AI Layoffs Need Evidence, Not Executive Storytelling

August 31, 2026

A new Financial Times analysis reports that U.S. technology companies have cut nearly 140,000 jobs in 2026 while pouring record sums into artificial intelligence infrastructure. The obvious story is that AI is replacing workers. The more important story is that executives are using AI to justify sweeping workforce decisions without proving that the technology caused the cuts or that the redesigned organizations will perform better.

Organizations need a better standard: every AI-linked workforce reduction should come with a testable operating thesis.

That distinction is important because companies are making decisions that can permanently damage trust, institutional knowledge, and execution capacity. The Financial Times found that Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft account for roughly 50,000 of the cuts, while the largest technology companies plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers. Some firms explicitly cite AI-driven efficiency. Others describe restructuring, reduced layers, and strategic focus. Those explanations often blur together, allowing leaders to present nearly any reduction as evidence of technological progress.

The result is an accountability gap. When AI succeeds, executives claim foresight. When layoffs create delays, quality problems, customer frustration, or rehiring costs, leaders can blame market conditions, legacy structures, or rapid technological change. Organizations need a better standard: every AI-linked workforce reduction should come with a testable operating thesis.

That thesis should specify which tasks will disappear, which tasks will change, which workflows will absorb the work, and which outcomes should improve. It should identify the technology currently capable of doing the work, rather than the capabilities leaders expect to arrive later. It should also name the executive responsible for results. Without those elements, an AI layoff is a financial bet disguised as an operational conclusion.

Recent examples show why skepticism is warranted. A TechCrunch review of major 2026 layoffs found that companies frequently invoked AI while also correcting pandemic-era overhiring, flattening management, shifting investment, or rebuilding infrastructure. Those may be legitimate reasons to reduce headcount, but they are different claims. AI automation means a machine now performs a defined task reliably enough to reduce human labor. Strategic reallocation means leaders prefer to spend money elsewhere. Cost cutting means leaders need a lower expense base. Mixing the categories prevents boards, workers, and investors from judging whether the decision worked.

Companies should require four forms of evidence before describing workforce cuts as AI-driven. First, they need task-level proof. Leaders should document the actual work being automated, the baseline time and cost, the error rate, and the human review still required. A chatbot demo or a pilot in one team does not prove that an entire role can disappear.

Second, they need workflow proof. Automating one step can create more work elsewhere. Faster code generation may increase review and security demands. Automated customer service may reduce simple tickets while escalating more complex and emotionally charged cases to a smaller human team. AI can shift bottlenecks rather than remove them. Leaders should measure the full process, including handoffs, exceptions, corrections, and downstream risk.

Third, they need capacity proof. Many companies eliminate positions before managers know who will handle the remaining work. The burden then moves to employees who keep their jobs, producing burnout, hidden overtime, slower decisions, and weaker mentoring. Organizations should test whether the post-reduction team can sustain service levels for at least several operating cycles, including peak periods and unexpected failures.

Fourth, they need outcome proof. The promised gains should appear in customer satisfaction, cycle time, quality, revenue, risk, or another business measure. A lower payroll is an input, not proof of successful AI adoption. If a company saves money while damaging product reliability or losing customers, the technology program has failed even if the quarterly expense line looks better.

Boards should demand that management separate three categories in reporting: verified automation savings, strategic workforce reallocation, and ordinary cost reduction. Each category should carry different metrics and accountability. Verified automation savings should include task and workflow evidence. Strategic reallocation should show where the money and talent moved. Cost reduction should be defended on financial grounds without borrowing the aura of AI innovation.

The strongest organizations will treat AI workforce redesign as an experiment with explicit assumptions, named owners, and stop conditions.

Workers also need honest communication. Employees can accept difficult change more readily when leaders explain what the technology can do now, what remains experimental, and how roles will evolve. Vague claims that everyone must become more productive with AI create anxiety without direction. Role-specific training, transition pathways, and clear performance expectations make change credible. They also help companies retain the people who understand customers, systems, and failure modes.

The strongest organizations will treat AI workforce redesign as an experiment with explicit assumptions, named owners, and stop conditions. If quality falls, customer complaints rise, or critical knowledge disappears, leaders should pause and adjust rather than defend the original decision. Some eliminated roles may need to return in redesigned form. Rehiring should count as learning, not embarrassment.

AI will change employment, but technology alone does not decide who loses a job. Executives decide how quickly to automate, which evidence to trust, which risks to accept, and whether to invest in workers before cutting them. The current wave of layoffs reveals less about what AI can do than about how loosely companies govern major organizational choices. The solution is not to reject automation. It is to require leaders to prove that their workforce decisions produce durable operational value, measurable resilience, and stronger long-term organizational market competitiveness.

Adapted from: The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026). https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook

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About the Author

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky was named “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times for helping leaders overcome frustrations with Generative AI. He serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Dr. Gleb wrote seven best-selling books, and his two most recent ones are Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams and ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, Vietnamese, German, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, with 8 years as a lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill and 7 years as a professor at Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Trusting Files is Equally as Important as Trusting Identity

August 30, 2026

By Jack Madine

Banks have mastered identity security, but attackers are exploiting a new weak point: trusted files that can conceal malware, fraud and emerging threats.

For more than a decade, financial services have led the way in cybersecurity investment. Banks have embraced multi-factor authentication, adopted zero trust principles and invested heavily in identity and access management. Few industries have strengthened digital identity as successfully.

However, attackers never stop adapting. As banks have taken measures to strengthen identity security, cybercriminals have shifted their focus elsewhere. However, the new weapon of choice is the files that organisations accept, exchange and trust every day.

Why are cybercriminals using files in attacks?

During my time at Lloyds, I was also part of the Cyber Defence Alliance, working alongside security professionals from across the banking sector.

The biggest lesson I took away was that attackers rarely persist against the strongest defences and instead look for the weakest link. Today, that means embedding malicious software in the files that organisations allow into their environments.

It’s an issue that extends across every industry and research shows that more than half of organisations, across all sectors, have experienced at least one file-related breach in the past two years, with the average incident costing $2.7 million.

In the financial sector, whilst banks have invested heavily in strengthening identity security, comparatively less attention was paid to file security, and that imbalance is now being exploited.

