Happy Thursday! Billy McFarland recently announced the dates of Fyre 2, a reboot of the disastrous “luxury” music festival that landed him in federal prison for fraud after attendees paid thousands of dollars to sleep in FEMA tents and eat cold cheese sandwiches. Tickets ranging from $1,400 to $1.1 million went on sale last week.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to back future Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip if Hamas does not immediately release its remaining hostages. “‘Shalom Hamas’ means Hello and Goodbye – You can choose. Release all of the Hostages now, not later,” he wrote on Truth Social, warning that he would send Israel “everything it needs to finish the job” barring the abductees’ release. The ultimatum followed Trump’s meeting with eight freed hostages at the White House on Wednesday. It also came amid revelations, first reported by Axios on Wednesday, that the Trump administration has been engaging in direct negotiations with Hamas aimed at freeing the remaining American captives. Fifty-nine hostages, five of whom have U.S. citizenship, remain in terrorist captivity.
- The U.S. has suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed Wednesday. Speaking to Fox Business, Ratcliffe indicated that the pause would be reversed when a date for future ceasefire negotiations with Russia is set. The decision came amid the White House’s order to halt military aid to Ukraine earlier this week, in the aftermath of Friday’s contentious White House meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “President Trump had a real question about whether President Zelensky is committed to a peace process. He said let’s pause,” Ratcliffe said, adding that both the hold on weapons shipments and intelligence sharing “will go away” when there’s progress toward peace talks.
- The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday to reject the Trump administration’s effort to keep billions of dollars in foreign aid frozen, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberal justices in the majority. The decision upheld U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s order requiring the Trump administration to continue the disbursement of $2 billion in payments to contractors for work that has already been completed. In a searing dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote: “Does a single district court judge … have unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”
- The Justice Department on Wednesday unveiled charges against 12 Chinese nationals it accused of contributing to a hacking ring that targets dissidents, news outlets, defense contractors, and government agencies on behalf of the Chinese government. Announcing the two indictments, which were filed in New York and Washington, U.S. officials accused the “cyber mercenaries” of stealing data to sell to Beijing and other buyers. One of the implicated hacking companies charges the Chinese government between $10,000 and $75,000 for each email inbox it breached, the DOJ alleged.
- A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend planned cuts to billions of dollars in research funding to universities and medical research institutes across the country. The ruling effectively halts the administration’s effort to impose a 15 percent cap on “indirect costs”—research overhead like facilities and administrative expenses—across all NIH grants. U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley’s preliminary injunction extended her February 10 order temporarily preventing the proposed changes from taking effect.
- The Trump administration must temporarily reinstate thousands of probationary employees at the Department of Agriculture who were fired last month, the Merit Systems Protection Board ruled Wednesday. The board, an independent administrative body that handles federal labor disputes, found that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the sweeping layoffs had violated federal law. The ruling followed the mass dismissal of employees who were recently hired or promoted to new positions as the administration seeks to to drastically reduce the federal workforce, and it could signal future rulings in favor of dismissed probationary workers.
- The Senate voted 52-46 Wednesday to confirm Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in New York and President Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, will now assume the No. 2 position at the Justice Department. During his confirmation hearing, Blanche criticized what he described as the department’s “partisan lawfare” against his former client.
- U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Texas Democrat, died on Wednesday at the age of 70. Turner, the former mayor of Houston, had joined Congress just two months before his death. “He died at his home from enduring health complications,” his family said in a statement. “Congressman Turner was the consummate public servant. But to us, he was our beloved father, grandfather, sibling and relative. Thank you for your prayer.”
In a world of mass smartphone usage and internet access, wired communications infrastructure can seem like a forgotten relic of a bygone era. But despite the perception of a “wireless” world, the luxuries of modernity still very much rely on lines and cables: An estimated 99 percent of all communications—phone calls, emails, internet traffic, etc.—between the continents travel through hundreds of thousands of miles of undersea fiber optic cables. As Google’s former undersea cable project manager, Jayne Stowell, noted in 2019: “People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean.”
