David Sanger of the New York Times delivers a must-read on the foreign policy challenges now facing US leaders Russia bombards Ukraine. Israel and Hamas are locked in a danse macabre. The threat of outright war between Jerusalem and Tehran grows daily. Beijing and Washington snarl. In a moment like this, David Sanger’s latest book, subtitled China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, is a must-read. Painstakingly researched, New Cold Wars brims with on-record interviews and observations by thinly veiled sources. Officials closest to the president talk with an e ..read more

As tensions with China rise, scientists at America’s leading universities complain of stalled research after crackdown at airports Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for several hours, plans for future research shattered. Many western scholars are nervous about travelling to China in the current political climate. But lately it is Chinese researchers working at US universities who are increasingly reporting interrogations – and in several cases deportations – at US airports, despite holding valid work or study visas for sci ..read more

Volt Typhoon hacking campaign is waiting ‘for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow’, says Christopher Wray Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into US critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow”, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has warned. An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University in Na ..read more

The author’s new book posits an all-too-possible catastrophe, destruction assured by human frailty as much as by technology Annie Jacobsen was a high school student in 1983, when ABC television broadcast the film The Day After, about the horrors of nuclear war. She never forgot the experience. More than 100 million Americans watched and were terrified too. One of them lived in the White House. According to his biographer and his own memoirs, it helped turn Ronald Reagan into a nuclear disarmer in his second term. Not long after, the world’s stockpile of nuclear warheads peaked and began to dec ..read more

Speaker Mike Johnson averted government shutdown but faces far-right threat of removal over $60bn national security package With the government funding fight resolved, the US House of Representatives is expected to soon turn to a long-stalled national security package that would send military assistance to Ukraine, as well as Israel and other US allies. Despite increasingly desperate pleas from Kyiv, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, had refused to bring the wartime aid bill to the floor until Congress finalized a government funding bill, which it did early on Saturday morning – befo ..read more

The CNN analyst’s new book considers threats outside the US, in Ukraine and Taiwan, and within, as Biden battles Trump At CNN in Washington, Jim Sciutto’s dimly lit office is both man cave and shrine to a foreign correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries. A typewriter he bought on Portobello Road during a decade in London. Photos he took in Afghanistan and Ukraine. A Vietnamese newspaper account of the time he rode over the South China Sea on a US spy plane. A corked bottle of water from his trip to the North Pole in a US nuclear submarine. A fragment of the Black Hawk helicop ..read more

Biden administration not required to disclose sales below set dollar amount, in addition to public shipments worth over $573m The US is reported to have made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the start of the war in Gaza, but the deliveries escaped congressional oversight because each transaction was under the dollar amount requiring approval. The Biden administration has become increasingly critical of the conduct of Israeli military operations in Gaza and the failure to allow in meaningful amounts of humanitarian aid, with the death toll now over 30,0 ..read more

The reporter’s new book considers the dark comedy of errors – and a dictator’s literary ambition – that led America to war By the time the US and UK were preparing to invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein was spending much of his time hidden away writing novels and obsessing over Arabic grammar, according to a new book based on previously unpublished transcripts and documents from his regime. Very much like Richard Nixon, Saddam taped many conversations with his officials. The tapes were seized by US forces after the 2003 invasion, shipped to Washington to be transcribed and translated, but not made pub ..read more

Company accused of violations including Chinese employees improperly downloading files relating to Pentagon programs Boeing said on Thursday it had reached a $51m settlement with the US state department for numerous export violations including Chinese employees in China improperly downloading documents related to US Pentagon programs. The state department said from 2013 through 2017 three Chinese employees at Boeing facilities in China downloaded technical data involving programs including the F-18, F-15 and F-22 fighter jets, the E-3 airborne warning and control system, the AH-64 Apache attac ..read more

Manuel Rocha was arrested for allegedly engaging in ‘clandestine activity’ on the communist country’s behalf since at least 1981 A former career US diplomat told a federal judge on Thursday he will plead guilty to charges of working for decades as a secret agent for communist Cuba, an unexpectedly swift resolution to a case prosecutors called one of the most brazen betrayals in the history of the US foreign service. Manuel Rocha’s stunning fall from grace could culminate in a lengthy prison term after the 73-year-old said he would admit to federal counts of conspiring to act as an agent of a f ..read more