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Vietnam’s great banking clean-up is only the beginning

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IwPost
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Vietnam’s great banking clean-up is only the beginning

Vietnamese banks started deleting more than 86 million bank accounts last September.

Of the roughly 200 million accounts on the country’s books, only 113 million personal accounts and some 711,000 organizational ones survived the biometric verification requirements introduced by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV).

The rest, close to 43% of the total, were dormant, duplicated, unverifiable or opened by someone who never intended to be found.

How does a banking system end up with 86 million accounts nobody can put a face to? Slowly, is the answer. Account opening got easier every year. Checking who still controlled those accounts did not.

Identity records, transaction monitoring, and fraud alerts grew up in different systems at different times, and the connections between them remain scattered. In the end it took a national biometric identity program, run with the Ministry of Public Security, to do the clean-up that the industry’s own controls never managed.

Ironically, those 86 million accounts are a product of the market’s success. Non-cash transactions rose 40.74% year-on-year in the first two months of 2026, based on the SBV figures. Several banks say 95% of their transactions now go through digital channels. VietQR acceptance has reached around 2.1 million merchant outlets.

Vietnam built one of the busiest digital payments markets anywhere, and did it in under a decade. What has not kept pace is the infrastructure underneath: the identity checks, the fraud monitoring and the connections between them.

Fraud found the gaps first

The National Cybersecurity Association put consumer losses to online fraud at VND18.9 trillion for 2024, roughly US$744 million.

Police records show $1.5 billion has been lost across more than 24,000 cases since 2020, and the trend worsened through last year: Viettel Cyber Security logged 6.5 million compromised user accounts in the third quarter of 2025, 64% more than the quarter before, plus nearly 4,000 phishing domains dressed up as banks, government agencies and online shops.

Very little of that involved defeating a bank’s security outright. A mule needs a dormant account, and until September there were tens of millions to choose from. An impersonator needs a customer who was verified once, at onboarding, years ago.

A suspicious transfer requires a monitoring system that cannot detect a device change or a new beneficiary added the day before, because that information is stored elsewhere in the bank. The weak points sit between systems, not inside them.

Most Vietnamese banks are running technology designed for a card-and-branch business that has since been augmented with instant transfers, QR, wallets and e-commerce, one integration at a time.

Every addition made sense on its own. Together, they add up to an estate where a new fraud rule takes weeks to deploy and still covers only one channel, and where a good share of the technology budget goes to keeping old connections alive rather than building anything.

There is a point at which patching stops being the cheap option, once the maintenance bill and the losses leaking through the gaps are added together honestly. However, Vietnam’s transaction growth is pushing its institutions towards the crossover faster than most markets get there.

Regulation has picked a direction

The SBV has not been subtle about where it wants the industry to go. Facial biometric checks are mandatory for online transfers above VND10 million, and for total daily transfers exceeding VND20 million.

Its centralized fraud database, SIMO, connects 149 institutions; by mid-April 2026 it had pushed out 3.7 million warnings to customers, and over 1.2 million of them paused or abandoned a transaction as a result, keeping nearly VND4.17 trillion (about $158 million) out of criminal accounts.

Money is being directed too. Banks must now commit at least 15% of technology implementation budgets to cybersecurity and data security, a floor set in the banking sector’s 2026 digital transformation directive and repeated in the new Cybersecurity Law.

The Law on Data, the Personal Data Protection Law, and the Law on Digital Technology Industry, which came into force in January, put data handling and AI on a statutory footing for the first time.

Taken together, the expectation is plain enough: know who owns every account, share what you see and be in a position to stop a payment while it can still be stopped. Some banks have already jumped, including VPBank, LPBank and TPBank. VIB was first in the country to run its core banking on AWS, alongside a private cloud.

Payment rails are being rebuilt both outward and inward. Cross-border QR with China went live in December 2025, adding to working links with Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, and the State Bank announced the launch of a Vietnam–Singapore QR corridor in July, NAPAS’s sixth country connection.

Japan, South Korea and Malaysia are next on the list. Merchants gain a new customer base with each corridor; fraud, authentication and settlement teams gain a new jurisdiction, a second currency and no extra seconds to work with.

The trap in all this investment is obvious once named. A bank can migrate to newer technology and keep the old fragmentation, with issuing, authentication, fraud monitoring and servicing still in separate places.

Building for the new Vietnam

Over the past several years, I have worked with banks across Vietnam and the region on exactly this challenge: how to modernize payments infrastructure without disrupting growth, customer experience or day-to-day operations.

In Vietnam, the cloud-native SmartVista platform powered one of the first Visa Flexible Credential deployments in the market, enabling issuers to offer a single credential that lets customers switch between debit, credit, installments and reward options.

In practice, the product idea is rarely the hardest part. The real constraint is whether the underlying architecture can turn that idea into a secure, scalable service quickly enough.

PVcomBank offers another example of what the transformation looks like over time. The bank moved from its legacy core environment to a modular SmartVista stack, expanding its card issuing and management capabilities while connecting components through flexible APIs.

The platform now supports more than 1.1 million cards and processes an average of seven million transactions each month, alongside fraud management and 3DS 2.2 capabilities.

That growth would be much harder to manage on an estate where every new service requires another integration, another workaround and another operational dependency. The lesson is not that every bank needs the same technology, but that every bank needs an architecture capable of adapting as quickly as the market itself.

Next door in Cambodia, BPC took BIDC, a subsidiary of Vietnam’s biggest bank by assets, BIDV, live on SmartVista in March. One platform now covers BIDC’s issuing, acquiring, contactless EMV and fraud management and replacing the patchwork it ran before.

The bank now has real-time visibility across operations along with the ability to release new features without stopping anything else. We see Vietnamese banks working towards the same position, often on a much larger scale.

