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Europe's next-generation fighter ambitions took a significant blow this week as French President Macron and German Chancellor Merz agreed to shelve the joint Future Combat Air System program. Years of industrial rivalry and strategic disagreements between Paris and Berlin proved insurmountable, leaving the UK-Italy-Japan Tempest program as the primary contender for next-generation European air power.
That collapse arrives against a broader backdrop of shifting European sentiment. A new report from the European Council on Foreign Relations finds that trust in the United States has hit an all-time low across the continent. Europeans, the research suggests, are increasingly prepared to take their own security and technological futures into their own hands, a posture that will likely shape defense and industrial policy for years to come.
On the software side, a quieter but consequential development: WebAssembly three point zero has officially landed. The specification marks a meaningful step forward for the web's low-level runtime, expanding what developers can build and run directly in the browser with near-native performance. It's the kind of foundational update that won't make headlines today but will quietly reshape applications for the next decade.
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