Monthly Archives: May 2026

Taiwan’s Coveted Complex Industrial Ecosystem

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) doesn’t live in the cloud; it lives in fabs, packaging plants, memory stacks, substrate lines, testing facilities and server factories. AI has a geographic map. Its most important point, other than America itself, is Taiwan. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, fabricates roughly 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips. Even that striking number vastly understates the U.S. and allied dependency. It can leave the impression that Taiwan’s role is mainly a chip-fabrication problem—and that TSMC’s new factory in Arizona, United States can solve it. It can’t….

Taiwan’s advantage isn’t merely one company or one factory. It is the cluster: foundries, packaging houses, substrate suppliers, materials firms, equipment engineers, testing specialists, design-service providers and process experts operating in close proximity. That density shortens iteration cycles, improves yields, accelerates ramp-up and compounds tacit knowledge. Decades of operational learning can’t be bought instantly, even with generous subsidies and political urgency.

A country (United States) determined to win the defining technological race of the century can’t allow its chief rival (China) to control the industrial base (Taiwan) on which that race depends.

Alexander Benard et al., Taiwan Is the Key to AI Dominance, WSJ, May 13, 2026

Expansive cleared soil area with rows of young palm plants and surrounding forest

Deforestation-Free: Coffee, Soy and Meat

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In May 2026, the European Union (EU) published its simplified version of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (DR), which is set to come into force at the end of 2026. The EUDR aims to halt deforestation by stopping the import of palm oil, cocoa, coffee, soy, cattle and timber from land that has been deforested. Together, these commodities account for more than two thirds of global deforestation, according to the EU. But the EU has also entered into a trade agreement with South American countries. The deal with the Mercosur trade bloc could significantly increase exports in some of those same commodities, especially soy and beef, into European markets.

A recent report from Global Canopy, a nonprofit focused on ending deforestation, said the EUDR 313 out of 500 companies that import commodities had taken some steps to address deforestation, including mapping and re-evaluating sources of those key commodities. Improved satellite data has been key in this especially, being able to track where deforestation has taken place and mapping it to commodity supply chains. Companies leading the change included consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, Dutch snack and spread maker Flora Food Group and Austrian paper and packaging company Mondi Group.

The report also highlighted Swiss food giant Nestlé as another leader. Nestlé said that by the end of 2025 it had assessed some 96.7% of its primary supply chains for meat, palm oil, pulp and paper, soy, sugar, cocoa and coffee as deforestation free….It embarked on a decadelong mapping assessment of its farms, using satellite data, ground visits and third party verification to get to where it is now…

The tracking of cattle has been a real challenge for those trying to stop deforestation, with many cows smuggled between farms before slaughter, obscuring where the animals originated from and if they came from deforested land…

Excerpt from Yusuf Khan, Europe Wants To Stop Deforestation. A New Trade Deal Is Putting That Under Strain, WSJ, May 6, 2026

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How the U.S. Surveillance System Works

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In the battle against illegal immigration, the U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tools that give federal agents easy access to the home and workplace addresses of American citizens, their social-media accounts, vehicle information, flight history, law-enforcement records and other personal information, as well as data to track their daily comings and goings, The Wall Street Journal found. The government’s tracking system relies on an amalgam of public and private information sifted, sorted and packaged by contractors that include Palantir Technologies, Deloitte, Japanese conglomerate NEC and smaller spyware specialists.

The Department of Homeland Security has put these surveillance tools—facial-recognition software, location tracking and social-media scrapers once aimed largely at suspected terrorists and drug-traffickers—in the hands of federal immigration agents, who can identify, research and track virtually anyone by entering a name, license plate or by simply taking a person’s photo.

The government surveillance system has advanced since the 9/11 terrorist attacks with the aid of artificial intelligence and the linking of government records with far-reaching commercial databases. It has been used against people whom the government alleged opposed or obstructed the immigration crackdown.