None of the deadlines will move while they get there. The Singapore corridor is open, more are scheduled and SIMO’s next reporting update will show which institutions are keeping pace. The clean-up of 86 million accounts dealt with the past.

What Vietnamese banks build over the next few years will determine far more than fraud outcomes. It will determine how quickly they can innovate, compete and earn customer trust in an increasingly digital economy.

Danny Duong, Ph.D., is managing director Vietnam at BPC. Over the past several years, he has worked with banks across Vietnam and Southeast Asia on payments infrastructure modernization, helping institutions rebuild core systems to support digital growth without disrupting operations.

Comcast store punished low sales by smashing pies in workers’ faces, lawsuit claims

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IwPost
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Comcast store punished low sales by smashing pies in workers’ faces, lawsuit claims

A lawsuit against Comcast’s cable division alleges that a store manager humiliated the lowest performing salesperson each month with a strange ritual in which a cream pie was smashed into the employee’s face. The lawsuit claims the store manager took videos of the assaults and ordered employees to participate in the assaults and record their own videos.

A Comcast store in Plainville, Connecticut, “had a policy that the highest-ranked Retail Sales Consultant for the prior month was instructed by his or her supervisor—Ms. Peterson, the Comcast Store manager—to tie the lowest-ranked sales consultant for the prior month to a chair in the back office and thereafter assault that person by violently smashing a cream pie in their face,” the complaint alleged.

Plaintiff David Figueroa’s lawsuit said he was hired as a retail sales consultant on February 2, 2026, and was supervised by store manager Sully Fuentes Peterson. Figueroa alleges that Peterson “designed and implemented” the pie-in-face ritual to meet goals related to sales and positive responses in customer surveys.

“Defendant did not inform the Plaintiff prior to his acceptance of Defendant’s offer of employment that the Comcast Store has a policy of subjecting Retail Sales Consultants to public assaults by co-workers—at the direction of Ms. Peterson, the store manager—for the purpose of increasing Defendant’s sales and profitability,” the lawsuit said.

Comcast was negligent, lawsuit alleges

Figueroa resigned on February 27, and he alleges it was a constructive discharge. The lawsuit says the defendant, Comcast, was negligent because it “reasonably should have known” about the store management’s policies and that the policies could harm employees. Comcast “failed to properly supervise the Comcast Store’s management team,” allowing store management to humiliate employees “for the purpose of promoting the Defendant’s revenues and profits,” the lawsuit alleged.

Comcast is likely to dispute the negligence claim and may dispute at least some of the factual allegations. Comcast provided a statement to Ars today in which it said it disagrees with the complaint, but did not provide any details. Comcast also did not say whether it still employs the manager.

“The Company has zero tolerance for harassment, humiliation, or any behavior that compromises a respectful and safe workplace,” Comcast said in the statement provided to Ars. “This matter is in litigation so we will not comment on the specific allegations, other than to say that we disagree with the claims in the complaint and its characterization of the alleged events, and intend to fully respond through the legal process.”

Figueroa is seeking compensatory damages for “past and future economic losses” and for emotional distress. The complaint was filed on July 9 in a Connecticut superior court and was described in articles published yesterday by Law360 and The Desk.

Peterson maintained a chart in the back office that ranked store sales staff and “identified the employees who either had been recently assaulted or were scheduled to be assaulted in this way,” the lawsuit said. The complaint includes a photo of what is said to be the chart, which includes people’s first names followed by a month and a “pie face” emoji.

A chart on a wall includes numbers and names along with several emojis, including one depicting a pie in the face.

Image from lawsuit against Comcast.

Image from lawsuit against Comcast.

“An objective, reasonable person in Plaintiff’s position would have felt compelled to resign his employment as a result of this work atmosphere that Defendant—through its employees, servants, agents—created,” the lawsuit said. “As a result of the pervasive, repeated, and ongoing threats of violence—and actual violence inflicted on co-workers not meeting sales goals—Plaintiff resigned his position with Defendant, resulting in his constructive discharge from Defendant’s employment.”

“Assaults were videotaped”

As the case moves forward, the court could be shown video evidence of alleged pie assaults. The lawsuit claims the “assaults were videotaped by Ms. Peterson,” that she “ordered her staff to participate in these assaults and to video them,” and that Figueroa himself “witnessed and videotaped a co-worker, Ty, being tied-up and assaulted by a co-worker in the backroom of the Comcast Store.”

“Ms. Peterson ordered, was present for, and videotaped this assault, as did the Plaintiff and other co-workers,” the lawsuit said. “The co-worker who struck Ty in the face while Ty was tied-up had better sales results than Ty and, therefore, Ms. Peterson ordered him to assault his poorer performing co-worker, in front of his peers.”

The lawsuit alleges that in another incident, an assistant sales manager named Jania was assaulted with a pie because she “received a poor survey score from a customer. The Plaintiff viewed a video of Jania being assaulted on a co-worker’s phone.”

Figueroa’s lawsuit said that on February 27, he called Comcast regional manager Maranda Cody to inform her about the pie assaults and tell her that he did not feel comfortable continuing to work at the store. Cody instructed Figueroa to send her a text message memorializing his concerns and reasons for wanting to resign, the lawsuit said. Figueroa said he did not receive a response to the text message or his complaints, and went ahead with his resignation.

Comcast’s cable division has been trying to reverse customer losses over the past year by offering a five-year price guarantee and plans without data caps. The changes came after Comcast President Mike Cavanagh said in April 2025 that “we are not winning in the marketplace.”

Russia charges Telegram founder Durov with facilitating terrorism

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IwPost
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Russia charges Telegram founder Durov with facilitating terrorism


Russia has charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorism, alleging the messaging platform was used by Ukrainian intelligence services to recruit operatives and coordinate acts of sabotage inside Russia.

