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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Microsoft’s artificial intelligence head Mustafa Suleyman is building a new team focused on consumer health by hiring staff from a similar unit he once led at Google DeepMind, as the rival companies race to create lucrative applications from the cutting-edge technology.

Suleyman, a British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, has hired Dominic King, the former head of DeepMind’s health unit and a UK-trained surgeon, as vice-president of Microsoft AI’s new London-based health team.

He has also poached Christopher Kelly, a clinical research scientist at DeepMind and a neonatal intensive care doctor at Evelina Children’s Hospital in London, as well as two others from his time at the AI start-up.

Microsoft’s new consumer AI health division comes as tech groups rush to turn generative AI into a staple of everyday life, in a bid to drive revenues from the fast-developing technology. Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chief executive of DeepMind, is also focused on healthcare, such as leading spin-off AI group Isomorphic Labs, which is working on drug discovery.

Health has become one of the growth areas in the AI boom. Consumers have often turned to the web for health-related queries, and a Deloitte survey this year found that 48 per cent of respondents asked generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude health-focused questions.

These include questions about specific health conditions, symptoms and mental health. Microsoft AI’s health unit will focus on these types of consumer health applications using generative AI.

The US tech group, which hired Suleyman earlier this year, confirmed the creation of its new unit. “In our mission to inform, support and empower everyone with responsible AI, health is a critical use case,” said Microsoft. “We continue to hire top talent in support of these efforts.”

Google DeepMind’s health operation, founded by Suleyman, started in 2016 and grew to a team of more than 100 people based in London. The unit had signed a five-year partnership with 10 UK NHS hospitals to process the medical data of 1.6mn patients, and launched an app to monitor patients’ vital signs.

However, DeepMind was later embroiled in controversy over its work for the UK health sector amid concerns about the security of patient data. This led to Suleyman’s unit being spun off in 2019 by parent company Alphabet into a Google unit in California headed by David Feinberg, the former chief executive of Geisinger, one of the US’s largest private health groups.

Suleyman left DeepMind that same year, taking up a new policy role at Google’s California headquarters before leaving in 2022 to do a stint as a venture investor. He later created AI start-up Inflection.

In March, Microsoft hired Suleyman from Inflection as well as most of its staff, including Karén Simonyan, co-founder and chief scientist of Inflection, and a former DeepMind researcher himself.

Other recent hires for Microsoft’s AI health unit include Peter Hames, the former chief executive of UK digital health start-up Big Health and Bay Gross, co-founder of digital healthcare provider Cityblock Health.

As part of his broader team, Suleyman has also employed former DeepMind colleagues Nando de Freitas and Trevor Back, who led the start-up’s health research team. However, both de Freitas and Back will not work specifically on Microsoft’s health applications.

A Texas bankruptcy court ruled on Tuesday that The Onion‘s acquisition of Alex Jones‘ disinformation empire, Infowars, could not move forward, dealing a blow to the satirical newspaper. The most surreal media merger in recent memory is now set to disintegrate — at least for now — after almost a month of legal wrangling.

“I don’t think it’s enough money,” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez wrote in a late-night decision, per NBC News. “I’m going to not approve the sale.” Judge Lopez has left it up to trustee Christopher Murray to decide what to do next. It’s possible that there could be another auction, in which the Onion could once again place bid for the embattled conspiracy theorist’s publication. He could also decide to reexamine the Jones-associated company First United American, which offered a revised bid that has not yet been disclosed, per the AP.

In 2022, Jones was ordered to pay a total of nearly $1.5 billion in civil damages to the families of victims in the deadly 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Jones had falsely and repeatedly claimed on Infowars that the massacre was a hoax, smearing parents of children who were killed as “crisis actors” — incendiary attacks that saw the grieving families subjected to years of harassment and intimidation by viewers who believed Jones’ lies. In the course of multiple defamation lawsuits brought against him and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, Jones testified that, contrary to his earlier statements, the Sandy Hook shooting was “100 percent real.”

This year, having failed to pay what he owed the victims’ families, Jones asked a judge to convert his personal bankruptcy to a Chapter 7 to liquidate his assets, including the Infowars brand, in order to at least partially cover the massive settlement. The court ruled in September that he could put Free Speech Systems up for auction.

The process took a surprising turn in November, when The Onion revealed that it had placed the winning bid in the court-ordered auction. It was another attention-grabbing stunt for the beloved parody publisher, which had just three months earlier revived its print edition under new parent company Global Tetrahedron, a firm with a jokingly ominous name created to acquire the title from its previous owner in April, with former NBC News reporter Ben Collins stepping in as CEO of the paper. The Onion announced that it would relaunch Infowars and its social channels in January 2025 as sources of irreverent comedy rather than paranoiac diatribes, vowing “to end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good.” The brand also partnered with the gun control activism nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety on an ad deal for the revamped Infowars.

Jones was apoplectic over the sale and aired a broadcast that saw him raving that “imperial troops” were storming his studio to seize it from him. That didn’t happen, and a company with links to the right-wing firebrand soon mounted a legal challenge to the takeover: First American United Companies, affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, alleged that The Onion had bid only $1.75 million for Infowars, compared to its offer of $3.5 million, and had therefore won the auction through collusion and fraud. Murray, the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the liquidation of Free Speech Systems, said the First American bid was actually “inferior,” as the total value of The Onion‘s deal stood at $7 million — because most of the Sandy Hook families had agreed to receive a percentage of revenues from an Onion-owned Infowars instead of cash from the sale itself. (These were the only two sealed bids in the auction.)

