Can the US beat China at AI?

GZERO Staff

November 11, 2026

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Could artificial intelligence give authoritarian governments an edge over democracies? On an upcoming episode of GZERO World, former White House AI advisor Ben Buchanan and author of the new book “The Bitter Struggle” warns that AI could supercharge surveillance, censorship and government crackdowns, giving autocracies new ways to tighten their grip on power. China is racing ahead on AI, but Buchanan says it may be dangerously overconfident in its ability to control the technology.

So how can democracies win the AI race without sacrificing the very values they’re trying to protect? Buchanan says the US needs to stay ahead of China in AI innovation, put that advantage to work in America’s national security, and ensure the technology doesn’t concentrate too much power in the hands of corporations and the state — one of the most challenging parts of the AI rollout and the race for technological supremacy.

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News|Articles|November 9, 2026

Cannabis Use Prevalent In Substance-Related Adolescent Emergency Care: Insights From Kevin Xu, MD

Author(s)Jessica Walters, Kevin Xu, MDEdit your interests

New data shows cannabis dominates teens’ substance-related ER visits, often with alcohol or stimulants, urging better screening and intervention for psychosis, vomiting.

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Among adolescents with a substance-related emergency department visit, 84% had a cannabis-involved encounter, a recent study found.¹ Kevin Xu, MD, lead investigator, said this finding supported prioritizing cannabis screening when assessing substance use.² Xu cautioned that a cannabis diagnosis indicated documentation rather than causation, that cannabis seldom was the primary reason for hospitalization, and that approximately half of individuals with a cannabis-related encounter had exposure to another substance, such as alcohol or stimulants. Cannabis-related acute care presentations with diagnostic codes for vomiting, a surrogate for cannabis hyperemesis, and psychosis increased over the study period, with increases concentrated among adolescents and young adults, while alcohol as the primary reason for hospitalization rose sharply among adults ages 25 to 34. Xu stated that alcohol-related harm should not be presumed to have receded among younger adults and that these encounters represented a critical point for intervention for substance use disorders and co-occurring psychiatric disorders.

Psychiatric Times: Among adolescents with a substance-related emergency visit, 84% had a cannabis-involved encounter. What does this indicate about how clinicians should be assessing for drug use?

Kevin Xu, MD: This finding, taken in conjunction with other public health research illustrating rising cannabis use in the adolescent population, suggests that cannabis screening should be prioritized when assessing substance use. Our data includes both emergency department (ED) visits and inpatient admissions. ED claims do not designate a “primary diagnosis,” whereas inpatient claims do. Thus, in the ED, a cannabis diagnosis may be recorded even when cannabis was not the main reason for the visit. The presence of a cannabis diagnosis therefore indicates that it was documented, not that it caused the encounter.

PT: When cannabis was the primary reason for admission, the adolescent trend declined. How do you reconcile that with the rise in overall cannabis involvement?

Xu: To consider the extent to which cannabis was the “main” reason behind a substance-related admission, we conducted a number of sensitivity analyses across inpatient hospitalizations (in which we could restrict encounters that had cannabis listed as the primary diagnosis). We found that hospitalizations with cannabis as the main reason for admission were far less common than those for other substances, such as alcohol. In other words, cannabis is frequently documented in substance-related ED visits and inpatient admissions but appears to seldomly be the main reason for hospitalization.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the increase in cannabis involvement among adolescents reflects cannabis being documented more often as one of several diagnoses, rather than the primary diagnosis for admission.

 However, this does not mean that cannabis is “harmless” when it is not the primary diagnosis. Cannabis use frequently occurs alongside other substances, and this co-occurring use may make a presentation more serious even when cannabis is not the main reason for the visit.

Additionally, it is noteworthy to add that cannabis related acute care presentations with diagnostic codes for vomiting (a surrogate for cannabis hyperemesis) and psychosis did increase over the study’s time period, with increases concentrated amongst adolescents and young adults.

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PT: Nearly half of cannabis-related encounters involved another substance. What does that tell us about how these patients present?

Xu: This is an important finding we would like to emphasize. Our data indicates that when someone has an acute care encounter involving cannabis, co-occurring substance exposure needs to be evaluated before attributing the reason for presentation solely to cannabis. Approximately half of the individuals with a cannabis related encounter had exposure to another substance, such as alcohol or stimulants. The subset of individuals who use cannabis and land in the emergency room likely represent a particularly vulnerable population, enriched not only for polysubstance use, but also comorbid psychiatric disorders (eg, mood, anxiety disorders).

