigeria, marking the beginning of a deployment of approximately 200 American intelligence analysts, advisers and trainers to assist the country’s armed forces in targeted counterterrorism operations aimed in part at protecting Nigerian Christians, officials from both countries confirmed on Friday. – New York Times

U.S. President Donald Trump’s pick for ambassador to South Africa, conservative activist and writer Leo Brent Bozell III, has arrived in the country where he will seek to improve fraught ties between the two states. – Reuters

Seven Ghanaian tomato traders were killed when Islamist insurgents attacked the town of Titao in northern Burkina Faso on Saturday, Ghana’s interior minister has said. – Reuters

Nigerian troops have repelled simultaneous assaults by Islamist militants on two military bases in Borno state, leaving an unspecified number of soldiers dead, the army said on Monday, in some of the fiercest clashes reported in the northeast this year. – Reuters

A feud between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates across the Horn of Africa is overshadowing this weekend’s African Union summit, though most of the continent’s leaders will try to avoid taking sides, nine diplomats and experts said. – Reuters

China will implement zero‑tariff treatment for imports from the 53 African countries with which it has diplomatic relations, starting May 1, 2026, state media reported on Saturday. – Reuters

Turkey sent its deep-sea drilling vessel Cagri Bey to Somalia on Sunday for what its energy minister said would be Ankara’s first offshore exploration mission outside its maritime zone. – Reuters

Rapid Support Forces violations in Sudan during the capture of the city of al-Fashir amount to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Friday. – Reuters

Strikes on a market in central Sudan ‘s Kordofan region killed at least 28 people and wounded dozens, said a rights group on Monday, as the war between the army and a paramilitary group nears its three-year mark. – Associated Press

A new group of third-country nationals was deported by the United States to Cameroon on Monday, lawyers told The Associated Press, days after it came to light that the Trump administration sent nine people to the Central African nation last month as part of its secretive program to remove immigrants to countries they have no ties with. – Associated Press

Italy pledged Friday to deepen cooperation with African countries during its second Italy-Africa summit, the first on African soil, aimed at reviewing projects started in critical sectors such as energy and infrastructure during Italy’s first phase of the Mattei Plan for Africa. – Associated Press

Driving through the vast, scorched landscape, I hear the words that have followed me all day. ‘They roasted the pastor and his wife alive in the church. We heard their screams.’ – Daily Mail

North America

The U.S. campaign to block Cuba’s oil imports is deepening a humanitarian crisis on the island, the United Nations said Friday, as Mexico and other countries shipped food and emergency supplies. – Wall Street Journal

Mass murder in a western Canadian town thrust an American coal operator into a horrifying situation. Conuma Resources Chief Executive Brian Sullivan was at home in Charleston, S.C., last Tuesday afternoon when a shock interrupted his video meeting with colleagues about employee retention at the company’s headquarters in a Canadian hamlet called Tumbler Ridge. – Wall Street Journal

Days after a deadly mass shooting devastated a rural town in British Columbia, Canada, police are still searching for clues as to why the suspect, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, would have turned violent, and how she could have carried out her attack. – Wall Street Journal

In much of Canada, President Trump’s provocations like making the country a 51st state are deeply unpopular. In this conservative, oil-rich province, Trump presents an opportunity. – Wall Street Journal

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will visit New Delhi in early March to work with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the framework for a comprehensive economic partnership agreement, Canadian official Victor Fedeli said on Monday. – Reuters

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Monday the appointment of public servant Janice Charette as the next chief trade negotiator to the United States. – Reuters

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said Canada wants a change of government in Iran but would not say whether it would support a U.S. military strike, the Globe and Mail reported on Saturday. – Reuters

Garbage has begun to pile up on street corners in the Cuban capital of Havana, attracting hordes of flies and reeking of rotten food, in one of the most visible impacts of the U.S. bid to prevent oil from reaching the Caribbean’s largest island. – Reuters

Dov S. Zakheim writes: Carney simply cannot afford a complete rupture with Washington. However much he may resent Trump’s attitude, and however much he seeks to have Canada lead a third way for “middle powers,” he should take care to avoid aggravating the already tense Canadian-American relationship until it reaches a point of no return. That would be a political, military and economic disaster for both countries for which no concert of middle powers could ever compensate. – The Hill

Carlos Giménez writes: My community overwhelmingly backed President Trump because we know strength, not appeasement, is exactly what puts America First. Finally, we must speak directly to the Cuban people: America stands with you — not with your jailers. Our goal is not chaos or suffering. It is FREEDOM. The communist regime is on its knees. This is not the time to blink. It’s time to finish the job — by enforcing the law, applying maximum pressure, and standing proudly on the side of FREEDOM. President Trump, the time for a free Cuba is now. – Fox News

Cybersecurity

An artificial-intelligence defense startup seeking to deploy its voice-controlled AI agent across drones and other military technology has raised $6 million in a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. – Wall Street Journal

Ireland’s data protection watchdog said on Tuesday it is investigating X over concerns the social-media platform could be breaching European Union privacy rules. – Wall Street Journal

Britain could bring in an Australian-style ban on social media for children under 16 as early as this year and close a loophole that left some AI chatbots outside safety rules, as part of government efforts to respond more quickly to digital risks. – Reuters

The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. – Politico 

Editorial: Nor does it make Europe look appealing for businesses when police raid the X offices in Paris. Musk has a responsibility to responsibly build his Grok chatbot, which had produced sexualized images of women and girls. But there seems to be more enthusiasm in France for raiding offices of foreign firms than for creating the conditions that enable French firms to build something that can compete globally. Europe too often rotates between overly aggressive regulation coming out of Brussels and spending big on industrial policy inside national capitals. The continent is having trouble getting out of this slow-growth trap. It’s is a warning to Americans tempted to follow the same model. – Washington Post

Jack D. Hidary writes: The size and scale of these managers means that small movements on their part can move the entire market. More complex structured instruments as well as increased leverage in the private markets that are now available mean that the real-world footprint of many assets are many times their notional value. Language models aren’t appropriate tools for these critical tasks, and the viability of our financial markets depends on getting this right. China is intent on dominating key sectors of the global economy and has proved it can do so in areas such as critical materials. The laser focus in its new five-year plan puts the U.S. and its allies on notice that we will have to leapfrog with AI for the real world if the West is to edge out China. – Wall Street Journal