Headlines

Iran war as a cage Trump can’t escape

Six weeks into what the Trump administration has branded “Operation Epic Fury,” it is worth pausing to ask the question that Washington’s war managers seem constitutionally incapable of posing to themselves: what exactly did we think was going to happen next? The opening salvo

China tech companies going gangbusters in the Gulf

On April 1, Baidu’s Apollo Go opened bookings on its own app in Dubai, the first international deployment of its proprietary autonomous ride-hailing platform. Two days earlier, on March 30, WeRide and Uber launched the first fully driverless robotaxi operations in Dubai,

Quantum computers to break our codes faster than expected

Online data is generally pretty secure. Assuming everyone is careful with passwords and other protections, you can think of it as being locked in a vault so strong that even all the world’s supercomputers, working together for 10,000 years, could not crack it. But last month,

To Lam’s Vietnam drifting perceptibly closer to China

Within days of securing the state presidency, Vietnamese leader To Lam confirmed a state visit to China on April 14–17, his first overseas trip in the new dual role. It mirrors the pattern he set after becoming general secretary in August 2024, when he also traveled north

Dueling Hormuz blockades push world to the brink

US President Donald Trump’s announcement that the US Navy would impose a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, announced after failed face-to-face talks in Islamabad, signals a perilous new phase of the Iran war, one that threatens to prolong the oil shock’s impact on the global