PT: How does increasing product potency factor into what you’re seeing in emergency departments?

Xu: It is difficult to infer a causal relationship between increasing potency and our findings as claims data does not record potency of cannabis products. We are heartened by progress in this field, evidenced in recent work proposing weekly exposure thresholds associated with a higher risk of cannabis use disorder.³ This is a very important first step for understanding how potency is factoring into the trends that we are seeing.

PT: Alcohol as the primary reason for hospitalization rose sharply among adults ages 25 to 34. What might explain that trend?

Xu: Much attention has focused on increasing cannabis use and declining alcohol use among younger adults. Reports of declining alcohol use among younger adults have raised hope for lower rates of serious alcohol-related morbidity within this demographic. Yet these data suggest that alcohol remains a substantial contributor among young adults who present to acute care with substance-related problems.

These findings are a reminder that alcohol remains an important contributor to severe substance-related adverse events While our study was not designed to identify the causes of these trends, we need to hold off on concluding that alcohol-related harm has somehow “receded” from younger adults. One possibility is that a smaller subgroup of young adults is experiencing more severe alcohol-related harm despite declining consumption overall, although this requires further study. We also measured alcohol’s share of substance-related admissions rather than population-based rates, so the increase may partly reflect declines in admissions involving other substances.

PT: What would you highlight about this data for the practicing psychiatric clinician?

Xu: We need to take into account individualized, patient level factors when assessing for substance use in patients, as the harms related to their use are clearly not uniform across the lifespan. The growing involvement of cannabis in acute care encounters among younger patients also merits attention, particularly because it frequently occurs alongside other substance-related problems.

An important next step is to understand how and when these patients receive treatment for their substance use disorders and co-occurring psychiatric disorders as these substance-related encounters represent a critical point for intervention.

Dr Xu is an assistant professor of psychiatry at WashU Medicine.

References

1. Steinle JT, Grucza RA, Buss JL, et al. Changing patterns of alcohol and cannabis acute care admissions by age in the U.S., 2016-2023. Am J Psychiatry. Published online November 4, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.20260023

2. Renny MH, Stecher Y, Vargas-Torres C, et al. Trends in substance use-related emergency department visits by youth, 2018-2023. Am J Emerg Med. 2025;92:1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajem.2025.02.035

3. Thorne RL, Lawn W, Petrilli K, et al. Estimating thresholds for risk of cannabis use disorder using standard delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) units. Addiction. 2026.

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1918

Armistice Day: World War I ends

HISTORY.com Editors

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Published: March 10, 2010Last Updated: November 09, 2026

At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. The First World War left 9 million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and Great Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives. In addition, at least 5 million civilians died from disease, starvation or exposure.

The Great War

Explore U.S. involvement in World War I in the critical year of 1918.

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On June 28, 1914, in an event that is widely regarded as sparking the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his wife were shot to death by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Ferdinand had been inspecting his uncle’s imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the threat of Serbian nationalists who wanted these Austro-Hungarian possessions to join newly independent Serbia. Austria-Hungary blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the problem of Slavic nationalism once and for all. However, as Russia supported Serbia, an Austro-Hungarian declaration of war was delayed until its leaders received assurances from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause in the event of a Russian intervention.

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On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers collapsed. On July 29, Austro-Hungarian forces began to shell the Serbian capital, Belgrade, and Serbia’s ally Russia ordered a troop mobilization against Austria-Hungary. France, allied with Russia, began to mobilize on August 1. France and Germany declared war against each other on August 3. After crossing through neutral Luxembourg, the German army invaded Belgium on the night of August 3-4, prompting Great Britain, Belgium’s ally, to declare war against Germany.

For the most part, the people of Europe greeted the outbreak of war with jubilation. Most patriotically assumed that their country would be victorious within months. Of the initial belligerents, Germany was most prepared for the outbreak of hostilities, and its military leaders had formatted a sophisticated military strategy known as the “Schlieffen Plan,” which envisioned the conquest of France through a great arcing offensive through Belgium and into northern France. Russia, slow to mobilize, was to be kept occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces while Germany attacked France.