This is a significant security gap as financial institutions receive thousands of external files every day. Attackers understand that if they can persuade an organisation to trust a malicious file, they can often bypass many of the controls designed to protect user identities altogether.

Modern file formats can contain macros, embedded hyperlinks, scripts and password-protected content, giving attackers multiple ways to conceal malware. Even when organisations disable macros, malicious links and other active content can remain, allowing threats to evade traditional antivirus tools.

As financial institutions continue their digital transformation, every uploaded identity document, supplier invoice, bank statement and third-party file has become a potential attack vector.

How is AI making the situation harder for security teams?

AI is capable of performing tasks that once required significant technical expertise and time. One of the clearest examples is document fraud. AI tools can produce convincing driving licences, passports and payslips at a standard that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

Combine that with the rise of digital onboarding, where opening an account may require little more than a few images and a short video, and fraudulent KYC submissions have become far easier to produce.

A bank may verify an individual’s identity correctly, but if it implicitly trusts the document itself, it creates a serious vulnerability.

Phishing campaigns also continue to rely heavily on malicious attachments, while supply chain attacks increasingly arrive through files exchanged between trusted business partners rather than traditional network intrusions.

I’ve seen first-hand how much damage a single compromised supplier relationship can cause because everyone downstream tends to trust that channel by default. That’s exactly the assumption attackers are relying on.

Why does inspecting files at the point of transfer matter more than catching them afterwards?

Trust has always been the foundation of banking. Traditionally, that trust has centred on identity. Today, it must also extend to the integrity of every file entering the organisation.

Too many security teams still inspect files only after they have entered internal systems, often relying on a single detection method. In many cases, that’s signature-based antivirus, which remains effective against known threats but offers limited protection against new or unknown attacks.

A far more effective approach is to establish trust before files cross the security perimeter. Every external file should be verified, analysed and sanitised before it reaches users or critical infrastructure.

Applying multiple inspection techniques not only improves detection rates but also reduces false positives. More importantly, it prevents malicious content from entering the environment in the first place, reducing the need for costly incident response further downstream.

How do you re-establish trust in files?

Since there are so many potential threats at play, file security needs a multi-layered approach. As files move between customers, partners and financial institutions, they should be inspected automatically using multiple complementary technologies.

Managed File Transfer (MFT) has traditionally been viewed as a secure way of moving sensitive data between organisations, but it should also function as a security layer.

Multi-engine antivirus scanning improves detection rates for known malware, while sandboxing safely executes suspicious files to identify previously unseen threats. Threat intelligence provides additional context by identifying indicators associated with known attack campaigns, while AI-powered document analysis can detect manipulated or fraudulent content that traditional security tools may overlook.

Finally, technologies such as Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR) remove potentially dangerous active content while reconstructing the document itself, allowing business processes to continue without interruption and protecting the organisation from unnecessary risk.

That distinction matters because blocking every suspicious file isn’t a practical solution. Banks depend on the seamless exchange of a huge number of documents and blocking every file until it’s been manually cleared would quickly create an operational bottleneck.

Financial institutions have got identity security right by embedding it within the infrastructure. File security now needs the same discipline. The goal is to make sure that by the time a file reaches someone, whether that’s a mortgage application that needs to be approved or an invoice that must be paid, it has already been verified as safe and secure.

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About the Author

Jack Madine is Senior Product Manager for MetaDefender Aether at OPSWAT, specialising in file security and zero-day threat detection. He previously worked as a cybersecurity specialist at Lloyds Banking Group and spent four years at Adarma Security, bringing extensive financial services and cybersecurity experience to his current role.

How Businesses Can Keep Growing Across Borders in a More Fragmented World

August 30, 2026

Digitalisation Across Borders in a More Fragmented World

By Marco Donzelli

Digitalisation, fragmentation, and rising trade risks are reshaping cross-border growth, creating new challenges and opportunities for ambitious international businesses.

International expansion has never been free of risk, but the list of risks and issues that businesses face when they branch out across borders has become more extensive. Tariffs have become a regrettable fact of life, geopolitical tensions can massively redirect trade without warning, regulations are becoming increasingly complex, and supply chains remain vulnerable to disruption.

Our annual HLB Survey of Business Leaders has shown both the number and perceived severity of risks rising since the programme began in 2020, with average concern levels across its risk radar reaching a record 63% in 2026. Yet, despite all this, organisations have never stopped looking overseas.

UNCTAD estimates that global goods trade reached approximately $13.7 trillion in the first half of 2026, 12.5% higher than a year earlier, while services trade grew by 10.5%. Those figures might seem to contradict the manifold obstacles international organisations are facing, but they prove that the commercial case for crossing borders remains strong.

Success, however, increasingly depends on ensuring that a global expansion plan has been fully and properly thought through, and that each strategy has the resilience and flexibility to withstand the unforeseen.

A more demanding trading environment

More than a year after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day”, tariffs remain the most visible sign of this challenging trading environment. The WTO reported that the value of global goods imports affected by new tariffs and other import measures more than quadrupled between October 2024 and October 2025 compared with the previous 12 months, reaching the highest level in more than 15 years of monitoring.

What this means for organisations planning an international expansion is that margins and product competitiveness are both likely to fluctuate significantly once the expansion plan is approved, creating a layer of uncertainty that some will find dispiriting.

Wars and geopolitical disputes, which have become an unfortunate fixture of recent news, add another layer of pressure. Besides how they impact demand in affected areas, they can also close shipping routes, increase energy and insurance costs, restrict access to materials, and force businesses to change their supply lines with little notice.

Another layer to the constant vacillation of supply and demand is that of currency itself, which can meaningfully change market economics in the period between an organisation signing a contract and receiving payment, adding to the pressures felt by those operating across borders.

Another element these firms will have to deal with is scrutiny, both in the form of regulation and that of closer examination of foreign investment. When entering a new market, businesses must already contend with local rules governing tax, employment, data, quality control, and reporting; but now they must also be prepared for new, swiftly implemented controls around overseas ownership and new forms of compliance. How differently those pressures play out from one jurisdiction to another is something I have to deal with every day leading a network that covers more than 150 countries.

