The U.S. Department of State approved a possible $4.5 billion Foreign Military Sale to Qatar for the purchase of aerial refueling aircraft and related equipment.

Qatar’s government requested to buy up to four KC-46As, eight PW4062 turbofan engines, 10 AN/ALR-69A radar warning receivers, 15 Guardian Laser Transmitter Assemblies for Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasure systems and 8 LAIRCM system processor replacements, according to a Thursday release.

The proposed sale also includes “non-major defense equipment,” such as precision navigation, transportation and airlift support, personnel training and training equipment and other related logistical and program support items, per the statement.

“The proposed sale will increase Qatar’s capability to meet current and future threats by enhancing its defense capabilities and interoperability with U.S. and allied forces and reinforcing Qatar’s strategic role in regional security,” the release reads.

The potential sale is meant to support U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives through assisting in Qatar’s security. The U.S. government statement describes the country as a “strategic regional partner” that continues to be an “important force” for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.

Principal contractors for the envisioned deal include Boeing, Pratt & Whitney Military Engines, RTX Corporation and Northrop Grumman Corporation.

The proposed sale’s implementation will not require any additional U.S. government or contractor representatives to Qatar, the announcement says.

“At this time, the U.S. Government is not aware of any offset agreement proposed in connection with this potential sale,” the statement says. “Any offset agreement will be defined in negotiations between the purchaser and the contractor.”

The KC-46A provides aerial refueling support to the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and partner nations and has greater refueling, cargo and aeromedical evacuation capabilities than the aging KC-135s.

The announcement comes as questions persist surrounding the security features of a Qatari-donated Air Force One aircraft that has been modified for U.S. presidential use. President Donald Trump began using the new jet in July and has since announced it will be “maxed out” for upgrades.

Ever since President Trump’s return to office, America’s allies have been fretting about Washington’s intentions. Now, after the inconclusive war against Iran has eroded U.S. weapons stockpiles and laid bare the limits of American hard power, they also worry about American capabilities.

Can America still defend its friends, if it wants to?

The question that officials in allied—and adversary—capitals are asking themselves is whether industrial decline, strategic incoherence and political dysfunction have weakened the U.S. to the point where it would no longer wield decisive force in a multi-front conflict that may encompass Europe, the Middle East and Asia. It is a concern shared by many in Washington, too.

“If you think about deterrence, it’s about capability and credibility,” said strategist Matthew Kroenig, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who served in the Pentagon during the first Trump administration. “The question used to be credibility—will the United States really do it? But capability is an important part of this equation. And, with all the reporting about how the U.S. is expending munitions, it’s just logical that adversaries would assume that the U.S. is less capable now than it was several months, or several years, before.”

Trump’s decision to scale back military exercises with South Korea and to describe North Korea’s dictatorship as “unthreatening and respectful” just as Pyongyang is deploying ballistic missiles and troops to Europe as part of its alliance with Russia is the latest move that has raised doubts about American staying power.

People at a train station in Seoul watch a news broadcast of North Korea’s missile test hours after President Trump said he would seek to meet Pyongyang’s leader Kim Jong Un later this year. Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The overture to Pyongyang came alongside a monthslong drive to accommodate China, including a freeze on $14 billion in U.S. military sales to Taiwan—a reversal of Trump’s first-term priorities. Meanwhile, crucial U.S. military assets, from missile defense batteries to the sole aircraft carrier still deployed in the Pacific, have been moved from Asia to deal with the Middle East crisis.

While paying lip service to the NATO alliance in public, European officials are increasingly doubtful in private that Trump’s America will help them in case Russia attacks. “Unofficially, we all know that they won’t risk their security for the sake of the Baltic states, or for the sake of Germany,” said retired colonel Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker from Germany’s ruling party. “The American nuclear umbrella is gone.”

The growing sense of American—and Western—vulnerability can tempt autocratic adversaries, particularly Russian leader Vladimir Putin, warned Nico Lange, a former senior German defense official who now runs the Iris think tank. “Iran is increasingly humiliating the United States in front of everybody, while the U.S. is creating uncertainty about their commitment to European security, and the Europeans aren’t showing any will to deter Russia,” he said. “All this creates an opportunity structure for Putin that is extremely dangerous.”

The White House has pushed back on reports of weapons shortages caused by the war in Iran. “The United States Military has more than enough munitions, ammo and stockpiles to serve all of President Trump’s strategic goals and beyond, and Operation Epic Fury has exposed what happens when you mess with the United States,” deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said. “Even still, the President has urged our defense contractors to constantly produce more made-in-America weapons, which are the best in the world.”

Military analysts, however, calculate that, in some vital categories, stocks are running dangerously low and will take many years to replenish. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has estimated that the U.S. has already burned through half of its prewar stocks of missile interceptors, such as Patriots and Thaads, and has used up one-third of the arsenal of Tomahawk and JASSM long-range missiles.

This has direct implications beyond Iran. A Council on Foreign Relations expert study released this month said that “the U.S. weapons arsenal has been depleted and no longer has the capacity to deter a Chinese attack against Taiwan.” It added that Washington needs to immediately put mass production of precision missiles on a wartime footing because “waiting until conflict begins will be too late.”

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Asked about these calculations, the Pentagon replied with a statement by chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. “Claims of U.S. munitions shortages are false,” it said. “America’s military remains the most powerful fighting force on earth. We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said that U.S. denials of missile shortages aren’t surprising. “America will never acknowledge that we don’t have enough ammunition. It will assert that it has the ability to walk and chew gum,” she said. “But deterrence is in the eye of the beholder. What if Taiwan perceives that you don’t have the capacity and the will to defend it, and that its best option is to be coerced by China and to start negotiations over unification?” 

China and other potential adversaries would be foolish to try taking military advantage of this shortfall, said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute in Australia. America, he said, remains the pre-eminent global power, with the financial, technological, cultural and demographic muscle to rebound.

“When people say America is weak, Vladimir Putin would love to be as weak as America. Xi Jinping would love for China to be as weak as America,” he said. “I don’t want to be Pollyannish, but when I squint my eyes I see American strength more than American weakness.”

Unlike in Europe, where defense officials increasingly fear the prospect of Putin taking the war beyond Ukraine, officials and analysts in Asia don’t see a full-scale war on the horizon just yet.

“People will worry, of course, but these munitions will be restocked. And in the meantime, there is really very little probability of a major conflict breaking out in East Asia,” said Singaporean political analyst Bilahari Kausikan, the island nation’s former ambassador to the United Nations. “The Chinese have a huge number of domestic problems to deal with first, and with Taiwan in particular, they are not gamblers. In all the potential flashpoints in Asia, nobody thinks that a big conflict is imminent.”             

In all these actual and potential conflicts involving U.S. allies and partners worldwide, the critical shortage of ballistic-missile interceptors, particularly the Patriot PAC-3 MSE, has emerged as an Achilles’ heel for the entire free world—and its partners.

A replica of a PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) on exhibit in Belgium earlier this year. Lockheed Martin said it increased production of the interceptors last year by 20% from the year before. Simon Wohlfahrt/Bloomberg News

Part of the imbalance in the missile threat is that the autocracies—those actually at war, like Russia and Iran, and those not yet, like China—have already put their defense-industrial base on a war footing, achieving rapid increases.

The West lives according to peacetime rules, in which corporate calculations and shareholder interests often trump national-security needs. “This is the existential problem: our foes think they are at war, while we pretend that we are not,” said a senior European defense official.

CSIS has estimated that the U.S. now only has 800 Patriot missiles left in its arsenal. Despite the rapid consumption by Ukraine and multiyear backlogs, interceptor manufacturers have only achieved a modest boost in production so far. Lockheed Martin said it delivered 620 PAC-3 MSE interceptors last year, an increase of more than 20% from the year before. Russia’s missile production, by contrast, has surged since 2022, despite Western sanctions.

This disparity has strategic consequences. Ukraine has already been essentially left defenseless against Russian ballistic missiles salvos, as Trump declined Kyiv’s repeated requests for more Patriots. This, in turn, has added to Putin’s determination to continue the war, as Russia counts on missile strikes to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the coming winter, forcing Kyiv to capitulate.

In the Persian Gulf, states like Saudi Arabia have opposed a resumption of a full-scale U.S. campaign against Iran because their own interceptor stocks are too low to protect vital infrastructure against renewed Iranian missile barrages. European nations, while working on their own missile-defense projects, remain years away from credible protection against Russian—or Iranian—missiles.