The Schlieffen Plan was nearly successful, but in early September, the French rallied and halted the German advance at the bloody Battle of the Marne near Paris. By the end of 1914, well over a million soldiers of various nationalities had been killed on the battlefields of Europe, and neither for the Allies nor the Central Powers was a final victory in sight. On the western front—the battle line that stretched across northern France and Belgium—the combatants settled down in the trenches for a terrible war of attrition.

World War I Armistice Day Celebrations

On November 11, 1918, World War I finally came to an end after four-plus years of combat. Armistice Day was wildly celebrated throughout the world, and in this rare footage, we see how New York, Washington D.C. and Paris took to the streets with pure joy.

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In 1915, the Allies attempted to break the stalemate with an amphibious invasion of Turkey, which had joined the Central Powers in October 1914, but after heavy bloodshed, the Allies were forced to retreat in early 1916. The year 1916 saw great offensives by Germany and Britain along the western front, but neither side accomplished a decisive victory. In the east, Germany was more successful, and the disorganized Russian army suffered terrible losses, spurring the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. By the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and immediately set about negotiating peace with Germany. In 1918, the infusion of American troops and resources into the western front finally tipped the scale in the Allies’ favor. Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies on November 11, 1918.

World War I was known as the “war to end all wars” because of the great slaughter and destruction it caused. Unfortunately, the peace treaty that officially ended the conflict—the Treaty of Versailles of 1919—forced punitive terms on Germany that destabilized Europe and laid the groundwork for World War II.

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Democrats press White House on prediction market betting by staff

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Camila Grigera Naón

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November 10, 2026, 12:16 PM ET

Jeff Merkley (left) and Elizabeth Warren (right) sent a letter to the White House counsel on Monday.ANDREW HARRER—GETTY IMAGES

Two Democratic senators are pressing the White House to disclose whether employees have used inside information to trade on prediction market platforms. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) sent a letter to White House counsel Will Scharf on Monday asking what safeguards the administration has in place to prevent staff from using confidential government information to profit from bets.

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The request follows a July report that Gabriel Perez, President Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator, allegedly made over $100,000 on prediction market Kalshi by betting on which words Trump would use in more than a dozen speeches. Perez later reached a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that required him to surrender his profits, pay a penalty, and agree to a three-year trading ban.

“It has been four months since this White House insider trading scandal came to light, and we write to you to understand what further steps—if any—your office is taking to prevent abuses of power,” read a copy of the letter shared with Fortune.

The letter also asked whether White House staff receive training on rules against using nonpublic information to trade or bet and whether officials contacted the CFTC or Justice Department about Perez’s case. They requested a copy of a memo warning staff against such bets and answers to their questions by Nov. 23.

The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

The case is one of several that have raised concerns about insiders using nonpublic information to profit on prediction markets. In April, federal prosecutors charged a U.S. soldier with using classified information to make more than $400,000 on Polymarket bets tied to the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. In February, six newly created Polymarket accounts drew scrutiny after earning roughly $1 million in combined profits betting the U.S. would strike Iran before the month ended.

The letter offers a preview of the scrutiny the Trump administration could face when Democrats retake control of Congress in January. Warren is expected to chair the Senate Banking Committee, giving her a powerful platform to investigate financial firms and potential conflicts involving the president’s family businesses.

Other Democrats are also pushing for restrictions on prediction markets. On Tuesday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) called on Congress to ban sports prediction markets, describing them as “sports betting disguised as financial trading.”

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The Trump family has expanded its ties to the prediction market industry during Trump’s second term. Donald Trump Jr. advises both Kalshi and Polymarket, and 1789 Capital, the venture firm where he is a partner, has invested in Polymarket. Trump Media, the company behind Truth Social in which the president holds a stake through a trust, announced plans in October 2025 for a prediction market service called Truth Predict with crypto exchange Crypto.com. It later scaled back the initial offering to a marketing partnership.

Fortune Daily breaks the traditional barrier between audience and newsroom. The show transforms Fortune’s trusted reporting into actionable, conversational, and entertaining insights for an emerging class of business leaders. Watch here.