These manifold pressures create major obstacles for international growth, with significant risks for those that overextend and commit to expansions without properly anticipating the potential downfalls. Any plan built which reflects domestic strategy and fails to account for the potential turbulence of global commerce is unlikely to meet expectations, let alone succeed.

However, as the impressive UNCTAD figures around global goods trade demonstrate, these obstacles are not insurmountable. The benefits are clear for businesses who can overcome them, provided the appropriate preparations and concessions are made.

Fortune favours the bold

New markets can give a business access to customers, skills, suppliers, and capabilities that are unavailable at home. Operating across several countries may also reduce its dependence on demand in any one economy, while creating the scale needed to compete, which has been made easier than ever before as digital platforms allow firms to register an overseas footprint without a physical presence.

That continuing appetite for international growth can be seen in investment figures. Global foreign direct investment rose by 6% to $1.6 trillion in 2025, ending two years of decline. The recovery was uneven, with investment into developed economies increasing by 11% and developing economies by only 2%, but businesses are clearly still committing capital across borders.

Choosing where to expand now requires stronger evidence that a particular market can support a viable operation. The opportunities remain considerable, provided companies investigate them thoroughly before deciding where and how to invest.

Finding the right fit

The first and most important judgement that decision-makers must make when assessing an attractive market is the level at which the business will actually operate. They have to look beyond that country’s headline growth, as that won’t translate automatically into demand for a particular product, nor does it indicate the time required to secure a licence or the cost of employing the right people.

The issues that go into determining the eventual return of an overseas expansion go much deeper than just demand, with tax, customs, data rules, and the ability to move money across borders all playing a role in determining the success of the venture.

For management teams, this means that plans have to be made flexible, and that potential variables are exhaustively considered long before any action is taken. What are the assumptions that underpin this move? And what will happen if those assumptions are proven wrong? Would the operation remain viable if a tariff raised input costs, the local currency weakened, or a supplier became unavailable? These are just some of the questions that must be considered to avoid the worst possible outcomes.

This is already influencing corporate behaviour. Allianz Trade’s 2026 survey of 6,000 companies across 13 markets found that 80% had adjusted trade and supply-chain routes following the 2025 US tariff announcements, while 75% still expected positive export growth. Businesses are changing their plans so that international growth can continue under different conditions.

A robust plan should therefore include agreed thresholds for proceeding, pausing, or changing course. Those decisions are easier when leaders make them before commercial enthusiasm and sunk costs begin to narrow the available options.

Globalisation is becoming more deliberate

Any cross-border strategy that relies on the assumption that markets will remain open, aligned, and predictable is running a risk that no business today can afford. Tariffs, regulation, and geopolitical tension have become part of the equation for the cost of doing business, and disruption has become a question of when, not if.

By understanding local conditions early, testing the assumptions behind an investment, and retaining room to adjust, businesses can continue to reach new markets and build internationally.

The continuing growth in trade and investment shows that businesses are finding ways forward, and I remain optimistic about the opportunities available to companies that overcome the uncertainty in search of growth and expansion, even though it might require more preparation than it once did.

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About the Author

Marco Donzelli is Global CEO of HLB International, where he has led the network since 2017. Under his leadership, HLB has strengthened its position as a top 10 professional services network internationally. Prior to becoming CEO, Marco held senior leadership roles within HLB, following earlier roles at Deutsche Bank, Deloitte and in management consultancy. He also mentors start-ups and entrepreneurs through the Cambridge Master of Entrepreneurship and Barclays Eagle Lab programmes.

Building a More Resilient European Digital Ecosystem

August 30, 2026

By Eva Kelmendi

Europe’s semiconductor ambitions will depend on securing not only chip supply chains, but also the digital infrastructure and technologies underpinning its future resilience.

As part of its continuing campaign to secure its own semiconductor supply chain and de-risk from Chinese supply, the European Union has proposed a Chips Act 2.0, following up on the original Chips Act adopted in 2023. Last September 27 countries signed the Brussels Declaration, agreeing to the need for an updated Chips Act that includes five objectives to achieve semiconductor market independence by 2030. The new legislation emphasizes the need to secure each level of value added from the most advanced chips needed for AI development to those of lower-tier capacity for everyday appliances, automobiles, and telecommunications infrastructure.

Europe’s Semiconductor Vulnerabilities

The lack of European technological resilience became especially apparent when the 2020-22 Covid-era “chip crunch” highlighted structural dependencies on East Asian supply chains. European manufacturing was again strained when President Biden announced chip export controls in late 2022, and when China imposed rare earths export bans in April and October 2025. EU manufacturers are dependent on China and Taiwan for chips below 28nm; however, for chips above this threshold, other inputs in chip making like the rare earths, high-performance magnets, or intermediate processes like polishing and wet-processing still stem from China. This sort of diversified dependence on China is even more consequential, increasing risks across value chains for both the tech needed for AI and data centre development and everyday electronics and communications products.

From Chip Fabs to the Wider Technology Ecosystem

EU companies face an array of dependencies along the lower-tier of semiconductors. The new Chips Act recognizes this, seeking to create chip-adjacent resilience by incentivizing Europe-made packaging for AI accelerators, Massive MIMO technology for 5G, and wide-band-power-gap devices. This would shift the focus from fabrication companies like ESMC in Germany or STMicroelectronics’ chip plant in Italy, and move it towards empowering industries like Sweden’s Ericsson, which builds its own in-house telecommunications chips, or France’s Mistral, which aims to power its own compute. The diversification of the Chips Act is especially important now as Europe risks losing its ASML-led monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography for chip-making.

Securing Europe’s 5G Infrastructure

Efforts for de-risking from China have not only been incorporated through EU financing but also through import bans on making use of Huawei and ZTE technology. The US finalized its ban on the companies in 2022, labelling them national security threats. The EU followed suit but implementation has been slow and uneven across member states, with 17 countries unable to feasibly sever ties due to tech dependencies. Whether a security threat or not, Chinese companies pose dependency traps to European manufacturing: NVIDIA’s GPUs may still outperform Huawei’s Ascend NPU models, but for less-intensive needs, Huawei’s technology offers a reliable and cheaper alternative that Western equivalents.