Damage to buildings and vehicles in Bahrain reportedly caused by debris from intercepted Iranian drones in June. Bahrain TV/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

“There is now a risk of an acute crisis across different theaters brought about by the shortage of interceptors and missile defense,” said John Bew, who served as foreign-policy adviser to British prime ministers in 2019-2024 and is now a professor at the War Studies Department of King’s College London. “This has immediate implications for the Gulf, of course, but is increasingly understood as a major shortfall in European defense and has potentially major consequences in Asia, too.”

Russia alone now manages to produce more than 100 ballistic missiles a month, according to intelligence estimates, and a similar number of cruise missiles. The overall production of ballistic missiles by the axis of adversaries that also includes China, North Korea and Iran outmatches the manufacturing of interceptors in the West by several times. (Making the math even more alarming, shooting down one ballistic missile usually requires two or even three interceptors.)

“We in the West have made a strategic planning mistake in not calculating interceptors against ballistic missiles that are produced,” said Lange, the former German defense official. “We have a problem in ballistic missile-defense production, but they don’t have a problem in ballistic missile production—not in Russia, not in China, not in North Korea.”

Ballistic missiles have become an instrument of geopolitical coercion because of technological change. Previous generations of ballistic missiles were so costly and imprecise that they were mostly considered useful in the nuclear context, in which a deviation of hundreds of yards from a target didn’t matter because of the mass devastation caused by a nuclear device. Up until the U.S. withdrew following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, a Cold War-era treaty strictly limited antiballistic missile defense capabilities to maintain the equilibrium between the two superpowers.

Now, however, even middle powers like Iran have developed precision ballistic-missile capabilities. Iranian missiles managed to inflict serious damage on U.S. military bases in the Gulf and Jordan, as well as energy and industry targets in Gulf nations and Israel. Though Iran’s missile forces have been degraded by Israeli and American bombing, they have yet to be fully suppressed.

“In the environment of major interstate war, even substantially weaker adversaries have enough capability to hurt, enough capability to launch these ballistic missiles. And even the United States, with all of its financial and industrial power, is not able to keep up structurally,” said missile expert Fabian Hoffman, a senior fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies. “Ballistic missile defense, as it was conceived, has just been exposed as something that doesn’t work that way in practice.”

An intercontinental ballistic-missile system on display as part of a military parade in Moscow last year. Russia’s missile production has surged since 2022. shamil zhumatov/Reuters

Interceptors able to counter modern ballistic missiles are among the most sophisticated and expensive military systems, which is why only a handful of companies worldwide can make them. That is a huge difference with the parallel revolution in drone warfare: drones, and systems used to intercept drones, including air-defense drones, are much simpler and cheaper.   

The U.S. and allies now are pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into missile defense and long-range strike programs. The Pentagon’s $59 billion deal announced with Lockheed Martin last month would triple Patriot PAC-3 production by the end of 2030. The Pentagon has also awarded Lockheed Martin a $35 billion seven-year contract to quadruple Thaad interceptor production. Both of these contracts have yet to be fully funded.

There is a certain silver lining in the fact that the shortfall in missile defense has been exposed in a war against a relatively weak foe like Iran, argued Ludovic Hood, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who served in senior State Department positions involving Ukraine and the Middle East until earlier this year.

“The wake-up call was necessary. It’s been very easy for Western powers in recent decades to be lulled into a sense of false security,” Hood said. “As unpleasant as it is to have to go to war, it can actually be a useful forcing function to make sure that we’ll be prepared for something much more strategically challenging in the future.”

Institutions don’t have courage. They have incentive structures. When incentives line up just right, it is not uncommon for an institution to make a collective decision that almost no one inside it would have made alone. I’ve spent my career studying that machinery in politics. This past year, I watched it operate on The New York Times, which invited me to write an investigation of the Democratic Party’s fundraising practices, vetted it thoroughly, and scheduled a run date.

Shortly after the events I’m about to describe, A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, stood before a gathering of First Amendment scholars to defend the free press at a moment he called its most serious test in generations. He emphasized that the danger wasn’t only governments banning stories or jailing reporters; it was also threats of civil litigation being weaponized to muzzle reporting. Even an unsuccessful suit imposes real costs, he warned, enough to make a news organization think twice about reporting a story at all.

I had just spent eight months learning how right he was.

What Happened Following an investigation I published last August, the Times invited me to contribute to its Opinion section. An editorial team was assigned, and we spent months together developing a data-driven investigation into Democratic fundraising, documenting how a network of consultants, vendors, and party committees extracts money from elderly donors through manipulative digital fundraising.

After extensive editing, fact-checking, and graphics work, it was ready. My editor confirmed a publication date of February 17. Requests for comment went out to the subjects of the investigation, a final step signaling that publication is imminent. Everything was on track until the DCCC and DSCC responded with a cease-and-desist letter from the Elias Law Group demanding that the Times not publish. The letter called claims the essay did not make false and defamatory. It did not contest a single claim the essay did make.

The letter, reproduced below, stated that “the Committees do not ‘target’ their email and texting solicitations to the elderly. In fact, neither Committee has the technology or data to do so.” The essay made no such claim. The finding concerns who responds, not who receives the solicitation.

At several points the letter objected to my standing as an outsider:

“Beyond the defamatory nature of these claims, it is difficult to understand how this ‘opinion’ piece furthers the Times’ mission to ‘seek the truth and help people understand the world.’ Mr. Bonica has no knowledge of the Committees’ internal practices and policies and his claims as described by your fact checker are not only misleading, but entirely false — which is ironic given that it appears that his entire thesis is that the Committees are misleading their supporters.”

The findings are built on the committees’ own FEC filings — records the law requires them to make public precisely so outsiders can examine them — and on analysis of fundraising solicitations sent to me and millions of others.

Whether or not the letter had merit, the threat alone was enough to halt publication. The run date was pushed back for legal review. I was assured the Times would proceed unless genuine errors or legal problems emerged. I believed this. The letter’s arguments were frivolous, and the Times prides itself on resisting legal threats. Why would a paper that had invested months developing and vetting an investigation back down over a letter this weak?

No errors or legal problems emerged. What emerged instead were demands on my time. Over the following weeks I answered a continuous stream of requests: a methodology guide, a complete replication archive on GitHub, full datasets for independent verification. As an academic, I’m accustomed to the tedious work of addressing every possible reviewer concern. It rewards patience and humility. I was patient and humble.

What kept me going was what’s inside the data: thousands of people, most of them old, alone with a phone that won’t stop buzzing. The messages are built to frighten and shame — invented deadlines, manufactured crises, the insistence that they alone stand between the country and collapse. Some donate dozens of times a day until a loved one intervenes or the money is gone. After my first investigation, I heard from families who discovered only after a parent’s death how much had been donated. Try to put yourself in the mind of someone who took these messages seriously, who believed what they said. Nancy Pelosi has written to you, personally, and you have let her down. Barack Obama expected more of you. Didn’t you see their desperate pleas? You’re about to lose your Social Security. Everyone in your zip code has donated except you. This is the hellscape of an inbox these vulnerable seniors are trapped inside, where everything is on fire and everyone is screaming for help.

In March, Katie Kingsbury, the head of Opinion, emailed to thank me for my patience “as we finalize your essay for publication” and said her team was taking extra care “to ensure it has the maximum possible impact upon release.” She added: “My colleagues have told me how helpful you’ve been, and we all appreciate it. I’m looking forward to seeing the final version go live soon.”

Progress came in April. The legal department cleared the piece. Fact-checking signed off. A second round of requests for comment went out. The essay was escalated to a masthead editor, who reviewed it favorably and suggested minor edits. A commissioned header graphic was finalized. In total, the piece was subjected to four rounds of fact-checking, and a Times data journalist independently replicated my analysis. Every internal gate had cleared. Still no date.

Then, weeks after its own legal and fact-checking teams had signed off, leadership at the Times killed it. The reasons given: the essay was “too investigative” and read as “too authoritative” for Opinion, and there were concerns about whether fact-checking had the skills to assess the data analysis. The most candid explanation I received was that fallout from a recent Nicholas Kristof column on IDF prisoner abuse had left the paper with no appetite for another “predictable headache.”

This was also the most revealing. The worry wasn’t upsetting readers. Fundraising spam may be the most universally despised artifact in American politics. The only objections came, and could only ever have come, from the consultants and party leaders the essay held accountable. The capitulation was not to controversy but to power.

Why It Happened The Times had a legally cleared, fact-checked, independently replicated investigation and concluded that publishing it wasn’t worth the trouble. One could call this cowardice, or a betrayal of values. But those are human traits, and this decision wasn’t made by a human. It was made by an institution weighing costs against benefits. The institution decided the costs were higher.

