Malta, a Mediterranean island of 550,000 people, has just become the world’s first country to hand every citizen aged 14 and over a free year of ChatGPT Plus. There is a catch: you have to complete a two-hour “AI for Everyone” literacy course, run by the government’s Digital Innovation Authority, before you get access. This whole bit raises a question governments haven’t really had to answer before: when a government starts treating AI access as a public utility rather than a consumer product, who controls the terms, who writes the curriculum, and what happens when the free year runs out and half a million people have to decide whether to pay for something they’ve come to rely on?
📊 Number of the Day
0.25%
That’s what NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has proposed that all alliance members formally commit to spending 0.25% of GDP annually on military aid to Ukraine. If allies approve the idea, annual flows to Ukraine would effectively triple to $143 billion, based on the alliance’s own estimate of combined NATO GDP. But the proposal is already facing stiff resistance from some major NATO members, so it remains to be seen whether this will become a reality.
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🇷🇺 Russia Is Recruiting University Students as Drone Pilots
What It Is: Russian universities are offering students a deal: take a year off, fly military drones in Ukraine, earn up to $70,000, and return with your tuition paid and veteran status to your name. Since January 2026, students at risk of expulsion have been specifically targeted, with drone service offered as an alternative to academic failure. The pitch emphasises remote operation, safety, and financial reward. Legal experts are considerably less enthusiastic, warning that the contracts lack any basis in Russian law and could bind recruits to indefinite deployment or reassignment to the front line.
Why It Matters: Russia is reaching into its engineering lecture halls because it has run out of easier options. After nearly five years of grinding war, the professional drone operator corps cannot keep pace with battlefield demand. Drones now dominate the conflict: cheap, precise, expendable, and the side that trains and deploys operators faster holds a real tactical advantage. The recruitment pitch is carefully calibrated: young men already failing academically, offered money, status, and a story they can tell themselves about serving from a safe distance. Many will take that deal without fully understanding what they have signed up for.
The Big Picture: This recruitment drive mostly reflects how depleted Russia has become. Its economy has been under severe pressure from years of sanctions and war spending. Its professional military manpower has been depleted. The negotiating table, which briefly showed signs of life after Trump’s election, has gone cold again. Ukraine is still receiving weapons from Europe. No ceasefire framework exists. No end date is visible. Russia’s response is to adapt, finding new ways to fill the gaps the war keeps opening rather than looking for an exit. Militarising the university pipeline is the latest version of that adaptation.
🇨🇺 US Has Left Cuba With No Fuel
What It Is: Cuba’s Energy Minister has declared the island has “absolutely no fuel oil and absolutely no diesel.” Power cuts in some areas are running for 22 hours a day. The US tightened its oil blockade in January 2026 following the collapse of Maduro’s Venezuela, which had been Cuba’s primary oil supplier. Hospitals, water systems, food supply chains, and public transport are all affected. The UN has warned of humanitarian collapse. The Trump administration has since offered $100 million in humanitarian aid, routed through the Catholic Church to bypass the Cuban government entirely. The Cuban government said it will consider the aid offer but wants it to be no-strings-attached.
Why It Matters: Cuba’s power grid has effectively collapsed. This is a genuine humanitarian crisis, with ordinary Cubans living through 22-hour blackouts, hospitals running on fumes, and a food chain that is breaking down. The people actually carrying this weight are Cuban civilians who had no say in the decisions that produced this outcome.
The Big Picture: The irony here is worth stating plainly. The United States imposed a blockade that cut off Cuba’s fuel. It watched the island’s energy infrastructure collapse. It is now offering $100 million in aid, routed specifically through the Catholic Church to avoid putting a single dollar in the Cuban government’s hands. Depending on how you read it, that is either a precise piece of coercive statecraft or one of the more cynical humanitarian gestures in recent memory. If Cuba accepts the money, it is the more significant development: it is the first public acknowledgement that the blockade has undermined the state’s capacity to function. There are various reports that the Cuban government has already accepted the 100 million in aid, but government officials say otherwise, insisting the aid should be in accordance with international humanitarian norms rather than a payment to accept what the Trump administration wants Cuba to do.