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Trump’s third way on Iran

Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to reporters during the G7 foreign ministers summit in Paris yesterday. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images When Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with his G7 counterparts in Paris yesterday, he told them that President Trump had considered resuming the war with Iran or cutting a deal — but chose a third option: strangling the Iranian regime, Axios’ Barak Ravid reports. Rubio explained: “It’s not just return to war or sign a ridiculous peace deal. We won’t do a stupid deal. The third option we have is to continue to do what we do now,” Rubio said, according to three people in the room. He went on to say that the U.S. is imposing devastating costs on Iran’s economy, making it harder for it to fund terrorist organizations or rebuild its military. And there’s no end date. The intrigue: U.S. officials say that Rubio was among the members of Trump’s national security team who pushed for the strangulation strategy, along with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Jared Kushner, Trump’s adviser and son-in-law. Keep reading.

AI industry’s week from hell

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

A week of political upheaval, financial turmoil and salacious scandal delivered one final indignity to the AI industry yesterday, as Anthropic’s staggering IPO target fell short of expectations, Axios’ Zachary Basu and Ben Berkowitz write. Why it matters: The bubble is wobbling. Investors, businesses and governments need a spectacular success from Anthropic to stave off a crisis of confidence that could tear through the broader economy . Zoom in: Anthropic announced plans yesterday to raise as much as $64.4 billion in one of the largest IPOs in history, targeting a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion. That’s roughly $600 billion below what investors envisioned just months ago. Data: S&P Capital IQ Pro. Chart: Erin Davis/Axios Zoom out: Anthropic’s valuation reset caps a punishing stretch of new challenges that began with last week’s stunning midterm results A blue wave of AI-skeptical Democrats will arrive in Congress armed with subpoena power and an appetite for investigating the industry’s safety failures and vast political influence Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the central cog in AI’s global gears, was swept up in an espionage scandal after admitting to an affair with a suspected Chinese spy. His board, the FBI and Congress are investigating. Nvidia has shed more than $1 trillion in market value since the first revelation Wall Street went into a tailspin as investors reckoned with the implications of the Democratic sweep — including in data-center havens like Texas — for AI’s sprawling infrastructure ambitions. The Nasdaq lost $2.5 trillion in market value Thursday before staging a sharp rebound. Keep reading.

Miller’s focus: MAGA and men

Stephen Miller and Natalie Harp walk to Marine One on Friday. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Stephen Miller wants to use his new role as White House chief of staff to win back young and minority men who helped elect President Trump in 2024 but swung toward Democrats in the midterms, two people familiar with the administration’s plans tell Axios’ Alex Isenstadt. Why it matters: Miller, named last week to replace Susie Wiles, plans to focus on reviving the populist agenda that helped the president build his 2024 coalition, with an emphasis on working-class voters. Young, working-class and minority men fled the GOP in droves in last week’s elections, amid high prices fueled by Trump’s tariffs, the war in Iran, and concerns about AI’s impact on the job market. Trump won men under 30 by 14 points in 2024, according to a Tufts study. Last week, Democrats won them by 22 points in House races — a 36-point shift. Latino men also swung sharply toward Democrats, as the administration’s hard-line immigration crackdown became an increasingly contentious political issue Zoom in: Miller wants to spend more time highlighting administration policies he believes haven’t gotten enough attention, and that will appeal to working-class voters concerned about the economy, insiders tell Axios. His priorities will sound familiar to Trump watchers: eliminating what the administration considers “woke” policies from colleges and workplaces, lowering prescription drug prices, and rooting out government and health-care fraud. He also wants to emphasize reducing the federal bureaucracy and push for permitting reform, while highlighting how those efforts could help address affordability. Sources in the business community say Miller’s ideological drive makes him mostly impervious to typical Washington lobbying Between the lines: With Democrats taking control of Congress in January, Miller will have to advance that agenda without the help of Republican majorities in either the House or Senate. Some of his plans could be pursued through executive orders by Trump. Others, including permitting reform, would require bipartisan cooperation. Reality check: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who’s in line to become House speaker in January, has said he has “zero interest” in working with Miller, whose immigration policies have made him a frequent target of Democratic attacks. Share this story.