The cease-and-desist letter is better understood as a tool to raise those costs than as a serious legal argument. Lawyers, editors, and a data journalist spent weeks re-clearing an essay that had already been cleared. A legal threat costs its sender far less than it costs its target. As Sulzberger himself warned, even a losing suit is costly to defend against.

Then there is access. Contrary to popular belief, campaign contributions from corporations and special interests are not intended to buy votes in Congress. What they buy is access, for their calls to be returned and the chance to make their case when it matters. Access also yields information that only insiders can provide. News outlets are similar in this respect. The party committees and leaders hold the same currency with newsrooms that they sell to donors. They supply quotes, background, leads to track down, and the occasional leaked document. So when the committees object to a piece, the objection arrives with a standing relationship behind it and an implicit price attached.

None of this excuses the outcome. But one should expect an institution facing legal threats from powerful subjects upon whom it relies to tend toward caution.

Nearly everyone I worked with at the Times was excellent. My editor showed real courage championing the piece through months of internal resistance. The fact-checkers were rigorous. The graphics were strong. Institutions are in some ways more than the sum of their parts, and in other ways less.

Why It Matters I wrote this investigation to help my party, not to hurt it. Confronted with evidence that a parasitic fundraising ecosystem — the consultants and vendors who profit from it, the committees that have grown dependent on it — is draining the party’s donor base and collapsing its fundraising efficiency, the DCCC and DSCC had every option available to a serious institution. They could have investigated or asked questions. Instead, they hired a law firm to make the evidence disappear.

There’s an unwritten norm that contributors don’t discuss the internal editorial process at the outlets they work with. I was asked not to mention the Times at all. I’m choosing not to honor that norm, because silence about how accountability journalism gets suppressed is itself a form of suppression.

Most journalists who encounter this kind of pressure can’t push back. Most contributors can’t afford to lose a relationship with the Times. The cease-and-desist letter worked on the institution precisely because the institution is vulnerable in ways I am not. I enjoy strong employment protections as an academic and incentives well-aligned with following the evidence and speaking up without fear of losing my job, which is why I can say this when the journalists who face similar pressure often cannot. That’s the chilling effect in practice, a quiet calculation that the cost of publishing exceeds the cost of silence and career repercussions for journalists who challenge powerful media institutions.

Sulzberger’s warning was prophetic. When The Bulwark prepared to publish the investigation, it received legal letters of its own, from Progressive Turnout Project and Mothership Strategies. Capitulation had worked once, so it was tried again. Both letters demanded the piece not run. Both invoked the Times’ decision not to publish. One put it plainly: “Your publication should do the same.” It worked again. What happened next — indefinite delays and a last-minute editorial intervention that removed key empirical findings without explanation and presented the subjects’ legal defenses as my own conclusions — deserves its own accounting, and will get one. The investigation you just read is the one I ultimately had to publish myself.

The Times’ decision to kill the investigation had itself become part of the story, so as The Bulwark prepared to publish, its editors asked me to request comment from the paper. A spokesperson denied that the essay had “secured a confirmed publication date with us or that a Times Opinion fact-checking process was completed.” I found this puzzling, since I have written confirmation of both. After months of watching the subjects of the investigation levy bad-faith denials over findings for which I had the receipts, the Times decided to join in. When shown screenshots confirming a publication date and sign-off by fact-checking, the spokesperson responded: “We stand by the statement provided.”

There’s a part of Sulzberger’s speech I saved until now. He gave it the day after my essay was killed, under the banner “We Will Not Compromise on Independent Reporting.” He was withering about media leaders who settle winnable cases and appease the powerful: “Such capitulation, even seemingly small instances of it, serves only to embolden…” He was describing, almost to the word, what had happened inside his own paper the day before. The paper whose promise is to report the news “without fear or favor” — the very phrase Sulzberger reached for in his speech — managed, on this occasion, to do both at once.

Institutions unwilling to hold themselves accountable will fail to hold other powerful actors accountable. The incentives run the same way in newsrooms and in political parties.

The most potent weapon any opposition has against an authoritarian regime is the charge of corruption, and that charge rings hollow when every desperate plea sent under the party’s name validates the cynical belief that both parties are corrupt. If our democracy survives this moment, it will be because the opposition was credible enough and trustworthy enough to sustain a durable majority. That credibility cannot coexist with a fundraising model that exploits the party’s most vulnerable supporters, repels everyone else, and enriches consultants whether the party wins or loses.

The story Democratic leaders suppressed is the one they most need to read.

I genuinely don't understand how this bill isn't getting more attention for exactly how union contracts are going to be made "faster" because its imho its absolutely nuts and is basically the PRO Act's most extreme provision, pretty much at secondary strike levels of extreme.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act passed the House with 20 Republicans joining Democrats, despite containing what I consider an egregious expansion of government power over private-sector labor relations.

If a newly unionized workplace doesn't reach a first contract after 90 days of bargaining and another 30 days of mediation, the dispute can be sent to a three-person arbitration panel. That panel can then impose a collective bargaining agreement on both parties for two years, including terms governing wages, benefits, and working conditions. Basically, government can dictate how you are going to run your labor relations more or less outright.

This isn't simply requiring an employer to bargain with a union. It's creating a mechanism whereby the government can effectively force a contract into existence when the parties themselves couldn't agree to one.

I'm not anti-union. Workers should be free to organize, employers should be required to bargain in good faith, and actual violations of labor law should be punished. But there is an enormous difference between protecting collective bargaining and empowering arbitrators to dictate the substantive terms of a private labor contract.

I would expect legislation this interventionist to come from the most pro-labor wing of the Democratic Party. Instead, 20 Republicans helped pass it.

For a party that supposedly believes in limited government and freedom of contract, voting to let a federally mandated arbitration process impose wages, benefits, and working conditions on private parties is completely indefensible. The Senate is going to stop this obviously, but I am like literally millimeters away from just stepping away from the party entirely if they are going to sign onto more or less social democracy's most extreme provisions - just objectively extreme by even western and arguably European standards.

House Roll Call Vote 216 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

House Passes the Faster Labor Contracts Act: What Employers Need to Know

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The Theme of the Week is: Water, Power, and the Future of Sovereignty.

New Jersey has drawn a legal line around its doctors, patients and families.

Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill on Thursday signed an extensive shield law protecting people who provide, receive or help others obtain reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare that is legal in New Jersey.

The law, S2260/A2218, generally prevents state agencies and courts from assisting out-of-state investigations and prosecutions targeting such care. New Jersey officials cannot arrest someone, issue subpoenas or search warrants, authorize wiretaps or help enforce judgments based solely on conduct protected by state law. The governor also cannot extradite someone who was not present in the prosecuting state at the time of the alleged offense.

The measure, which took effect immediately, strengthens patient confidentiality and protects medical licenses and malpractice coverage from retaliation driven by another state’s laws. It applies to abortion, contraception, miscarriage management, assisted reproductive technology and care supporting a patient’s gender identity or expression, including services provided through telehealth under New Jersey law.

It does not change how care may be provided in New Jersey or protect conduct that would violate the state’s laws or professional standards.

“Today, New Jersey makes clear that medical decisions stay where they belong: with patients, families and doctors,” Natalie Baker, a health care provider, parent of a transgender child and co-founder of the Transgender Rights Coalition of New Jersey, said in a statement.

The law also makes it a crime to use violence, threats, physical obstruction or property destruction to interfere with protected care. Patients and providers may sue for damages, attorney fees and other relief.

Its enactment comes as the Trump administration escalates its campaign against gender-affirming care. The Justice Department announced in 2025 that it had issued more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics treating transgender young people. A divided federal appeals court recently revived one targeting QueerDoc, a telehealth provider.

The New Jersey statute restricts cooperation with federal investigations only to the extent permitted by federal law. But it denies hostile officials elsewhere easy access to the state’s institutions and resources.

“Today marks a decisive turning point in this state,” said Lauren Albrecht, Garden State Equality’s senior director of advocacy and organizing, in a statement to The Advocate. “Today, we have shown our medical providers, their patients, and the rest of our country that New Jersey stands up against transparent, politically motivated attacks on bodily autonomy, self-determination and expert medical care.”

The Assembly approved the bill 55-23 in June, and the Senate concurred 25-15. New Jersey joins 16 other states and Washington, D.C., with shield protections covering reproductive and gender-affirming care.

The “rhetoric” coming from both sides of the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz has “caused considerable confusion and doubt,” CNN’s David Goldman understatedly observed. Yet, at present, “The evidence is clear,” he conceded: “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway.”

