The West Is on a World Tour Against Huawei | The Possibility Covid Is Man-Made Is Not a ‘Divisive’ Issue | Israel Weighing Special Court for Palestinian Suspects in Oct. 7 Massacre, and more

It was a victory for Western security hawks in a long battle to clip the wings of Huawei — China’s crown jewel at the center of a race between Washington and Beijing over who will control key technologies like future telecom networks, microchips, artificial intelligence and quantum.
The cheap, reliable networking equipment built by Chinese telecom giants has become a growing flashpoint for Western countries, whose governments worry about both security and an overreliance on Chinese technology. The United States has begun physically rooting out its own Huawei-built infrastructure, a policy called “rip and replace.” In Europe, many countries have blocked and are phasing out the Chinese vendor from 5G networks.
Far less noticed has been the anti-Huawei campaign being waged by the U.S. and the European Union in the rest of the world.

The Possibility Covid Is Man-Made Is Not a ‘Divisive’ Issue - the World Needs to Know  ((Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph)
The goal of any inquiry is to learn lessons so a similar calamity can be averted.
So it seems oddly short-sighted that the Covid Inquiry is refusing to examine the origins of the pandemic.
Finding out the origins of Covid-19 is crucial. If the virus really was cooked up in a Chinese lab, then we need to know so the world can consider introducing a moratorium on such risky research.
Likewise, should we be allowing so-called “virus hunters” to gather rare diseases from remote locations and bring them back to cities when the danger from accidental escape could be catastrophic?
Failing to act sends a message to rogue actors that reckless lab work will be treated with impunity - a dangerous precedent to set as synthetic biology grows even more sophisticated.
It also stops us from being able to prepare for a future engineered virus that we may know nothing about.
Hamish de Bretton Gordon, an expert on chemical and biological counter-terrorism, told The Telegraph: “The chance of a man-made virus in future is so high, and so likely, that we can’t wait until the end of the inquiry to take action.
“Because of the ease and advances in synthetic biology, the next man-made pathogen could be highly virulent and very transmissible.
“Something like Lassa fever or Ebola crossed with Covid could create millions and millions of deaths.”

Stasis Is Not Stalemate in the Ukraine War  (Alexander J. Motyl Dennis Soltys, National Interest)
Stasis or a “state of equilibrium” better captures the reality, although it too overlooks the fact that the Ukrainians are doing better in some respects and the Russians in others. But at least stasis doesn’t imply that traditional actions are impossible or useless. They may be, but policymakers and analysts who project three months of stasis onto an “endless” stalemate are mistaken. The stasis would have to continue for at least another half year for claims of stalemate to be plausible. For the time being, it is much too early to say that the broader Ukrainian war effort is failing.

Israel Weighing Special Court for Palestinian Suspects in Oct. 7 Massacre  (Dahlia Scheindlin, Foreign Policy)
The Hamas attack that killed at least 1,200 people in Israel last month presented its leaders with difficult decisions about how to both wage war in Gaza and free the hostages held there. But it also posed a longer-term dilemma in government circles that has received less attention so far: What should Israel do with the Palestinians suspected of perpetrating the mass killing?
Israel captured several hundred of these suspects on Oct. 7 and the days that followed the massacre. In other circumstances, Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who commit crimes in Israel would be tried in the country’s regular court system.
But experts say this case is almost unprecedented in its scope and severity, and it poses particularly vexing questions and complications for the legal system. So many that some officials are calling for the formation of a special judicial framework—possibly a military tribunal—where the suspects would stand trial.
The dilemmas span every stage of a legal process: How should the suspects be treated in detention until their trials, and who will represent them? Are Israel’s regular criminal courts adequate for the heinous nature of the crimes, or the sheer number of defendants? Why is the investigation so complicated, given the abundance of evidence? And should the sentencing options include the death penalty?
Hovering over all these are questions about the very purpose of the judicial system. How does it address the crimes committed against individual Israelis on Oct. 7 while also addressing the collective existential wound inflicted on Israeli society? Legal proceedings are supposed to give the victims a sense of justice, deter future crimes, and demonstrate the value of the rule of law more broadly to society. And in this case, “society” doesn’t just mean Israel. Given how the Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza have both captivated and polarized people around the world, the international community will no doubt watch the proceedings closely.
With these heightened stakes, there are risks even at this early stage; already, some people are raising concerns about the suspects’ prison conditions.