Archive
China’s Repression Is Crossing Borders, But Not as One Story
Beijing’s security state does not stop at China’s borders, but the risks it creates abroad are not all the same. The hard task is to see how repression can feed fear, flight, recruitment, and intimidation without turning Uyghur identity or dissent into a security label.
The Feed Is the Platform Safety Fight
Lawmakers want to make social platforms safer without turning the state into an editor. That line sounds clean until you look at how TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Snap actually work: the feed is where product design becomes harm, and any serious safety regime has to reach it carefully.
SpaceX Is Making Space Cheaper and More Fragile
SpaceX has done more than any company to make orbital access routine. That success is now becoming a strategic vulnerability, because NASA, the Pentagon, satellite operators, and soon perhaps public investors are leaning on one firm faster than the rest of the market can catch up.
Cassidy Was Beaten by Trump, Then Finished Off by the Rules
Bill Cassidy’s defeat was not just a revenge killing and not just an election-administration story. Trump made the incumbent toxic inside the GOP base, while Louisiana’s new closed primary system stripped away the broader electorate Cassidy needed to survive.
Nigeria’s Counterterrorism Wins Are Not Protecting Its Children
Nigeria can now point to a high-profile U.S.-backed strike against an Islamic State commander. But the abduction of children in Borno shows the harder test is not whether militants can be killed, but whether schools can be made boringly, reliably safe.
The Musk-Altman Trial Is Really About AI’s Missing Constitution
The courtroom drama around Elon Musk and Sam Altman looks like another billionaire feud, but the harder story is about who gets to turn a public-benefit promise into a commercial empire. OpenAI may beat Musk in court, but the case still exposes a fragile governance model for frontier AI.
Ituri’s Ebola Window Is Already Narrow
Congo has beaten Ebola before, but this outbreak is testing the parts of containment that fail first: trust, speed, borders and access. The danger is not that Ebola is impossible to stop, but that Ituri may be starting from behind.
Tina Peters’s Commutation Makes Election Tampering Look Negotiable
Jared Polis did not pardon Tina Peters, and that distinction matters. But in a system that depends on local officials treating voting equipment as off-limits, shortening her sentence after national pressure sends a dangerous signal about which punishments can survive politics.
Smart Glasses Are Becoming Normal Before Consent Has a Chance
Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are not the privacy apocalypse, but they are doing something more durable: making face-worn cameras feel ordinary. The law can punish the worst abuses, but it still gives bystanders almost no practical way to know, refuse, or control what happens after they are captured.
Adani’s Civil Deal Looks Like a Prosecutorial Retreat
The reported turn away from criminal fraud charges against Gautam Adani is not a clean exoneration, and it is not obviously just geopolitics. The public record points to a more familiar prosecutorial calculation: take the enforceable civil win when the criminal case is too risky to carry across borders and into a jury room.
Drones Are Moving the Ukraine War Into Everyone’s Blind Spot
The Russia-Ukraine war is no longer contained by the geography of trenches and occupied towns. Cheap drones are turning apartment blocks, aid convoys, fuel plants and NATO-border airspace into connected risks, and that makes the next crisis more likely to arrive by accident than by plan.
Mifepristone Won in Court, But Not Yet in Law
The Supreme Court kept abortion pills moving through telehealth and the mail, which matters enormously for patients right now. But the ruling did not close the legal fight over mifepristone so much as shift it toward state lawsuits, mailing-law theories and the next test of FDA power.
Dela Rosa’s Senate Sanctuary Is the ICC’s Hardest Test
The ICC has moved from accusing Duterte’s drug-war architects to trying to put one of them in custody. The problem is that international justice still has to pass through Philippine politics, and Ronald dela Rosa’s standoff shows how narrow that passage may be.
AI Is the New Language of Tech Layoffs, Not Their Sole Cause
Tech companies are cutting jobs while pouring money into AI, and the timing makes the story look simple: machines in, workers out. The truth is harsher and more useful: AI is giving executives a new operating model for old-fashioned investor discipline.
Warsh Can Talk About Cuts. He Cannot Make One Yet.
Kevin Warsh takes over the Federal Reserve with a president demanding cheaper money and prices moving the wrong way. His first credibility test is not whether he wants lower rates, but whether he can prove any cut is economics rather than politics.
Banks Need Cyber AI, but They Should Fear the Monoculture
Anthropic’s Mythos model has made frontier AI look less like a lab toy and more like bank-defense infrastructure. That may help individual firms move faster, but if the sector standardizes on the same opaque systems, cybersecurity could become its own channel of systemic risk.
Israel’s Next Front Is the Draft Office, Not Gaza City
Israel’s Gaza war has entered a more dangerous phase because the decisive pressure is no longer only military. Courts, sanctions, Eurovision boycotts and Israel’s own conscription crisis are now testing whether the country can convert battlefield gains into a durable political settlement.
Hormuz Is Turning the Iran War Into an Inflation War
The Iran conflict is now being fought through the price of risk: tankers waiting, insurers repricing, airlines rerouting and households paying more for fuel. Washington can deter Tehran and still lose if its strategy raises the cost of moving energy faster than it restores confidence.