On his way out the door, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is making an 11th-hour push for Mideast peace, promoting a major plan for reconstruction in Gaza that includes inviting the United Nations and “international partners” to work with the Palestinian Authority — Hamas’ rival — to create a new interim government while regional Arab governments provide security.

The U.S. plan has met with resistance from all the major players, and Mr. Blinken acknowledged Tuesday that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has opposed key parts of it, including Palestinian statehood. But he argued it’s imperative to think about the postwar political and economic reconstruction as the fighting rages on.

It’s unclear how the incoming Trump administration will greet the plan — and the commitment of U.S. funds and diplomacy to make it work. But there are signs the Trump and Biden teams are working together in the region in the short term: Steve Witkoff, a top Mideast adviser to Mr. Trump, has been participating in talks in Qatar as negotiators try to work through the final details of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

The FBI and French authorities have been engaged in a multi-month operation to remotely delete Chinese malware used by Beijing-linked hackers to steal data from thousands of U.S., European and Asian computer networks.

The Justice Department disclosed the operation Tuesday, revealing that the hacking group dubbed “Mustang Panda” and “Swill Typhoon” has been paid by the Chinese government since at least 2014 for the use of special malware called PlugX. 

U.S. federal court documents charge that the hackers infiltrated Windows-based computers of both government and private-sector networks in the U.S. Shipping companies in Europe and several European governments were also hacked, along with Chinese dissident groups and governments throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

U.S. officials said French law enforcement penetrated the Chinese command-and-control network running the hacking operation. The French then were able to issue a “self-delete” command. The FBI then applied the same technique on U.S. systems.

Impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was taken Wednesday to a detention center near Seoul, a historic first in the country that’s a key U.S. security ally, where no sitting president has previously suffered such a fate. 

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from Seoul that thousands of demonstrators – largely Mr. Yoon’s supporters — rallied on his behalf behind police barricades. He now appears caught in a tightening vice following the shock declaration of martial law on Dec. 3, which led to his impeachment after legislators moved quickly to overturn the declaration. 

Mr. Yoon faces an unprecedented situation. A range of legal and investigative bodies led by South Korea’s Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO) may seek charges of insurrection. According to South Korea’s constitution, no president can claim immunity for that charge. Mr. Yoon could be held in custody for weeks, possibly even months or longer. Under South Korean law, the leader of a rebellion can face the death penalty or life imprisonment, if convicted.

Securing what is known as the “GUIK” (Greenland, Iceland and the U.K.) gap is “critically important,” writes Carla Sands, who served as U.S. ambassador to Denmark during the first Trump administration and now is vice chair of the Center for Energy and Environment at the America First Policy Institute.

“As Chinese and Russian threats mount in the Arctic region, our national and global security depends on American leadership,” writes Ms. Sands. “At the crux of this is securing the world’s largest island and our North American neighbor, Greenland.”

“The Arctic is a critical front for global great power competition,” she writes. “The U.S. is the only nation that can secure the island on behalf of the free world. And we must stand in the gap, or else China and Russia will do it for us. They are already marching toward that end. The time to act is now.”

Threat Status opinion contributor Clifford D. May digs into the “scandal rocking the United Kingdom,” where “over decades, thousands of young British girls were systematically raped and, in some cases, killed by immigrant gangs.”

“Police, politicians, social workers and journalists refused to hold the criminals to account. Some helped cover up the crimes,” writes Mr. May, who notes that “this scandal has received greatly increased attention only since New Year’s Day, when Elon Musk began furiously tweeting about it.”

“The members of the gangs have been identified as predominantly Muslim men of Pakistani origin,” he writes. “This scandal should raise questions about how Britain and other Western countries have subverted legal immigration and law enforcement to further woke visions of ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism.’”

• Jan. 15 — Meeting DoD’s Innovation Challenge: Adapting and Scaling Cutting-Edge Technology to Enhance Modernization, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Jan. 15-16 — Surface Warfare: Sharpen the Sword; 37th National Symposium, Surface Navy Association

• Jan. 16 — The Limits of Influence: The Challenge of Translating Security Cooperation Into Leverage, Stimson Center

• Jan. 16 — Fractured Extraction: Shifts in China’s Rare Earths Policy: A Green Tea Chat with Cory Combs and Jessica DiCarlo, Wilson Center

• Jan. 16 — An Assessment of the U.S. Nuclear Enterprise with NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby, Hudson Institute

• Jan. 22 — Strategic Competition in the Second Trump Administration, Wilson Center