The FSB claimed Telegram failed to remove channels, chats and bots linked to the activity and has issued an international arrest warrant for the Russian-born entrepreneur, who lives abroad and holds French and UAE citizenship.

Durov, who left Russia in 2014 after refusing government demands to shut down opposition groups on his previous platform VKontakte, has previously accused Moscow of trying to restrict access to Telegram. The company responded to the charges by posting an image of Durov raising his middle finger on X.

via BBC

It’s official: Data centers are slowing America’s shift away from coal

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IwPost
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It’s official: Data centers are slowing America’s shift away from coal

As tech companies have built hundreds of hyperscale data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom, they have triggered conflicting predictions over how these facilities will affect the nation’s power grid. Critics have argued that data centers will raise power bills and increase carbon emissions. Supporters claimed they could increase investment in infrastructure and clean energy, leading to lower prices and emissions.

We now have a clearer picture about at least one consequence of the data center boom, and it isn’t encouraging. A report released last week from the Energy Information Administration found that carbon emissions from the U.S. power sector rose by 4 percent last year — larger than the increase in the economy overall, where emissions only ticked up 2 percent.  The agency attributes this rise to a 13 percent increase in coal power generation, partially driven by the proliferation of large-scale data centers.

The national increase in power sector emissions represents the reversal of a longstanding trend. Before the AI boom, U.S. power consumption had been flat for decades. Utilities, grid operators, and energy planners had assumed that pattern would continue, and many planned to retire their older and dirtier coal plants with the expectation that natural gas and renewables could replace them. Instead, electricity demand is rising much faster than anticipated. Data centers could make up more than 10 percent of U.S. electricity usage by 2030, and they operate around the clock, including when wind and solar farm output is low. That demand has extended the life of some aging coal plants.

“Commercial load is starting to grow, and that’s part of the data center story,” said Steve Piper, the director of energy research at S&P Global Energy, a market intelligence firm. “It’s kind of a rising tide lifts all boats phenomenon. While we think structurally coal will decline over time, [the AI boom] is going to slow down that decline.”

The increase in power sector emissions would have been even bigger were it not for the fact that solar and wind energy also surged last year. Utilities can now tap cheap, carbon-free energy during much of the day, which means they are less reliant on fossil fuel-burning plants that make up the backbone of the energy system. Solar now produces more power than coal during sunny months when demand is low. The climate problem is that while solar is still growing, coal is not shrinking. 

The other driving factor behind last year’s increase was that coal became cheaper relative to natural gas, the country’s largest power source. As natural gas exports have increased, domestic gas prices have risen relative to coal.

The coal industry has also been buoyed by increased political support. President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright have vowed to revive the nation’s moribund coal industry by supporting new coal power plants and helping build an export terminal that can ship coal to Asia. Wright has issued temporary emergency orders to prevent the retirement of at least half a dozen coal plants around the country, forcing utilities to run plants they had previously sought to shut down. His department has argued that these orders are justified because hot and cold weather are straining the power grid.

But these orders aren’t actually the reason that coal emissions have rebounded. The plants that Wright has kept open are running at a lower capacity than they did before Trump took office, in large part because there are still cheaper sources of power than coal out there. 

Take for example the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, owned by Consumers Energy. It was the first major coal facility that Wright prevented from closing. At the time, Wright said that the plant’s operation was necessary so that Michigan “[did] not lose critical power generation capability as summer begins.” Yet in each of the last three quarters, the plant has generated less electricity than it did in the equivalent quarter the previous year.  

Instead, the increase is happening across the country. Outside of the Western U.S., nearly every state generated more coal power in 2025 than it did in 2024. One of the biggest jumps came in Virginia, home to the world’s largest AI cluster, where utilities almost doubled their coal power generation to serve the state’s growing clusters of data centers. Nearby coal states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia also stepped up their generation to match data center demand. 

The report is especially concerning since decarbonizing the electricity sector, which accounts for about 25 percent of U.S. emissions, is an essential step toward meeting national climate targets. Unlike in the transportation sector, where electric vehicles still face significant cost and infrastructure barriers, and heavy industry, in which natural gas is still needed to make steel and cement at scale, the power sector has real cost-effective alternatives to fossil fuels.

Once electricity became cleaner, switching cars, home heating, and other sectors from fossil fuels to electricity would sharply reduce emissions.  

And there were signs of progress: Emissions from the power grid have fallen by about one-third from their peak around 2005 as utilities have replaced old coal plants with less carbon-intensive methods such as natural gas turbines, which emit about half as much carbon per watt of electricity. The rapid build-out of solar and wind power was supposed to reduce power emissions even further. 

The stubborn presence of coal is a problem for that progress.

“Coal generation may sort of have a floor in our forecasts,” said Piper. He said he expects that in the long run, coal will continue to decline, but that “it will take something else” to dislodge it from the power grid altogether. And until we have a grid with enough round-the-clock power to render the dirtiest fuels unnecessary, the nation’s journey away from fossil fuels will be stuck at the starting gate.  

Syrian Authorities Arrest 7 in Alleged ISIS Cell Targeting Aleppo 

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Syrian Authorities Arrest 7 in Alleged ISIS Cell Targeting Aleppo 


[DAMASCUS] Syria’s Interior Ministry announced the arrest of seven people it said were affiliated with the Islamic State (ISIS) during a joint security operation targeting two cells in Aleppo city and the towns of Azaz and Al-Bab in the province’s countryside. 

The ministry said on its official social media accounts that the Internal Security Forces carried out the operation in coordination with the General Intelligence Service, following surveillance that identified the cells’ locations and tracked their members’ movements. 

