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  What Went Wrong Before Hong Kong’s Inferno The Wang Fuk Court apartment complex in Hong Kong days after a fire on Nov. 26 killed 161 people and displaced thousands. Credit... Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times They saw it coming. Before the fire ripped through their homes and raged for two days, before it killed many of their neighbors and friends, residents of the Wang Fuk Court estate spent years warning Hong Kong officials about a renovation project they feared was becoming dangerous. The government had ordered repairs on the eight aging towers in the complex. But residents complained they were paying extortionate sums for shoddy work that used flammable materials, and they suspected it was because a corrupt syndicate had taken over the project. They told the authorities that the leaders of the owners’ board and the construction firms were acting at times against residents’ interests and safety. They told local news media that a politician was most likely working with the boar...
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  Is ‘ The West’ Over? As U. S. relations with Europe sour, longtime allies wonder if the world order will ever be the same. BY DAVID LUHNOW AND MARCUS WALKER THE WESTERN ALLIANCE  between the U.S. and its European partners has been a pillar of the global order since the end of World War II. Bonded by a common belief in freedom and democracy, it prevented major global conflict, defeated Communism and presided over a surge in global prosperity. Now, European leaders are asking whether it’s dead. “What we once called the normative West no longer exists,”  German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the leader of Europe’s most populous democracy, recently said at a gathering of business leaders in Berlin. Days later, the conservative and lifelong Atlanticist wistfully called on Germans to put aside nostalgia for an America they had known and loved for decades. “The Americans are now pursuing their own interests very, very aggressively” he said, and Germany must do the same. A winter c...
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  AI Costs Lack Accounting Transparency BY MARK MAURER The massive AI build-out comes with a transparency problem. Tech companies often provide the cost of AI data centers and chips associated with a long-term construction project. The catch: They generally don’t break out the costs for each, nor are they required to do so, despite the vastly different time periods in which facilities and chips depreciate. That means the cost of chips that may have to be replaced in a few years or less can be lumped in with buildings that can stand for decades. This has some investors seeking more details about tech giants’ surging capital spending on AI infrastructure. “The construction-in-prog-ress account is this big hole  where hyperscalers can bury a lot of their costs,” said Gaurav Kumar, an accounting professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Large tech companies are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, chips and networking. Spending on da...
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  Ukraine’s New Concessions for Peace Volodymyr Zelensky will travel to Mar-a-Lago Sunday to discuss the latest peace offer, and Ukraine’s President will come  bearing more concessions. This shows again that Ukraine isn’t the obstacle to ending Vladimir Putin’s war. The news is that, under a new U.S.-Ukraine framework accord, Kyiv may be willing to cede some land it holds in the east as part of a demilitarized front line. Ukraine had opposed giving up territory in Donetsk, where a fortified 31-mile defensive line has slowed Russian advances. But Mr. Zelensky is now saying Russia and Ukraine could both withdraw from some current positions as part of a demilitarized zone, provided it is approved by Ukrainian voters. This is a major concession, especially given Russia’s repeated violations of the 2014 and 2015 Minsk cease-fire agreements. Mr. Putin used those fighting pauses to build up his military in Crimea and occupied Donetsk and Luhansk to prepare for his 2022 invasion. Mr. ...
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  The Wall Street Journal   |   Page A003 Saturday, 27 December 2025 SHARE At 65, an Unlucky Job Seeker Faces a Bruising Reality BY DAN FROSCH KERSHAW, S.C.—Lynn Lee had just arrived for work at the ADM soybean processing plant one April morning when she spotted the cars with outof- state license plates and knew something was wrong. After more than five decades in this town of about 2,200, agricultural giant   Archer Daniels Midland   was shutting down its facility. Lee, who had been at the plant since 2021, boxed up her belongings and drove home. At 65, it was her fourth layoff. Yet tears still rushed down her cheeks. “I remember thinking, ‘What are the odds this would happen again?’ ” Lee said. Lee has survived a rolling tide of economic forces that have transformed manufacturing in rural America. The textile plants that moved to Brazil in the mid-2000s. The glass-fiber plant that shut down several years later. The sign-making company that shed workers during ...
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