Where EU companies face tight margins across an incredibly competitive market, import bans without cheap replacements can seriously impact revenues. When Greece switched to 4G in 2013, Huawei was the cheapest partner for Wind Hellas, providing almost all of Greece’s radio access network (RAN). Now Nova Telecommunications uses the exact same equipment across Greece and Cyprus.

The Balkans as Europe’s Strategic Frontier

Huawei’s competitive market integration is especially true for EU-accession candidates that have been seeking to both create attractive economies and comply with EU reforms. That dynamic produces a unique opportunity for EU border states to facilitate the EU’s de-risking goals. Telekom Srbija Group, for example, is responsible for building out 5G infrastructure across the Western Balkans. Without company efforts, which have been supported by financing from the EU and the US EXIM Bank, Serbia would likely still rely on Huawei products for expansion of its 5G network. Instead, Western loans stipulate Ericsson and Nokia products. Both companies are supporting the future transition to 6G, for which they will need advanced AI chips, and they both play a role in shaping the extent to which the EU and its accession countries rely on Chinese technology.

Working with Western companies instead of Huawei brings an added future benefit to the European Union in the realm of AI. Telekom Srbija Group, for example, hopes to become a driver of Serbia’s own emerging AI ecosystem, and chief executive officer Vladimir Lučić has argued that Serbia could develop into a major European AI centre by combining 5G networks with sovereign cloud platforms. Transitioning EU-accession candidates away from Huawei now means securing Europe’s AI future through secure data infrastructure, engineering talent, and access to advanced GPU capacity through international partnerships, including discussions with US institutions and global technology companies.

Surveying the other frontrunners in the Western Balkans telecommunications ng enlargement process, Albania and Montenegro, Vuk Vuksanovic, foreign policy expert at King’s College London, stated recently that while these countries may “not entirely replace or end partnerships with companies like Huawei, but deny them projects regarding the 5G spectrum.” That could mark a critical turning point: while the EU has sought change in the region, operators like Crnogorski Telekom, One Crna Gora, One Albania, and M:tel Montenegro still rely heavily on Huawei or ZTE equipment.

China’s Influence at Europe’s Periphery

EU-adjacent countries, such as those in the Balkans, act as strategic markets for the EU, functioning either as a potential weak point or as one well poised to protect broader European goals. China has warned the EU not to pursue state-led economic competition through the Chips Act or the proposed EU cybersecurity law, which would further reduce Chinese tech imports. Beijing has also responded by focusing itself on adjacent markets, turning them into a hybrid battleground for Europe’s economic independence. As the EU tries to decouple from China, Balkan telecom infrastructure could become a major weak point. Following the deal to no longer make use of Huawei equipment, for example, Telekom Srbija Group, and CEO Vladimir Lučić became targets of a cyber-attack originating from Russia, further highlighting ongoing challenges to European goals.

Turning De-Risking Into Digital Resilience

Banning Huawei and ZTE at a time when AI development is strongly encouraged leaves European innovators with fewer options. The European Chips Act 2.0 seeks to ameliorate the discrepancy; however, some countries, like Cyprus, Austria, and Hungary, are still nearly fully dependent on Chinese components. Thus, weak points across the Balkans and existing dependencies within EU countries themselves compound the risks from Chinese market dominance.

Europe’s chip strategy must also focus on existing critical infrastructure that every digital industry relies on. How EU-adjacent countries handle 5G expansion and telecommunications innovation will determine the EU’s goals for decoupling critical supply chains from China. Decoupling will be even more challenging for countries which have already fully integrated Huawei ecosystems. Europe must get ahead now, especially as China seeks to expand its influence from chips and rare-earths to the AI models that run on them. Multifaceted challenges stand in the way of a Chips Act 2.0, heightening economic rivalries with China, but also creating immense opportunity for investment, EU expansion, and home-grown technological innovation.

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About the Author

Eva Kelmendi is an Albanian-born analyst based in the UK, with experience working alongside civil society organisations focused on the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Her work centres on governance, political freedoms, and institutional accountability, with particular attention to democratic standards and the rule of law. She holds an MA in Human Rights from University College London (UCL).

Scaling Paid Media Across Geos: The Payment Infrastructure No One Talks About

August 28, 2026

Ask a performance marketer what’s hard about expanding paid media into new regions and you’ll hear about creative localization, audience research, platform quirks, and bid strategy. All real problems. But there’s one that almost never makes the list until it bites, and it’s usually the one that does the most damage: the payment infrastructure underneath the whole operation.

It’s an easy thing to overlook. Payments aren’t glamorous, they don’t show up in a campaign deck, and when they work you don’t think about them. The trouble is that as you scale across geographies, the payment layer is exactly where things quietly start to break — and the failures look like marketing problems, so that’s where teams waste time looking.

When a payment problem wears a marketing costume

Here’s a scenario most media buyers have lived through. A campaign is performing, spend is ramping, and then it stalls. The instinct is to blame the creative, the audience, the algorithm. Hours go into diagnosing a problem that was never about marketing at all — the card backing the account got declined or flagged, the platform paused delivery, and momentum that took weeks to build collapsed in an afternoon.

This happens far more than teams admit, partly because the root cause is invisible from inside the ad platform. You see a paused campaign and a drop in delivery. You don’t see that a single shared card number hit a limit, got locked for suspicious activity across too many accounts, or simply expired. The symptom and the cause live in different systems, so the connection rarely gets made.

Why geographic expansion makes it worse

Running paid media in one market with one card is manageable. Running it across several markets multiplies every payment risk at once. Different platforms in different regions have different tolerance for the same card behavior. Cross-border charges trigger fraud flags more easily. Currency and settlement friction creep in. And the more accounts you funnel through one or two payment methods, the more catastrophic any single failure becomes.

Most teams respond by adding more corporate cards, which trades one problem for another: now reconciliation is a nightmare and the fraud surface is bigger. It doesn’t actually solve the scaling issue. It just postpones it.

The infrastructure that makes scaling boring

The teams that scale paid media smoothly tend to treat payments as infrastructure rather than an errand. In practice that means a dedicated, limited payment instrument per account or per campaign, so that any single failure is contained and never takes the whole operation down with it. Platforms built for this — purpose-built business payment infrastructure like Finup — let teams issue cards per account, cap them, and keep each region’s spend isolated from the rest. When one card has an issue, it’s one campaign affected, not all of them.

