Financial Times - Raya Jalabi and Neri Zilber / Israel strikes Lebanese targets as Hizbollah chief warns of ‘red lines’ crossed

• Israel struck targets along Lebanon’s southern border on Thursday as the leader of the Hizbollah militant group said the Jewish state had crossed “all red lines” with this week’s mass detonations of communication devices. 

• “There is no doubt that we have been subjected to a major security and military blow that is unprecedented in the history of the resistance and unprecedented in the history of Lebanon,” Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

• Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, who declared this week that the war was in a “new phase”, said on Thursday evening that Hizbollah felt it was being “chased” and said the “sequence of military actions” against the group would continue. He added: “As time goes by, Hizbollah will pay an increasing price.”.

• The Israel Defense Forces said its air force had “struck approximately 100 [Hizbollah] launchers and additional terrorist infrastructure sites, consisting of approximately 1,000 barrels that were ready to be used”.

   

Bloomberg -  William Horobin, Ania Nussbaum, and Samy Adghirni / French Premier Pitches New Cabinet to Overcome Political Impasse

• French Prime Minister Michel Barnier met with President Emmanuel Macron in Paris late on Thursday to propose a new government after two weeks of tense consultations with rival political groups. 

• The presidential palace did not provide a list of new ministers, who can only be formally appointed by the president. According to reports in the French media, the new team would be largely made up of figures from Macron’s centrist group and Barnier’s conservative Republicans party. 

• Agence France-Presse said Barnier proposed Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, as interior minister. The 63-year-old has been a vocal critique of Macron’s past governments, demanding more fiscal discipline and taking a more conservative stance on social issues, including voting against inscribing the freedom of abortion in the French constitution.” 

• The first urgent test will come with the presentation of a budget bill to rein in France’s galloping deficit. The fiscal situation has deteriorated further over the summer under the watch of a caretaker government, fueling tensions between different parties over how to tackle the situation.

   

The Guardian - Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer/ Russia anticipated Kursk incursion months in advance, seized papers show

• Russia’s military command had anticipated Ukraine’s incursion into its Kursk region and had been making plans to prevent it for several months, according to a cache of documents that the Ukrainian army said it had seized from abandoned Russian positions in the region. 

• Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk took Kyiv’s western partners and many in the Ukrainian elite by surprise, as planning had been restricted to a very small number of people. But Russian military documents contain months of warnings about a possible incursion into the area and an attempt to occupy Sudzha, a town of 5,000 residents that has now been under Ukrainian occupation for more than a month. 

• An entry from 4 January spoke of the “potential for a breakthrough at the state border” by Ukrainian armed groups and ordered increased training to prepare to repel any attack. On 19 February, unit commanders were warned of Ukrainian plans for “a rapid push from the Sumy region into Russian territory, up to a depth of 80km [50 miles], to establish a four-day ‘corridor’ ahead of the arrival of the main Ukrainian army units on armoured vehicles”.

• The documents give an insight into Russian tactics over the past year, in one case speaking of the need to create decoy trenches and positions to confuse Ukrainian reconnaissance drones. “Models of tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery launchers should be created as well as mannequins of soldiers, and they should be periodically moved around,” reads one order”.

   

Politico - Gordon Repinski / Germany’s Scholz risks Biden’s fate

• One more defeat at the hands of the far right this weekend will almost certainly spell the end, and Scholz could very well share the fate of U.S. President Joe Biden — thrust aside by his panicking party to make way for a candidate who can avoid a massacre in a national election next year. 

• Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) narrowly trails the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in polling ahead of Sunday’s election in Brandenburg, the eastern state surrounding Berlin.

• If the SPD loses this traditional bastion, it will be the latest in a litany of electoral failures. The party was beaten into third place — behind the AfD — in the June European election, a stinging loss that has only been compounded by two major reversals at the ballot box in eastern Germany. On Sept. 1, the far right notched its biggest success since World War II, winning the state of Thuringia and finishing a close second in Saxony. Scholz’s SPD was crushed in both votes.

• While Sunday’s vote is ostensibly about a new state parliament in Brandenburg, Scholz will understand that he himself is on the ballot. The SPD has held power in the state for 34 years, with Dietmar Woidke at the helm as premier for almost a third of that time.”.
   

Our opinion reads for today:

• Al Jazeera - Belén Fernández / The Lebanon pager attack: Israel’s terror playbook strikes again

• Foreign Affairs - Carter Malkasian / America’s Crisis of Deterrence

• Euractiv - Bogolo Kenewendo, Bruno Oberle, Connie Hedegaard, Izabella Teixeira, Jason Bordoff, Juan Carlos Jobet, Kandeh Yumkella, Ma Jun and Sheila Khama / Minerals for the Energy Transition: Can We All Work Together?

• Project Syndicate - Shania Scotland / Put a Price on Shipping Emissions