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Could Iran-Linked Cyberattacks Reach Europe’s Homes And Critical Infrastructure? – Analysis

November 11, 2026

By Arab News

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Key Takeaways:

• France has attributed a wave of remote cyberattacks that overheated supermarket freezers and threatened blood-bank supplies across Europe to Iran’s IRGC-linked Shahid Kaveh unit.
• The low-cost attacks highlight the vulnerability of interconnected cold chains, medical devices, transport and cloud-dependent services to hybrid warfare that conventional defenses cannot stop.
• U.S. and European agencies have issued urgent cybersecurity guidance while warning that simultaneous disruptions to critical infrastructure could overwhelm emergency responses.

For a few days, governments around the world clung to the hope that the bizarre series of cyberattacks on supermarket freezers across France was the work of hackers with some kind of societal grudge, or perhaps criminals planning to demand ransom payments.

But the announcement by the French government on Monday that the attack of “unprecedented scale and unprecedented aggression” was in fact the work of Iranian agents suggests a far more ominous scenario.

If the conclusion of the French security services is correct, then US allies around the world could be on the cusp of a devastating cyberwar for which they are ill-prepared, and against which conventional military defenses are utterly helpless.

French retailers were not the only victims of the attacks. The first incident, in mid-October, saw the temperature of hundreds of supermarket fridges across France raised remotely to up to 50 degrees centigrade overnight, destroying large amounts of food.

Then, at the beginning of November, an identical cyberattack hit supermarket chains in seven countries across Europe, including Belgium, Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Even more worrying than the loss of perishable food worth millions of euros, on Nov. 1 and 2 the refrigerators at three regional blood banks run by the state French Blood Establishment were also hit.

On this occasion, because the essential supplies are monitored by staff in person around the clock, blood was moved to other refrigerators and saved.

At first, suspicion fell on Russia, which is at odds with many European countries for their support for Ukraine.

But on Monday, France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, was unequivocal. “Thanks to the remarkable efforts of government agencies,” he said, speaking during the G7 meeting in Paris, “I am able to confirm that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are responsible for this attack.”

He said that in addition to summoning the Iranian ambassador to Paris to “lodge a very strong protest,” France will take “any other necessary and proportionate measures” to respond to the incident and “deter anyone who might seek to repeat it.”

Iran has dismissed the French accusations as “baseless and hostile.”

The Paris public prosecutor said that government agencies had uncovered “the use of Farsi and IP addresses traced back to devices located in Iran,” in attacks which had all the hallmarks of an Iranian cyber warfare unit called Shahid Kaveh.

Shahid (or martyr) Kaveh was named after Mohammad Kaveh, a commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who was killed in 1986 during the Iran-Iraq War.

In July 2025 the unit was the subject of an investigation by DomainTools, a US cybersecurity company. This identified a sub-unit within Shahid Kaveh called Intelligence Group 13, which it described as “one of the most operationally aggressive and ideologically fortified units within the IRGC cyber arsenal.”

The DomainTools investigation even identified and named two Shahid Kaveh officials, including Hamid Reza Lashgarian, the head of Shahid Kaveh, for whom France has now issued an international arrest warrant.

Intelligence Group 13, it added, was “already known for its history of intrusions into critical infrastructure,” and DomainTools delivered what may yet turn out to have been a prescient warning.

Capable of delivering “retributive action through cyberspace,” further campaigns by the group, it predicted, were likely to include “threatening or disrupting civilian infrastructure in the US, Israel and the Gulf states.”

For Iran, hard pressed by sanctions, the appeal of such asymmetric warfare is obvious — a cheap but devastating cyberattack can potentially cause far more damage and disruption than any number of expensive drones or missiles — and governments around the world are now scrambling to react to this new form of hybrid warfare.

On Nov. 5, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, and the departments of health, transport and agriculture jointly published a fact sheet, warning operators of “critical infrastructure” to “strengthen industrial refrigeration and cold-chain monitoring systems cybersecurity.”

Chris Butera, acting assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, said it was “actively tracking this threat activity. Every organization that depends on refrigeration and monitoring systems should assume it could be a target.”

It is not only supermarket freezers at risk from such attacks. Industrial refrigeration and cold-chain monitoring systems, CISA said, are “critical to multiple industries from healthcare to chemical production, food and agriculture, and transportation.”

Danielle Cosgrove, a senior adviser to the Atlantic Council’s counterterrorism project, believes further attacks can be expected, and not limited to France.

“What particularly concerns me is the potential for simultaneous or cascading disruptions,” she told Arab News. “Imagine multiple hospitals, water facilities, transportation systems or food distribution centers experiencing unexplained failures at the same time.

