World

US-Israel War on Iran — Day 19

• Israel kills Iran’s security chief Ali Larijani in airstrike on Tehran safe house (BBC World) | Guardian profile — Larijani, secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, was killed alongside Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani. Widely considered the most consequential Iranian assassination since Khamenei himself on day one of the war. The Guardian argues his death may be a bigger loss than Khamenei’s, given his role as linchpin across Iranian politics, military strategy, and foreign relations. Iran’s FM Araghchi says the killings will not destabilise their “strong political structure.” Iran’s new supreme leader has rejected de-escalation proposals conveyed by intermediaries. (Also covered in Investigations)

• Iran launches “revenge” missile attack on Israel; fires drones and missiles across the Gulf (Al Jazeera) — Multiple-warhead missiles struck central Israel, killing two in Ramat Gan and damaging a Tel Aviv train station. Separately, Iran fired missiles and drones across the Gulf — Qatar, UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all reported interceptions and blasts. Burning debris from interceptions showered Dubai. Drone swarms also hit near the US embassy in Baghdad.

• Trump says US doesn’t need NATO after allies refuse Hormuz deployment (The Guardian) — France, Poland, and other NATO members explicitly refused to send forces. France’s Macron said France will “never take part.” Canada says the US hasn’t even formally asked NATO. Meanwhile, data suggest Iran is allowing more ships through the strait — nearly double recent days. Trump has also delayed his planned meeting with Xi Jinping, while seeking China’s help reopening Hormuz.

• Top US counterterrorism official Joe Kent resigns over Iran war (BBC World) | Al Jazeera profile — The NCTC director says Trump “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” and urged him to “reverse course.” He is the highest-level official to leave the administration over the war.

• Zelensky warns Ukraine faces missile shortage as Middle East war diverts resources (BBC Europe) — In a BBC interview, Zelensky says Putin wants a “long war” between the US and Iran. He called Iran and Russia “brothers in hatred” and announced Ukraine has sent 201 military experts to the Gulf to help counter Iranian drones. Europe should prepare for drone strikes by terrorists and criminals, he warned. (Also covered in Ukraine)

• Israel bombs central Beirut, killing 6; expands ground offensive in south Lebanon (Al Jazeera) — At least 912 people including 100+ children have been killed in Israeli attacks in Lebanon since the war began.

• USS Gerald R Ford to sail for repairs in Crete after fire, plumbing woes (The Guardian) | NPR — An onboard fire destroyed 100 beds and injured sailors. The world’s largest aircraft carrier has been deployed over nine months with no return date, participating in strikes on Iran after previously helping seize Venezuela’s president.

Pakistan–Afghanistan

• Pakistan airstrike kills hundreds at Kabul drug rehabilitation centre (BBC World) | Guardian witness accounts — The Guardian reports over 400 dead — patients burned in their beds or crushed by collapsing walls. Survivors describe the strike hitting as patients ate dinner. Pakistan says the strikes target Taliban militants; experts call them “defensive, not offensive” but warn of spiralling violence. (Also covered in Investigations)

Rest of the World

• Ukraine targets Moscow with drones for 4th consecutive day (Kyiv Independent) — At least 40 drones launched in the latest strike. (Also covered in Ukraine)

• Moldova cuts water supply after Russian strike causes oil spill in Ukraine (BBC World) — A 15-day state of alert imposed in the Dniester river basin.

• EU offers to pay Ukraine to fix oil pipeline at the centre of Ukraine–Hungary feud (NPR) — EU hopes this will persuade Hungary to drop its veto on major aid to Ukraine. (Also covered in Ukraine)

• Colombia accuses Ecuador of bombing targets inside its territory; 27 charred bodies found near border (The Guardian) — President Petro’s accusations mark a sharp deterioration in relations with Trump ally Daniel Noboa’s government.

• Cuba restores power after 29-hour nationwide blackout amid US oil blockade (Al Jazeera) | The Guardian — Trump is openly threatening to “take” Cuba, demanding regime change while the island’s 10 million people grapple with a collapsing power grid.

• At least 23 killed in suspected suicide bombings in north-eastern Nigeria (The Guardian) — Multiple attacks targeted a post office, market areas and a hospital in Maiduguri.

• Belgian court clears way for trial over 1961 killing of Congo PM Lumumba (BBC Europe) | The Guardian — Etienne Davignon, 93, a former diplomat, will stand trial for alleged complicity. The Lumumba family calls it the “beginning of a reckoning.”

