Since launching a military campaign in the Caribbean earlier this year, President Donald Trump has made clear what phase one of his plan looks like: killing alleged drug smugglers and pushing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to leave office. The end goal'let's call it phase three'is to work with a new government to gain access to the country's oil and rare earth minerals. Phase two' That's an open question. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as acting national security adviser, has taken the lead in planning for a variety of contingencies, several officials told us, although they said that the planning is restricted to a very small group of senior officials around the president and that they couldn't provide any details. Other officials involved in Venezuela discussions told us that if there is any substantive planning being done, it was news to them, and that they had little understanding of what the administration intends to do in the event that Maduro is toppled. (The State Department didn't respond to a request for comment.)...

Donald Trump continues to put pressure on Ukraine to accept his administration's peace proposal, despite how the plan favors Russia. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what this may suggest about the administration's shifting international priorities, and more. If the Ukrainians were to stop fighting today, 'they don't have any kind of security guarantee,' Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explained last night. Without that, 'their country is unviable'because who will want to live there or invest there if they know that the war is going to start, you know, next year or next month or in six months'' Ukraine needs a reason to believe that the war with Russia is 'really, really over,' she argued. 'The only way you achieve that is to put pressure not on Ukraine, but on Russia,' Applebaum said. 'It's almost as if the Trump administration doesn't want to admit, or can't understand, that the war only ends when the pressure is put on Russia.' This is 'the most obvious solution to the problem, and it's the one they just won't take,' she noted....

On Wednesday, Google released patches for a handful of security bugs in its Chrome browser, noting that one of the bugs was being actively exploited by hackers before the company had time to patch it. But on Friday, Google updated the page to say that the bug was discovered by Apple's security engineering team and Google's Threat Analysis Group, whose security researchers primarily track government hackers and mercenary spyware makers, indicating that the hacking campaign may have been orchestrated by government-backed hackers. According to the security advisory for iPhones and iPads, Apple patched two bugs and the company said it was aware 'that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals' running devices prior to iOS 26. That language is Apple's typical way of saying that it knows some of its customers and users were targeted by hackers exploiting zero-days, meaning flaws that at the time of exploitation are unknown to the software makers. Often, these are cases where government hackers used hacking tools and spyware made by companies such as NSO Group or Paragon Solutions to target journalists, dissidents, and human rights activists....

The robot swerved through the cafeteria of Rivian's Palo Alto office, shelves adorned with chilled canned coffees ' until it didn't. Five minutes later, a man carefully pushed it out of everyone's way, the words 'I'm stuck' flashing yellow on the poor droid's screen. It was an inauspicious start to Rivian's 'Autonomy & AI Day,' a showcase for the company's plans to make its vehicles capable of driving themselves. Rivian doesn't make the cafeteria robot and isn't responsible for its abilities, but there was a familiar message in its foibles: this stuff is hard. The EV equipped with the automated-driving software drove myself and two Rivian employees on a switchback route near the company's campus. As we glided past Tesla's engineering office, I noticed a Model S in front of us slow to turn into the rival company's lot. The R1S eventually noticed this, too, braking hard just before the Rivian employee nearly intervened. During my demo drive, there was one actual disengagement. The employee in the driver's seat took over as we passed through a one-lane section of road due to some tree-trimming. Minor stuff overall. But it wasn't exactly rare either; I spotted multiple other demo rides that had disengagements, too....