There’s a funding dimension too. Teams operating across borders increasingly fund their spending with crypto, topping up a central balance and issuing cards against it, which sidesteps the slow settlement and stacked fees that come with moving money between regions through traditional banking. For globally distributed media operations, that speed isn’t a luxury — it’s what keeps campaigns funded the moment they need to scale.

The quiet advantage

None of this shows up in a case study about a brilliant campaign. That’s exactly why it’s an advantage. While competitors are losing hours to mystery declines and mid-flight freezes they keep misdiagnosing as creative fatigue, teams with solid payment infrastructure just keep spending, keep scaling, and keep their attention on the work that actually moves performance. The unglamorous layer turns out to be the one that decides whether expansion feels smooth or feels like a constant fire drill.

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Seven Simple Tests That Reveal the Real Experience on an iGaming Site

August 28, 2026

A lot of casino reviews focus on the pre-sign-up experience, detailing the perks and incentives used to attract new customers and get them to open an account. That’s all good, but it doesn’t really tell you much about how the site performs once you’re a member. So, here are seven things to look out for to put any iGaming platform through its paces.

Deposit Speed

Adding cash to your account should be quick and painless, but that’s not always the case, especially if the casino has sluggish payment options and drawn-out ID checks. The good news is that with plenty of PayPal casinos to play at, the number of platforms that support swift deposits and withdrawals is growing.

Fees

Hidden fees live up to their name by being out of sight until you’ve created an account. A casino that starts adding on charges and costs for things like making deposits via a certain method or converting funds between currencies might show its true colors at this point.

Bonus Ts & Cs

The terms and conditions on new player bonuses are always worth reading in detail before you open an account and redeem the offer. However, the reality of using the perks you unlock might not be up to scratch in a few ways.

For example, you could find it tricky to keep track of how much you’ve wagered, which matters because there’s usually a minimum wager requirement to hit when you redeem a deposit matching bonus. If information like this is obscured from you, it’s a red flag.

Game Variety & Access

Boasting of thousands of slots and casino games sounds good at the start, but is meaningless if either the games aren’t easy to search, or the catalog of ‘thousands’ of titles is actually just made up of near-identical versions of the same experience. A truly varied line-up of slots and table games should be easy to sniff out, and you also want to check how quickly the games load, as sluggish server performance can put a dent in your shiny new iGaming account.

Responsible Gambling Integration

As with the other aspects of an online casino that get talked up pre-sign-up but can fall short, responsible gambling features might be advertised as available for compliance purposes, but end up hidden behind endless menus. Preferably, you’ll want a site to make it easy for you to impose your own wagering limits and cooldown periods.

Customer Support

Often, you’ll only be able to tell if a casino actually will help customers as quickly as the marketing materials claim once you’ve signed up. Live chat might be responsive when you’re on the way to converting into a customer, but fall silent after the fact. And customer support email reply turnaround times should also be on your review checklist.

Withdrawal Speed

As with deposits, withdrawals can be protracted, even if the site initially claims that it offers fast request processing. Read all of the small print on this, as always, and compare what you learn against the reality.

Put simply, until you get hands-on with a casino as a customer, you can’t really claim to have reviewed it, nor have a legitimate opinion about its quality.

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Personal Accident Cover in Bike Insurance: Is It Mandatory?

August 27, 2026

Personal Accident Cover - motorcycle lying on the road — Photo by Valentin Sarte from Pexels

A two-wheeler can make everyday travel more convenient, but insurance decisions often involve more than simply choosing a policy. Different covers serve different purposes, so understanding where each one fits can help riders make more informed choices.

While vehicle protection often gets most of the attention, personal accident cover in bike insurance is another aspect worth understanding. Its relevance can depend on the policy structure, regulatory requirements, and the protection already available to the owner-driver.

Knowing how this cover fits into the wider insurance framework can make policy selection easier. Let’s understand whether it is mandatory, why it matters, and how you can buy it online.

Is Personal Accident Cover Mandatory for Two-wheeler Owners?

For an eligible owner-driver, personal accident cover in bike insurance is compulsory under the applicable motor insurance framework in India.

1. Applies to Eligible Owner-drivers

The compulsory cover is designed for the registered owner who is also the insured person named in the policy. The owner-driver should also hold a valid driving licence for the cover to apply according to policy conditions.

This means the protection is linked specifically to the eligible owner-driver rather than every person using the two-wheeler.

2. Provides a Compulsory ₹15 Lakh Sum Insured

Compulsory personal accident cover provides a sum insured of ₹15 lakh for eligible owner-drivers. It can be arranged alongside a third-party or comprehensive two-wheeler insurance policy, depending on the selected insurance structure.

The benefit provides financial support following specified accidental death or permanent disability involving the eligible owner-driver.

3. Existing Cover can Affect the Requirement

The cover does not always need to be purchased separately for every vehicle owned by the same person. If you already hold qualifying standalone compulsory personal accident cover, duplicate owner-driver protection may not be required.

A similar consideration can apply when eligible cover already exists through another motor insurance policy. Reviewing existing personal accident cover in bike insurance can therefore help you understand whether another compulsory cover is necessary.

Why is Personal Accident Cover Important for Two-wheeler Owners?

The purpose of personal accident cover in bike insurance differs from protection designed for the two-wheeler itself.

1. Helps Support Financial Commitments After Disability

A serious accident resulting in permanent disability can affect a person’s ability to continue working in the same way. The cover can provide a financial cushion when permanent disability affects earning capacity or ongoing household responsibilities.

The applicable payout depends on the disability and the benefit structure stated within the policy. This gives personal accident cover in bike insurance a clear role in supporting financial preparedness for the owner-driver.

2. Provides Financial Security for the Family

An eligible accidental demise can create immediate financial responsibilities for the family of the insured owner-driver. The compulsory ₹15 lakh sum insured can provide a defined benefit, subject to applicable policy conditions.

Nominee information therefore becomes an important part of arranging the cover. Accurate nominee details help identify the intended recipient of the benefit following an eligible accidental death claim.

3. Offers a Defined Lump-sum Benefit

Personal accident cover works differently from insurance that reimburses repair expenses for an insured two-wheeler. The benefit is linked to the covered accidental outcome and the compensation scale stated within the policy.

