The head of U.S. Central Command is in Israel for high-level discussions with his Israeli counterparts about Iran’s threat to launch an attack in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike that killed a top Iranian general in Syria last week.

Gen. Erik Kurilla met Thursday with Israeli Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and is expected to meet with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Friday. They are discussing preparations by Israel and the U.S. to counter any Iranian attacks against Israel using ballistic missiles and drones.

Efforts to write new laws governing artificial intelligence have slowed to a crawl in Washington, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to create momentum. Mr. Altman was on Capitol Hill Thursday discussing AI policy.

Fresh off a trip to the Middle East, he was spotted exiting Sen. Todd Young’s office. The Indiana Republican is a member of the Senate Artificial Intelligence Caucus and has worked closely with Democratic leadership in pursuit of major AI legislation. Mr. Altman later told CNBC he talked with the senator about his desire for the U.S. to write AI legislation and he did not come away with a clear idea of when a bill could move forward in Congress.

Concerns are running high in U.S. national security circles that Washington is losing a race with authoritarian adversaries such as China and Russia to shape how AI is used in surveillance globally. Threat Status is closely covering revelations that Russia has deployed AI-powered surveillance using facial recognition to identify opposition figures at public events, while the European Union prepares to implement bloc-wide rules banning the use of such AI facial recognition applications for surveillance.

The Pentagon is “a couple of weeks” out from completing an assessment on setting up a congressionally mandated joint military force for the Pacific that lawmakers say is needed to prepare for a potential war with China, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress this week.

Threat Status disclosed in December that Congress was battling the Pentagon over a legal requirement to create the multiservice and multinational task force. During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday, Mr. Austin was asked about the controversy and disclosed that a study is underway regarding its creation. “What I’ve asked my team to do is look at this and do an assessment to make sure that we get it right and we understand the operational and cost issues associated with this,” he said.

Sen. Roger Wicker, Mississippi Republican and the committee’s ranking member, has said the failure to create the task force in a timely manner is “bewildering” since Chinese President Xi Jinping recently stated that China will take over Taiwan’s island democracy.

The back-and-forth on Capitol Hill came ahead of a key meeting this week between Mr. Xi and former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, who promoted a more conciliatory posture toward Beijing than Taiwan’s current leadership when he held the presidency from 2008 to 2016.

The U.S. has seen a dramatic spike in military sales to foreign countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a senior Defense Department official said this week at the Sea-Air-Space exposition near the District of Columbia.

Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn reports that the U.S. defense industry did more than $80 billion in business through the foreign military sales system during fiscal 2023, which Defense Security Cooperation Agency chief James Hursch says was a record. Sales to NATO allies amounted to $24 billion in fiscal 2023, up from $20 billion the previous fiscal year.

A Mexican drug cartel used death threats to force a tribal leader to back out of testifying to Congress this week, according to another tribal leader who did show up to tell lawmakers just how much power the drug lords have accumulated.

Jeffrey Stiffarm, president of the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana, said he didn’t want to name the fellow leader who backed out, but he said the threat seemed real and credible. The Washington Times’ Stephen Dinan reports that the cartels’ reach extends deep into the U.S., according to tribal leaders.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency has become “the drug of choice for Arab Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, to refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist and make the compromises necessary for establishing peace,” according to Arsen Ostrovsky and Asaf Romirowsky.

They argue that the U.N. agency, created in 1949, had one primary purpose — to resettle purported Arab Palestinian refugees. “Seventy-five years later, what does UNRWA have to show for it? Not a single refugee resettled,” Mr. Ostrovsky and Mr. Romirowsky write. “Instead, its raison d’etre and the root problem of its very existence has become to perpetuate the conflict by actively refusing to resettle Arab Palestinians, in contradiction of its very mandate, and offering them nothing but a false hope of a nonexistent ‘right of return’ to flooding Israel en masse and destroying the Jewish state.”

They go on to claim that 2,135 UNRWA employees have been “revealed as members of Hamas, representing 17% of the agency‘s workforce in Gaza, of whom at least 400 were active fighters.”