EU defense summit. European Union (EU) leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are meeting in Brussels today to discuss expanding the bloc’s defense capabilities and reinforcing its support for Ukraine. The EU is weighing allowing countries to alter their debt limits to enable more military spending and issuing more than $160 billion in loans for military procurement. Yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron said he was open to a discussion about using France’s nuclear deterrent to protect European allies from Russia.
Global computing prize. This year’s Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize in Computing, went to two scientists who developed the reinforcement learning method that is crucial to modern artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots. American Andrew Barto and Canadian Richard Sutton pioneered a reward-based, trial-and-error approach for machine learning. It was used to build an AI model that defeated the world’s best Go players, and more recently by the Chinese start-up DeepSeek.
Supreme Court on foreign aid freeze. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 yesterday that the Trump administration must unfreeze some $2 billion for already performed work. The plaintiffs pointed to the fact that Congress had already approved the funding before Trump’s foreign aid review. Separately, hundreds of diplomats at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) signed a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio protesting the dismantling of USAID, saying the decision undermines U.S. leadership and leaves a vacuum for adversaries to fill.
White House, Hamas hold talks. The Trump administration has held direct talks with Hamas over potential hostage releases, the White House press secretary said. It is unusual for U.S. officials to talk directly with groups that it lists as terrorists; the nominee for U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs conducted the talks. The White House said it had consulted with Israel. Trump said on social media last night that there would be “hell to pay” if hostages were not released “now.”
Charges in Chinese hacking case. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted twelve Chinese nationals for involvement in what it called a hacking-for-hire scheme that served Chinese government objectives. Some of the hackers targeted Chinese dissidents, religious organizations, and media groups based in the United States, the DOJ said. The Chinese Embassy in Washington called the indictment a “smear.” The defendants are unlikely to stand trial in the United States, the New York Times reported.
Mozambique protests. Police opened fire yesterday on opposition protesters in the capital, Maputo, injuring at least ten, activists and a rights researcher said. Activists had objected after opposition leader Venancio Mondlane was excluded from talks about a government deal to de-escalate tensions following disputed elections last year. A police spokesperson said officers had dispersed demonstrators but did not comment further.
Court victory for Hong Kong activists. Hong Kong’s top court overturned charges of refusing to comply with police inquiries for three activists that organized vigils to remember the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. The defendants had already served four-and-a-half month sentences after their 2023 conviction. The judges wrote that prosecutors provided insufficient proof the activists were foreign agents. It was a rare victory for the pro-democracy movement; in a separate ruling at the court today, judges upheld a sedition conviction for another activist.
Reported pause on military deportation flights. The Trump administration suspended the use of military planes to transport migrants to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or to other countries, unnamed U.S. defense officials told the Wall Street Journal. While the administration carried out more than forty such military flights since taking office, they are expensive; some flights carried people to Guantánamo Bay at the cost of at least $20,000 per migrant, according to the newspaper. The Department of Defense said Tuesday that no military deportation flights were scheduled for the next forty-eight hours.