“Individually they’re manageable, but collectively they strain emergency services, disrupt supply chains and physical services on which entire communities and economies depend.”

Cosgrove believes France may have been targeted because “there’s been a deterioration in relations between Europe and Iran, and the EU has significantly expanded sanctions against Iran this year.”

Also, in September France announced it was sending troops and equipment to Saudi Arabia to help defend the strategically important Red Sea oil port of Yanbu from missile attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

For cybersecurity firms and national security agencies racing to identify and protect potential targets, in our super-interconnected world the task is overwhelming.

Domestic targets of disruptive attacks could include “smart” devices, such as Alexa speakers, security cameras and home-management systems controlling lighting and heating.

More seriously, disruption targeted at internet-connected vehicles, many of which now have semi-automated features such as steering and braking overrides, could prove fatal — potentially, on a mass scale.

So-called denial of service attacks on cellphone and radio networks could cripple emergency responses by police, fire and ambulance services.

In a recent report the Cyber Monitoring Centre warned that three of the UK’s most critical sectors — health, transport and finance — are reliant upon and “highly exposed” to the cloud. Most countries are equally exposed.

Electricity and water supplies, hospital systems and even medical devices are considered particularly vulnerable.

On Nov. 5, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning that “medical devices can be vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, potentially impacting the safety and effectiveness of the device” and issued “tips to keep your medical device secure.”

According to an advisory issued in June by IEEE, the US technology standards association, “the transformation of healthcare through connected medical devices … carries substantial cybersecurity implications that extend far beyond traditional IT security concerns.”

Devices which rely on wireless or networked connectivity considered vulnerable to cyberattacks include pacemakers, insulin pumps, cardiac defibrillators and infusion pumps.

These concerns multiply when applied to mass-transport systems, from trains to aircraft.

There is still no adequate explanation for the multiple emailed bomb threats that were received by airlines across Europe last week, affecting flights to or from more than a dozen countries.

Another vital piece of European infrastructure at risk is the digital border Entry and Exit System, introduced this year by the European Union. So far, with multiple technical glitches in the wake of its introduction, the system appears to have been self-sabotaging, leading to enormous queues at airports and causing thousands of passengers to miss their flights over Europe’s busy summer period.

In some cases, the cost for individuals has extended beyond inconvenience. On Tuesday it was reported that some travelers from Britain, which is now out of the EU, have been blocked from returning to Europe and issued with large fines because the system failed to record their entry to and exit from the bloc correctly.

So far, although European prosecutors have reportedly investigated Russian links to one of the software companies involved in the system, the EU agency responsible for border controls insists the system has not been breached by bad actors, but the potential for widespread disruption caused by malicious hacking is obvious.

In addition to being defenseless when it comes to protection from digital attacks, expensive conventional weapons systems are also considered as being on the list of vulnerable targets.

On Sunday, the commander of the UK’s recently established Defense Cyber and Electromagnetic Force revealed that specialist “hunt forces” were operating overseas in a bid to foil cyber operations.

“We are trying to hunt for our adversaries in places where they prepare before they target UK military systems,” Maj. Gen. Mike Fayers told The Times of London.

The wave of attacks on fridges and blood banks across Europe, he added, “shows you the scale and the speed of the challenge we face in the cyber domain.”

It is a challenge to which the UK government has reacted over the past month by advising citizens to stock up on three days’ worth of emergency supplies, from tinned food and water to batteries and wind-up radios, to prepare for an unspecified “difficult situation.”

During a radio interview on Oct. 23, Andy Burnham, the prime minister, said “it’s not about panicking … It’s about just taking sensible measures to have enough in the house to tide you over should there be a difficult situation.

“Unexpected events,” he added, “seem to be becoming more and more common.”

A government website, “Be ready for emergencies,” lists “some simple and effective steps you can take to be ready for emergencies and the disruption they cause,” and offered a downloadable “Be Ready Checklist.”

Predictably, UK supermarkets reported panic buying of many of the items on the list.

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Arab News is Saudi Arabia’s first English-language newspaper. It was founded in 1975 by Hisham and Mohammed Ali Hafiz. Today, it is one of 29 publications produced by Saudi Research & Publishing Company (SRPC), a subsidiary of Saudi Research & Marketing Group (SRMG).

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