With the backing of Congress and President Trump, DHS spent a record $425 million on surveillance tech in 2025, a 17% increase from the prior year…Palantir is the top beneficiary of DHS’s stepped-up spending on deportation and surveillance work,… In 2025, DHS paid Palantir $30 million to put a broad span of information about individuals into an app on agents’ smartphones, allowing them to plot the location of people in the U.S. The app, known as Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, or ELITE, lets officers research and track individuals based on criminal history, license plate searches, name, date of birth or locations.

The results display on a map or as a list… The app pulls from a variety of government databases, including information compiled by private investigators known as “skip tracers” who track the current addresses of individuals. ..An ICE agent during court testimony last year compared ELITE to Google Maps: Targets appear as pins on a map, clustered around addresses where immigrants, including “lawful permanent residents,” are likely to live…

Through the year beginning in January 2025, the U.S. paid consulting firms, including Deloitte, $130 million, to aid ICE’s deportation efforts and law enforcement support work. New consultant contracts call for analysts to monitor people on social media, identify threats and create dossiers about people who make them. DHS awarded $15 million to tech company Cellebrite for forensic tools to unlock phones and extract call logs, GPS location data, text messages, deleted photos, contacts and email addresses. US. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) renewed agreements with vehicle-forensics firm Berla to retrieve data, including travel history, from the vehicles of suspects. In 2025, DHS reactivated a $2 million contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions, which makes Graphite, a hacking tool that can infiltrate encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp.

Since January 2025, DHS has announced plans to spend up to nearly $200 million on new surveillance contracts. of which $100 million for Babel Street Insight which provides an AI-driven platform to translate social-media posts from hundreds of languages, map networks of contacts and scan for what the company calls “expressions of violent intent” and “negative” sentiments. Nearly $21 million went to companies that track and identify targets with biometric technology. That included $8 million to NEC for a facial-recognition algorithm that identifies passengers boarding planes. DHS rolled out an app last year that allows agents to identify people from images, using NEC technology. DHS also expanded its use of Clearview AI, another facial-recognition database, which contains more than 70 billion photos.

Excerpt from Shane Shifflett, ‘We Know You Live Right Here’: No Secrets in America’s New Surveillance Dragnet, WSJ, Apr. 30, 2026

Why Iran is Trying Desperately Not to Become Iraq

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Israel set up a clandestine military outpost in the Iraqi desert to support its air campaign against Iran and launched airstrikes against Iraqi troops who almost discovered it early in the war. Israel built the installation, which housed special forces and served as a logistical hub for the Israeli air force, just before the war started with the knowledge of the U.S.. The Israeli base was almost discovered in early March 2026. Iraqi state media said a local shepherd reported unusual military activity in the area, including helicopter flights, and the Iraqi military sent troops to investigate. Israel kept them at bay with airstrikes, one of the people familiar with the matter said.,,,

The western desert region of Iraq is vast and sparsely populated, making it an ideal location for temporary outposts…. U.S. Special Forces made use of this area in Iraq as part of operations against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003.

Excerpt from Anat Peled et al., Israel Built and Defended a Secret Iran War Base in Iraq, WSJ, May 9, 2026

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How to Save Rhinos: Make them Radioactive

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With over 10,000 rhinos lost to poaching in the past decade, South Africa – home to the world’s largest population of rhinos – remains a target for criminals driven by the illegal trade of rhino horn. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, the South African Ministry of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment reported 103 rhinos poached. In response, this project run by the University of the Witwatersrand of South Africa is using radiation to support conservation and enforcement efforts.

After two years of initial tests, the Rhisotope Project was created in 2021 with the idea to tag rhino horns with radioactive material. This makes the horns detectable by radiation portal monitors (RPMs) already deployed at borders, ports and airports worldwide. These RPMs, commonly used to detect nuclear and other radioactive material, can now be harnessed against wildlife crime.

See IAEA Rhisotope Project.

