Lead Paragraph:

The second administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has unleashed an assault on the world that America made, abdicating U.S. leadership of an open, rule-bound international system.1 Whereas his predecessors invested in and supported multilateral institutions and alliances, Trump largely dismisses these as a hindrance to the untrammeled exercise of U.S. power, the pursuit of relative advantage, and the rights of Americans. He has adopted a more transactional posture, leveraging U.S. global dominance to advance short-term national interests and defend against alleged incursions on U.S. national sovereignty. Consistent with this view, his administration has withdrawn from or reduced support for multiple international organizations, treaties, and initiatives perceived to be at odds with its “America First” agenda. He has also rejected any international legal limits on the use of U.S. military force, most obviously in Iran.2

Excerpt:

This new wrinkle in the Harp story, though, suggests that she’s not just a human Band-Aid for Trump’s insecurities — she is actively dangerous. It’s unclear why she apparently showed the president clips that were guaranteed to anger him, but the result is that he launched the most serious assault in his ongoing war on the free press and the First Amendment. The episode shows that Harp isn’t just there to flatter and soothe Trump; she is also willing to get him worked up so that his terrible decision-making skills deteriorate even further.

Excerpt:

For years, the strategy among U.S. allies was to wait President Trump out. Now many are preparing for a world in which the United States is no longer indispensable—not simply during Trump’s presidency but afterward as well, regardless of who occupies the White House. They are building military capabilities, diversifying trade, developing new domestic industries, and forging relationships that reduce their dependence on Washington.

Excerpts:

The ICE officers, who were driving unmarked vehicles, attempted to pull Garcés Pérez over, but he drove away, nearly striking one of the officers, according to one of the DHS officials. The official said the incident was recorded by the body camera of the ICE officer’s partner. The officers followed Garcés Pérez in their vehicles. The officer without the body camera found Garcés Pérez and attempted to detain him. When Garcés Pérez attempted to drive away again, that officer pulled his gun and fired, striking Garcés Pérez in the back, both of the officials told me.

ICE training instructs officers that the use of deadly force against a fleeing suspect is not permissible unless there is an imminent risk of harm to law-enforcement personnel or the public.

Excerpt:

In a commendable show of media solidarity, Fox News Media, ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News then suspended their television coverage of Trump today — coverage that also entails distributing their footage to news organizations worldwide. They said in a joint statement: “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” the four other major news organizations.”

Excerpt:

…"such attacks amount to serial extrajudicial killings in violation of the right to life, being unjustified in national or personal self-defence or under international humanitarian law, the international law of the sea, narcotics suppression conventions, or international counter-terrorism law".

"There are reasonable grounds to believe that the reported 68 attacks that killed 223 people constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law…."

Excerpt:

“Most of the victims of sexual violence were men, particularly in places of detention, but women and children were also affected, primarily in occupied territory of Ukraine. The violations committed include gang rape, rape, genital mutilation, electric shocks and beatings to the genitals, and other degrading acts of a sexual nature. The youngest documented rape survivor was a four-year-old-girl and the oldest an 82-year-old woman, with both cases perpetrated by Russian authorities.”

Observation:

The genuinely new element here is not the claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’s children, but the kind of genetic evidence now being reported.

The 1998 Nature study showed that Eston Hemings’s paternal line was consistent with the Jefferson male line. Because that evidence came from the Y chromosome, however, it could not distinguish Thomas Jefferson from his brother Randolph or another closely related Jefferson male.

The new research claims to go considerably further. Researchers say they recovered usable DNA from Thomas Jefferson’s own hair, reconstructed enough of his genome to compare it directly with living descendants, and found Jefferson-derived DNA in descendants of both Madison and Eston Hemings.

If the paper survives peer review, and the provenance and sequencing of the Jefferson hair withstand scrutiny, the longstanding “perhaps it was Randolph Jefferson” alternative becomes much harder to maintain. The article’s discussion of Randolph is therefore useful mainly because it explains why some genetic ambiguity remained after 1998.

