THE MIDDLE EAST

Iran fires 300 missiles and drones at Israel, the region holds its breath, and then, mostly, exhales

For the first time in the history of their long shadow war, Iran attacked Israel directly, from its own soil. Almost everything was shot down. Both sides, having stared into the abyss, stepped back from it, for now.

Iran launched an unprecedented direct assault on Israel on the night of April 13, firing more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles from its own territory, in retaliation for the Israeli strike that killed its commanders in Damascus. It was the first time in decades of proxy warfare that Iran had struck Israel openly, from Iranian soil, and for a few hours the region stood at the edge of the full-scale war it has dreaded. Then the interception happened: a coalition of Israel, the United States, Britain, France and, quietly, some Arab states shot down almost the entire barrage, and the damage in Israel was minimal. Israel, under intense pressure from Washington to take the win and not widen the war, responded a week later with a limited, almost symbolic strike on Iran, and Iran chose to play it down. Both sides had made their point, absorbed the other's, and stepped back. The war did not come, this fortnight. But the taboo on direct attack is broken, and the ladder to catastrophe is now one rung shorter for the next time.

WASHINGTON

The first criminal trial of a former president begins, and the money for its wars finally moves

Two long-stalled things happened in Washington. On April 15, in a Manhattan courtroom, jury selection began in the first criminal trial of a former American president, Donald Trump, over hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign; the presumptive Republican nominee spent his days as a criminal defendant and his evenings as a candidate, a split-screen with no precedent. And on April 20, after six months of paralysis, the House finally passed $95 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, as Speaker Mike Johnson defied the hardliners in his own party to bring it to a vote; the Ukraine money, desperately needed as Russia pressed its advantage, will now flow. Attached to the package: the bill forcing TikTok's Chinese owner to sell the app or see it banned in America, which the president signed days later.

IN BRIEF

India begins to vote; Llama 3; a champion's memoir; O.J. Simpson dies

India began the largest election in human history on April 19, the first of seven phases stretching to June, with hundreds of millions casting ballots in blistering pre-monsoon heat. Meta released Llama 3 on April 18, the newest and most capable of its freely-available AI models, keeping the open-model challenge to OpenAI and Google alive. Salman Rushdie published "Knife," a memoir of the 2022 stabbing that cost him an eye, and of survival. And O.J. Simpson, the American football star whose 1995 acquittal for murder became the most-watched trial in history and a national parable about race, celebrity and justice, died on April 10 at 76.

The Column

The ban that will not do what it promises

Washington finally moved to force the sale of TikTok, on the grounds that Chinese ownership is a threat. I think the threat is real and the remedy is theatre, and the gap between them is worth understanding.

By Daniel Reeve

Congress this fortnight did the thing it has threatened for years: it passed a law forcing TikTok's Chinese parent to sell the app or have it banned from American phones, and the president signed it. The stated reason is national security, that the Chinese government could use TikTok to harvest Americans' data and to shape what 170 million Americans see. I want to say something that will please neither side of this argument, because I think both the fear and the fix are being misunderstood, and the misunderstanding is instructive about how governments deal with technology they find frightening and do not fully grasp.

Start with the fear, because the fear is not stupid. A social platform used by half the country, whose recommendation algorithm decides what those people watch for hours a day, is genuinely a lever of enormous power, and it is reasonable to be uneasy that the lever sits, ultimately, under a government that is a strategic rival and that compels its companies to cooperate with the state. That is a real concern. But notice what the concern actually is: it is about data harvesting and about algorithmic influence. And now look at the remedy, forcing a change of ownership, and ask whether it addresses the concern, and the honest answer is: barely, and only for one company.

Because here is what the ban does not touch. It does not stop the data harvesting, which every other app also does; American data brokers will happily sell a foreign government most of what it wants, legally, tomorrow, because the United States has no serious privacy law to prevent it. It does not address algorithmic influence in general; it addresses one Chinese-owned app while leaving the structural reality, that a handful of opaque recommendation engines shape what an entire population believes, entirely intact, merely under different ownership. If the fear is that an opaque algorithm controlled by an unaccountable power shapes what Americans see, that fear is satisfied by every large platform, and the fix of changing TikTok's owner is like responding to a house fire by repainting one wall. It targets the one actor everyone agrees to be scared of, and calls it a solution to a problem that is general.

This is the pattern I keep seeing in how governments engage technology: they identify a real risk, personify it in a single frightening company, and then pass a law aimed at the company rather than the risk, because the company is a target you can hit and the risk is a structural condition you would have to do hard, unglamorous, bipartisan work to actually address. The real answer to the TikTok fear is a serious privacy law that stops anyone, foreign or domestic, from hoovering up and trading Americans' data, plus genuine transparency requirements for the recommendation algorithms that shape public belief. Both would apply to everyone and keep no single villain out. Neither is as satisfying as banning the app your rival owns. So we got the ban, which is easy and specific and mostly theatre, instead of the law, which is hard and general and would actually work. Watch what happens: even if TikTok sells, the thing everyone was afraid of, the data trade, the opaque algorithm shaping a nation, will be exactly where it was, under new management. We will have hit the target and missed the point.

The Ledger

Meta's Llama 3 keeps the open-model race alive against OpenAI and Google. The TikTok law, ostensibly about data and algorithms, ducks the general versions of both problems in favour of hitting one company. Regulation aimed at a villain rather than a risk.

Data centers & power

Quiet this fortnight; the numbers refresh with next month's earnings. The build-out's power appetite grows regardless.

Rates

Sticky inflation pushed the expected first Fed cut later still, toward the autumn. Strong data keeps "higher for longer" alive; markets grow impatient.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 7.10 percent (April 18), back above 7 as rate-cut hopes recede. The thaw has refrozen; the spring season is frozen with it.

India tech

Voting has begun in the largest election ever, in punishing heat. The data question at the heart of the TikTok fight is one India, with its vast biometric ID system and thin privacy protections, will confront on its own terms before long.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The Iran-Israel exchange vindicates, uneasily, our long-held caution that the Gaza war would spread outward; it also shows the restraint that has, so far, kept the spread from becoming an inferno.

The Back Page

The trial of the century, fifty years on

O.J. Simpson died on April 10, and with him a piece of the twentieth century that never quite ended. For those too young to remember: in 1994 the most famous football player in America, a beloved figure who had crossed from sport into films and advertising, was charged with murdering his ex-wife and her friend, and the trial that followed in 1995 became the most-watched legal proceeding in history, a nine-month national obsession that stopped the country cold for the verdict. He was acquitted, by a jury that deliberated for hours after a trial that lasted the better part of a year, and the split-screen reaction, jubilation in much of Black America, disbelief in much of white America, laid bare a divide about race, policing and justice that the country had preferred not to look at. It was the first true media circus of the modern age, the template for everything that followed, the moment cable news learned that a single story could be milked forever and an audience would never look away. Simpson spent his later years in a strange twilight of infamy, a civil judgment, a later prison term for an unrelated crime, a ghoulish almost-confession of a book. But the trial is the thing, and the trial is why his death is a headline thirty years on: because for nine months in 1995 it held up a mirror to America, and the country did not like, and has never quite resolved, what it saw.