Music: Jan Bang · Erik Honoré · Gaute Storaas · Arve Henriksen — ‘Theme from Victoria’
Israel kills hundreds in Lebanon. J.D. Vance claims ‘the Israelis [are] trying to set us up for success’
Wired reports: The last time a government official from Lebanon sat down to think carefully about national digital infrastructure, nobody expected another war with Israel. That’s how it has always gone. “We were not ready for this,” says Kamal Shehadi, the Lebanese minister of technology and AI, and minister of the displaced. “I have to admit that we didn’t expect something of this magnitude to happen.” On March 2, 2026, Israeli evacuation warnings began appearing on phones across southern Lebanon….
Iran tightens its grip on Strait of Hormuz despite cease-fire
The Wall Street Journal reports: Iran told mediators it would limit the number of ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz to around a dozen a day and charge tolls under the cease-fire struck by President Trump, showing Tehran plans to tighten its grip on the world’s most important energy-shipping lane. Ships that pass will have to coordinate with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the powerful paramilitary group that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European…
Gulf states fear an emboldened Iran after Trump’s cease-fire. ‘Iran is the only one that is happy with the outcome’
The Wall Street Journal reports: The Iranian government hailed the cease-fire with the U.S. by posting images on social media of President Trump waving the white flag and collapsing on his knees in defeat. America’s allies and partners in the Middle East fear that Tehran may have a point—and that they will end up paying the price for a war in which the overwhelming military might of the U.S. and Israel failed to secure political gains. Subjected to thousands of…
A growing chorus of disaffected Trump supporters fume about Iran war on Truth Social
The New York Times reports: The people logging into Truth Social each day tend to count themselves among the most ardent supporters of President Trump and his MAGA movement. In recent weeks, though, even some in the echo chamber have turned against his actions in Iran. Thousands of users on the social media platform, which Mr. Trump created in 2022, have responded to the president’s drumbeat of posts with a mix of frustration, disbelief and outrage. They have written that…
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos finds thousands of zero-day flaws across major systems
The Hacker News reports: Artificial Intelligence (AI) company Anthropic announced a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing that will use a preview version of its new frontier model, Claude Mythos, to find and address security vulnerabilities. The model will be used by a small set of organizations, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, along with Anthropic, to secure critical software. The company said it’s forming this…
Republican overlords view ballot initiatives as giving voters too much power
The New York Times reports: Voters frustrated by one-party control in Republican states over the last decade have increasingly turned to citizen-sponsored initiatives to enact policies that their legislatures won’t. They expanded Medicaid, adopted paid sick leave, raised the minimum wage and safeguarded access to abortion. Now, the legislators are striking back. In North Dakota, Utah and South Dakota, legislatures are sponsoring measures on the November ballot that would raise the threshold for approving citizen amendments to 60 percent, not…
Pesticides may wreak havoc on the gut microbiome
Science reports: Eight years ago, Bhanudas More went for a routine blood test. More, a farmworker in this small village in Maharashtra state, was lean, worked long hours in the fields, and seemed healthy, so the result startled him. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a disease commonly associated with sedentary life in the city. Medication did little to bring his condition under control. He also began to experience persistent bloating and stomach discomfort. “I was taking the medicines,…
Music: Jan Bang · Erik Honoré · Gaute Storaas · Arve Henriksen — ‘Winter’
How Netanyahu duped Trump
The New York Times reports: Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal. Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus…
Trump’s Iran threats look like self-incrimination for potential war crimes
The New York Times reports: President Trump’s threat on Tuesday to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization escalated days of bellicose rhetoric in which he has made what appear to be self-incriminating statements about an intent to commit war crimes if the Iranian government does not submit to his demands. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, adding: “We will…
U.S. bombs craters in ‘restrikes’ on Kharg Island as rhetoric and reality sharply diverge
The New York Times reports: A stark disconnect between reality and rhetoric surfaced on Tuesday as U.S. forces continued their methodical strikes on military targets in Iran even as their commander in chief raised his steady stream of threats directed at Iran to apocalyptic levels. The United States launched a series of more than 90 strikes on Kharg Island, Iran’s oil export hub, early Tuesday. A U.S. military official characterized the Kharg strikes as “restrikes” — hitting targets that have…
Trump has backed himself into a corner
Hussein Banai writes: When President Donald Trump takes to the airwaves to threaten to bomb a nation of 90 million people “back to the Stone Ages” and follows that threat — in less than 48 hours — with strikes on civilian infrastructure, the destruction of a major bridge between two populous cities and a warning, in an expletive-laden post (on Easter Sunday, no less), that the assault on the targeted country’s power grid has “not even started,” it is worth…
Hegseth’s claims about Iran war contradict reality, officials say
The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump has continued to describe the war against Iran as an unqualified success, saying as recently as Monday that the United States was doing “unbelievably well,” while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tehran had been “embarrassed and humiliated” by U.S. forces. But Iran’s downing of an F-15E fighter jet and the high-risk rescue operation that ensued showed that Tehran retains the ability to threaten the United States’ military personnel and cast doubt on the…
A new economic superpower could spark a global retreat from fossil fuels
Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope write: The Iran war is also a climate war. Beyond its terrible human costs, the war’s disruptions of oil, gas, fertilizer and other shipments is another reminder of the risks inherent in basing the world economy on fossil fuels. The war’s jets, missiles and aircraft carriers, and the tankers, refineries and buildings they blow up, represent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions that further imperil a climate system that is already “very close” to…
If Viktor Orbán loses Hungary’s election, it will dispel the air of invincibility around strongmen
Laszlo Gendler writes: There is an irony buried in Hungarian political history. Fidesz—the Viktor Orbán-led party that has ruled with a supermajority for the last 16 years, reshaping Hungary’s constitution, packing its courts, weakening its free press, and gradually hollowing out most institutions that might check its power—is an acronym in Hungarian for “the Alliance of Young Democrats.” Founded in 1988 by students who gathered in clandestine groups to resist a communist government, Fidesz was initially conceived as a direct…