This means personal accident cover in bike insurance can provide a defined lump-sum benefit rather than reimbursement against repair bills. This structure can make the available financial support easier to understand before purchasing the policy.

How can You Buy Personal Accident Cover With Bike Insurance Online?

Personal accident cover in bike insurance can be arranged while purchasing a new two-wheeler policy or renewing an existing one.

1. Select the Two-wheeler Insurance Plan

Start by choosing the required insurance structure for your two-wheeler. This may be a third-party policy or a comprehensive policy, depending on the level of protection you prefer.

Review how compulsory personal accident cover is presented alongside the selected insurance plan before proceeding.

2. Check the Personal Accident Cover Details

Confirm the applicable owner-driver cover and review the ₹15 lakh sum insured shown during the purchase process. If you already have qualifying standalone cover, review that arrangement before selecting another compulsory benefit.

This can help you avoid unnecessary duplication when arranging insurance for another two-wheeler.

3. Provide Accurate Nominee Details

Enter the nominee information requested during the online application and check that the details are correct. The nominee is intended to receive the applicable benefit following an eligible accidental death.

Accurate information can make personal accident cover in bike insurance easier to manage when a claim needs to be raised.

4. Complete the Purchase and Review the Policy

Check the owner-driver details, nominee information, selected policy, and personal accident cover before making payment. Once the policy is issued, review the digital document and confirm that the relevant information appears correctly.

Keeping the document accessible can also make future reference and claim-related communication easier.

Make Rider Protection Part of an Informed Insurance Choice

Choosing suitable two-wheeler insurance involves looking beyond vehicle protection and considering how the policy supports the person riding it. Personal accident cover in bike insurance adds an important layer of financial preparedness for eligible owner-drivers.

Before purchasing, review your existing cover, understand the policy terms, and check that all personal details are recorded accurately. This can help you make a clearer and more informed insurance decision.

Many online insurance brokers, such as Jio Insurance Broking Ltd., provide access to bike insurance plans from multiple insurers for comparison. Such platforms can help riders review available options and choose protection aligned with their individual requirements.

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Uri Poliavich and the Renewal of Jewish School Infrastructure in Europe

August 27, 2026

Uri Poliavich Renews European Jewish Schools - Architecture of a school in France

The development of Jewish schools in Europe is the field Uri Poliavich works in as a philanthropist, through the Yael Foundation he co-founded in 2020 under the commitment “No Jewish Child Left Behind”. The foundation supports 145 institutions across 48 countries and 101 cities, reaching 29,000 children through day schools, Sunday schools, kindergartens, and after-school programs. Physical infrastructure is a defining part of what Uri Poliavich supports, covering renovation, expansion, and new construction, because a community keeps a school only when the building can hold the children who need places in it.

European Jewish communities differ in size, resources, and the condition of the institutions serving them, which means a program designed for a large community produces little in a small one. Uri Poliavich assesses each institution against its own circumstances for that reason, covering the enrollment it currently holds, the condition of its premises, and the number of families it could reach with additional capacity.

Why Uri Poliavich Prioritizes Modernization and Expansion

Uri Poliavich supports modernization on that basis, because a building unable to hold additional students sets a limit on the institution whatever the quality of its teaching. Expansion addresses the same constraint by adding places, so a growing community can admit the children it currently turns away.

Infrastructure is treated as part of educational quality in the charitable work of Uri Poliavich, so a grant can cover a building as readily as a curriculum. Each commitment is calculated from the enrollment of the school, its setting, and local costs, and released in stages against goals agreed at the start, which allows a principal to schedule construction against support already confirmed.

Support for Day Schools, Sunday Schools, Kindergartens and After-School Programs

Support extends across every format of Jewish education in the work of Uri Poliavich, covering 75 primary and secondary schools, 35 Sunday schools, 75 kindergartens, and 38 after-school institutions and programs. Applications are accepted from legally registered schools, kindergartens, and informal educational programs serving children aged 3 to 18, so a part-time program in a community of two hundred families is assessed on the same terms as a full-day school. Uri Poliavich applies a single measure across those formats, being the educational effect a grant produces over time, and the size of an institution therefore does not determine its access to support.

New Premises Built for the Enrollment Ahead

New construction is supported where existing premises cannot accommodate the community, and Uri Poliavich has directed that support toward purpose-built institutions designed for the enrollment a community expects to reach. A school under development in Limassol, Cyprus, is expected to open in 2027 with room for roughly 1,500 students. Uri Poliavich sizes construction that way because premises built to present demand fill within a few years, and a single building also gives a community one location for lessons, programs, and events.

Equipment, Curriculum and the Training Uri Poliavich Funds

Learning conditions are supported alongside construction in the work of Uri Poliavich, with grants covering curriculum development and classroom equipment so a renovated building is matched by what takes place inside it. A training track teaches modern classroom methods and technology to principals and senior staff and provides initial support for the projects that come out of it, which carries improvement into teaching practice and not only into facilities. Uri Poliavich supports Jewish tradition and a full academic curriculum within the same timetable, so a family selecting a school receives both from the same institution.

How Uri Poliavich Treats a School as Community Infrastructure

A functioning school gives a small community a reason for young families to remain, so Uri Poliavich supports institutions as community infrastructure and not as isolated projects. Supported schools run programs that involve parents, assist families, and sustain cultural activity, and those programs are covered on the same terms as lessons because they keep the community connected to the institution. Uri Poliavich commits across multi-year cycles for that reason, since effects on enrollment, teacher retention, and the decisions families make appear over several years. The same institutions are supported year after year, with the scale adjusted as they grow.

The Vision of Uri Poliavich for the Jewish Education Network in Europe

Connected institutions are the outcome Uri Poliavich works toward, so schools in the network are linked to one another and a method proven in one country becomes available in another. The International Jewish School Leadership Exchange, launched in April 2025, connects principals and administrators across borders for that purpose, while an annual summit brings the network together each year. Uri Poliavich supports that exchange as part of the same commitment that covers buildings and teaching, because a principal who can draw on the experience of another school solves a problem without starting from nothing. Uri Poliavich measures the work by whether the supported institutions continue operating on their own after the construction and training stages are complete.

