Joseph Belbruno Blog

  Role reversal: how foot-dragging France blindsided newly assertive Berlin    German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was making one last push to persuade EU leaders to use €210bn in frozen Russian sovereign assets to help Ukraine when he realised he lacked a critical ally: Emmanuel Macron. In the weeks leading up to Thursday’s summit in Brussels, the French president did not publicly oppose the German proposal. Privately, however, his team voiced reservations about its legality and warned that his indebted country would struggle to issue a national guarantee in case the assets had to be returned to Moscow on short notice. As more countries, including Italy, sided with Belgium, where the bulk of the Russian assets are located and whose government opposed the plan from the outset, Macron joined in, killing the idea.   “Macron betrayed Merz, and he knows that there will be a price to pay for that,” said a senior EU diplomat with direct knowledge of Thursday’s talks. “...

e Israele  e l’ipocrisia dell’embargo di Roger Abravanel C aro direttore, in Europa si parla molto di «embargo delle armi a Israele». È uno dei temi ricorrenti sui cartelli delle manifestazioni pro Pal. In realtà è una idea lontana dalla realtà. Israele non dipende dall’Europa per le armi. È vero il contrario. La Germania ha appena concluso un grande programma di acquisto del missile intercettore israeliano «Arrow 3». Arrow 3 è l’incarnazione di un’idea che per decenni è sembrata appartenere al mito del West o alla fantascienza militare: «hitting a bullet with a bullet» («Colpire un proiettile con un proiettile»). Eppure è esattamente ciò che fa: intercetta missili balistici fuori dall’atmosfera, prima che possano colpire un bersaglio o rilasciare una testata. E lo fa con una altissima precisione. Questa tecnologia nasce negli anni Novanta, quando Israele viene colpito dagli Scud di Saddam Hussein. Viene poi sviluppata guardando alla minaccia iraniana di annientarla con un missile ...

  West’s capitulation on Kremlin’s war chest is shameful Bill Browder In the dead of night last Thursday, as European Union leaders huddled in Brussels, a critical decision emerged from the fog of negotiations. The EU agreed to extend a €90 billion (£79 billion) interest-free loan to Ukraine, intended to safeguard the country’s defences and basic functioning for the next two years. It was a vital lifeline but it came with a grave failure: the outright rejection of a far bolder and more just plan to confiscate Russia’s frozen central bank assets and put them to work for Ukraine. I have spent years campaigning for the confiscation of these assets, so the outcome leaves me torn between relief and frustration. Relief, because Ukraine has been spared immediate financial and military collapse. Frustration, because the EU once again flinched at the moment when it could have forced the aggressor to pay for his own war. The assets in question amount to roughly €210 billion in Russian centra...

  Skip to main content Open Navigation Menu Give a gift Open Questions What if A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? GPT-5, a new release from OpenAI, is the latest product to suggest that progress on large language models has stalled. By  Cal Newport August 12, 2025 Illustration by Shira Inbar Saved For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today’s artificial-intelligence technologies can be traced back to January, 2020, when a team of researchers at OpenAI published a thirty-page  report  titled “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models.” The team was led by the A.I. researcher Jared Kaplan, and included Dario Amodei, who is now the C.E.O. of Anthropic. They investigated a fairly nerdy question: What happens to the performance of language models when you increase their size and the intensity of their training? Back then, many machine-learning experts thought that, after they ...