Israel Says It Killed Top Hamas Military Commander in July Strike
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Israel confirms it killed Hamas's military chief in a Gaza airstrike. Plus, three 9-11 defendants strike a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. And we'll look at how Beijing helped Huawei to come back stronger after it was blacklisted by the U.S. While the world was debating whether to use Huawei equipment or tear Huawei equipment out of its networks, China was actually buying Huawei's 5G base stations by the dozens, by the hundreds.

It's Thursday, August 1st. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Israel has confirmed this morning that it killed Hamas's top military commander, Mohammed Daif, in an airstrike in southern Gaza last month.

Israel, for decades, had been trying to kill Daif, who is believed to have been a key planner of the October 7th attacks and whom Israel says is the highest-level Hamas official killed so far in Gaza since the war started. Daif has been described as a force behind Hamas's local production of rockets, the development of the group's extensive subterranean tunnel network in Gaza, and the enhancement of its organized fighting forces, including the commando units that raided Israel last fall.

Gaza officials say scores of Palestinian civilians were killed in the strike targeting Daif last month, which took place in part of an area that Israel had declared a humanitarian zone.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of orchestrating the 9-11 terrorist attacks have agreed to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences. Prosecutors had been seeking the death penalty, but the alleged torture of the defendants while in CIA custody had clouded proceedings for years.

Democrats aren't set to gather for their convention in Chicago until August 19th, but they're getting a jump start on making Kamala Harris their nominee with a virtual roll call that will run between today and Monday. The atypical move was driven by an Ohio law requiring all candidates be legally certified by August 7th to appear on the state's ballot.

But Journal-White House reporter Ken Thomas said there had been other reasons to break from the tradition of an in-person convention roll call. Some Democrats quietly pushed for the virtual nomination last spring as a way to avoid protests on the convention floor against President Biden over his handling of the war in Gaza. That is viewed as less of a factor now as Harris has consolidated support among Democrats and

And she has not faced the same kind of protests over Gaza that the president faced earlier in the year. Meanwhile, we are exclusively reporting that allies of Donald Trump are launching a voter registration and turnout program targeting a key group in the November election, young men. The effort, called Send the Vote, hopes to raise $20 million and will partner with entertainers and athletes, including from the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

It targets a group that could prove crucial for the former president, who's drawn support among younger black and Hispanic men, but could now see that backing undercut by Kamala Harris's presidential bid. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate is expected to defeat a bipartisan tax bill today that had sailed through the House earlier this year and attracted support from anti-poverty groups and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The legislation would have revived expired provisions of a 2017 tax bill that help businesses make capital investments or conduct research, on top of expanding low-income housing and child tax credits. And the journal's Richard Rubin says some backers of the bill are warning of the consequences of its impending demise.

If this fails, businesses will be in the position that they had feared for years, which is that these tax provisions they had thought that Congress was so close to reviving are just not going to happen. And so they're going to have to deal with higher costs that can cascade through a business. It can mean layoffs. It can mean shutting a business down if it's big enough. It can just mean less investment and less profit.

We'll see how big of an issue this is in the campaign. With almost all Senate Republicans expected to oppose the bill, saying it leans too heavily toward Democrats' priorities, its failure could become a topic of campaign trail finger-pointing, and it will also heap more pressure on lawmakers next year when much larger sections of the 2017 tax law are scheduled to expire.

Amazon is set to report earnings later today, results that will reveal just how much its AI investments are affecting its bottom line. Though AI isn't the company's only costly bet.

Devices equipped with its Alexa voice assistant have found their way into millions of households around the world. But according to internal documents and people familiar with the business, Amazon's Devices lineup is operating in the red, with billions of dollars of losses on products including Kindles, Fire TV sticks, video doorbells, and Echoes.

And the journal's Dana Mattioli told our Tech News Briefing podcast why that is. Amazon's plan when they launched nearly a decade ago was to get the products into homes and then worry about making money later. The problem with Amazon's devices business is that it hasn't really played out that way, especially with the Echo. The Echoes are typically sold at or below cost. Sometimes they're given away and people don't tend to spend much using them once they have them. For

For the most part, people use free apps like checking the weather, asking Alexa the time, asking Alexa to set her timer. And I even have someone I spoke to within the org who said they worry that they hired 10,000 people to build a smart timer, essentially.

An Amazon spokeswoman said the continued use of its devices was itself a mark of success and that its devices division had established numerous profitable businesses. Though as for turning a profit on Echoes, Dana said Amazon, like other tech giants, is looking to AI. They're working on something called a Remarkable Alexa, and this will use more generative AI. And as of my reporting, Amazon is still thinking about what they could charge for that sort of service.

And for much more on Amazon's Devices Strategy, check out our Tech News Briefing podcast. And in other news moving markets, the Bank of England is set to unveil its latest interest rate decision in the coming hours, with markets pricing in a decent chance of a cut.