• Norway votes unanimously to investigate Epstein links to its foreign office (The Guardian) — PM Støre says files show the sex offender’s connections to people in “trusted and central positions.”

• Xi Jinping’s anticorruption drive sweeps up senior Chinese military chiefs (Al Jazeera) — Rooting out corruption in the military remains a priority as Xi consolidates control. (Also covered in Investigations)

• “Canada could join EU,” French foreign minister says (Politico) — A provocative statement amid shifting transatlantic alliances.

• Spanish king reopens debate on conquest of Mexico by acknowledging ‘abuse’ (BBC World) — King Felipe’s remarks appear to have helped thaw frosty relations with Mexico while reviving a fierce domestic debate over events 500 years ago.

Energy & Economy

• Global oil shock ripples: New Zealand prepares Covid-like fuel alert system (RNZ) | Guardian on Australia — Australia’s treasurer warns the war could slash $16.5bn from the economy; DiDi has raised rideshare prices over soaring petrol costs.

• Italy warns Russian “shadow fleet” tanker could explode in Mediterranean (BBC World) — Nine EU countries are urging the European Commission to act over the Arctic Metagaz, which is drifting out of control.

Science & Health

• India’s cheap semaglutide generics could reshape global obesity fight (BBC World) — India’s semaglutide patent expires March 20; about 50 branded generics are expected to enter the market at a fraction of the current price.

• Australian scientists develop world’s first quantum battery prototype (The Guardian) — A proof-of-concept device using quantum principles, with potential for rapid charging.

US

• Trump administration defends Anthropic blacklisting in court (Al Jazeera) — Defense Secretary Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after it refused to remove safety guardrails preventing use of Claude for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. Anthropic has sued to block the decision.

• Judge orders 1,000 Voice of America staffers back to work (NPR) — A major defeat for the Trump administration’s effort to gut the news outlet.

• AG Bondi formally summoned to Congress in Epstein case (BBC World) — Comes weeks after a Republican lawmaker accused the DOJ of a “cover-up” in releasing the Epstein files.

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Ukraine

Frontlines remain operationally stable despite Russian Chief of General Staff Gerasimov’s continued exaggeration of battlefield gains — ISW verified only 2 of his claimed 12 settlement seizures in the first half of March, and his claim of controlling over half of Lyman appears false, with a Ukrainian brigade reporting zero Russian presence there. Ukraine liberated more territory than Russia seized in February, and the Ukrainian counteroffensive in eastern Zaporizhia (Oleksandrivka/Hulyaipole directions) has recaptured over 400 km² since late January. Russian forces continue grinding attacks across the Donetsk front — 286 clashes recorded on March 17 — with a notable company-sized mechanized assault toward Novopavlivka, but no confirmed advances in Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka, or Kupyansk, where roughly 20 Russian soldiers remain cut off in the city center, surviving on drone-dropped supplies.

Ukraine’s deep strike campaign is intensifying. Shoigu acknowledged a fourfold increase in Ukrainian airstrikes across Russia in 2025 (to 23,000), conceding that the Urals are now in the “immediate threat zone.” Ukrainian drones hit Moscow for a fourth consecutive day, struck an aircraft repair plant in Novgorod Oblast (reportedly with two A-50 AWACS present), and set ablaze nearly the entire Labinsk oil depot in Krasnodar. Russia is responding by scaling back missile production to mass-produce drones, targeting 600–800 daily attacks with a goal of 1,000/day.

• UK-Ukraine defense pact signed — includes joint drone production, a new AI defense center, and British troops training on Ukrainian drones. (LBC, Ukrainska Pravda)
• 201 Ukrainian drone experts deployed to Middle East to help counter Iranian Shahed attacks. (Ukrainska Pravda) (Also covered in World)
• Russia sharing satellite imagery and drone tech with Iran to support strikes on US/Israeli forces. (WSJ)
• Japan considering weapons sales to Ukraine — a major policy shift if realized. (Technology.org)
• Germany allocates €200M for medium-range drones for Ukraine. (Ukrinform)
• Turkey offers to host peace talks — Fidan told Lavrov directly. Zelensky expresses “bad feeling” about talks given the Iran war. (Ukrainska Pravda)
• EU offers to help restore Druzhba pipeline — but drops linkage to €90bn loan and sanctions package from statement; Hungary outraged. (Ukrainska Pravda)
• Russia’s Telegram crackdown deepening — internet outages spreading to St. Petersburg; Durov silent on potential ban. (ISW)
• UN: Putin’s deportation of Ukrainian children is a crime against humanity — three years since ICC warrants issued. (Atlantic Council)

