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The PLA General Hospital’s Eighth Medical Center has institutionalised regular medical patrols and specialist outreach — including high‑altitude respiratory care, tuberculosis screening, heatstroke training and telemedicine — to improve the health and readiness of garrisoned troops. The programme reduces evacuations, enhances frontline medical skills, and reflects wider PLA priorities on force readiness and distributed care.

A volunteer "little cart" team of retired soldiers in Bengbu has been mobilized to provide hot‑meal logistics for passing PLA units, addressing manpower shortfalls created by the shift to continuous, mobile support operations. The initiative formalizes veterans' involvement through training, uniforms and appointment letters and serves both operational and social aims while highlighting questions about scalability and integration.

Ehud Barak has publicly expressed regret for his association with Jeffrey Epstein while denying any involvement in illegal activity. The interview follows a major U.S. document release tying numerous high-profile figures to Epstein and raises reputational questions for Barak without, so far, indicating criminal exposure.

Helion Energy says its Polaris prototype reached 150 million °C, a milestone the company frames as a three‑quarters step toward temperatures it considers necessary for commercial fusion. The firm pursues an FRC design and direct magnetic‑to‑electric conversion, targets a 50 MW Orion plant for Microsoft by 2028, and faces significant technical and fuel‑supply challenges before true commercialization.

About 20,000 people rallied in Caracas on Venezuela’s Youth Day to protest what demonstrators described as a U.S. attack, calling for the release of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and voicing solidarity with Cuba against recent U.S. pressure. The march highlights Maduro’s continued use of anti‑imperialist mobilization to bolster legitimacy and complicate international responses.

DeepSeek is testing a new long‑context model in its web and app interfaces that supports roughly one million tokens, while its public API remains limited to 128K token context on version 3.2. The trial highlights the commercial and technical trade‑offs involved in bringing ultra‑long context windows to production and signals intensifying competition in China’s AI landscape.

SpaceX’s Dragon launched four astronauts from Cape Canaveral to the International Space Station on February 13, beginning an eight‑month mission focused on experiments to support future Moon and Mars exploration. The flight highlights the maturation of commercial crew services and continued multinational cooperation aboard the ISS despite broader geopolitical tensions.

A steep Bitcoin sell‑off since late 2025 inflicted a $12.4 billion quarterly loss on MicroStrategy, revealing the fragility of a buy‑and‑hold strategy financed with equity and debt. The rout has pushed the company toward potential restructuring, altered corporate and investor behaviour across the crypto ecosystem, and undermined the narrative of Bitcoin as a reliable store of value.

A platform called RentAHuman that promised AI agents could autonomously hire humans for real‑world tasks drew millions of visitors but failed to deliver paid work in a Wired reporter’s test. The service functions more as a marketing engine and a proof‑of‑concept for treating people as callable infrastructure, exposing unresolved questions about payments, liability and the dignity of labour in an AI‑driven economy.

SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon on 13 February from Florida, ferrying four astronauts to the International Space Station for an eight‑month mission centered on experiments that support lunar and Mars exploration, such as plant–bacteria research to improve food production. The flight highlights the growing role of commercial providers in sustaining human presence in low Earth orbit and testing technologies needed for deep‑space missions.

China United Property & Casualty Insurance has been hit with at least 15 regional regulatory penalties in early 2026 for widespread branch-level misconduct including falsified documents, fictitious intermediary fees, inflated agricultural insurance and unauthorised product changes. The sanctions, issued by the National Financial Regulatory Administration and its regional bureaus, highlight systemic control weaknesses and signal intensified supervisory scrutiny of insurers in China.

Cai Lei, an ALS patient and research organiser in China, remains a central figure in nationwide efforts to push amyotrophic lateral sclerosis research forward despite being in the terminal stage of his illness. Through patient registries, international collaborations, and a high‑profile push for post‑mortem tissue donation, he is building infrastructure that could materially accelerate domestic ALS science even if he does not live to see a cure.

China’s National Financial Regulatory Administration has issued its fourth penalty this year against Taiping Property & Casualty Insurance Co., fining multiple local branches for misconduct including falsified financials, illicit agent arrangements and poor channel management. Regulators named branch managers personally responsible, signalling intensified oversight of distribution practices and internal controls across the insurance sector.

Hong Kong equities retreated ahead of the Lunar New Year, with the Hang Seng down 1.72% as metals and mining stocks led losses. Tech names proved more resilient, while investors await U.S. inflation data and post‑holiday Chinese activity for direction.

China’s central bank data for January show broad money (M2) up 9% and an increase of 8.09 trillion yuan in RMB deposits, while total social financing expanded by 7.22 trillion yuan. Government bond issuance and short‑term bank credit powered the monthly financing increase, against a backdrop of plentiful interbank liquidity and low short‑term rates.

China’s A‑share indices closed lower on the final trading day of the Year of the Snake, with turnover subdued ahead of the Lunar New Year. Investors rotated into robotics, PCB materials and memory‑adjacent stocks after bullish commentary on embodied AI and signs of a sharp rally in DRAM prices, while CPO‑related names plunged.

Zhipu AI’s shares surged after open‑sourcing its GLM‑5 foundation model and hiking prices for an AI coding subscription, boosting investor optimism about product traction. Yet the company continues to incur large losses driven by heavy R&D and compute costs, and is pursuing a mainland Shanghai listing to broaden its capital base.

Meituan expects a heavy net loss for 2025 after its core local commerce arm swung from large operating profit to an operating loss, driven by intensified domestic competition and increased overseas and ecosystem investment. The reversal has unsettled investors and highlights the tough trade‑off between defending market share and preserving profitability in China’s on‑demand services market.

The U.S. Air Force says it is prepared to reintroduce MIRVs on Minuteman ICBMs and restore B‑52 nuclear carriage now that New START has lapsed. Those options, while technically reversible, broaden U.S. military choices and risk provoking reciprocal moves by Russia and China, complicating arms‑control prospects.

Yushu Technology CEO Wang Xingxing says embodied intelligence — AI embodied in robots and edge devices — is in its early platform phase but could surpass the mobile internet in scale and economic impact. Scaling will depend on industrial innovation in hardware, safety standards and supply chains rather than software breakthroughs alone.