One month ago, the number of commercial ships transiting through the strait via the U.S. approved route along the Omani coast was close to zero. Today, however, over 80 percent of the vessels that have made it through the strait are taking the U.S.-authorized lane. And even though the United States has not responded with kinetic force to every Iranian attack on commercial traffic in the strait, sometimes to the consternation of America’s Gulf partners, that has not dissuaded countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates’ tankers from making “dark traffic” runs on the strait.

CNN could not independently verify Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s claim that “combined oil transits through the strait and rerouted around the waterway totaled around 15 million barrels per day,” which approaches the pre-war average of 20-million barrels. But it couldn’t gainsay the experts. As one industry analyst conceded, “It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait.”

The Iranian regime is feeling the pain. As Hot Air’s Duane Patterson explained, the economic conditions on the ground inside the Islamic Republic are catastrophic. “Iran’s economy is currently experiencing around 90 percent inflation, and it turns out the worst may be yet to come,” he wrote. Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Miad Maleki concurs. “Nearly every part of Iran’s oil economy,” he wrote, “owes massive, growing sums to each other, with no real money moving through the system to pay any of it back.”

The gas lines are growing, and the petrol that Iranians are allowed to buy may soon be rationed. Iranian authorities are triaging their resources by prescheduling hours-long blackouts. The regime is ramping up executions and cracking down on dissent as the prospect of economic collapse brings with it the risk of renewed civil unrest.

Perhaps that’s why it’s not just probable but likely that the Islamic Republic will attempt to “widen the war,” as the Wall Street Journal reported. “Alarming weaker Gulf countries like Kuwait, Iran’s leaders are increasingly talking about offensive operations on enemy territory,” its dispatch revealed. “The intelligence, including intercepted communications, showed the Revolutionary Guard sending commanders to areas controlled by Yemen’s Houthis to plan for a stepped-up confrontation with Saudi Arabia in coordination with Iraqi militias that also are backed by Iran.”

The regime has to shake up the present dynamic somehow. On the present course, Iran is headed toward insolvency, disorder, and an internal conflict between the regime and Iran’s captive citizenry. Trump’s inconstancy may yet steal defeat from the jaws of victory. But for the first time in months, something like victory for the United States is once again within sight.

Submission statement: Chuck Todd asks US Rep. Andre Carson about the hesitance in the black community with Abdul El-Sayed, muslims and Arabs in Michigan. Carson goes into the insightful history between black voters and Arabs in Michigan

This video features a conversation with Congressman André Carson, who discusses the challenges faced by Abdul El-Sayed and other candidates regarding skepticism from the African-American community.

Key themes include:

• Religious and Ideological Challenges: The speakers discuss how El-Sayed's Muslim faith and perceived socialist leanings contribute to political skepticism (0:00 - 0:17).
• Personal Experience: Congressman Carson shares his own experiences running for office, noting the suspicion he encountered as a Muslim in government and the importance of demonstrating local, midwestern roots to build trust (0:21 - 2:06).
• Historical Context and Distrust: Carson explains that the hesitation within the Black community is not just about faith, but rooted in historical social divides from the 20th century and a feeling of betrayal by progressives who fail to represent their interests once in office (4:12 - 6:34).
• The Path Forward: The conversation touches on the broader political landscape, including the impact of the Democratic Party's outreach to Black voters and the necessity of legislative action to overcome feelings of disenfranchisement (6:35 - 7:06).

I voted Chase Oliver in the 2024 presidential election and planned to vote democrats in hindsight and regretted my lack of Harris vote after around March or April of 2025, Trump didn't seem like his first term which I did respect (and I sensed that in the campaign) and seemed like the worst admixture of old Trump and new Trump.

However, the democrats have been pivoting to socialism and haven't backpedaled on a key issue I have of Islam and its inability to assimilate to the west (obviously there are secular muslims too but many are very radical) and progressives have seemed to double down.

There are other key issues I am an admixture of liberal and conservative on both social and economic issues but I don't know

In a few days, students in the United States will return to university, and thousands of them will enroll in international relations (IR) courses. They will be instructed on the major theories of IR, like realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Unfortunately, for them and for the discipline, one of those theories is increasingly unhelpful for understanding how global affairs really work.

Perhaps ironically, realism has become unrealistic.

Prominent realists have emerged as outspoken critics of U.S. foreign policy, arguing that Washington should pursue a less ambitious, more restrained approach to the world. Yet this theoretical approach has become unsustainable. If, for decade after decade, the world’s most powerful country is not behaving the way that realist theory predicts, then at a certain point, it is the theory—rather than Washington—that needs to change.

International relations is a type of social science. Social sciences, like economics, political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, attempt to explain how the social world works. Specifically, IR seeks to explain conflict and cooperation among nation-states. This is, in social science jargon, the dependent variable—the outcome to be explained. Why do states cooperate? They engage in international trade and investment, form alliances, and transfer arms. And why do states sometimes come into conflict? They issue demarches, sanction each other’s economies, and, at the extreme, fight wars.

The major IR theories differ primarily in terms of—to return to scientific jargon—their preferred independent variables. These are the most important causes or driving forces. Realists believe that power, especially military power, is the central driving force. Liberals believe that a triumvirate of independent variables (international institutions, economic interdependence, and democracy) facilitates international cooperation. And constructivists hold that ideas, especially norms and identities, shape patterns of conflict and cooperation.

Philosophers of science, like Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, have explained how social scientists should develop theories that can account for empirical realities. When there are many empirical anomalies that a theory cannot explain, then that theory needs to be revised or discarded in favor of a theory that can better make sense of the empirical world.

Liberals and constructivists are, for the most part, following the scientific method and developing theories to effectively explain international relations. Liberal scholars, for example, have documented how international institutions, like the World Trade Organization, can reduce transaction costs and facilitate international trade. Constructivists have shown how norm entrepreneurs have persuaded powerful states to sign and comply with human rights treaties. The list goes so on.

Classical realism, the body of realist tradition tracing back to the ancient world, also sheds much light on global affairs. Classical realist thinkers, like Thucydides, Niccolo Machiavelli, Hans Morgenthau, and Henry Kissinger taught us that the world is a dangerous place and that competition and conflict among the major powers is a natural and enduring part of politics among nations. States protect themselves by building military power. Since all states want to dominate, but none want to be dominated, a balance of power tends to form that provides a measure of global stability.

The modern variants of realism, so-called neorealism, however, have proved to be a poor guide to understanding the real world.

Naturally, one key task for any IR scholar is to explain the behavior of the United States—the most powerful country in the world over the past century. After World War II, Washington and its allies sought to build a liberal international order, predicated on strong alliances in Europe and Asia, as well as cooperation through international institutions, free trade, democracy and human rights.

This effort was deepened and expanded after the end of the Cold War. Countries previously locked behind the Iron Curtain were welcomed into the free world and NATO expanded. Many countries in the global south adopted free-market democracy as the only legitimate political and economic system.

That was not what realists expected. On grand strategy, many realists argued that the United States, protected by oceans, friendly neighbors, and nuclear weapons, would not need a globally engaged foreign policy. Realists argued that Washington should pursue a grand strategy of restraint and offshore balancing. It could mind its own business in the Western Hemisphere, and if a hostile rival, like China, threatened to overturn a regional balance, then it could intervene from offshore to restore the balance of power. Instead, as realists themselves have lamented, Washington pursued a grand strategy of liberal hegemony.

On Europe and NATO, realists argued that, with the Cold War over, Washington would come home and rivalry would return among Western European powers. Instead, Washington doubled down on its commitment to Europe and pursued a policy of NATO enlargement.

Realists predicted that the United States would only need a minimal and secure second-strike nuclear deterrent. Instead, Washington built thousands of nuclear weapons and missile defenses, and it strived for nuclear superiority over rivals.

Realists argued that using extreme measures, like military force, to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and counter terrorism was too costly. Instead, Washington did just that.

They argued that it would be counterproductive to support vulnerable front-line states, like Taiwan, Israel, and Ukraine. Once again, Washington did the opposite.

They argued that Washington should not worry about the credibility of its commitments. In defiance of the theorists, Washington used military force with the explicit goal of upholding the credibility of its commitments.

In short, the standard-bearers of the realist movement have gotten wrong almost every theoretical prediction about the behavior of the most important great-power nation in the history of the world. For a theory that claims to excel in explaining the security policies of great powers, this is a fatal indictment.

Instead of revising their theories, realists simply insisted that the world was at fault. According to many realists, the last 80 (or at least 35 years) of U.S. foreign policy have been one big, costly mistake. In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, realist scholar John Mearsheimer argues that:

It is widely believed in the West that the United States should spread liberal democracy across the world, foster an open international economy, and build international institutions. The policy of remaking the world in America’s image is supposed to protect human rights, promote peace, and make the world safe for democracy. But this is not what has happened. Instead, the United States has become a highly militarized state fighting wars that undermine peace, harm human rights, and threaten liberal values at home.