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Nepal Flash Floods Leave More Than 1,000 Missing After Glacial Collapse at Tibet Border

August 27, 2026

Nepal Flash Floods Leave Thousands Missing

At least 165 people have died and more than 1,000 remain missing after a catastrophic flash flood and debris flow struck the Nepal-Tibet border. Nepalese authorities said 823 people remained out of contact, including 579 tourists, while Chinese state media reported another 558 missing in Tibet’s Gyirong county. Hundreds of foreign nationals from India, Ukraine, Australia, the UK, Malaysia, South Korea, the US and other countries are among those unaccounted for, although officials warned that some figures from Nepal and China may overlap.

The disaster swept through villages, markets, roads and border facilities, with rescue teams searching for survivors amid extensive mud and debris. The U.S. Geological Survey initially reported an earthquake but later determined that the seismic activity was caused by a glacial collapse and debris flow, which triggered catastrophic flooding downstream. Nepal and China have deployed emergency workers, vehicles, helicopters, boats and rescue dogs, while international organisations and governments have offered assistance. Authorities have also warned that a blockage upstream could potentially cause another flood.

The tragedy highlights the exposure of Himalayan communities and tourists to abrupt glacial and climate-related hazards. And the final toll may be a lot higher as many people are still unaccounted for and large areas are difficult to access. The extent of the devastation has also prompted fears over the safety of infrastructure and tourism routes along the Nepal-China border as rescue workers continue their search for missing people and to assess the damage.

Related Readings:

Rescuers Search for Survivors After Venezuela Earthquakes

Rescue Efforts Intensify as Myanmar Earthquake Death Toll Rises

Wildfires Devastate Los Angeles, Claiming Five Lives and Forcing Mass Evacuations

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The Hormuz Catastrophe: The Netanyahu and Trump Administrations Knew the Risks—and Escalated Anyway

August 26, 2026

Strategic Alert, map of the Strait of Hormuz featuring a large red warning icon.

By Dan Steinbock

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has produced precisely the kind of strategic blowback that earlier Israeli and American war-gaming had warned against. So, why the escalation?

Iran has not collapsed, while Hormuz has become a global economic choke point. The central failure was not ignorance of the risks, but the political decision in Washington and Tel Aviv to gamble that coercive military power could overcome them.

So, why did they set the stage for the catastrophe that was both unwarranted and unnecessary?

The Israeli conventional war game

In February 2024 – after 4 months of the Israeli obliteration of Gaza – over 100 senior military and government officials participated in a report by Reichman University’s Institute for Counter-Terrorism which outlined in painful detail how unprepared the Israeli home front was for an all-out war with Hezbollah.

A wider war could restore deterrence, destroy adversaries, preserve his coalition and keep the strategic initiative.

This lethal scenario was written long before Hamas’ October 7^th attack on Israel. It is the result of a three-year study. The 130-page report was the work of six think tanks made up of over 100 terrorism experts, former senior security officials, academics, and government officials who examined critical aspects related to the level of preparedness for the IDF and the home front in the event of a multi-front war.

The project was led by Professor Boaz Ganor, a world-renowned counter-terrorism expert. In the months leading up to October 7, he presented his research to relevant military and political authorities in an attempt to rouse intelligence and decision-makers from complacency and misconceptions.

The Netanyahu government ignored him and the analysis.

The Israel-Iran nuclear war game

In late 2023 – almost in parallel with the Hamas attack – a high-level U.S. war game was conducted in Washington. The participants included members of U.S. executive branch, Republicans and Democrats in the Congress, leading academics, think-tank experts and Pentagon officials. The game started in 2027 with Israeli intelligence reports that Iran was mating nuclear warheads to its long-range missiles. Consequently, Israel targets Iran’s key nuclear and missile sites with U.S. standoff hypersonic missiles.

Intriguingly, initially the U.S. participants presumed that self-restraint would prevail in this high-level war game. Yet, the simulation’s cold logic compelled them into a sequence of steps that quickly went nuclear. The adverse consequences were felt by millions of civilians in both Israel and Iran.

The lessons of the war game were ignored by both the Netanyahu government and the Trump administration.

Why did Netanyahu court the U.S. into the Iran conflict fully knowing the consequences?

Both war games were common knowledge among the US and Israeli military elites well before October 7, 2023. I referenced each in my book The Fall of Israel (2024). So, why were the lessons of these games effectively ignored?

The evidence points less to strategic ignorance than to political and strategic risk-taking. In particular, The Fall of Israel shows that Netanyahu’s government repeatedly treated regional escalation as a means of escaping an increasingly untenable post-October 7 position: prolong Gaza invasion, weaken Hezbollah, expand Israel’s northern security zone and ultimately confront Iran.

I argued that Netanyahu rejected a Gaza ceasefire while expecting Trump’s return to provide greater freedom of action against Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

But the risks were hardly invisible even in 2023. The high-level U.S. war game in late projected that an Israel-Iran confrontation could rapidly escape Israeli and American control and go nuclear. The Hezbollah scenario likewise anticipated thousands of rockets, saturation of Israeli defenses, attacks on infrastructure and paralysis of ports and trade.

Netanyahu’s calculation therefore appears brutally simple: the risks of escalation were judged preferable to the political risks of de-escalation. A wider war could restore deterrence, destroy adversaries, preserve his coalition and keep the strategic initiative.

The catastrophic externalities—Lebanon, Iran, Hormuz, the Gulf and the world economy—were treated as manageable collateral risks. They were not Israel’s problem. They were the world’s problem.

Why did Trump take the bait when Washington understood the stakes?

Trump inherited an enormous institutional warning system. U.S. officials, Pentagon planners and bipartisan experts had already modeled escalation from an Israeli attack on Iran through retaliation, Israeli counterstrikes, nuclear signaling and ultimately nuclear exchange.

The war game initially assumed rational self-restraint; but its own sequence demonstrated how quickly that assumption could collapse.

Yet Trump appears to have made the classic great-power error: confusing overwhelming tactical superiority with strategic control.

To the interventionists, the political attractions were obvious—destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, reinforce Israel, demonstrate American dominance and claim a decisive victory where previous administrations had failed.

But the premise that Iran could be compelled to surrender under bombardment underestimated asymmetric retaliation, regional proxies, geography and the extraordinary leverage of Hormuz.