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We The Subjects — Plundering Health Data

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When geneticist Jingyuan Fu heard that an artificial intelligence (AI) group in China had downloaded a large biomedical dataset her team built in Europe, she felt pride — and a jolt of unease. “We spent millions on that dataset,” says Fu, a professor of systems medicine at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “And the Chinese bought the whole thing for around €2,000.” In recent years, Fu’s group, like many others, has also begun using such data as feedstock for artificial intelligence. The AI group in China that downloaded her dataset had the same goal. “The Chinese wanted all our data,” Fu says. “And they also wanted our insights into how to mine it for AI development.”
From her perspective, today’s global scramble for biomedical data looks increasingly lopsided. “China has collected a huge amount of data,” she says. “But their own data sharing and openness is very limited.”… China already holds the largest data repositories, with 1.4 billion people using the WeChat app, many of whom are already connected to hospital databases for data integration, analysis and even healthcare delivery. “China also runs the largest number of clinical trials in the world generating massive drug response and real-world-evidence datasets.”

[A]fter decades of policies pushing ‘open science’, governments are now promoting ‘data sovereignty’ — the idea that sensitive datasets should remain under national control and foreign access should be conditional. [In Europe] the stance is defensive. [Europe] is embarrassed about having allowed Chinese AI developers to plunder European biomedical databases, even while China blocks foreign access to Chinese datasets. They are now belatedly closing international access to biomedical databases, after years of championing cross-border sharing…“According to the European Commission “there are currently no partnerships involving the sharing of such data with China or the United States for AI development”….

As of April 2025, the 2.5 petabytes of omics data in the US Cancer Genome Atlas Program database are now closed to Chinese researchers, and UK Biobank data, containing whole-genome and exome sequences for 500,000 people, is no longer internationally downloadable. UK Biobank data must now be analyzed on the Biobank’s own platform, which provides a cloud-based ‘reading room’ without allowing individual data downloads…In September 2025, the US National Institutes of Health issued new regulations for genomic data repositories and users aimed at “protecting Americans’ sensitive personal health-related data from misuse by foreign adversaries” while enhancing “the privacy and autonomy of research participants”….In December 2025, the US State Department launched its Pax Silica initiative, aimed at forming an international AI alliance that hedges against China. [Furthermore], data that are generated and held by hospitals, insurers, device makers, drug makers and data platform companies. are abundant For example, US-based electronic health records vendor Epic Systems Corporation manages records for over 300 million US patients and says that it has more than 150 AI features in development…

[But]AI models developed using sequestered datasets often ‘overfit’ to the specific demographics or clinical practices of their training environment…. “Without external, international validation, these biases are frequently only discovered after they have caused clinical harm,” …[For example] many high-performing AI tools for melanoma detection show a precipitous drop in accuracy when applied to darker skin tones. “Because major datasets are often skewed toward light-skinned northern European or North American populations, “these tools can misclassify malignant lesions as benign in under-represented groups.”

Excerpt from Paul Webster, Who Owns by Health Data?, Nature Medicine,  April 24, 2026

Luigi’ing like Googling? Gloom/Doom Feeding Political Assassinations

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Months before his arrest for allegedly attempting to murder the chief executive of OpenAI, Daniel Moreno-Gama suggested “Luigi’ing some tech CEOs” in an internet chat. Moreno-Gama traveled from the Houston area to San Francisco, threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion and then attacked OpenAI’s headquarters’ entrance, planning to burn the building down. The incident spotlights a brewing anticorporate fervor in some internet subcultures, amplified by the national attention on Luigi Mangione, the accused UnitedHealthcare CEO killer.***

Except from Zusha Elinson, Altman Attack Suspect Called for ‘Luigi-ing Tech CEOs’ in Online Messages, WSJ, Apr. 15, 2026

*** Supporters on social media platforms like TikTok, X, and Instagram, and attendees at events have cheered Luigi Mangione as folk hero, seeing his actions as a stand for the underdog and against corporate power .

Several bombs falling from the sky onto a rural area with fires and thick black smoke

When Bombs Fall Like Rain: A View of the 21st Century

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On April 8, 2026, Israel struck Lebanon, hitting 100 sites in 90 seconds in one of Israel’s deadliest bombing campaigns in Lebanon in the past two years…The April 8 Israeli bombings hit in the middle of the afternoon and left more than 350 people dead, including more than 130 women and children, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Israel said it killed 250 militants and released the identities of a handful, saying they were unit commanders and intelligence officers…Lebanese civil defense said strikes hit half a dozen sites in the heart of Beirut—upscale neighborhoods and tourist areas outside of Hezbollah’s traditional Shia Muslim strongholds in the southern suburbs. Residents screamed and ran from the explosions as plumes of smoke rose one after the other into the sunny Mediterranean sky. 