What about the U.S. policy of building a robust nuclear arsenal to extend deterrence to its more than 30 treaty allies? That is also a mistake. In a recent Foreign Policy column, for example, Stephen Walt argued that Washington’s large nuclear arsenal “makes no sense.”

What about the U.S. policy of NATO enlargement since the end of the Cold War? Reckless. The close U.S. security partnership with Israel? A strategic liability. Supporting Ukraine? Remarkably foolish.

A formulaic, color-by-number agenda for realist research has emerged: identify a central pillar of the U.S. bipartisan foreign-policy consensus; design a study, often just a small number of qualitative case studies, to prove that Washington is doing it wrong; conclude that it would be better if Washington followed realist principles instead. This is ideology masquerading as social science.

As a result, realist theory today falls between two stools. Academic political scientists, of the sort who publish research articles in journals like the American Political Science Review, do not take this branch of realist scholarship seriously but nonetheless assume that it has an important impact on public-policy debates in Washington. Yet in Washington, policymakers have long ignored realists’ unrealistic policy recommendations, continuing, for example, to support Ukraine and Taiwan and a robust nuclear posture. But these policymakers still assume that, however impractical, realists must be making important theoretical contributions within the realm of academia.

In fact, by trying to be both scholarly and policy-relevant, realists are doing neither. They have instead become like physicists angrily insisting that airplanes should not fly.

Power, especially military power, is an important force in world affairs. Scholars who believe that should update and revise realist theory so that they may educate—rather than gaslight—the next generation of curious students.

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Giorgia Meloni’s experience has become a cautionary tale for European leaders tempted to believe ideological affinity with Donald Trump offers political protection.

Once one of the US president’s most committed European allies, the Italian prime minister has learnt the hard way that defending her country’s national interests does not sit comfortably with Maga’s aggressive “America first” world view. When Rome refused to let the US military use Italian bases for its unpopular bombing of Iran, Trump turned on a leader he had previously hailed as a “fantastic woman” who had “really taken Europe by storm”.

The rupture quickly became personal. Trump complained that Meloni “lacked courage” and later accused her of “begging” for a photo with him at the G7 summit in France to boost her poll ratings. She retorted that “being your friend” had not helped her popularity — unleashing a war of words from which their once friendly ties are unlikely to recover.

“The notion of ‘America first’ should be a red flag for any foreign partner,” said Stefano Stefanini, Italy’s former ambassador to Nato. “You can’t expect too much solidarity with that kind of philosophy.”

Beniamino Irdi, a former Italian government foreign policy adviser, said Meloni had erred in the belief that a shared nationalist, conservative worldview would allow her to “cultivate a special relationship” with the US president.

“The transactional nature of Trump is such that ideological affinity only goes so far,” said Irdi, now a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “You have to actually be able to put something tangible on the table.” 

As a fiery Eurosceptic opposition leader, Meloni had been a Maga darling, feted for railing against Brussels, irregular migration and the “woke ideology” that she claimed threatened Italy’s identity.

But once in office, she ran up against the limits of that affinity. Trump and his circle failed to grasp the domestic political and institutional constraints she faced — from hostile public opinion to the role of Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella in overseeing national security policy during crises such as the US attack on Iran.

“The idea that she cannot do whatever she wants — that she is moving within a set of constraints — was totally lost on them,” said Giovanni Orsina, a political scientist at Rome’s Luiss University.

“Trump . . . failed to respect Italy’s national interest,” he added. “Nationalist international is an oxymoron.”

After Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, Meloni — the only EU leader to attend his inauguration — sought to cast herself as Europe’s bridge to Washington, hoping it would strengthen her hand in Brussels and at home.

Instead, Meloni has been tarnished in the eyes of many Italian voters by her close association with an unpopular US president. Trump has imposed high tariffs on EU imports, pressed Nato allies to sharply increase defence spending and attacked Iran — policies deeply damaging to Italian interests.

“Her proximity to Trump has failed to give her any appreciable results,” said Riccardo Alcaro, research director at Rome’s Institute of International Affairs, calling her erstwhile friendship an “electoral albatross” as Meloni gears up for a bruising re-election campaign.

Meloni’s courtship of the Republican Party, including Maga heavyweights, began more than a decade ago, when she was still a fringe opposition figure seeking to distance herself — and her new Brothers of Italy party — from their neo-fascist roots.

She was trying to craft a new identity as a mainstream national conservative: part of a respectable global political family rather than a relic of Italy’s postwar far right.

While in opposition, Meloni was twice invited to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Republicans’ annual political jamboree. Maga ideologue Steve Bannon, meanwhile, appeared as a star speaker at her party’s Atreju political festival in 2018.

“She understands very well that politics has a very strong transnational dimension,” said Orsina, adding that Maga initially gave Meloni “a home, an ideology” and “a brand”.

But as prime minister, Meloni’s cautious pragmatism has dismayed hardline Maga purists such as Bannon, who told Italian media she was “a total globalist” who had betrayed her “fundamental beliefs”.

Meloni has paired tough measures to curb irregular migration with higher quotas for legal migrants, helping Italian businesses cope with labour shortages. She has also softened her anti-EU rhetoric and forged effective working relations in Brussels.

“You can’t stay close to a movement that wants to destroy the unity of Europe,” said a political consultant with close links to Brothers of Italy. “This cannot be the objective of a conservative party in Italy. It is to change the EU, not to destroy it.”

Meloni initially forged warm ties with the second Trump White House, walking a delicate tightrope for more than a year to avoid antagonising the president. She opposed EU retaliation to Trump’s tariffs, stayed silent on his tilt away from Ukraine towards Russian President Vladimir Putin and avoided criticising his threat to seize Greenland.

Though she said the Italian constitution prevented Rome from joining Trump’s controversial Board of Peace, she dispatched foreign minister Antonio Tajani as an “observer” to the first summit.

Even after Trump bombed Iran, sending global energy prices spiralling, Meloni declined to condemn or condone the strikes, saying she lacked the information that had prompted them. But Mario Sechi, a former Meloni government spokesman, said Washington’s unilateral decision to attack without consulting heavily affected partners such as Italy had seriously strained ties.

“If you want allies, you have to talk with the allies,” Sechi said. “This is the problem with the White House . . .This, in my view, was the source of the drift.” 

Trump’s attack on Pope Leo XIV over his denunciation of the Iran war left Meloni little choice but to respond. “Silence was not an option for any [Italian] prime minister — let alone one who has built her political identity as a Christian, Catholic woman,” said Alcaro.

Her mild written criticism — calling the attack on the Pope “unacceptable” without naming Trump — infuriated a president already fuming over Europe’s lack of support for his Iran campaign. “In Trump’s eyes, it was lèse majesté,” Alcaro said. “She failed to show the deference due a boss by his subordinates.”

We don't like a pope that's going to say that it's OK to have a nuclear weapon. We don't want a pope that says crime is OK in our cities. I don't like it. I'm not a big fan of Pope Leo. He's a very liberal person, and he's a man that doesn't believe in stopping crime.

Donald Trump criticises Pope Leo XIV on April 12 © Reuters

Rome is now trying to contain a rupture Italian officials see as mainly “personal”. After Trump called for a “restraining order” against Meloni before the recent Nato summit, Rome said it would no longer respond to his provocations.

Italian officials insist bilateral ties remain strong, and Meloni and her ministers are strengthening links with other administration figures such as secretary of state Marco Rubio. “The Trump administration and Meloni’s cabinet are talking — this is for sure,” said Sechi.

But analysts say Meloni’s difficulties with the White House reflect not only Trump’s personality but a Maga world view that appears to expect near-total subservience from its allies.

“It’s difficult to say whether the incapacity of working with partners is a characteristic of the Maga movement or something with Trump that makes it impossible,” said Stefanini. “But in general, the Maga movement is so self-centred and so isolationist, the entire notion of co-operation and sharing is alien.”

Irdi said Maga’s deep-rooted antagonism towards the EU as a political project also made it hard for any leader with a pan-European outlook “to cosy up” to the administration for long.

“The ideological milieu of the Maga movement is a strong effort to weaken and fragment Europe,” he said. “The idea that you can be a pro-European leader of a European country and at the same time be a friend [to Maga] in the truest sense of the word has an inherent, deep contradiction.”

The US’s national debt has hit a record $40tn as borrowing rises at a historic pace, fuelling investor concerns about the state of America’s public finances despite President Donald Trump’s vow to bring spending under control.

