Mexico

• U.S. agents arrested two senior leaders of the Sinaloa cartel - co-founder Ismael Zambada García and the son of the other co-founder (El Chapo), Joaquín Guzmán López - on drug trafficking charges after luring Zambada García across the border to Texas.
• Guzmán López reportedly knew their private plane was heading to the U.S. and helped trick Zambada García into boarding it because doing so somehow helped Guzmán López's brother Ovidia, who's also in U.S. custody.
• Though the Sinaloa cartel is a major player in the U.S. fentanyl trade, the arrest of two of its leaders is unlikely to affect the U.S. fentanyl epidemic because the cartel's operations are highly decentralized. Zambada García himself even alluded to the replaceability of senior cartel figures in a 2010 interview: "Locked up, dead or extradited, their replacements are already out there."
• A more likely outcome from the arrests will be embarrassing courtroom revelations that former Mexican officials helped protect senior cartel leaders from prosecution for decades.

• On Wednesday, Israel's military recovered five bodies of hostages from a tunnel in an area of Khan Younis that was previously designated a humanitarian safe zone.
• Israel estimates that there are now about 75 living - and 40 dead - hostages remaining in Gaza. As always, Hamas refuses to confirm.

• Four Katyusha rockets flew towards Iraq's Al Assad Air Base - which houses U.S. troops - and two of them successfully penetrated the perimeter. The base reported no injuries or serious damage.
• The U.S. and Iraq recently agreed to wind down their anti-Islamic State coalition work at bases like Al Assad, and the U.S. forces there were probably going to withdraw in the coming weeks anyway.
• These rockets likely came from the Iran-backed Shia militants in the region. They slowed down their attacks on U.S. troops and their partners after a February de-escalation agreement, but may have wanted to lob some final rockets at U.S. forces before they depart.

• The U.S., UK, and South Korea accused North Korean state-backed hackers of trying to steal military secrets in all three countries. The U.S. assessed that the hackers were funded by successful ransomware attacks on American hospitals and healthcare companies - i.e., they're using ransom payments from commercial attacks to pay for espionage operations.

• A NYT exposé investigated a cluster of shell companies - all operating from a single address in Hong Kong - that have been sending U.S.-made chips and other American technologies to Russia for use in Ukraine.
• Such transfers violate U.S. sanctions, but there was no one present at the nondescript building to answer for the violations. The NYT interpreted the lack of accountability as "a sign that the U.S. government and tech giants cannot control where their technology goes."

• Seemingly coordinated arsonists attacked at least four signal stations on France's high-speed rail network before dawn today - just hours before the Olympics Opening Ceremony starts (at 7:30 pm local time / 1:30 pm ET). Up to 800,000 passengers were affected by train cancellations stemming from the fires.
• No group has claimed the sabotage yet. Some French officials have suggested that militant environmentalists were responsible (even though public transit is far from the least environmentally friendly transport option: the French high-speed rail company, SNCF, boasts that "a rail journey averages 1/30th of the CO2 emitted during the same journey by car").
• Others have blamed Russia, which seems like a more plausible culprit: according to the Czech transport minister, Russia has already made "thousands" of attempts to disrupt European rail systems since the war in Ukraine started.
• A Kremlin spokesman played dumb about the possibility of Russian involvement, only saying that the (potentially related) charges against a suspected Olympics disruptor this week are "one might even say, curious."