Syrian Internal Security Forces take part in a joint operation with the General Intelligence Service targeting suspected ISIS cells in Aleppo and its countryside, July 29, 2026. (Courtesy: Syrian Interior Ministry Media Office)

According to the ministry, the two cells were planning attacks against government facilities in Aleppo city and its countryside. Authorities did not disclose which facilities were targeted or when the alleged attacks were expected to take place. They also did not release the names of those detained or details of their alleged roles within the organization. 

A source in the Interior Ministry told The Media Line that forces taking part in the operation seized explosives, improvised explosive devices, and several weapons from warehouses belonging to the cells during raids on locations that authorities said ISIS had been using in Aleppo city and Al-Bab.The source, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said the seized materials also included explosive vests, ammunition, and other items linked to the activities of the detained cells. 

Photographs released by the authorities showed the seven detainees, along with weapons, explosive devices, and other materials that the ministry said were confiscated during the operation. 

The ministry did not say whether the raids were conducted simultaneously at the targeted locations or whether they resulted in clashes or casualties. Authorities have also not announced whether the detainees have been referred to judicial authorities or formally charged. 

This operation was part of the Interior Ministry’s continuing efforts to pursue sleeper cells and individuals linked to armed organizations and to prevent attacks against government institutions or civilians, the source said. 

Weapons, ammunition, and equipment that Syria’s Interior Ministry said were seized from warehouses linked to ISIS cells during an operation in Aleppo and its countryside, July 29, 2026.Courtesy: Syrian Interior Ministry Media Office)

Azaz and Al-Bab are located in the northern Aleppo countryside, while Aleppo city is one of Syria’s largest population and economic centers. The operation covered several locations across the city and surrounding areas, reflecting the geographical scope of the activities being monitored by the authorities. 

The Internal Security Forces and General Intelligence Service have previously announced joint operations against cells accused of links to ISIS. Authorities said those operations helped disrupt plots the organization had been preparing to carry out. 

The latest operation highlights the continuing security challenge posed by scattered ISIS cells despite the organization’s loss of territorial control, as Syrian authorities seek to strengthen security and prevent the group from rebuilding its presence in urban and rural areas. 

Donald Trump and Wars of Choice

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Tom Engelhardt
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Donald Trump and Wars of Choice


The Me, Me, Me Presidency

There’s no I in war. But there is in Iran. And in Iraq, too. Both these wars were about ME — that is, the Middle East. It’s a region rife with supposed American security interests, but this wordplay points to another very all-too-real dynamic: These wars are as much about the “I” and “ME” of the White House as they are about the countries we attack. Or to put it another way: It’s the presidential psyche, stupid.

Way back in 2002, then-President George W. Bush warned that Iraq, Iran, and outlier North Korea comprised a grave threat. “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” he warned. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.” North Korea built a nuclear arsenal, and with it, purchased a guarantee of security. The other two countries produced no nukes, and the story has been radically different.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003. Two months later, the war was won. Except it wasn’t. Despite President George W. Bush’s unforgettable May 1, 2003, “mission accomplished” moment when, from the deck of an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego, he declared “major combat operations in Iraq … ended,” the American war there somehow never actually stopped. An insurgency was raging, U.S. bases were being mortared, and American officials feared a civil war between the country’s formerly reigning Sunni minority and its rising Shiite majority was brewing. It became a forever war that lived up to the moniker. Last week, almost a quarter century since Bush made the case for war in Iraq, a U.S. soldier was killed in an Iranian attack on an American base there.

President Donald Trump was elected on a promise to say goodbye to all that. American-style wars of choice were going to be a thing of the past: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end.” And yet Trump’s America is now deeply involved in a seemingly ever-escalating and never-ending conflict with — yes! — Iraq’s neighbor, Iran.

No one, I suspect, not even Trump, has the faintest idea why he did this, though maybe he felt left out of the club of forever-war makers, co-chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe he just sensed that he had to give this country a shot at being globally competitive when it came to making endless (and endlessly unsuccessful) war, if the U.S. was to remain the superpower on this planet.

Not everyone thinks, however, that you need to fight ruinous wars to be a superpower. There’s China, which is the quietest rising power in recent history because — except for a few border flare-ups with India early in this decade, and saber-rattling when it comes to Taiwan, the island nation off the coast of the mainland — it hasn’t been at war since 1979.

In lieu of pursuing fruitless conflicts around the world, it’s been silently leading the global production of green energy technology. China’s exports of green tech shot up by more than a third in the first six months of the year. This included a reported rise in shipments of lithium batteries and wind turbines by 38 percent and 36 percent, respectively. “In the first half of this year, the situation in the Middle East was tense and global supply of chemical products was tight,” Wang Jun, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Customs said at a recent press briefing. “China, with its complete industrial system and full-chain supporting capabilities, quickly seized the sudden external demands.”

And this Chinese green technology boom was in full swing even before Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen declared a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia and began attacking the kingdom’s oil ships in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, briefly driving the price of oil back above $100 per barrel, about 40 percent higher than before the conflict began.

As his war with Iran has gone off the rails, Trump has begun redefining the conflict from a war to “a little excursion,” which just kept going on and on, leading him in March to sum things up this way: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough. We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long running danger once and for all.”

You’ll recall that Trump also said on March 2 that the war was set to last “four to five weeks.” And three days later, that the U.S. and Israel continued “to totally demolish the enemy far ahead of schedule.” By March 9, Trump said that the conflict was “very complete, pretty much.” And two days later, the president declared victory. “Let me tell you, we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won,” Trump announced at a rally in Kentucky. “We won.”

Like Bush’s “mission accomplished” moment, Trump’s was also decidedly short-lived. On March 15, the president said Iran still had “a little bit of fight back, but not much.” In a Truth Social post five days later, he wrote: “We are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down” the war. On April 1, Trump announced the U.S. was “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly” and on the 6th said the war “could end very quickly.” But it didn’t. “The war in Iran is going along swimmingly,” he declared on April 16. And in a May 1 letter to Congress, Trump said: “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.” Except Iran never got the memo.