Undersea cables could soon see unprecedented levels of data flow, particularly as the development of artificial intelligence accelerates. But they may also represent a major vulnerability. Amid recent incidents in which the connections have been damaged or destroyed, Western countries increasingly believe that the critical infrastructure is falling victim to acts of deliberate sabotage by bad actors—namely, Russia and China.
There are currently 570 operational undersea cable systems, with an additional 81 in development, according to the telecoms research firm TeleGeography. These cables, which are typically the size of a garden hose, are laid along the ocean floor and buried as they approach land. Almost all undersea cables are developed and managed by private companies that make money selling data capacity to telecoms companies and internet service providers like Verizon. Companies like Google and Meta are also increasingly investing in their own cables to meet their growing data traffic needs.
Geological events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can lead to cable breaks. But they can also be damaged, often accidentally, by ships dragging their anchors along the ocean floor or by fishing vessels getting their equipment caught. Such damage doesn’t typically result in significant disruption to internet traffic or other telecommunications, as data flows can often be re-routed to other cables. “It’s very difficult to see a significant effect when one or two cables go down,” Tim Stronge, the head of research at TeleGeography, said of countries with multiple connections. But more remote locations sometimes only have one or two cable connections. Last summer, parts of Tonga, a country of some 170 islands in the South Pacific, lost internet access for weeks after an earthquake damaged a cable.
But incidents in recent months have raised the specter of an intentional sabotage campaign. In December, Finnish authorities detained an oil tanker believed to be part of Russia’s shadow fleet—a group of vessels with intentionally obscured ownership used to evade international sanctions on Russia oil exports—in connection to multiple damaged and cut cables in the Baltic Sea, including one carrying power between Finland and Estonia. The ship had apparently been dragging its anchor for more than 60 miles in an area with multiple cables. Finland released the tanker on Sunday, but said it would continue to hold three of the crew members amid the ongoing criminal investigation.
Proving that the cables were cut as an act of intentional sabotage is a tricky business. “It’s very difficult to demonstrate intent and to demonstrate that these acts were committed deliberately,” Sophie Arts, a fellow with the German Marshall Fund who researches Nordic and Arctic security, told TMD. Ships’ anchors can accidentally drop and drag due to human error, faulty equipment, and weather conditions. In January, for example, Sweden detained a Maltese-flagged, Bulgarian-owned cargo ship suspected of sabotaging a cable connecting the country with Latvia—but Swedish authorities later concluded the crew’s damage was unintentional. “We have film footage where we can see a wave hitting the lock and the anchor drops,” a Swedish prosecutor said. “In this case we can say, ‘No, it wasn’t a hybrid attack.’”
But for the companies behind the cables, a broken cable is a broken cable, intentional or not. There have been an average of nearly 200 cable faults each year between 2010 and 2023, with relatively little year-to-year variation.
Western countries believe, however, that at least some of the recent incidents have the hallmarks of so-called “grey zone” activity or hybrid warfare by Russia and China—acts of aggression by state actors that are intentionally masked behind nominally non-governmental actors. “When you follow their navigation patterns where you can see them zigzagging over cables in a way that has no other purpose than trying to get as much contact with potential cable sites as possible, we get a pretty clear sense that at least some of these instances definitely appear to be deliberate,” Arts said.
The Taiwanese coast guard detained a Chinese-crewed vessel last week that was loitering near an undersea cable connecting the main island of Taiwan to its Penghu Islands around the time the company that owns the cable reported an outage. “It cannot be ruled out that it was a grey-zone intrusion by China,” the coast guard said in a statement. Officials also suspected a different Chinese-linked vessel could have been involved in damage to a separate cable in January, but the ship was not detained.
What’s particularly troubling to some analysts is the appearance of coordination between Russia and China in these incidents. In November, a Chinese-flagged vessel was detained under suspicion it had cut a cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden and another connecting Finland and Germany. The alleged act of sabotage followed a 2023 incident in which a Chinese-owned containership cut a gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea and damaged two nearby cables. While Chinese officials admitted the ship was responsible for the damage, they claimed it was an accident.