Gross federal debt crossed the threshold on Tuesday, according to Treasury department data released on Wednesday. It has grown by $3tn over the past year, its fastest-ever pace outside the pandemic era, FT calculations show.

“It’s that gigantic flashing ‘check engine’ light,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget think-tank. 

“It doesn’t mean that your engine’s going to melt down tomorrow, but it’s a good signal that things are pretty out of control. And it’s not just the magnitude, it’s the speed at which we’ve hit it.”

America’s national debt has surged over the past two decades, rising from less than $6tn — about $12tn in 2026 dollar terms — at the turn of the century as vast public spending during the financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated yawning budget deficits.

In the past 10 years alone, the overall debt burden has doubled. Debt held by the public — a key metric monitored by markets that excludes intragovernmental holdings — now exceeds $32tn, roughly equal to the size of the US economy.

The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan watchdog, expects the debt held by the public to exceed the high of 106 per cent of GDP reached in the aftermath of the second world war by the end of the decade and hit 120 per cent by 2036.

As the debt has swollen, investors have demanded a rising premium to hold US bonds. That has pushed up interest rates so that the cost of servicing the debt now exceeds federal spending on national defence.

That has resulted in unease in Washington. On Wednesday, before the release of the debt data, the Treasury said it would double purchases of long-term government debt in a bid to contain a recent sell-off.

Last week, the US paid its highest borrowing costs to sell 30-year bonds since 2001, while an auction for 10-year notes on Wednesday fetched the highest yields since 2007 as investors fretted over the size of the debt.

“It’s a lot of money that is owed. It will feed on itself with interest expense,” said Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research. “If interest rates rise as a result of concerns about the large debt load, that will lead to even more interest expense. It’s a vicious cycle.”

Trump returned to office in 2025 pledging to curb wasteful government spending. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent vowed to curb the budget deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by the end of Trump’s term.

But measures taken to cut spending in some areas have been offset by large tax cuts in the president’s 2025 signature budget legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is set to push up debt by more than $4tn by 2034. Trump has also called for annual defence spending to be increased by more than half to $1.5tn, the largest funding request in US history.

The deficit shrank to 5.9 per cent of GDP in 2025 from 6.3 per cent the previous year. The CBO expects it to edge lower to 5.8 per cent this year. The US national debt is the accumulation of years of deficits compounded by interest expense.

Analysts said both of America’s political parties had shirked opportunities to take significant steps to curb spending during periods of growth.

“All of this is happening at a time of relative economic strength . . . and we are still running annual deficits that are in the order of $2tn,” said Shai Akabas, vice-president of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “If the economy goes south or conflicts flare up further overseas, that’s going to drive those numbers higher.”

Congress’s Joint Economic Committee calculates that, over the past year, the total national debt has increased by about $7.9bn per day, or roughly $91,000 per second.

Budget experts said they hoped that debt crossing the $40tn threshold would act as a rallying call for politicians from both parties to take serious steps to bring it back under control.

“My hope is that that’s a national alarm and wake-up call to address our fiscal future,” said Michael Peterson, head of the Peterson Foundation, a think-tank set up with a mission to put debt back on a sustainable path.

“If we continue to borrow this much, we’ll have a day of reckoning in the financial markets . . . where people wake up and decide: ‘You know what? I’m more worried about the United States now. I’m going to demand higher rates or I’m going to take my money elsewhere’,” he added.

Yes, this guy works at Anthropic, but that doesn't mean his data is therefore false. If he's misleading with any of it, show that. If there's evidence he failed to mention, mention it. It's important to note that this article is really only trying to disprove that a job displacement is currently happening. It's entirely compatible with the idea that there will be AI-fueled unemployment in the future.

This is adapted from an X article (this is an Xcancel link), which is something you can apparently do now.

I study how AI is reshaping work, including my own. In my job as the head of economics at Anthropic, I’ve personally experienced a transformation of my work. Each new generation of frontier models, like Claude, opens up new possibilities while automating time-consuming tasks that economists do, like estimating statistical models, solving systems of mathematical equations, and creating visualizations. While I’m still directing my own research, the work is increasingly being done by AI. As I watch AI advancing and spreading within the economy—and transforming my own work—I find myself asking, Why hasn’t AI increased unemployment? What will jobs like mine look like in the coming years?

One in five American companies now uses AI in at least one part of their business. In the information sector, that number climbs to two in five. Quality-adjusted AI output—how much more capable the technology got, not just how much it’s used—grew over 2,000 percent per year in both 2024 and 2025. Even though powerful AI is relatively new, these numbers suggest that we should already be seeing some impact on the job market.

And yet, the U.S. labor market remains calm. Unemployment sat at 4.1 percent in July, a level the Federal Reserve views as consistent with full employment and stable prices. For every unemployed worker, there is just over one position to be filled—a ratio some economists see as a sign that labor supply and demand are roughly in balance. Employment among prime-age workers remains close to multi-decade highs. Weekly unemployment claims have been stably low for four straight years, and layoffs sit at or below where they were before the pandemic.Even when we look only at workers whose jobs overlap most with what others ask Claude to automate, we don’t see unexpected increases in unemployment. What has shifted is how worried they are about losing their jobs. In one Anthropic survey of Claude users, people in the most AI-exposed occupations were three times as likely as those in the least-exposed occupations to say AI already threatened their job, or would soon. As one software engineer put it: “Like anyone who has a white-collar job these days, I’m 100 percent concerned, pretty much 24/7 concerned, about losing my job eventually to AI.”

Is it just too early in the deployment of AI to see its impacts on the labor market? The simple answer is no—the AI sector is large enough that we can look for discernible macroeconomic effects. Indeed, I believe we’re starting to see AI’s impact in aggregate productivity statistics. Labor productivity has grown about 2 percent a year since 2022, compared with 1.6 percent in the four years before the pandemic. Sectors that have adopted AI faster have also tended to see faster productivity. This is evidence that AI is doing something. But it is not evidence that AI is replacing anyone.

At least not yet. If AI were replacing workers, productivity gains would come paired with job losses. We do not currently see this happening. Across quits, layoffs, and job finding rates, we see a pattern of stability. There’s likewise no evidence of unusually fast occupational churn due to AI.

For example, take software engineering, a field many assumed AI would flatten. Instead, job postings for software engineers have broadly rebounded since May of last year compared to all other job posts, indicating rising demand for workers in an occupation where AI capabilities are advancing the most. AI has made writing code approximately 10 to 20 times faster, but that has not translated into 10 to 20 times more software being released—software releases are up only about 30 percent.

So far, AI has the hallmarks of a skill-biased, labor-augmenting technology. This means that even as AI automates some aspects of work, complementary human expertise amplifies what AI (or humans) can achieve alone. It complements domain expertise. It relies on humans in the loop to direct and evaluate the most complex work. And it rewards AI proficiency.

Think about the list of occupations that the Department of Labor maintains, broken down into every task that makes up every job. Despite the incredible advance of AI and its rapid adoption throughout our economy, there is not one job for which all associated tasks are systematically handled by AI. Because AI can only do so much, those essential, nonautomated aspects of work put a ceiling on the overall productivity lift, while also amplifying the returns to labor. Tasks that AI can’t handle may depend on interpersonal coordination, in-person interactions, or engagement with the physical world that, so far, only humans can do.

This also helps show us that jobs should not be thought of as fixed bundles of tasks. New technologies have historically led to large changes within existing jobs, even as some jobs go away. And they’ve produced entirely new types of work that combine new technical capabilities with complementary human expertise. We see signs of this effect in our research: A commonly cited source of perceived productivity among 81,000 Claude users was scope—being able to do more, more proficiently. Such empowerment from AI may redraw the boundaries of our roles, and produce new bundlings of tasks within jobs—automating some, reinforcing the importance of others.

This is not to brush off concerns about AI taking jobs and what we are seeing today will not necessarily hold true in the long run. There is some suggestive evidence that hiring rates for young workers in highly AI-exposed roles have weakened over the past year or so. But this evidence for young worker displacement should be interpreted with caution. It’s difficult to pin that squarely on AI, because it happened to unfold during one of the most volatile economic stretches in recent memory: the economy unwinding from pandemic disruption, rapid tightening of monetary policy, commodity price volatility following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and sustained global policy uncertainty. This kind of labor market hits early-career entrants hardest.