As the war has simply gone on and on, Trump has continued to tweak his terminology and rebrand the conflict with Iran as “a skirmish.” (Tell that, of course, to all the dead Iranian children!) Here’s how he put it, in fact, on July 22: “I call it a skirmish. This is, with this skirmish we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I call it that, because, let me tell you, they’re getting hit so hard and they want to make a deal. But I say they’re not ready to make a deal.” And if the Iran war doesn’t end in the coming weeks, Trump will undoubtedly have to tweak terminology further, perhaps relabeling his skirmish with Iran a tussle, a scuffle, or even a full-scale kerfuffle.

As Trump insists the war is a minor engagement, he continues to dish out immense amounts of pain on Iranians and threatens even worse. He seems increasingly eager to blast civilian infrastructure and smash Iran into submission. As he put it all too bluntly when it came to those civilian targets: “Any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by missile, rocket, drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy one bridge or power plant.” And he’s also been threatening to launch “a massive attack. Bigger than ever before.”

His Secretary of War Pete Hegseth certainly understands the president, or why would he start insisting on checking the testosterone levels of American troops and begin referring to what, in the Trump years, had already gone from the Department of Defense to the Department of War as “the High-T Department of War”?

But while Hegseth is hoping to amp up the military’s potency, Americans want to bring the Iran war to a close. Only 29 percent of Americans approve of the way Trump is handling the Iran war, according to a recent Washington Post poll. Even a Fox News survey (yes, Fox News!) found disapproval ratings hit a record high in July, with 56 percent of Americans opposing U.S. military action against Iran, including 40 percent who “strongly” oppose it. Nearly two-thirds of respondents now think the conflict will last at least a year.

Even worse was a recent CBS News/YouGov poll that found 21 percent of Americans think the conflict will last multiple years! That same poll found that 67 percent of respondents say the U.S. should end the war with Iran now. Young people are the most fed up, with 83 percent urging the president to stop the war posthaste.

And even among his most fervent followers, support had already dropped by 13 percent over the previous two months, according to a Politico poll, while almost 1 of every 5 MAGA voters had come to believe that the U.S. should end its war in Iran, no matter the cost or results.

Of course, Trump doesn’t really care about young voters or Republican voters or even MAGA devotees. As he put it last week: “A poll just came out: Americans don’t want high gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war.” His war in the ME is wrapped up in his egocentric narcissism and his me, me, me world. The phrase “wars of choice” now means wars of Donald’s choice. But the Iranian government has a say in the matter and has made a choice to hold out amid renewed threats and attacks. And despite what Trump seems to think, the public in the U.S. can make choices, too. If Trump keeps on fighting in Iran, he may sooner or later also find himself in a distinct “skirmish” with the American people.

Watching American power tentatively arrive in the Philippines

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IwPost
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Watching American power tentatively arrive in the Philippines

OYSTER BAY, PALAWAN – When American forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, I watched it happen from Kuwait, where I worked as a contracted security guard. The last convoy crossed the berm that December — roughly 100 vehicles — and with it went the war in which I had served.

Two years later, at a joint Department of Defense intelligence facility in Germany, I watched pieces of the old Cold War-era footprint being dismantled and shipped home. I have spent much of my adult life watching American power leave places abroad.

Last week, from a hilltop above Oyster Bay on the Philippine island of Palawan, I watched it arrive. It did not arrive the way it left Iraq. What I looked down on was a Philippine Navy detachment on the western coast of Palawan, facing the South China Sea — one of the places where boats resupplying the Sierra Madre stage their runs.

A Philippine Coast Guard vessel, the BRP Malapascua, sat in the bay — the ship I was told had carried home the men wounded at the shoal last week, when a Chinese coast guardsman struck a Filipino marine in the head with a wooden baton.

The Malapascua knows the place. In 2023, near that same shoal, a Chinese cutter targeted the ship with a military-grade laser that temporarily blinded crew members on her bridge.

The newest American investment on the shore beyond her is almost comically modest: a $975,000 contract for a boat repair facility with a portable gantry crane and improvements to an existing launch. It sits beside a pier the Philippines built itself, sized for the Philippine Navy’s landing vessels.

Elsewhere on the base, a small American unit called Task Force Ayungin advises and trains Philippine forces conducting operations in the contested waters. A 2026 buildup looks like this: a repair bay and a solicitation notice.

Standing on that hill, I asked myself two questions. If China invades Taiwan, will Taiwan share the fate of Ukraine, a country in whose armed forces I served as a drone operator? And are the United States and its allies building something here to credibly counter China in the South China Sea?

I cannot answer the first question. The second one has an answer, and it is written in concrete across this archipelago. Start with the geography. Under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, American forces now hold rotational access to nine Philippine military sites. Five of them date to 2016.

Four were added in 2023, and the map explains them better than any communique does. Three of the new sites cluster in northern Luzon, facing the Luzon Strait and Taiwan beyond it.

The fourth is Balabac, at the southern tip of Palawan, facing the Spratly Islands, where Manila is building a three-kilometer runway and American money is following with barracks, warehouses and support infrastructure.

The funding has compounded across separate accounts: more than $82 million committed to the original sites by early 2023, another $128 million requested for EDCA construction in the following budget, and a separate $500 million foreign military financing package announced in July 2024 to modernize the Philippine armed forces and coast guard.

Fuel farms, aprons, warehouses, command centers. Much of the infrastructure is described in the language of disaster response. Fuel does not care what you call it.

Then the missiles. In April 2024, the US Army flew its Typhon launcher to northern Luzon for an exercise. It never went home. The Typhon system fires Tomahawks, giving it sufficient nominal range to reach portions of China’s coast from northern Luzon.

