1. Power constraints could emerge as the biggest bottleneck to America's AI growth vis-a-vis China.
Beijing has already prepared by installing an eye-popping 1,500 gigawatts of new energy capacity since 2021, taking its total to 3,891GW. However, the US has not: its installed capacity has barely risen in recent years, and now sits around 1,373GW — or less than what China added in just four years. This is shocking. Worse, China will add over 3.4 terawatts of electricity-generation capacity in the next five years, according to Bloomberg — six times as much as the US.
2. Industrial policy and infrastructure development are back again as priorities for international development actors in Africa, after couple of decades of dalliance with RCTs and small interventions.
3. The declining labour productivity growth rates.
Between 1950 and 1973, the metric, based on output per hour worked, rose at an annual average of 4 per cent across developed economies. But the rate halved to 1.9 per cent from 1973 to 2009. And since the financial crisis, it has slowed further, averaging just 1.2 per cent between 2009 and 2025.
Pension systems are grappling with increasing dependency ratios.
When the German retirement age was set at 65 in the 1910s, life expectancy was below 50. It has now increased to over 81, while the retirement age is only set to increase to 67... In the 1960s, Japan had eight or nine people aged 20 to 64 for every person aged over 65. Now it is just over one.
4. Richard Hass makes the point that since America chose the war, it must also make the choice on ending it. This is an important point.
America did have other viable options, above all diplomacy, especially as no convincing case has been made that an imminent threat had to be dealt with militarily. The contrast between Washington’s near-unlimited willingness to compromise and demonstrate patience when it comes to persuading Russia to end its aggression against Ukraine and its unrealistic demands and lack of patience with Iran in the run-up to this war is as stark as it is telling. Ukraine’s offer to help defend against Iranian drones while Russia reportedly provides intelligence to Iran only makes the double standard worse.
5. Around 14.5 million barrels of oil transit the Strait of Hormuz daily. It has shrunk rapidly.
More on the Strait
Iran’s ace in the hole has been its de facto blockade of the strait through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied gas normally flows. At its narrowest point, the strait is less than 21 nautical miles wide, putting tankers perilously close to drones and missiles from Iran’s southern coastline. Tehran now has near-total sway over the Gulf oil market, forcing neighbours such as Iraq to almost entirely stop production and trapping roughly 300mn barrels of oil and gas in the region, a number that rises by about 20mn every day...
With its new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, announcing his goal to keep the strait closed indefinitely, Iran has wrongfooted oil traders who had always presumed that US military might would keep the waterway open. Iran has never blocked the strait before, despite its previous threats.
6. Some facts about Indian equity markets.
If we look at data from January 1, 2025, to the end of February 2026... emerging market (EM) equities were up 51.4 per cent, international equities were up by 47 per cent, the United States rose by 18.4 per cent, and total world equity returns were 28.3 per cent. In contrast, over this same 14 months period, India was down 0.7 per cent, the second-worst performing market in the world, with only Saudi Arabia performing worse. In fact, India and Saudi Arabia are the only two markets that are actually down (all returns in US dollar). This is when Korea has tripled, Brazil is up 80 per cent, and Taiwan has risen by more than 50 per cent. We have underperformed the EM benchmark by 5,000 basis points in just 14 months... Absolute foreign ownership of the Indian market is at a 15-year low, and we see foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) selling on a daily basis. India has received zero net foreign flows over the last five years, a very long time indeed.
It has definitively debunked the There is no alternative (TINA) hypothesis.
Our markets had done very well, and many other large EM countries were seen as uninvestable. We are the fastest-growing economy in the world — where else will FPIs go? This was the narrative. This myth has been debunked. If they wish, FPIs can totally ignore us. Five years of net zero flows. There are always choices for capital, and capital only chases potential returns. If we do not offer a good risk/return proposition, nobody will come.
7. Middle East has hundreds of desalination plants.
8. On Monday, the benchmark Brent crude price surged to $119 a barrel before diving to $84, the biggest intraday swing in dollar terms ever.
10. M Govinda Rao on the 16th Finance Commission.
11. After starting out importing everything from China, Ukraine can now make drones with no components imported from China.