🇬🇧 Palantir Is Embedded in the British Government
What It Is: NHS England is granting Palantir contractors a new “admin” role, giving them unlimited access to identifiable patient data held on its Federated Data Platform. The previous arrangement required specific data access applications for each dataset. The reason cited internally for abandoning that safeguard was that applying for individual agreements was “too inconvenient.” The NHS’s own internal briefing acknowledged a “risk of loss of public confidence.” Palantir’s existing FDP contract is worth £330 million.
Why It Matters: The NHS story does not exist in isolation. Palantir has been building its position inside the British government for years, contract by contract: Border Force, the Ministry of Defence, the Financial Conduct Authority. NHS patient data is the most commercially and analytically valuable centralised dataset in the UK, with tens of millions of records from birth to death. Granting unlimited admin access because the proper process was inconvenient is a governance failure, whatever they call it internally. The NHS’s own team knew it, flagged it, and it happened anyway.
The Big Picture: Palantir holds contracts with the CIA and ICE, the US agency responsible for immigration enforcement. In the current UK political climate, that association alone is enough to generate serious public discomfort. But the deeper issue is the pattern: Palantir has become embedded in the plumbing of the British state, and NHS patient data is probably the most valuable thing it gains from that position. The backlash from privacy campaigners, the government’s own MPs, and the press is already building. A parliamentary fight may be coming. The harder question is whether political pressure can reverse a decision that has already been made, or whether “unlimited access” is now simply the new baseline because following an established process is just too inconvenient for the admin.
🌐 Around the Globe
🇫🇷 France/BlackCore: French authorities are investigating whether an Israeli firm called BlackCore ran a disinformation campaign targeting three hard-left France Unbowed candidates ahead of March’s municipal elections, using fake websites and smear ads. Meta confirmed the network originated in Israel.
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia/Iran: Saudi Arabia has proposed a non-aggression pact between Middle Eastern states and Iran, modelled on the 1975 Helsinki Accords. European allies are broadly supportive.
🇪🇸 Spain/EU Army: Spain’s Foreign Minister has publicly called for the EU to build its own army, independent of the US. “Europe can’t wake up every day wondering what the US will do next,” he said.
🇵🇰 Pakistan/Iran Aircraft: Despite presenting itself as a neutral mediator between the US and Iran, Pakistan allowed Iranian military aircraft to shelter at Nur Khan Air Base near Rawalpindi, apparently to protect them from potential US airstrikes.
🇦🇺 Trump Tower Australia: Plans for a 91-storey Trump International Hotel and Tower on the Gold Coast, billed as Australia’s tallest building, have been abandoned after the developer concluded the Trump brand had become “toxic” following the Iran war.
🇺🇬 Uganda: Yoweri Museveni, 81, was sworn in for a seventh presidential term, extending a rule that began in 1986. He won January’s election with 71.65% of the vote amid an internet blackout and credible reports of ballot-stuffing.
🇬🇷 Greece Draft Evasion: Greece is introducing fines of up to €6,000 for military draft evaders, collected through the tax authority. Around 37,700 Greeks are currently classified as evaders.
👁️ Good News of the Week
Scientists at South Korea’s POSTECH and Kyungpook National University have successfully 3D-bioprinted a living human cornea capable of restoring sight in blind patients. The team’s bioink blends decellularised donor corneal tissue, stripped of its original cells to form a biological scaffold, with stem cells, which regrow and integrate with the patient’s own eye. In lab testing, over 90% of printed cells survived and remained active. That figure matters more in the current global shortage: there is one available donor cornea for every 70 patients who need a transplant. Following successful animal trials, the team is preparing for expanded human clinical trials. The waiting list problem in eye donation is one of medicine’s most persistent bottlenecks, and this is a credible path toward solving it.
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🧠 Brain Food
✨ Quote of the Day
“Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.”
— Herbert Hoover
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