In December and January, a Russian-linked cargo vessel loitered for weeks near an undersea cable landing station off the coast of Taiwan before returning to port in Russia without unloading any goods. “What we appear to be seeing is a growing Russia-China gray zone collaboration, perhaps moving in the direction of a full-fledged ‘axis,’” said Raymond Powell, the analyst who first identified the vessel’s suspicious activity and the director of Stanford University’s SeaLight project.
Western officials seem to be done giving Russia and China the benefit of the doubt. “If I had a nickel for every time a Chinese ship was dragging its anchor on the bottom of the Baltic Sea in the vicinity of important cables I would have two nickels, which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice,” the then-Foreign Minister of Lithuania, Gabrielius Landsbergis, said in November. After the December cable cuts, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said it’s “more than difficult to still believe in coincidences.”
“This is an urgent wake-up call for all of us,” he added.
NATO launched a new initiative in January, dubbed Baltic Sentry, to increase the monitoring and protection of critical undersea infrastructure. The effort will include the deployment of ships, sea patrol aircraft, and naval drones. “Ship captains must understand that potential threats to our infrastructure will have consequences, including possible boarding, impounding, and arrest,” said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. NATO is also funding a research project to explore re-routing data flows via satellite in the event of cable cuts.
The European Union also announced a plan to step up monitoring of undersea cables, pledging in February to devote a billion euros over the next two years toward improving threat detection, deterrence, and cable repair capacity.
“These are all important strides that have been made in response,” Arts told TMD. “But of course, we haven’t seen it fully deter and stop these actions. We’ll have to see how it evolves further.”
Today’s Must-Read
How Abandoning Ukraine Could Harm U.S.-European Relations
What might surprise the Trump administration is the reaction not just from liberal European powers but backlash from populist leaders such as Nigel Farage, who said the spat would “make Putin feel like the winner” and added that Ukraine needed security guarantees. … What most Americans don’t realize, however, is that Europe can and will make the United States regret the Trump administration’s actions.
Toeing the Company Line
Worth Your Time
- Writing for Law and Liberty, Frederick M. Hess chronicled Americans’ declining trust in teachers unions in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. “By early 2021, the medical rationale for school closures had dissipated. It was clear that schools were not a significant source of community spread; that students were generally not at risk; and that school closures were having devastating effects on youth learning, well-being, and mental health. … Yet union and district leaders kept moving the goalposts on reopening,” he wrote. “The experience scarred communities across the land. It broke the longstanding compact between schools and families. Even beyond the grim consequences of closure, the pandemic revealed ugly truths about self-serving adult interests and bureaucratic inertia. Over the decades, parents have learned to regard schools as reliable custodians of their kids. … The pandemic upended that relationship. It taught millions of parents that distrust should be the norm. That’s why masking and vaccine mandates became so contentious. It’s why examples of DEI excess and videos of irate parents upbraiding school boards went viral. For wary parents wondering if their trust had been misplaced, each new example served as confirmation.”
National Review: China Declares It’s Ready for ‘Any Kind of War’ with U.S. as Increased Trump Tariffs Take Effect
China is escalating its rhetoric towards the U.S. following President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs that increased taxes on Chinese imports from 10 to 20 percent.
“Intimidation does not scare us. Bullying does not work on us. Pressuring, coercion or threats are not the right way of dealing with China. Anyone using maximum pressure on China is picking the wrong guy and miscalculating. If the U.S. truly wants to solve the fentanyl issue, then the right thing to do is to consult with China by treating each other as equals,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said Tuesday.
“If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” the embassy said on X.
In the Zeitgeist
Exactly 55 years ago today, The Beatles released Let it Be as a single. The ballad would go on to enter the Billboard Hot 100 Singles at No. 6—the chart’s highest debut at the time—before climbing to No. 1.
Let Us Know
What’s your favorite Beatles song?