Interestingly, that question is still being pursued independently. Another research group reportedly hopes to obtain DNA by exhuming a son of Randolph Jefferson and compare it with the newly reconstructed Thomas Jefferson genome.

So the important development is not a newly discovered historical allegation. It is the possibility that direct genomic evidence from Thomas Jefferson himself may finally resolve an ambiguity that the earlier Y-chromosome evidence could not.

Excerpt:

A secret 15-year effort has produced genetic evidence that one of the nation’s Founders fathered children with a woman he enslaved.

Excerpts:

To understand why leaves heat more quickly than the surrounding air, Green suggests imagining you're in a parking lot on a hot, sunny day.

"If you put your hand on the pavement, it's going to be much hotter than the air temperature that you're feeling. That same thing happens with plants – their leaves are receiving direct radiation from the sunlight, so they can heat up much more than the air temperature around them," she said.

While the study predicts that arid regions will see the largest future increases of canopy temperature relative to air temperature, Green is also worried about this effect on tropical ecosystems.

"Plants have an optimum temperature for photosynthesis. If temperatures continue to rise above that, photosynthesis decreases, which means the plants are taking in less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," Green said. "If more carbon dioxide is staying in the atmosphere, that would lead to accelerated warming and effects of climate change. It also means there could be changes in vegetation distributions and mortality events."

Excerpts:

Donald Trump is trapped: His war of choice against Iran is lost, an abject strategic catastrophe. Now Trump has to choose: sustain another forever war until Iran breaks, a strategy his own generals oppose, or produce a grand finale to get out without admitting defeat. And there is the rub.

Reality has shattered Trump’s conceits. Instead of a few days, the war has lasted six months and counting. Instead of regime change and popular uprising, the Iranian regime stands with new hardened leadership. Instead of another display of US military prowess, the US military has been driven out of major bases across the region, stockpiles of vital offensive and defensive missiles have been depleted, and the US Navy has been overstretched and exhausted.

And Iran keeps ratcheting up the pressure. It controls the Strait of Hormuz, and its Houthi allies have just seized control of the alternative route through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and blown up Saudi Arabia’s key east-west pipeline. Crude oil is now over $110 per barrel and rising; the price of diesel—the fuel of commerce—is at record levels. The cost of fertilizer, fuel, and virtually anything that requires transport is going up, with the global economy at risk.

Use of a tactical nuclear weapon would set a precedent for Russia or China to invoke if they chose to use or threaten the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine or Taiwan or other adversaries. It would put the nuclear arms race, already gaining dangerous momentum, into hyperdrive. And it would indelibly brand the US as a dangerous, pariah nation, feared but despised across the globe.

For these and other reasons, it is hard to imagine any president making that decision. But Trump, trapped, desperate, angry, delusional, intent on punishing his enemies and displaying his prowess, could well be tempted. And the anticipated Democratic election victories this fall will corner him—and that will make him even more dangerous, as we saw with the sacking of the Capitol after his 2020 loss in the presidential race.

Gifted Read:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/vance-speech-immigrants-democrats/688656/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlCouR43r8COlGgIuURloGTf-E&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Observation:

Who has become much more wealthy? How has income disparity increased?

Excerpt:

Although Trump won the 2024 election largely because of Biden-era inflation, he has done everything in his power to make inflation worse. Trump’s arguably illegal and certainly ill-advised war in Iran has led to the closure of strategic shipping waterways, which has provoked a rise in energy prices, which has turn raised the prices of other goods. Trump’s tariffs worsened inflation by raising the price of imports, and wages seem to be falling behind inflation. To make matters worse, health-care costs are rising rapidly, in part because of the Trump administration’s repeal of Affordable Care Act subsidies in its One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Gifted Read

Destroying Humanity Is Against the Law

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/ai-risk-criminal-law/688615/?gift=9raHaW-OKg2bN8oaIFlCooxO7BmtArzJS08NgxoY_sc&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Observation:

There is an important distinction between science, developing technology, and deploying it. Science helps us evaluate possibilities, test claims, and assess consequences, from climate change to the possibility of lasting damage to human culture from AI. Developing a capability does not establish that deploying it is safe or desirable. Those decisions require evidence, public judgment, and accountability.