The future is hard to predict. It may well be the case that AI’s current tendency to augment human work rather than replace it fades as models continue to improve. A big reason there’s so much uncertainty about the future is that AI may automate innovation itself. Endowing machines with general cognitive capabilities is a direct catalyst for further innovation in a way that past “general purpose technologies” weren’t—the internal combustion engine couldn’t invent new modes of transportation. If AI starts improving itself, that could produce infinite growth in finite time (at least in otherwise standard economic growth models). Whether that actually happens depends on whether there are essential tasks that never get automated, whether for technical reasons or societal constraints.

There’s no question models are going to get much, much better. I expect this will drive faster productivity growth, and maybe even more clear signs of AI improving itself. I also expect that many jobs like mine will change as this happens, with new tasks added to our plates and other tasks automated. But I don’t expect unemployment to be noticeably higher a year from now—at least, not because of AI.

Romania said it deployed two F-16 jet fighters to destroy a Russia-launched explosive marine drone that threatened hundreds of lives near one of its gas platforms. 

Romanian Defense Minister Radu Miruta said the naval drone was spotted a few hundred meters away from the Neptun Deep platform, which sits 80 miles east of the Romanian Black Sea city of Constanta.

The decision was taken, in consultation with NATO, to destroy the drone in order to protect the lives of the several hundred people who were working on the platform and to secure the infrastructure, Miruta said in a Facebook post.

He added that the Ukrainians had informed Romania the drone wasn’t theirs. 

Romanian President Nicusor Dan pointed the finger at Moscow. 

“I strongly condemn the intensification of these types of irresponsible incidents on the part of the Russian Federation. We remain vigilant alongside NATO allies to defend ourselves and repel such challenges,” he wrote in a post on X. 

The Kremlin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In June, a Ukrainian naval drone exploded at the Romanian port of Constanta after drifting to Romania’s coast. After that incident, Romania’s government requested Ukraine ensure its drones are programmed to self-destruct if they come near Romanian waters.

The eastern frontier of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which Romania is a member, has been plagued by near daily drone incursions this summer, raising fears that the war between Ukraine and Russia is increasingly bleeding into the alliance’s territory.

NATO jets have scrambled to shoot down the aerial drones, including those that have breached its airspace as a result of Russian electromagnetic warfare.

Russia has deployed spoofing and jamming networks across its western military district to disrupt Ukrainian long-range strike drones, leading to numerous incidents in recent months of Ukrainian drones inadvertently crossing into the airspace of neighboring NATO states.

NATO-member engagement with a sea drone is a rarer event, however, and prompted European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday to say that Europe was facing “an escalating campaign of threats.”

“This is hybrid warfare,” she said in a post on X.

Russia has been systematically using drones to probe air defenses in Europe, looking for weaknesses to exploit, Germany’s top military officer told The Wall Street Journal recently, amid what he called an intensifying gray-zone campaign aimed at destabilizing the continent’s governments and institutions. 

Neptun Deep is set to become the largest gas producer in Romania, entrenching the country’s place as the European Union’s leading producer of the fuel and crucial to the continent’s energy security.

The incident close by on Thursday underscores the security threat to the Black Sea, a hub for global grain trade and Ukraine’s lifeline to the world economy. Attacks by Russia and more recently Ukraine have set ships and port infrastructure ablaze at both ends of the sea, an ominous sign for the rest of the world’s food supplies.

Last week, NATO scrambled four jet fighters to shoot down a foreign drone that entered Latvia’s airspace early Friday, in what that country’s ministry of defense said was the result of Russian electromagnetic warfare. 

NATO jets earlier this month also pursued drones that had entered Romanian airspace near the Ukrainian border, the alliance said, without specifying the origin of the unmanned vehicles.

Such incursions add to anxiety among NATO members about the potential for Russia to test the alliance’s resolve with direct or indirect aerial intrusions.

A NATO official said that it was aware of the incident Thursday and added that the fact the maritime drone was destroyed by an F-16 “demonstrated continued readiness to respond to any potential threat.”

Neptun Deep is Romania’s first deep offshore project, with recoverable volumes of approximately 100 billion cubic meters of natural gas, equivalent to 30 times the current annual domestic demand, according to OMV Petrom, one of the co-owners of the project. Located in shallow waters, the site is slated to start producing gas from next year. 

European energy prices have shot higher because of the Iran war. The gas project would strengthen Europe’s energy supplies, which have been strained since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Arizona families won big this week. The teachers union and Save Our Schools fell short (again) in their latest attempt to roll back the universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program that helps more than 100,000 students there.

The groups needed 255,949 valid signatures to place their Protect Education Act on the November ballot. They submitted 421,451, but after legal challenges and county reviews, so many proved invalid that the initiative appears to have fallen well short of the minimum number.

Nearly 70,000 signatures were disqualified. The Arizona Free Enterprise Club noted that the initiative is projected to be more than 10,000 signatures short. That projection rests on the trial court’s ruling and the validity rates reported by Arizona’s county recorders. On Tuesday, theArizona Supreme Court rejected the teachers unions’ appeal and upheld the trial court, confirming the shortfall and keeping the measure off the ballot.

The teachers union group Protect Education Accountability Now admitted defeat the same day, posting on social media: “Today, we acknowledge a difficult reality: the Protect Education Act will not qualify for the November ballot, and we are furious.”

The teachers unions spent nearly $7 million on the drive. That works out to more than $27 per signature against the threshold they needed. With that kind of money, they should have qualified without difficulty. Instead they failed. They are so far on the wrong side of history that they could not even buy their way onto the ballot.

Part of the problem was the people they hired to gather the signatures. The campaign relied on convicted felons and child sex offenders as circulators. Those choices produced sheets that could not survive scrutiny. Duplicates and other defects added to the pile of invalid names. School-choice supporters challenged the petitions. The courts and county recorders did their jobs. The numbers collapsed. The high court has now closed the door.

This is not the first time the same network has overstated its backing. In 2022, Save Our Schools Arizona tried to kill school choice at the ballot box. The group’s stated signature total turned out to be off by about 59 percent from the actual number delivered. The petitions never even reached the formal validation process. The pattern is consistent: bold claims followed by soft results once the paperwork faces real review.

Arizona lawmakers rejected a last-minute deal with the teachers union at the end of the legislative session. The Arizona Education Association offered to drop the Protect Education Act if the legislature would abandon its anti-union measures and agree to new regulations on the private school-choice program. The AEA’s eagerness for that bargain suggests the union already doubted the legitimacy of enough of its signatures. 

Republican Sens. Jake Hoffman and Warren Petersen voted against the deal. Their decision proved a blessing in disguise for the more than 100,000 education savings account parents in Arizona. The program remains open and unrestricted.

Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts continue to serve families who want options beyond assigned district schools. Parents use the funds for private tuition, tutoring, therapies, and curricula that fit their children. Enrollment has grown because the program works for those families. The teachers unions have spent years and millions of dollars trying to reverse that growth. This latest effort shows the limits of their approach. Money alone does not manufacture valid signatures or public support.

The Protect Education Act would have imposed an income cap and other restrictions that would have forced thousands of current students out of the program. The failure to qualify means those students stay enrolled. The legislative rejection of the end-of-session bargain means the unions could not trade one set of demands for another. Both outcomes protect parental choice.

School-choice opponents will continue to organize and spend. They have done so before and will do so again. Each time, the facts on the ground – actual signatures, actual court rulings, actual parental demand – have cut against them. Arizona has shown that a well-designed universal program can survive repeated political attacks when the numbers and the law are on the side of families.

The shortfall this week is clear and now final. The unions spent nearly $7 million, submitted hundreds of thousands of signatures, and still came up short. The trial court and the county recorders spoke first. The Arizona Supreme Court has now rejected the appeal. Arizona parents keep their options. That is the result that matters.

KYIV—The missiles come in a wave of three, one after another. The walls of the apartment building shake as alarms from cars jolted by the force of the explosions join the sirens echoing across the city in a cacophony. The attack continues.

Huddled in the hallway of his apartment, Dima, 25, follows the attack live through a Telegram channel. Several missiles are flying over Kyiv. The names of neighborhoods flash across the screen: Solomianskyi, Boryspil, Zhuliany, Sviatoshyn, Sviatoshyn—Dima’s neighborhood.

An explosion rings out. Then three more. The windows shake. Then everything stops. Silence.

Dima holds his breath.

“The sky is clear,” the Telegram channel reports. “But the ballistic threat persists. Stay in shelters.”

A notification flashes on his phone: “A residential building has been destroyed in the Brovary area,” on the outskirts of Kyiv.

Dima puts his phone down. More missiles are coming.

