Tech moves fast, but you're still playing catch-up?

That's exactly why 100K+ engineers working at Google, Meta, and Apple read The Code twice a week.

Here's what you get:

All delivered twice a week in just 2 short emails.

Join 100K+ engineers

What you need to know

U.S. military poised around Venezuela

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan “Raizin” Caine, has arrived in Puerto Rico, a move widely read as preparation for imminent U.S. military activity directed at Venezuela. His presence on the island, which has long served as a forward staging ground for U.S. operations in the Caribbean, signals a shift from contingency planning to active operational management.

On 24 November the U.S. terrorism designation against the Cartel de los Soles, the Venezuelan military-linked trafficking network associated by the Trump administration with Nicolás Maduro, comes into force.

Commercial disruption has intensified. Several international carriers have suspended routes to Venezuela, with Turkish Airlines (the flag carrier of Türkiye) joining the list on 24 November. This indicates the rising operational risk and the prospect of airspace closures if the U.S. initiates strike or interdiction missions.

Diplomats are also taking precautions. Reports suggest that foreign embassy personnel have begun quietly departing Caracas, either through routine “authorized departure” instructions or discreet evacuation.

Taken together, the military posture, the terrorism designation, the commercial flight suspensions, and the diplomatic drawdowns point to preparations for a coordinated military campaign. This could include maritime interdictions, special forces operations, or limited strikes on Venezuelan security infrastructure.

The sequencing suggests Washington intends to isolate the regime physically, financially, and diplomatically, and there is currently no discussion of an off ramp.

It’s the U.S. vs China, everyone else needs to choose a side

Rubio and Zelenskyy finesse peace framework concepts

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has left Geneva after a round of talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a meeting both sides described as substantive.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials say negotiators made progress toward a shared outline for President Donald Trump’s peace plan, although no one suggested that a final agreement is close.

After several hours of closed-door discussions, Rubio appeared briefly with Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff. Rubio called the session “probably the most productive and meaningful meeting so far,” while noting that “there is more work to do.” Yermak avoided specifics, a sign of how sensitive the negotiations have become.

Various versions of so-called European peace plans are now circulating in the media. These drafts sketch different mixes of ceasefire terms, territorial arrangements, demilitarization measures, and security guarantees. Most are either speculative exercises or diplomatic trial balloons rather than accurate reflections of the Geneva talks.

For Kyiv, the red lines are unchanged and non-negotiable. Zelenskyy is highly unlikely to accept any settlement that recognizes Russian territorial gains, grants Moscow additional land, or imposes deep reductions on Ukraine’s armed forces.

Any workable agreement, in practice, will have to find other forms of compromise, such as security guarantees, phased withdrawals, international monitoring, reconstruction financing, or sanctions arrangements, without breaching those boundaries.

Whether Moscow is willing to engage on that basis remains the central uncertainty surrounding the Geneva talks.

Royal Navy shadows Russian vessels in the Channel

The Royal Navy has escorted two Russian naval vessels through the English Channel, the latest movement in a steady flow of Russian warships using one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors.

According to the Ministry of Defence, HMS Severn, an offshore patrol vessel, was assigned to monitor the Stoikiy, a Steregushchiy-class corvette, and the Yelnya, a fleet tanker, as they traveled west through the Dover Strait during the past fortnight.

Officials said the escort was routine, part of the United Kingdom’s commitment to track foreign naval activity in its area of responsibility and maintain awareness in the Channel. The Stoikiy, equipped with anti-ship missiles and air-defense systems, normally serves with Russia’s Baltic Fleet. The Yelnya, a replenishment tanker, supports longer-range deployments.

Although such transits are not uncommon, their frequency has increased amid friction between NATO and Russia. British defense officials maintain that every Russian warship entering the Channel is met and tracked, partly to uphold maritime safety in congested waters and partly to demonstrate allied vigilance. France’s Marine Nationale often coordinates with the Royal Navy to follow these movements as the ships pass between national zones.

Netherlands halts flights after drone incursions near sensitive bases

The Netherlands’ Defense Ministry confirmed that multiple drone incursions over the weekend forced the temporary suspension of air traffic at Eindhoven Airport, one of the country’s busiest military-civilian hubs. Officials said flight operations were halted as a precaution after unidentified drones were detected entering restricted airspace on repeated occasions, prompting security alerts and temporary runway closures.