Ukraine will not be mass-producing drones with no Chinese components anytime soon, because it’s still much cheaper to use them. Given China’s dominance of global manufacturing, it is hard to define any drone as truly “China-free.” Many components made outside China still contain Chinese parts or raw materials... Ukraine is one of many nations that have been working to reduce their reliance on Chinese supply chains... Two companies in Ukraine that have built “China-free” drones were picked to compete for contracts in a Pentagon “drone dominance program” under which the United States plans to buy thousands of low-cost attack drones. One of the companies, Ukrainian Defense Drones Tech Corporation, where the men were soldering circuit boards in the basement workshop, was among 11 in all selected last week for possible American drone orders... Ukrainian Defense Drones began making drones in 2023. Initially, all of its components were Chinese. Within a year, however, it had localized production of carbon fiber frames and antennas. By 2025, Ukrainian Defense Drones had expanded to produce flight controllers, speed regulators, radio modems and video transmission systems. Essentially, all its components were made in Ukraine except for the cameras. The company has since gained technology for cameras, too, which it hopes to produce in Europe...
In the first year after the Russian invasion in February 2022, nearly all of Ukraine’s drones came from China. As demand surged, Beijing imposed export restrictions in 2023 and expanded them in 2024... As the rules tightened, Ukraine resorted to middlemen to buy some parts, and Ukrainian companies began to view the Chinese market as increasingly unreliable. Kyiv turned its focus to building its own drones, and eventually to doing so with fewer Chinese components. By 2024, the vast majority of drones that Ukraine sent to the front were assembled domestically — but still almost entirely with Chinese components. A year later, however, the share of parts from China in Ukraine’s drones had fallen to about 38 percent... Ukraine still buys cheaper Chinese components because the Ukrainian military needs huge numbers of drones and has a limited budget to buy them. Drone missions fail at very high rates, another reason that Ukraine tries to keep costs down.
12. Finally, on how AI has impacted the Iran-US/Israel war.
AI is reshaping how the US military makes decisions in war — a shift clear in Iran, where the Pentagon says it struck more than 2,000 targets in just four days... “If we look at the campaign against Isis, the coalition struck around 2,000 targets in the first six months of the campaign in Iraq and Syria,” said Jessica Dorsey, who researches the use of AI and international humanitarian law at Utrecht University... The unprecedented tempo of targeted attacks has been driven in part by AI systems that sift the torrents of intelligence data from drones, satellites and other sensors, generating strike options far faster than traditional human-led planning. The conflict also marks the first battlefield use of “frontier” generative AI models... helping commanders interpret data, plan operations and provide real-time feedback during combat. Over the past two years, the US Department of Defense has extensively integrated AI-enabled technology within its operations. The primary operating system for the Pentagon’s data is Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which alongside Anthropic’s Claude model forms a real-time data analysis dashboard for operations in Iran...During a live military operation such as Operation Epic Fury in Iran, Palantir’s Maven platform acts as the software “brain”. It supports the entire so-called kill chain — finding and hitting a target during active conflict. That ranges from identifying and prioritising the target to selecting the appropriate weapon and finally assessing the battle damage. Traditionally, kill chains involved printing off documents and waiting for a senior commander to study and approve it. “Those [older] kill chains are measured in hours and sometimes days,” said a defence tech expert who asked to remain anonymous. “The point of [AI] is to shrink that into seconds and minutes, almost instantaneous.”... As of May 2025, the Maven system was used by more than 20,000 users across 35 military entities in the field, according to public comments by Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. That number may be closer to 50,000 users in the US today, according to defence researchers, with Nato also signing up to use Maven in 2025...
The bombing of a girls’ primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, further illustrates the lethal risks of quickly generated or improperly vetted targets... In Iran, AI has potentially already been involved in identifying exponentially more targets than in previous wars, said Utrecht University’s Dorsey. Those targets could have existed beforehand — or they could have been generated quickly by AI systems, creating a serious concern about how carefully these have been vetted as required by law, she said.
This about the Minab school bombing.
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