Shares in Toyota have fallen more than 8 percent, although the carmaker posted rising profit on strong hybrid car sales and a weaker yen. The currency's strengthening after a Bank of Japan rate cut this week has led some investors to see those benefits as short-lived.

Back in the U.S., meta shares have rallied off hours after it reported a sharp rise in digital ad sales. And more big names are set to report earnings today, including ConocoPhillips before the morning bell and Apple after the market close. Coming up, U.S. sanctions on Huawei were predicted to spell the end for the Chinese firm, but instead it's stronger than ever. We'll look at why after the break.

We could all use more time. Amazon Business offers smart business buying solutions so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin. I can see why they call it smart. Learn more at amazonbusiness.com.

When the U.S. cut off Chinese tech company Huawei's access to cutting-edge American technology five years ago, many in the industry thought it was just a matter of time before the company crumbled. But as the journal's Lisa Lin in Singapore is here to discuss, that is anything but the case. Huawei's profit more than doubled last year. It continues to hold on to pole position in its sector, and it's even expanded into new businesses too.

Lisa, take us back to 2019 when the U.S. added Huawei to its trade blacklist based on fears the company via its tech might be spying on Americans and their allies. What happens back in China immediately after that?

Sure. There were two paradigm shifts immediately after that decision. First was on a state level. So on the part of China, they realized they had this huge vulnerability when it came to relying on U.S. technology. The fact that one U.S. trade policy could actually ring the death knell for one of China's largest trade icons, that was a big deal. So that kickstarted a domestic campaign by the Chinese authorities, which was a big deal.

to develop solutions to Western technologies. And this campaign still continues on today. The other thing that happens within Huawei itself, there is a big shift in the thinking of the senior management. In the past, they used to think, okay, we could rely on components from the US. Now, the thinking was that

No, we cannot, and we're on our own. So what Huawei did was to actually refocus and redirect its efforts, especially on the R&D side, to the areas that they couldn't source from the U.S., so areas such as chips, enterprise technology, cloud computing. Lise, if my memory is correct, around this time, back in 2019, Huawei was going around the world offering to build countries 5G networks, and there was concern that those networks might sort of be under Beijing's control in some way.

In the ensuing years, does the business model change? Do they focus less on exporting around the world or does that continue just to other countries that aren't as much in the American orbit? So Huawei used to be a telecommunications equipment giant and it was also really huge in smartphones. At one point, it was actually challenging Samsung to be the top smartphone maker.

What happened five years later is you're looking at a Huawei that's a lot more diversified in terms of what it's selling. So now it's also offering you cloud computing space, database management products, semiconductor chips. And in fact, Huawei is seen as the front runner in China to be providing AI chips, the chips that they want to replace NVIDIA with.

But that said, if you look at where Huawei's revenue is coming from geographically, it's a lot more reliant on China than ever before. Yeah, this is a company that had styled itself on being independent from Beijing back in the day, but which over the last few years has become much more of what you describe as a national champion.

That's right. There's actually a famous story in the Chinese tech industry about Huawei's founder Ren Junfei. He turned down a state loan decades ago so that the company would be seen as independent of the state. That was the way he wanted Huawei to be developed. Post-2019, what you saw is the sanctions just really cleaved Huawei a lot closer to the Chinese government. One reason is because Huawei

Huawei was very dependent on state subsidies. So Huawei actually, in the last five years, got $3 billion of state subsidies just to boost its R&D research. The second reason was China's picking up a lot of the slack in terms of the demand for Huawei's products.

So what we did at the journal was we looked through government procurement contracts and we found that the Chinese government was buying a lot of stuff from Huawei, everything from its CPUs to its database management products to its cloud computing services. It's a testament, Lisa, to the power of the Chinese state when it wants to help out one of its national champion businesses here. But does Huawei's survival necessarily mean that U.S. policy here failed in some way?

Yeah, Luke, I wouldn't be so quick to judge because with policy, it takes years to unfold. And in this case, U.S. officials have told us that the intention of the policy wasn't to kill Huawei. It was meant to ensure that the U.S. and its allies had networks that were free of national security threats.

What I would say is this is an example of how U.S. trade policy could have unintended consequences. Because six years ago, China was a ready and willing buyer of a lot of American technology. But post the sanctions on Huawei, what you've seen is it's really turbocharged the country to kickstart this national campaign to find domestic alternatives.

The fear is that it's not just going to be Huawei. There are going to be many more examples of such blowbacks going forward. That was The Wall Street Journal's Lisa Lin in Singapore. Lisa, thank you so much for bringing us this story. Thanks, Luke. And that's it for What's News for Thursday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach and Kate Bullivant with supervising producer Christina Rocca. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.

We could all use more time. Amazon Business offers smart business buying solutions so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin. I can see why they call it smart. Learn more at amazonbusiness.com.