The Marines followed with NMESIS, an unmanned launcher carrying Naval Strike Missiles. It was brought to Batanes for exercises last year and to Calayan this June — islands closer to Taiwan than to Manila.

By Manila’s own account, the system remained in the country after last spring’s drills so Philippine Marines could train on it. The word for all of this is rotational. And the word is doing a lot of work.

The Philippines is arming in parallel. Indian-made BrahMos anti-ship batteries are positioned in Zambales, putting the contested Scarborough Shoal within the system’s reported range. New frigates are arriving from Korean shipyards.

And in July, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro called the acquisition of five retired Abukuma-class destroyer escorts a done deal — one of the largest transfers of retired combatants Japan has ever made to a foreign navy. A decade ago, that sentence would have been unthinkable.

Japan is the other anchor, and its shift runs deepest. Tokyo is driving defense spending toward 2% of GDP, has ordered 400 Tomahawks and, in March, placed its first upgraded, long-range Type 12 missiles on Kyushu, within reach of portions of the Chinese mainland.

Its southwest islands are being garrisoned one by one, radars and launchers working down the Ryukyus toward Taiwan.

In November, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a situation threatening Japan’s survival — the legal classification that could permit her forces to exercise collective self-defense. No sitting prime minister had ever stated it so plainly. Beijing answered with diplomatic threats, economic pressure and increased maritime activity.

She did not retract it. And a reciprocal access agreement, in force since last September, now lets Japanese and Philippine forces train on each other’s soil. The spokes of the American alliance system are lashing themselves to each other, no longer only to the hub.

So the answer to my second question is yes. This is earnest. It is the most serious military architecture assembled in the Western Pacific since the Cold War. I once guarded that war’s leftovers in Germany.

But earnest and decisive are different words, and the view from that hilltop showed me the distance between them. The wounded in that bay were struck at Second Thomas Shoal on July 20.

On July 23 and July 24, Chinese ships blasted Philippine fisheries vessels with water cannons at Scarborough Shoal, where Chinese coast guard patrols logged 933 ship-days in the first half of this year — nearly matching their total for all of 2025.

All of it happened inside the reach of missiles that will never fire at a water cannon. The alliance is building for the war above a threshold while losing the contest below it, one baton blow at a time.

And the structure has a hollow center. The Philippines holds a mutual defense treaty with Washington dating to 1951. Japan holds one from 1960. Taiwan, the island every runway and launcher out here silently references, holds nothing. No treaty obliges the United States to defend it.

A 1979 law requires Washington to arm the island and maintain the capacity to resist coercion, while deliberately leaving the decision to intervene unresolved. The chain is strongest at its ends and empty in the middle, and everyone building it knows.

In Kuwait, I watched an army leave a war it had chosen. Above Oyster Bay, I watched the slow assembly of a war no one has chosen yet. The steel is going in; the will remains on order.

Whether that is deterrence or a schedule is the question the whole structure exists to avoid answering. And from a hilltop in Palawan, looking down at a boat shed rising beside a contested sea, you can feel the region waiting on the answer, too.

Benjamin Stuart Reed served in Iraq with the US Army, worked as a security contractor in Afghanistan and the Gulf, and flew drones with the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the first year of the war. He travels and writes across Asia and is finishing a memoir, “War Tourist.” He wrote this from Palawan.

F1 season to end in Europe if Qatar, Abu Dhabi races cannot proceed

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F1 season to end in Europe if Qatar, Abu Dhabi races cannot proceed

Formula 1 will conclude its 2026 season in Europe if the Qatar and Abu Dhabi Grands Prix cannot take place because of the situation in the Middle East, the sport’s president and CEO Stefano Domenicali said Wednesday, Anadolu reports.

Speaking during a media roundtable following the Hungarian Grand Prix, Domenicali said both races are confirmed but Formula 1 would monitor developments until mid-September.

“We will take the maximum time for us to see how the situation will develop, and we will take the decision at the right time,” he said, according to the Formula 1 website.

“That moment will not be before the middle of September. For us today, the races in Qatar and Abu Dhabi are confirmed,” he added.

Qatar is scheduled to host the penultimate round from Nov. 27 – 29, followed by the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix from Dec. 4 – 6.

Domenicali said Formula 1 would relocate the conclusion of the championship if conditions did not sufficiently improve.

“If this will not be possible, the end of the season would be in Europe,” he said, without identifying potential replacement venues.

The uncertainty follows the removal of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix from their original April dates because of the regional situation.

Formula 1 and the FIA announced Sunday that Malaysia’s Sepang International Circuit would host the Bahrain Grand Prix from Oct. 2 – 4, subject to final agreements and approval from the World Motor Sport Council. The Saudi Arabian race has not been rescheduled.

Domenicali said Formula 1 was also preparing alternative plans for 2027 if the situation continued, while maintaining its target of holding 24 Grands Prix.

Quantum computing roundup: Still more technologies making waves

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Quantum computing roundup: Still more technologies making waves

If you follow quantum computing news for long enough, it can start to seem like any quantum system that can alternate between two well-separated energy states can be used as a qubit. Atoms, ions, photons, electrons, and manufactured devices all have their backers. One of the key things that attracts backers is the tech’s ability to scale. We’ll need a lot of high-quality qubits to start doing any complex computations, and the ability of any technology to get us there is the subject of debate.

So even as some technologies can now support thousands of qubits, some competitors are still working on a small handful of qubits—the companies behind them are convinced that they have the potential to scale more effectively.

One of those technologies involves quantum dots that hold a single electron. Their advantage is that we can manufacture them using the same tech we use to build traditional processors, an approach that has proven to be scalable. This week saw two new papers describing different ways of using quantum dots, one of which was appealing enough that IBM bought the company that developed it. Separately, another company has released a processor showing 100 individual electrons being held in diamond defects, technology that wasn’t obvious could scale.