cd ~/repos/ratatosk && claude --resume c60501cc-b829-4a45-9b78-98b03a821185

Investigations & Geopolitics

• Drinking from the Bitter Chalice in the Middle East, Again (War on the Rocks) — Steven Simon argues that devastating US-Israeli airstrikes may not produce lasting political outcomes. Without a comprehensive post-war strategy, today’s military success risks becoming perpetual conflict as a weakened Iran resorts to asymmetric warfare, Hormuz mining, and covert nuclear rebuilding.

• The Disappearing Off-Ramp in Iran (The Atlantic) — A UK security adviser who attended US-Iran talks reportedly judged a deal was within reach before the escalation window closed. Neither side now has a plausible path to de-escalation.

• Israel Is Hunting Down Iranian Regime Members One by One (WSJ) — Israel’s systematic campaign to locate and eliminate Iranian officials in hiding. The decapitation strategy raises questions about what kind of Iranian state, if any, survives to negotiate.

• Open War at the Durand Line (War on the Rocks) — Detailed analysis of Pakistan’s “Operation Righteous Fury” — airstrikes on Taliban military installations in Kabul, Kandahar, and Paktia. Pakistan has structural advantages (600,000-strong military, controls 40% of Afghan customs revenue), but the escalation risks unifying Taliban factions under a nationalist banner. Three scenarios: mediated de-escalation, normalized low-grade war, or strategic backfire.

• Bailing Out Russia for “Peace” Is a Losing Proposition (War on the Rocks) — Russia proposed a ~$14 trillion economic reintegration package including sanctions relief, restored dollar access, and joint ventures. The authors argue this would recreate the vulnerabilities that weakened NATO’s deterrence, effectively bankrolling Russian rearmament. Defense and security already exceed 38% of Russia’s federal budget (possibly over 50% with classified spending).

• Double-Edged Swords: How Military Purges Shape Authoritarian Appetite for War (War on the Rocks) — Purges embolden leaders by removing internal constraints while degrading combat effectiveness. Examines Saddam’s Iraq, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China — where five of six top generals have been removed since 2022, including Zhang Youxia, China’s highest-ranking general.

• The Era of US Dominance in Economic Warfare Is Over (Financial Times) — America’s ability to weaponize the financial system is eroding as alternative payment systems, digital currencies, and non-Western financial infrastructure mature.

• How Does the Iran War Affect China’s Energy Security? (War on the Rocks) — China is 85% energy self-sufficient; Iranian oil represents only ~2.5% of total energy needs. The real vulnerability is a prolonged Strait of Hormuz closure beyond three months.

• 3 Million Iranians Displaced Since War Started (Fortune) — Over 3 million displaced, creating a potential migration crisis for Turkey and Europe reminiscent of the Syrian refugee wave.

• Israel’s Plan to Expand Lebanon Ground Campaign (The Guardian) — Fears of a repeat of the 1982–2000 occupation that ultimately strengthened Hezbollah.

• Military Operational Thinking in an Age of AI (War on the Rocks) — AI in military planning amplifies whichever operational tradition already dominates. Current AI aligns most readily with analytic, center-of-gravity approaches — potentially marginalizing judgment-based reasoning and adaptive command.

• Cuba Libre: Rubio’s Big Bet on Regime Change (Washington Monthly) — Whether Rubio’s Cuba strategy has any realistic chance of success at a moment when US military bandwidth is stretched thin.

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Tech

• Switzerland Built an Alternative to BGP | HN — SCION, developed at ETH Zürich, replaces BGP with multi-path routing, isolation domains, and cryptographic path validation. Already handles Swiss interbank settlements worth 220 billion CHF/day with sub-millisecond failover. No IETF standardization yet and limited vendor support, but early healthcare-sector adoption is underway.

• SSH Has No Host Header | HN — Unlike HTTP, SSH has no mechanism to identify which host a connection targets, making IP-sharing across VMs impossible. exe.dev’s workaround: assign unique IPs per user and route based on SSH key + IP combination.

