China is pledging to use 'extraordinary measures' to support the country's bid to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other cutting-edge technological fields, according to its 15th five-year plan. Many researchers noted an air of confidence in the plan. 'Five years ago, the sentiment of the Chinese science policymakers was still very much like, we don't want to be too far behind the US, we are still doing the catching up,' says Meicen Sun, an information scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 'Now, there is this more palpable sentiment that there's a real chance we can be a true leader,' she says. The government has promised to boost its research and development (R&D) expenditure over the next five years. And the country's science budget is also expected to increase to 426 billion yuan (US$62 billion) this year, a rise of 10% from 2025. The Chinese government now considers science to be as important as other top-level national goals, such as boosting defence, economic growth and the country's international influence, says Stefanie Kam, who researches Chinese politics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore....

The White House has received reports in recent weeks that President Trump's personal phone number has been offered for sale to deep-pocketed interests seeking influence, two administration officials told us. 'It's honestly just wild,' one of them said. 'I've heard of CEOs offering money for his number. I've heard of crypto bros offering cryptocurrency for it.' Journalists have taken to horse-trading among themselves, offering the contact information of other world leaders'or sometimes even dozens of bold-faced names'just to get the most important one saved into their phones. 'It's out of control,' said the second official, who, like others we spoke with for this story, requested anonymity to talk frankly on the issue. 'It's like a wrecking ball.' No one foresaw this at the start of Trump's second term, when the number was closely held by the president's friends and a handful of journalists who used it sparingly. So many people now call Trump on his private iPhone that his advisers have stopped trying to keep track. Sometimes in meetings, he will leave his phone face up, allowing staff to gawk at the flashing notifications of incoming or missed calls that pile up on his screen. Only some of them are from numbers that have been saved in the device. 'It is literally call after reporter call,' the first official said. 'It is just boom, boom, boom.'...

President Trump prides himself on being a rule breaker, but he is discovering a rule he can't break: Good statecraft demands clear objectives. Trump has billed the war with Iran as a one-time opportunity for Iranians to take back their country. This implies regime change, yet the administration's ambitions have in fact been vague and inconsistent. By offering a grab bag of justifications and intentions, the United States has been squandering an opportunity to declare a goal that is both necessary and achievable: Instead of changing Iran's regime, the U.S. should fatally weaken it. Tehran is counting on the cost of this war exceeding Trump's willingness to fight it. If Iran's regime survives, it will be even more determined to rebuild and wreak vengeance, at least in the short term. Some argue that the only way to stop Iran from menacing the region and its people is to crush this regime. But the regime's tenacity cannot be underestimated. There are no limits to what Iran's leaders will do to survive, as demonstrated by their massacre of up to 36,500 Iranian protesters in the streets in January....

Many leaders can get agentic pilots rolling'but realizing ROI can mean activating thousands of AI agents enterprise-wide. Is your organization ready' 'Agency isn't a feature'it's a transfer of decision rights,' says McKinsey Partner Rich Isenberg. 'The question shifts from 'Is the model accurate'' to 'Who's accountable when the system acts''' On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, Isenberg joins Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly to explore how leaders can scale AI safely, mitigate risk for autonomous systems, and build the trust required to make innovation stick. Rich Isenberg: People sometimes view agentic as a better chatbot. In reality, you're giving these software programs agency. They can plan. They can call tools. They can execute workflows. To manage this, your entire operating model has to change. Agentic AI is not only content generation; it's decisioning and action at machine-like speed. The question shifts from 'Is the model accurate'' to 'Who is accountable when the system acts'' Your governance must define the scope, inventory, and ownership and make that auditable....