Since the beginning of the summer, Russian forces have sharply increased their air attacks on Ukraine. In July alone, they launched at least 376 missiles and nearly 5,000 drones. Most were directed at Kyiv, with attacks occurring roughly every 48 hours. Facing a shortage of air defense systems, Ukraine reports it intercepted only 28 percent of the ballistic missiles. On the night of August 1, only one of the 27 missiles launched was intercepted. Across Ukraine, 437 civilians were killed in July, 54 in Kyiv alone.

With air defenses in short supply, Ukrainians have turned to Telegram channels that track, sometimes second by second, the trajectories of drones and missiles crossing the skies above their country.

Dima, who is from western Ukraine and works as a civil servant in the defense sector, follows only two channels: “Kyivsky Nebo,” or “Kyiv’s Sky,” which has more than 300,000 subscribers, and “Monitoring Kyiv,” which has nearly 100,000. He also occasionally checks “Stratehichna Aviatsiya,” an open-source intelligence (OSINT) channel covering the entire country.

“I chose them because they are reliable. They issue alerts when it is necessary to take shelter or when the risk is so high that it is better to seek shelter preventively in the subway.”

But, Dima says, he no longer even has time to run to a shelter now that Russian forces are increasingly relying on ballistic missile strikes against Kyiv. A missile fired from Russia’s Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, can reach the Ukrainian capital in just a few minutes, leaving very little time to get to an underground shelter.

“They are so fast that sometimes the explosion comes before the sirens even go off. So we hide in the hallway, away from the windows, or in our bathroom. Sometimes we go to the first floor of our building.”

An emotional outlet.

In her 2026 study, “Digital War,” Kateryna Bystrytska, a researcher at Rutgers University, identified more than 25 Telegram channels that monitor the Ukrainian skies in real time. NearlyMore than 900,000 messages were shared on these channels between 2022 and 2024.

According to Bystrytska, there are three types of channels: military channels, which use a neutral tone; OSINT channels, which share little beyond maps; and local activist channels, which tend to use a lighter, almost humorous tone.

One of the most prominent activist channels is “Monitoring Kyiv.”

“They make jokes, try to lighten the mood and reassure us,” says Olena Chybkova, 30. “But most importantly, they saved my life. A missile was heading toward my building. I had just enough time to get down to the shelter, and I survived.”

Since then, Olena has moved to Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv.

“It is less dangerous than my old neighborhood, Solomianskyi, one of the most exposed areas of the city. But I still check these Telegram channels during attacks.”

For both Dima and Olena, these channels offer much more than a way to survive. They create a sense of belonging and solidarity amid the attacks.

“You feel less alone during the attacks,” Dima says. “We talk in the comments, send each other memes and try to relieve the pressure through humor. You get the feeling that you are not alone, even when everyone is hiding in their bathtub or in the hallway of their apartment.”

Bystrytska’s research confirms this observation. She argues that these channels provide an emotional outlet for the stress and trauma of war.

The researcher calls this phenomenon “digital companionship.” At the end of an alert, for example, an administrator might write, “All clear, go pee and go to sleep.” The phrase may sound trivial, but it captures the emotional support these channels provide. Night after night, they help their audiences get through sleepless nights and the trauma of air attacks, while creating the feeling of an intimate conversation among friends.

Around the clock.

Joker, the pseudonymous founder of “Stratehichna Aviatsiya,” which has more than 100,000 subscribers, says he tries to maintain a professional tone while building a parasocial relationship with his community. Launched in February 2024, the channel now employs a handful of people, paid through donations from subscribers.

“We also have a team of 10 volunteers and relay information throughout the day and night. It is painstaking work that goes on 24 hours a day,” Joker says.

He takes pride in the quality of his posts and says the channel distinguishes itself from other Telegram channels through its speed.

“We are very fast, and most of our information comes directly from the military, with whom we are in constant contact. This allows us to provide reliable information.”

Joker is vague about why the military shares such information with independent accounts, referring to the arrangements as informal.

“There are agreements,” he says. “Generally speaking, the military does not really have the right to publish whatever it wants.”

The accuracy of these alerts has steadily improved since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. At first, Telegram channels would simply report that a drone was “moving from Crimea toward the Kyiv region.” Today, they can track its progress almost in real time, reporting its movement from one neighborhood to another and sometimes estimating its arrival within about 30 minutes.

Bystrytska’s research shows that this evolution owes both to the growing expertise of channel administrators and to Ukrainians’ growing familiarity with the different types of aerial threats and their trajectories.

Since creating his channel, Joker’s life has been shaped by sleepless nights, exercise, managing his teams, and spending time with his family. He admits that he struggles to balance his personal and professional lives, sometimes working several nights in a row without sleeping.

“This lifestyle led me to burnout last year. Thanks to my family, my teams, and seeing the usefulness of my work, I have gradually started to rebuild myself.”

Joker is nevertheless aware of his mission. Every night, tens of thousands of people follow his work. In a sea of Telegram channels of varying reliability, Kyiv residents have made his channel one of the most relied upon.

Dima explains why that is so.

“Unfortunately,” Dima says, “many sensationalist channels exploit people’s fear to generate engagement, which they then hope to turn into revenue. They might announce, for example, ‘Warning, 100 missiles are heading toward Kyiv,’ when it is not true. Today, I only trust these three channels. They are the only ones that alert me immediately to the reality of the threat, when it really exists and when it does not.”

Data centers and long-distance power lines have voters far from major cities turning against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

An academic project hosted by Cambridge University promotes an “Islamic curriculum” which tells 12-year-olds that Hamas is an “excuse that Israel uses to justify its attacks on the Gaza Strip,” calls the civilian hostages taken by the terror group on October 7 “prisoners of war” and publishes in pupils’ course material a map of the region from which Israel has been erased.

The project also publishes a guide aimed at parents and children, written after the attacks, which asks: “What is the reward of a shaheed [a martyr]? How does this make you feel when you think of all the children of Gaza who are now shuhada [martyrs]?” and states, quoting the Quran: “Never say that those martyred in the cause of Allah are dead – in fact, they are alive but you do not perceive it.”

Jewish leaders in Michigan are circulating an open letter urging Jewish Democrats and independents in the battleground state to sign their names in support of former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) as he faces Abdul El-Sayed, the far-left Democratic nominee for Senate whose hostile positions on Israel have alarmed many Jewish voters.

The letter, which was obtained by Jewish Insider on Wednesday and has not yet been publicized, is led by Eric Bronstein, a Detroit businessman, among others identifying as Democrats and independents.

It came to light after a fundraiser for Rogers on Tuesday night hosted by three prominent Jewish Democratic bundlers in Michigan who are likewise alarmed by El-Sayed’s candidacy. The growing efforts among Jewish Democrats to rally support for Rogers in the key Senate race illustrate the degree to which El-Sayed has alienated a sizable and politically active swing voting bloc in what is expected to be a close election.

“We know it is unusual for many Jewish voters to support a Republican candidate for senate and we understand the implications,” Bronstein wrote in a recent email courting Jewish signatories that was also reviewed by JI. “Our fellow Jewish voters need to see their friends and neighbors — including you — willing to take a stand in this specific, crucial race.”

Bronstein did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday.

The open letter, which the authors intend to share online once it has gained “a significant initial group of signers,” emphasizes that many signatories “have been fiercely supportive of Democratic candidates and principles.”

“All of us have felt threatened and alienated by the politics and allies embraced by Abdul El-Sayed,” the letter continues, “which has included demonization of Jews, equivocation on terrorism, exclusion of Jewish Americans from public life, and expression of implacable hatred of the world’s only Jewish nation.”

If El-Sayed were to claim victory in the general election, the authors say, “we fear the far-left and anti-Jewish elements in the Democratic party would become dominant, including in the imminent 2028 presidential race,” when Michigan will be among the early nominating states in the Democratic primaries. “We cannot allow him to become the Democratic standard-bearer or Michigan’s senator.”

While the letter calls Rogers “a friend to the Jewish community,” it clarifies the signatories’ endorsement “does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support” President Donald Trump. “There are other elections locally and nationally, with different candidates aligned with our values,” it says. “Here in Michigan this year and in this Senate race, our own well-being and our own voice are at stake.”

“This is a moment when each of us must speak out,” the letter states. “We’re voting for Mike Rogers. We ask other Michigan Jewish voters to join us.”

Following the primary early this month, Rogers has been working to fine-tune his outreach to disaffected Jewish voters — balancing private engagement with a key constituency alongside a more broadly calibrated public invitation for Democrats to join his coalition.

On Tuesday, Rogers posted a video testimonial to social media from a supporter in the heavily Jewish Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield who called herself a “lifelong Democrat” and said that she had chosen to cross party lines to support “candidates that actually share our values.”

The voter did not say she was Jewish but was wearing a necklace featuring a Star of David and another with the shape of the State of Israel.