Flipping spins

The first news comes from a publication in Nature from a company called HRL Laboratories, the descendant of the research program launched by Howard Hughes. HRL is using manufactured quantum dots, a distinct technology from the dots used in displays, although it relies on some of the same physics principles. Both approaches use a structure that traps electrons in a region smaller than the electron’s wavelength. In displays, this allows control of the wavelength that the material emits.

For qubits, the traps are far smaller and serve to hold a single electron in place. Critically, they can be manufactured; with the right wiring, electromagnetic interactions can trap a single electron in a small patch of silicon. Once trapped, the electron’s spin, which can be up, down, or a superposition of the two, can be used as a qubit. While this technology can scale easily—we’re very good at putting wiring into silicon at scale—electron spins are hard to keep stable and are typically controlled via microwaves, requiring a separate control system.

But “typically” doesn’t mean “always,” and HRL is describing a different tech. It requires three separate quantum dots, each holding an electron, with the surrounding electronics controlling how much the spins of these three electrons can interact. That’s critical because, under certain conditions, no two electrons can have the same spin. This explains why atomic orbitals fill up the way they do, with each energy level holding just a pair, one spin-up, the other spin-down. Enabling them to interact can alter their spins.

To do operations on this kind of qubit, you simply need to control which electrons are interacting and to what extent. That is controlled electronically, allowing us to eliminate microwaves entirely. Everything is handled via wiring, eliminating the need for lots of microwave-carrying cabling into the refrigeration system that keeps the hardware near absolute zero.

HRL spends much of the paper describing its control system, which sits at an intermediate level of refrigeration and consists of a traditional processor optimized for low-temperature and low-power operations, consuming less than 3.5 watts despite being manufactured on a 130 nm process. Instructions for operating the qubits are compiled elsewhere, then loaded into the controller, after which it operates autonomously. Communications with the chip that holds the qubits are handled by a superconducting ribbon cable.

The system HRL describes had 18 qubits, and the company ran a simple error-correction code on it, demonstrating a logical error rate of less than 1 percent. That’s well below what has been achieved with other technology, but it’s an important validation that the problems HRL is facing are likely to be in the realm of engineering rather than physics.

Hybrid machines

Although the paper was published by HRL, the progress it has made has since become the property of IBM. That’s notable because IBM has bet big on competing technology in which qubits are held in a manufactured device called a transmon and controlled with microwave pulses—precisely the control system that HRL was trying to avoid. It’s not an obvious fit at first, so we asked IBM Director of Research Jay Gambetta about the decision.

“At a high level, I’m a strong believer in silicon technology—superconducting qubits are built on silicon, spins are built on silicon,” Gambetta told Ars. “It gives us flexibility to keep both parts going in parallel, build on the same foundation.” Right now, that foundation allows rapid iteration and testing of designs. IBM has typically released a new processor architecture every year, refining it over two or three generations before the next one arrives.

But Gambetta suggested that in the longer term, this raises the possibility that HRL tech will appear in an IBM system, operating alongside IBM’s existing tech. “As we look at the error correction codes going forward, some codes are better at being memories, some are better at being magic state creation,” Gambetta said. “I want to have the flexibility to build my hardware that maximizes both of them.”

Other spin tech

The same issue of Nature includes a separate paper on quantum-dot qubits from a group at Delft University of Technology. We covered their technology in May, but in short, it involves qubits based on single electrons in quantum dots and focuses on moving electrons and their spins around.

One problem with quantum dots and other manufactured qubits is that their connections are dictated by the wiring of the chip they’re on. Since error correction codes are based on the geometry of the connections among qubits, this means committing to one or a small number of error correction codes when the chip is manufactured. If better code is developed or if some operations are easier to perform with a different code, you’re out of luck until the next generation of chips.

Qubits based on trapped ions or neutral atoms don’t have this limitation. The qubits can be moved around so that any one can hypothetically be connected to any other. This provides a great deal of algorithmic flexibility and efficiency; their backers expect it’s enough to overcome the relatively slow operations compared to silicon-based qubits.

In May, however, the Delft team showed that an individual spin could be moved from one quantum dot to a neighboring, unoccupied one and that this approach could scale—the spin could be moved through several intervening dots and end up on the opposite side of the chip from where it started. In theory, this means any two spins could be moved around arbitrarily, brought into proximity, and entangled. The approach combines the advantage of manufacturing with the flexibility of atom-based systems.

Wednesday’s paper expands on that, creating a bus that electrons can be moved along, with a number of bus stops where they can be stored when not needed. We need a lot more hardware to get this to work, but that hardware is very compact, and the flexibility can be powerful.

The team describes a 1.2 micrometer bus route and says that the fidelity of sending a spin from one end to another and back is nearly 98 percent. Using a handful of spins, the researchers implement a small error-correction code. They also characterize the sources of error in their system, finding that most of it stems from two sources: noise that arises during the spin exchanges needed for entanglement and the loss of coherence while the qubits are being moved or idling, a common problem with spin qubits.

Diamonds are a qubit’s best friend?

A separate technology went pretty quiet after we looked at it a decade ago: nitrogen vacancies in diamonds. A diamond is a regular array of carbon atoms, all sharing bonds with their neighbors. But impurities can be scattered throughout the array, including the incorporation of nitrogen. Nitrogen can form one less bond than carbon, so it leaves a neighboring carbon with a single unbonded electron. The spin of that electron can be manipulated just like the spin of one held in a quantum dot.

The problem has been that it’s very difficult to control where nitrogen vacancies end up within the diamond. While it’s relatively easy to run wires to them after they’re identified, every chip made to work with nitrogen vacancies is bespoke; if you use a standardized chip layout, there’s no guarantee that there will be one—and only one—nitrogen vacancy where the wiring expects it to be. Saxon Q, a spinout of the Universität Leipzig, has apparently developed a technique that can put nitrogen vacancies within a 10-nanometer radius.