The result is the opposite of the promised quick victory. By August, Trump’s approval had fallen to 33%, while 80% of Americans said they expected the war to be prolonged. Earlier Pew polling found 59% of Americans believed using force against Iran was the wrong decision and 62% disapproved of Trump’s handling of it.

Ironically, Washington has converted a military operation into a strategic endurance contest in which Iran possesses an exceptionally powerful economic weapon: Hormuz.

Soaring oil/gas prices, plunging growth, 6+ million displaced

The Strait remains severely constrained. IEA estimates that Gulf output was still 8.3 million barrels/day below pre-war levels in July, while global inventories had fallen 410 million barrels since the beginning of the war. The agency now projects a 1.8 mb/d global oil deficit in 3Q26.

Brent was about $91/bbl on August 18, after reaching $105 in July. The EIA’s relatively benign baseline assumes Hormuz constraints persist through August and puts 3Q Brent around $85. But that is increasingly a floor, not a comfortable forecast.

Today, the baseline for the 1–3 month range is roughly $90–110 Brent if the present stalemate persists; $110–130+ if attacks intensify or Hormuz remains effectively closed into autumn; and $70–80 if a credible settlement restores unrestricted shipping.

Gas is even more exposed. European TTF recently reached about €64/MWh, while Uniper expects €50–60/MWh for as long as Hormuz remains closed. Qatar’s economy is projected to contract 8.6% in 2026, while Qatar and Kuwait are losing an estimated $1.5–2 billion per week in energy-export revenues.

Economically, the World Bank cut regional 2026 growth from 4.0% to 1.8%; IMF stress scenarios put global growth as low as 2% with inflation above 6% if the energy disruption persists into 2027.

The human baseline is already enormous: by June 10, reported deaths included 3,468 in Iran, 3,371 in Lebanon, 26 in Israel and 13 U.S. troops, plus deaths across Iraq and the Gulf. For all practical purposes, these estimates are likely huge under-estimates and ignore the displacement of millions in the region.

Starting in early 2026, some 3.2 million Iranians have fled massive regional airstrikes and hostilities. In Gaza, 1.7 to 1.9 million — over 80% of its population – remains displaced inside the enclave, despite volatile ceasefires. And in Lebanon 1.0 million have been displaced.

That’s a total of 6 million displaced people.

What options remain and how badly has America damaged itself

There are four remaining trajectories. First, negotiated de-escalation: reopen Hormuz, freeze attacks, restore oil/LNG flows and negotiate Iran’s nuclear status.

Second, prolonged managed conflict: intermittent strikes, sanctions and restricted shipping, producing structurally higher energy prices.

Third, regional expansion: Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gulf infrastructure become increasingly active fronts.

Fourth, the tail risk: escalation toward nuclear confrontation—the scenario the war games warned could arise from supposedly controlled conventional operations.

What is urgently needed is an internationally mediated settlement involving Iran, the Gulf states, Europe, China, Russia and the UN—not another unilateral U.S. military ultimatum. As I argued in The Fall of Israel, unipolar solutions are increasingly incapable of managing a multipolar Middle East.

The reputational damage to Washington is already severe and potentially structural. Pew’s 2026 36-country survey found only 37% favorable views of the U.S., against 57% unfavorable, while 63% said America does not contribute to global peace and stability. In eight European countries, perceptions of U.S. reliability have fallen by 28–52 percentage points since 2022.

That is the geopolitical catastrophe. Washington sought to demonstrate that American military power still governs the Middle East. Instead, it has demonstrated that military superiority cannot guarantee political control.

Today, Hormuz has become an inconvenient symbol to many in Washington. After decades of U.S. primacy, the world’s most important energy chokepoint is now a bargaining instrument in a war Washington helped make possible.

Trump’s “Economic D-Day”: weaponizing the dollar regime

The Trump administration’s “Operation Economic Outcast” is best understood as a strategic pivot: after nearly six months of war failed to produce Iranian capitulation or secure Hormuz, Washington is attempting to convert its enormous financial leverage into the victory that military force has not delivered.

Announced August 24, the campaign sanctions more than 60 entities, individuals and vessels and targets Iran’s oil, shipping, aviation, technology, gold, digital assets and nuclear/missile networks; Washington is also threatening secondary sanctions against countries continuing to trade with Tehran.

Why now? Iran’s rial has collapsed to roughly 2 million per dollar, inflation is projected near 69%, and its economy is contracting—precisely the moment Washington hopes economic pain will force Tehran to reopen Hormuz and accept a nuclear settlement.

A wider war could restore deterrence, destroy adversaries, preserve his coalition and keep the strategic initiative.

But the strategy confronts a fundamental contradiction: Iran has endured decades of sanctions, while China remains its largest oil customer. Washington conspicuously did not sanction major Chinese financial institutions in this first wave, highlighting the diplomatic limits of escalation.

Three outcomes are plausible:

Prolonged economic war (likeliest) — Iran absorbs further economic damage but refuses surrender. Secondary sanctions generate friction with China, India, Turkey and the UAE, while Tehran retaliates through Hormuz. Global consumers pay for an American-Iranian confrontation.
Negotiated capitulation — economic exhaustion pushes Tehran into a deal, Hormuz reopens and oil prices fall. This is Washington’s desired outcome, but requires Iran to believe concessions improve rather than jeopardize regime survival.
Escalatory blowback — sanctions are interpreted as regime-change warfare; Iran tightens Hormuz, attacks remaining economic targets or expands asymmetric operations. The result could be higher oil/LNG prices, greater humanitarian suffering and a wider diplomatic rupture—turning an economic instrument intended to end the war into the mechanism that prolongs it.

The irony is stark: Washington is now trying economic coercion because military coercion has reached its limits.

And the longer Hormuz remains constrained, the more the “Economic D-Day” risks imposing costs on the world economy that exceed the additional pressure it imposes on Tehran.

The original version was released by Informed Comment (US) on August 25, 2026; the section on Trump’s “Economic D-Day” is an update.

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About the Author

Dr Dan Steinbock, an expert of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). He is also the author of two new books on the Middle East crises: The Obliteration Doctrine (Sept. 2025) and The Fall of Israel (Oct. 2024). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/