As AI rapidly expands its impact over our lives, jobs, and politics, more and more people are raising alarms about its potential harms. In many cases, those speaking out about the danger are those who know the most: current and former workers in the industry.
Civil Rights Policy Brief #254 | July 5, 2026 | Rodney A. Maggay Policy Summary: In 2024 prior to the United States elections the Republican National Committee and the Trump Campaign filed numerous legal challenges that sought to invalidate mail voting ballot receipt...
President Donald Trump may have gotten what he most wanted from the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled on July 1, 2024 – by a 6-3 vote – that former presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution by, essentially, being president. Trump named three justices to the high court during his first term in office – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – and all three ruled in his favor in Trump v. United States (Barrett in part). The latest raft of major SCOTUS rulings, due next month, may continue to largely meet with Trump’s approval, or at least conservative priorities, but by no means is the court’s October 2025 term, as it’s officially known, likely to be a slam dunk for the right.
The war in Ukraine, which is Europe’s largest land war since 1945, has entered the peculiar phase familiar to historians and unbearable to those living through it — the phase in which catastrophe becomes routine. Loud air raid sirens still interrupt dinners in Kyiv. Young men still disappear into the trench lines of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia. Russian drones still arrive nightly, buzzing in the dark like giant mechanical mosquitoes. As the rumble draws nearer, exhausted people rise from their beds and head into the narrow corridors of their apartments or into the basements of their houses. It happens night after night, year after year, while outside the region, the war increasingly competes with other crises for attention, just becoming a part of the atmospheric background of modern life.
New York often sits in the average voter’s mind as a solid blue state, almost as a homogenous Democrat stronghold. With the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of NYC, one wouldn’t be faulted for assuming that the rest of the state is skewed towards the left to some degree. Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer lend credence to this impression.
There is a fairly short but detailed history of covert operations, and actions, being discovered by people posting their workout data to Strava, a fitness tracking app.. President Trump’s war with Iran that began at the start of March has been involved in this issue. A French navy’s Charles De Gaulle Aircraft Carrier was discovered moving closer to the Middle East when an officer uploaded their run to Strava which gave up the location of the ship.
The mid-term 2026 elections provide an opportunity for the Democrats to become the majority party in the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. Polls suggest that President Trump’s popularity is declining and that the Dems have an opportunity in the mid-terms.
A year ago, at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term as President, he signed Executive Order 14199, requesting a “government‑wide review” of all international intergovernmental organizations, conventions, and treaties that the United States formally supports. That review resulted in a signed a memorandum on January 6th of this year that specifies that the U.S. formally withdraw from 66 “organizations, conventions, and treaties.” Included in the 66 are the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other important climate treaties. In all, the U.S. withdrew from 31 UN bodies.
In October 2025, U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported on its official website that more than 2 million undocumented immigrants had already left the United States — including 1.6 million who voluntarily self-deported and more than 527,000 who were forcefully deported. “This is just the beginning,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin proudly stated.
Since early September, the United States has carried out at least 14 strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. The US has now deployed fighter jets, warships and thousands of troops to the Caribbean. The military buildup in the region is the largest since 1994 when the United States sent two aircraft carriers and more than 20,000 troops into Haiti to take part in “Operation Uphold Democracy.”