The incidents followed a more serious confrontation on Friday, when the Dutch Air Force fired on several drones lingering over Volkel Air Base.

Dutch authorities have not attributed the incursions to any state or non-state actor. Officials said the pattern suggested coordinated testing of air-defense responses rather than recreational flying. The National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism has been informed, and additional counter-drone teams have been deployed to both Volkel and Eindhoven.

The episodes come amid growing unease in Europe about Russian surveillance efforts in NATO airspace, as well as an increase in drone overflights of critical infrastructure across the continent. The Netherlands is expected to brief allies through NATO channels in the coming days.

The birthplace of civilization

Israel kills senior Hezbollah commander near Beirut

Israel yesterday assassinated Ali Tabtabai, the most senior military commander in Hezbollah and a figure widely regarded by regional intelligence services as the group’s de facto chief of operations.

Tabtabai died in a targeted strike that used several precision-guided missiles and hit a crowded working-class neighborhood close to Beirut’s international airport. The blast hit part of a residential block that had served as a safe house, killing four others. At least three of the other dead appear to have been Hezbollah operatives, according to martyrdom notices issued by the group’s media outlets.

Israeli officials, speaking anonymously to local media, described the operation as part of an expanded campaign to weaken Hezbollah’s cross-border strike capabilities and to erode senior field leadership. Hezbollah has not issued a formal reply, although its channels portrayed Tabtabai as “one of the pillars” of its regional operations.

Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, condemned the strike as a violation of sovereignty. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam called the attack a “grave escalation”, arguing that it showed the need to return to the framework set out in UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the accord that ended the 2006 war. Although Salam did not name Hezbollah directly, the resolution’s provisions include the withdrawal of armed groups from the border area and the disarmament of non-state militias, a politically charged issue in the days ahead.

The assassination is likely to sharpen Lebanon’s internal debate over the disarmament of Hezbollah, and it may test the limits of international crisis-management efforts led by Paris and Washington.

Move fast and break things

Dogecoinomics over

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been shut down eight months before its mandate was due to expire.

Launched with fanfare as a flagship cost-cutting scheme, DOGE pledged to uncover $2 trillion in federal fraud, waste, and duplication.

In practice, DOGE spent little time on audits and concentrated instead on aggressively reducing the size of the bureaucracies that regulate the economy and deliver federal services. Agencies throughout the government, from procurement offices to labor inspectors to environmental review teams, lost significant portions of their staff. Several watchdog bodies were merged, scaled back, or left barely functional. The White House called this “streamlining”; critics said it amounted to a deliberate weakening of the state’s basic machinery.

The results were modest. Internal estimates indicate that DOGE identified only about $2 billion in plausible savings, a fraction of one percent of what had been promised and well below the economic cost of the disruption. Economists argue that the sudden removal of regulatory and compliance personnel contributed to delays in federal contracting, an increase in procurement mistakes, and gaps in oversight of financial institutions and infrastructure projects.

The early closure is widely viewed as an acknowledgment that the program had become politically and operationally untenable. Congressional leaders are now pressing for investigations into DOGE’s methods, the damage inflicted on federal services, and the administration’s initial claims of trillion-dollar savings that never materialized.

Trump signals Muslim Brotherhood designation

President Donald Trump said in a weekend interview that he intends to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a step that would rank among the administration’s most far-reaching moves against an Islamist movement with branches and affiliates across the Middle East.

The remark, delivered in typically direct terms, is the clearest indication so far that the White House aims to revive a policy push that has surfaced repeatedly since 2017, although it has stalled for practical legal and diplomatic reasons.

Officials familiar with the process said the administration is preparing to act through an executive order, which would allow the president to bypass Congressional delays and instruct the State Department to begin the formal review. A parallel legislative option is also being developed as a fallback, with a bill expected to be introduced if the executive route becomes bogged down in interagency or judicial disputes.

A designation of this sort would carry wide-ranging consequences. It would require sanctions on individuals and entities linked to Brotherhood networks, complicate U.S. relations with states where Brotherhood-derived parties hold political roles, and strain intelligence cooperation with allies that differentiate between political and militant branches.

Debate inside the administration is set to sharpen in the coming days as legal, diplomatic and security officials weigh the impact of targeting an organization whose membership is diffuse, whose structure varies across countries and whose local functions remain contested.

Center of Gravity sign up link: https://www.namea-group.com/the-daily-brief