Ragheda Sharara, who was chased out of her home in Beirut’s southern suburbs at the beginning of March by the fighting, was staying at the Manara Riva Suites hotel by the sea when the bombs hit. The 34-year-old was sitting in the lobby when she felt the airstrikes and saw falling glass and smoke. Worried the building would fall, she ran outside and saw rescuers with a naked elderly woman who had been bathing and whose legs were severed in the blast. 

Israel says its targets weren’t top officials but rather midlevel battlefield commanders who it said were responsible for directing strikes at Israel and Israeli forces. The goal was to create a psychological shock by hitting them simultaneously without warning, an aerial version of the pager attack that decimated the Hezbollah’s ranks two years ago, people familiar with the operation said. Israel named the operation “Eternal Darkness.”

Excerpt from Omar Abdel-Baqui, ‘Bombs Fell Like Rain’: The Israeli Attack That Hit 100 Lebanese Targets in 90 Seconds, WSJ, Apr. 17, 2026

For the Poor by the Poor: the Ethics of Cocaine Trade

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The First Capital Command, known by its Portuguese initials PCC, started out as a disgruntled band of inmates fighting for soap and toilet paper in the 1990s.  It now has some 40,000 members behind bars and on the streets with a vast network of affiliates—making it the largest criminal group in the Americas by some estimates, operating in nearly 30 countries on every continent…With the scale of Italian organized criminal groups and the efficiency of a multinational corporation, the PCC has helped drive record cocaine seizures in Europe and sparked violent turf wars in the heart of major ports in Belgium and the Netherlands. 

 Unlike the narco-tycoons of Mexico, the heavily armed Colombian cocaine militias or the flashy drug lords of Rio de Janeiro’s Red Command gang, PCC members keep a low, businesslike profile, seeking fortune not fame—and shying away from the kinds of gratuitous violence that attract police and TV news crews. New recruits sign up to a strict internal code of conduct, their swearing-in ceremonies sometimes conducted by videoconference.

By adopting religious personas—pretending to be ministers—PCC figures have gone into far-flung regions of Brazil to gain the trust of locals and recruit new members, while securing routes to neighboring cocaine-producing countries…In 2023, prosecutors in Brazil’s northern state of Rio Grande do Norte investigated a PCC cell accused of setting up at least seven churches to launder drug money—a practice now so common that authorities have a name for it: narco-Pentecostalism. Drug profits are also laundered through gas stations, fintechs, real-estate funds, sex motels, car dealerships and construction firms…Few crimes are outside the PCC’s reach. Members today are involved in everything from illegal gold mining and cargo theft to cybercrimes and the trafficking of exotic birds…

When the PCC was born in August 1993 inside the grimy walls of the Taubaté high-security prison in São Paulo state, its founders weren’t seeking world domination. They demanded better sanitation and beds, among other basics. Brazil’s prisons were slum-like infernos—some of the world’s most overcrowded and violent, plagued by tuberculosis and lice—and rights groups said guards routinely beat inmates. Resentment was simmering at Taubaté after 111 inmates had months earlier been killed when police crushed a rebellion at another prison not far away…Alarmed by the growing jailhouse fraternity, authorities tightened prison controls and transferred inmates to other states. This only accelerated the PCC’s national expansion and hardened its resolve. “Peace, justice and freedom” became the PCC’s rallying call, as it cast itself as a parallel power to a state whose abuses—from prison officials to politicians—help the gang draw recruits….The PCC offers recruits a future in a system “made for the poor by the poor,” said Bruno Manso, a foremost authority on the gang and co-author of “The War: The Rise of the PCC and the World of Crime in Brazil.” Manso said the PCC provides what recruits feel they can’t get elsewhere: escape from “the utter misery of urban life.”

Excerpt from Samantha Pearson, How a Brazilian Prison Gang Became a Global Cocaine Power,WSJ, Apr. 23, 2026