Meanwhile, Elon Musk — who a year ago made the controversial decision to reinstate Jones’ account on X, formerly Twitter, despite his permanent suspensions from nearly every other social media platform — also took action against the purchase. In legal objection to the sale filed by X in November, the company pointed out that according to its user agreement, they are the owner of Jones’ and Infowars’ accounts on the site, and have no obligation to turn them over to an entity that purchases Free Speech Systems’ collective assets. The unusually aggressive move was a stark reminder that users of such websites do not have ultimate control of their profiles, and threw a potential wrench in The Onion‘s scheme to turn Jones’ digital footprint into a mockery of everything he stands for.

Murray testified on Tuesday before Judge Lopez of the U.S. District and Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of Texas that The Onion‘s offer should be approved over First American’s. In his own testimony, auctioneer Jeff Tanenbaum defended the sale process when Jones’ lawyers pressed him over not holding a live auction.

Jones himself did not attend court this week but used his show to continue complaining about the prospect of The Onion wresting control of his once lucrative conspiracy theory factory. “I can’t imagine the judge would certify this fraud,” he told his audience on Tuesday. “I mean it’s head-spinning the stuff they did and what they claimed.”

Now that the judge has spoken, it’s up to Christopher Murray to decide what happens next — and whether the cathartic punchline of the Sandy Hook families having some say over Infowars’ fate could finally come to pass.

Israel’s defence minister said the country wanted to create a “sterile defensive area” inside Syria after seizing territory and pounding military targets in the country following the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

In recent days, Israeli ground forces have crossed the border from the occupied Golan Heights into a previously demilitarised buffer zone of more than 200 sq km inside Syria, seizing abandoned Syrian army positions.

Israel Katz said on Tuesday that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the military “to establish a sterile defensive area free of weapons and terror threats in southern Syria” without a permanent Israeli presence.

His comments came after Israel launched air strikes across Syria, with the Israeli military saying it had struck most of the “strategic weapons stockpiles” in the Arab state.

Over the past 48 hours, Israeli fighter jets carried out more than 350 aerial strikes, while war ships struck Syrian naval bases at Al-Bayda and Latakia ports.

Katz said that Israel had “destroyed” Syria’s modest navy “with great success”.

Israel’s strikes and incursions into Syria have been condemned internationally. Turkey’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that “Israel is again displaying its occupier mentality”.

Geir Pedersen, UN envoy to Syria, warned that Israel risked damaging the chances of a peaceful transition in the fragile state.

“We need to see a stop to the Israeli attacks,” Pedersen said. “It’s extremely important that we don’t see any action from any international actor that destroys the possibility for this transformation in Syria to take place.”

On Tuesday, IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee denied reports that the military had advanced towards the Syrian capital, Damascus, saying its troops “are present inside the buffer zone and at defensive points close to the border in order to protect the Israeli border”.

However, another Israeli military spokesperson acknowledged that while most of the ground force operations were inside the buffer zone, some troops had operated “beyond” the area.

Israel occupied most of the Golan Heights during the six-day war in 1967, but its claim over the land is not internationally recognised. Israeli ground troops last entered Syrian territory beyond the Golan Heights in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Israel has for more than a decade launched air strikes in Syria, targeting Iranian-affiliated weapons sites. Iran and the militant groups it supports, including the Lebanese movement Hizbollah, deployed in Syria to back the Assad regime during the country’s civil war.

Netanyahu said in a press conference on Monday night that “control on the Golan Heights ensures our security; it ensures our sovereignty”.

“The Golan Heights will be an inseparable part of the state of Israel forever,” he added.

Israeli officials said on Monday that air strikes had hit targets including remnants of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles.

A person familiar with developments in Syria said that Israel had also struck what was left of the Syrian air force, including grounded planes and helicopters.

The US, Israel’s biggest ally, backed its actions in Syria, describing the operations as “exigent operations to eliminate what they believe are limited threats”.

“We certainly recognise that they live in a tough neighbourhood and they have, as always, the right to defend themselves,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday.

The campaign came as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist rebel faction that led the offensive that ousted Assad, seeks to consolidate control of Syria amid fears the change of regime could fuel regional instability.

Mohamed al-Bashir, head of the Syrian Salvation Government, HTS’s de facto civilian administration in the northwestern province of Idlib, announced he would be leading a temporary caretaker government for all of Syria that would “maybe” end on March 1 next year.

The toppling of the Assad regime, which ruled Syria for 50 years, capped a lightning offensive by HTS that swept across the country in under a fortnight.

As HTS took control of Damascus on Sunday, Assad escaped to Russia, the country that backed him in Syria’s 13-year civil war.

HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani pledged in a statement published on rebel-run social media channels to hold to account “the criminals, murderers and army and security officers involved in torture of the Syrian people”.

HTS has issued a general amnesty for conscripted members of the Assad military, while state bodies have ordered a resumption of public services and activity in the economically vital oil sector.

Fighters and Syrian civilians have also opened the Assad regime’s notorious prisons, releasing captives including political prisoners who had been incarcerated for decades and uncovering evidence of torture.

Traffic began picking up on the streets of Damascus on Tuesday as residents tentatively began returning to a semblance of normal life, however. Some shops and restaurants reopened and government employees began going back to work.

Police from the Syrian Salvation Government were directing traffic in the city, while rebel fighters helped guard government ministries, some of which were ransacked and broken into during the rebel offensive. 

Additional reporting by Richard Salame in Beirut and Felicia Schwartz in Washington

Cartography by Steven Bernard