• Fixing eBPF Spinlock Issues in the Linux Kernel | HN | Lobsters — A race condition in the resilient queued spinlock: if an NMI interrupted between lock acquisition and held-locks table registration, deadlock detection failed, causing 250ms freezes. Fix: register the lock before attempting acquisition. Shipped in kernel 6.19.

• Python 3.15’s JIT Is Now Back on Track | HN — The copy-and-patch JIT now delivers 11–12% speedup on macOS AArch64 and 5–6% on x86_64 Linux. Two key innovations: a tracing frontend with dual dispatch and reference count elimination. The Faster CPython team was laid off by Microsoft in 2025 but largely picked up by ARM.

• All Longest Regex Matches in Linear Time | Lobsters — Most regex engines guarantee linear time for single matches but go quadratic when finding all matches. RE# uses a bidirectional two-pass algorithm to mark all match boundaries in O(n), preserving POSIX leftmost-longest semantics.

• syntaqlite: High-Fidelity Devtools for SQLite | Lobsters — Parser, formatter, validator, and LSP that uses SQLite’s own Lemon grammar rather than approximating it. Handles compile-flag-aware syntax validation, version-specific features, and SQL embedded in Python/TypeScript.

• A Decade of Slug | HN — GPU text rendering directly from Bézier curves without texture maps, producing resolution-independent antialiased glyphs. Ten years in, the author has released the patent to the public domain and published reference shaders under MIT.

• postmarketOS Duranium | Lobsters — An immutable variant with read-only /usr, dm-verity integrity verification, mandatory LUKS2 encryption, and A/B partition updates with automatic rollback.

• Methods in Languages for Systems Programming | Lobsters — Examines whether systems languages should have methods. Languages like Odin and Hare reject them; Zig and C3 embrace them. The author argues the distinction is largely performative.

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AI

• Attention Residuals: learnable depth aggregation for LLMs | r/MachineLearning — Kimi team replaces fixed-weight residual connections with softmax attention over preceding layer outputs, allowing input-dependent depth selection. Integrated into Kimi Linear (48B params, 3B activated) and pretrained on 1.4T tokens. Achieves more uniform output magnitudes and gradient distribution with consistent scaling law improvements.

• Claude Cowork: remote access from your phone | r/ClaudeAI — Anthropic launches remote access for Claude Cowork: pair your phone with Claude Desktop, send tasks from mobile, and return to finished work. Everything Claude can do on your desktop — files, browser, tools, code — is reachable remotely. Available on all paid plans as a research preview.

• How subdirectory CLAUDE.md files actually work | r/ClaudeAI — Researchers traced Claude Code’s API calls and reverse-engineered CLAUDE.md loading: only the Read tool triggers subdirectory loading, content is injected as <system-reminder> blocks appended to tool results, deduplication is per-subprocess via an in-memory Map, and prompt caching absorbs injection costs.

• Weight Norm Clipping accelerates grokking 18–66x — Per-row L2 clipping on decoder weights after every optimizer step. Five lines of code, zero failures across 300 seeds, 66x speedup on grokking.

• TerraLingua: emergent AI societies in a persistent multi-agent world | r/MachineLearning — Cognizant AI Lab built a persistent 2D world where LLM agents face resource scarcity, mortality, and local communication. Emergent behaviors include legacy-leaving (farewell messages, energy transfers before death), deceptive artifacts, governance conflicts, and cultural continuity across agent generations.

• Opus 4.6 catches prompt injection hidden in a PDF — User fed a job assessment PDF into Opus 4.6; before answering, the model flagged a prompt injection at the bottom asking it to mention “dual-loop feedback architecture” in deliverables. Unsolicited detection of adversarial content in a legitimate document.

• mlx-tune: fine-tune LLMs on Apple Silicon | r/MachineLearning — SFT, DPO, ORPO, GRPO, KTO, SimPO, and VLM training on M1–M5 Macs. Unsloth-compatible API for local prototyping that scales to cloud GPUs.

• Obsidian + Claude: persistent memory via MCP server — Open-source MCP server connecting Claude to an Obsidian vault for persistent cross-session memory.

• claude-remote: control Claude Code from your phone via Discord — Mirrors Claude Code sessions to Discord with syntax-highlighted diffs and interactive buttons for approving tool calls. Windows only for now.

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