The company’s hardware is striking in several ways, most notably because it runs at room temperature. The machines it is building fit in a standard rack mount and plug right into a normal power supply. The other notable feature is its modular design; the company builds a “core” with eight qubits and can integrate multiple cores in a single rack. It announced last week that it is selling units with over 100 qubits total, which it expects to begin shipping within a few months. Larger systems are expected next year.

Both will be too small to do interesting error-corrected computations. But Saxon Q says its individual hardware qubits have a gate fidelity of over 99.9 percent, making the technology competitive with others on the market. So once again, we return to where we started: The key question remains whether the technology can scale.

Conflicts can spread infectious diseases while making outbreaks harder to detect

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Conflicts can spread infectious diseases while making outbreaks harder to detect

The Ebola outbreak that emerged in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and crossed into neighbouring Uganda may have been killing people for weeks before the alarm was raised. When Médecins Sans Frontières investigated in May 2026, it reported that at least 55 people had died since the beginning of April.

On May 17, the WHO Director-General declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, signalling that countries needed to coordinate their response. By then, the virus had been circulating in a conflict-affected region where fighting had weakened the clinics, laboratories and reporting systems needed to detect and contain it.

This collision between conflict and disease extends far beyond one country. A review of previous research found that war can help infectious diseases spread by damaging healthcare, interrupting vaccination and sanitation, forcing people from their homes and preventing aid workers from reaching them. Violence can also make outbreaks harder to detect.

Spotting an outbreak early gives health authorities a better chance of containing it before it becomes a larger crisis. Yet our research suggests that countries may be least able to spot outbreaks in precisely the places where the danger is greatest.

We examined infectious-disease outbreaks reported through the World Health Organization’s disease outbreak news (Dons) between 1996 and 2024. We then compared where and when those outbreaks were reported with records of armed conflict across 236 countries and territories.

The WHO archive does not include every outbreak worldwide. It contains selected events that were detected, reported to the WHO and considered important enough to publish. Researchers have also found inconsistencies in disease names, case numbers and other details. If an outbreak goes unnoticed, or is noticed but never reported internationally, it cannot appear in the archive.

Our results therefore show patterns in reported outbreaks, not every outbreak that occurred. Even so, they suggest that conflict may affect both how diseases spread and which ones become visible to the wider world.

Many of the diseases reported more often during conflict were linked to the collapse of basic services. Reported polio outbreaks, for example, became more common during civil wars. This fits with evidence that conflict reduces vaccination coverage by displacing communities and making it dangerous or impossible for health workers to reach them.

The naturally occurring “wild” poliovirus now continues to circulate routinely in only Afghanistan and Pakistan, where insecurity has repeatedly obstructed efforts to eliminate it. Other countries can experience outbreaks linked to the weakened virus used in oral polio vaccines. These rare outbreaks occur when vaccination rates are so low that the weakened virus circulates for a long time and changes into a form capable of causing illness.

Reported cholera outbreaks followed a similar pattern, but the clearest rise came one and two years after fighting began. This may be because clean-water supplies, sanitation and healthcare deteriorate gradually during a prolonged conflict. Our study found a pattern – but it can’t prove that this was the cause.

The war in Yemen contributed to one of the largest recorded cholera epidemics in recent history. More than a million suspected cases were recorded as conflict damaged water and sanitation systems, disrupted healthcare and displaced communities.

Many of the patterns we found were strongest in sub-Saharan Africa. This may partly be because some of the diseases studied are already more common there as a result of climate, wildlife and other local environmental conditions – not conflict alone.

The pattern remained after we allowed for differences in countries’ income. But income does not tell us everything about how well a country can detect and report disease. We therefore cannot say how much of the result reflects the places where particular diseases naturally occur and how much reflects differences in reporting.

When outbreaks disappear from the records

One result ran in the opposite direction: influenza was reported less often during conflict.

History gives us little reason to assume that war prevents flu from spreading. During the first world war, mass troop movements and crowded military camps helped the 1918 influenza pandemic spread around the world. It infected an estimated 500 million people and is thought to have killed at least 50 million.

Crowding in shelters and camps could similarly help respiratory infections spread during modern conflicts. But war can also change how people travel and make it harder for them to visit a clinic. Laboratories may close, testing supplies may run out and health authorities may no longer be able to collect or share results. Flu could therefore continue spreading while becoming less visible in official records.

Tracking influenza depends on laboratories and national reporting systems connected through the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System. Damage to this network could help explain why fewer influenza outbreaks were reported during conflict.

There is another complication. Disease outbreak news is not the WHO’s main record of routine flu activity, and the types of influenza events selected for publication have changed over time. The decline could therefore reflect weaker testing and reporting, a real change in transmission, or changes in what the WHO published. Our data cannot determine which explanation is correct.

We also grouped conflicts according to how many people were killed in fighting each year. Reported outbreaks did not continue to rise as conflicts became deadlier, while reported influenza fell further.

One possible explanation is that disease monitoring continues to work during less intense conflicts but starts to collapse in the most violent ones. Yet this is not proof. Counting deaths across a whole country cannot capture every local effect of war, and changes in how diseases spread or what gets reported could also have shaped the result.

Pandemic-preparedness programmes developed since the COVID-19 pandemic have placed great emphasis on laboratories and disease-monitoring networks. But these systems still depend on something more basic: health workers who can reach people safely, clinics that remain open and institutions capable of reporting what they find. When those foundations collapse, even advanced warning systems may receive too little reliable information.

An outbreak map is often read as a picture of where disease exists. It is also a picture of where the world can still see outbreaks. In places fractured by conflict, that visibility may be fading precisely when the need for it is greatest.

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