Introduction Three years ago today, Hamas-led gunmen crossed from Gaza into southern Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. In the days that followed, the U.S. House voted overwhelmingly to stand with Israel, and support for Israel’s right to respond was close to a bipartisan given in American politics. Few would have predicted...
Intro In one week this month, Europe’s leaders sounded a coordinated alarm. France, the Netherlands, Finland, Lithuania and Switzerland each warned their citizens of rising threats from Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron told party leaders, “No one is safe.” The warnings raise three fair questions. Are European governments fear-mongering? Are they laying groundwork to enter...
The McKenna West case took four courts in three states to reach an unfinished answer, and every party in it was American. The fastest-growing part of the market she entered is not American at all and the legal machinery that eventually resolved her case stops at the border. The Growth Isn’t Mostly American Gestational surrogacy...
Four major indicators moved in a favorable direction this year. Each arrived with a documented explanation from the agency that produced it. Almost none of them led a newscast. Intro The Atlantic hurricane season passed its climatological peak this month without producing a single hurricane. Five tropical storms have formed Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Dolly and...
Second in a two-part series. Part I examined the antitrust exemption bill filed five days before the “Pacing the Frontier” letter. On Sept. 10, the AI company Anthropic published a 154-page threat intelligence report. Buried in it was an account of an Iran-linked account using the company’s Claude model to assemble what the report called...
A Ukrainian drone started a fire at an industrial site in Novy Urengoy on Wednesday, in the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district just south of the Arctic Circle. Regional governor Dmitry Artyukhov said air defenses repelled the attack and falling debris caused the blaze, and that there were no deaths or injuries. He did not identify the...
Updated with data through September 7, 2026 For ten consecutive quarters, German industrial revenue contracted. That streak ended in the first quarter of 2026. In the second quarter, revenue grew 4.7 percent year-on-year to €556.4 billion the second straight quarter of growth, and by conventional reading, a recovery. Over the same twelve months, German industry...
A German research team has shown that a passive listener sitting within range of an ordinary Wi-Fi network can recognize individual people walking through that network’s signal field, without a camera, without the target carrying a phone, and without ever joining the network. The finding is real, it is peer-reviewed, and it was presented at...
In April, senior U.S. officials predicted that a naval blockade would fill Iran’s oil storage tanks within days and force the country to shut in its wells. Four months later, Iran is still producing roughly 2.5 million barrels per day. What happened between the prediction and the outcome is a case study in how a...
France’s ban on unsolicited telemarketing calls takes effect Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026, replacing the country’s opt-out registry with a rule that requires businesses to obtain a consumer’s consent before dialing. Individuals who place illegal calls face fines up to €75,000 (about $87,000) per call. Companies face up to €375,000 (about $435,000) per call. The law,...