Recent changes to state laws and policies reflect conservative efforts to remove what they consider “divisive concepts” regarding race and gender. South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Utah have now joined 21 other states attempting to modify or eliminate curricula considered by many on the right to promote progressive concepts they say have direct, negative impacts on students.

Those who have a casual understanding of history or geopolitics may react agreeably to the concept: the greater abundance of natural resources a country has the more well-off the people of that country will be. Unfortunately, for Nigerians, the opposite is their reality. The abundance of oil in Nigeria, along with their colonial history, has resulted in a “resource curse,” a theory posited by contemporary international relations scholars. Nigeria now finds its economy reliant on the export of oil and renting their oil fields to multinational corporations (MNCs), leading to a commodity industry based on corruption and wealth centralization.

The Iran nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is an accord reached between Iran and several world powers, including the United States, in 2015. Under its terms, Iran agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and open its weapons-making facilities to international inspections in exchange for sanctions relief worth billions of dollars. Since the United States’ withdrawal from JCPOA in 2018 under President Trump, Iran has expanded its nuclear program, breaching its commitments to the agreement, including resuming uranium enrichment and violating limits on nuclear materials. While the JCPOA remains legally valid, Iran’s violations of the agreement’s terms have thus far thwarted negotiations to revive it or to forge a new deal with the Trump administration. Foreign diplomacy analysts and Israeli officials have identified Trump’s backing out of the deal as a costly blunder that has fueled both Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and rising instability in the middle east.

The Democratic primary for the New York mayoral race was seen as a “perfect storm”, “clearly a rebuke”, and a surprise to many onlookers. In it, self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani managed to pull off a stunning and decisive victory over establishment Democrat and former governor Andrew Cuomo. As Mamdani began gaining steam in the latter weeks of the campaign, the mayoral race began to be seen as a litmus test for the future of the Democratic Party.

On the first day of his second presidential term, President Donald J. Trump issued Executive Order No. 14160. This executive order is popularly known as the birthright citizenship executive order which purports to make changes to the Birthright Citizenship rule embodied in the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. That rule declares, with modest exceptions, that children born within the geographic territory of the United States are instantly granted United States citizenship. That constitutional rule was later affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark. However, with the ongoing national debate on immigration and immigrants in the United States, President Trump made a campaign promise to abolish the rule in order to try and stem the flow of immigrants from Latin American and South American countries to the United States.

I sat down with Kyle Rable to learn more about the No Kings! protests. Kyle is a new father, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Texas Tech, a U.S. Army Reserves Captain, a card-carrying union member, & self-described “hick-lib”; he is running for Congress in Congressional District 19 against Jodey Arrington. Kyle serves as Secretary for the Lubbock County Democrats and helps organize protests in Lubbock.

Elections & Politics Brief #186 | Nate Iglehart | July 5, 2025 The most important aspect of democracy is being able to vote for who represents you in government. Without that ability, democracy gives way to less accountable forms of governance. However, this core part of democracy is also one...

Across the world conflicts are raging, and in their paths leave levels of humanitarian crisis that reach peaks never seen in human history. One of these lesser reported upon conflict regions has the largest humanitarian crisis in recorded history: Sudan.