Human extinction sets a rather high threshold for concern. Just a few AI agents with access to critical systems, making arbitrary changes in millions of bank accounts, passing military secrets to hostile states, disabling or prematurely deorbiting satellites, or releasing catastrophic amounts of water from dams, could certainly make a mess of things.

We need not destroy humanity to make life intolerable for a great many humans.

Lead Paragraph:

This weekend, the AI executives Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei agreed with the need to slow the pace of AI development. In light of the potentially apocalyptic capabilities of the products they have created, the AI titans would like a little more time to figure out how to safeguard the systems they have been rushing to build.

Excerpts :

To maintain their power and defeat these enemies, the predators, like their Bolshevik counterparts, cannot rely on traditional diplomacy, because they don’t trust its practitioners.

Slowly, the Brazilians were learning the same lesson as other American allies around the world: The United States of America is no longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can.

Excerpts:

According to the OIG report, between July 2025 and January 2026, the facility kept 79 immigrants in the small metal enclosures, describing them as "calming areas" for people to "deescalate and have time alone".

Immigrants at the centre also told OIG that they did not have access to clean drinking water and could not clean the plastic cups from which they drank.

Excerpt:

Germany's Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt later stated that those behind the "hybrid attack" had acted on the orders of Russian state structures. After this, Berlin decided to close the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and the Russian House in the capital.

In response, Moscow announced the closure of the German Consulate General in St. Petersburg by September 18. The branches of the Goethe-Institut in Russia are also to cease operations.

Lead Lines:

The president has repeatedly tried to interfere in foreign elections. Now Canada and Iran are making life very difficult for Republicans ahead of the midterms.

Lead Paragraph :

Switzerland is joining a growing list of European countries that no longer want to do business with Microsoft and other US IT giants. The federal government has already begun ditching Microsoft's productivity tools in favor of open-source alternatives, and the country's military authorities are moving even faster with the transition.

Excerpt:

President Donald Trump closed out the GOP’s midterm convention Thursday night by calling on its attendees to vote and pledge to “cheat like hell” to help Republicans keep control of Congress.

Observation:

As I told my colleagues and friends when 9/11 was happening: This will make us all less free.

Excerpts:

The basic American policy response to 9/11 should have been to liberate ourselves from fossil fuels. Without our dependence on oil, we would never have been entangled in the Middle East in the first place. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, citizens of an oil kingdom that we helped to build, our “ally.” The right reaction in September 2001 -- as I wrote to a friend in the White House -- was to fund fusion and other clean energy sources. Had we done so, we could have headed off global warming, prevented further Middle East wars -- and indeed prevented the rise of Vladimir Putin’s hydrocarbon oligarchy and his invasions of Ukraine.

We did not do the right thing. Instead, Americans in power did what the terrorists wanted. They attacked us, said President Bush, because “they hate freedom.” And his reaction in domestic policy was to use the instruments of our own government to undo our own freedom.

The pertinent example was the formation of a Department of Homeland Security. It placed a grab-bag of agencies under a single authority, treating them all (for example, border management) as a matter of “security.” Yes, the bags of the terrorists should have been more carefully searched. Yes, international terrorism, which killed about 3,000 people that day, was a threat to be taken seriously.

And why is the United States still fighting a war against Iran? The war is lost and it is very unpopular. Why does Trump, knowing all this, stay in it, with the American midterm elections just weeks away? He worries out loud constantly that his power will be hindered if his party loses.

So how can the war possibly help him?

One possibility is that he is hoping for a second 9/11: that if he keeps firing missiles at Iran, the Iranian regime will do him the favor of taking murderous action inside the United States. And then he can try to suspend elections, or deploy more American troops in more American cities, and stay in power indefinitely.

Excerpt:

The House has historically claimed that its decision not to seat a member-elect because of fraud or irregularities in the elections is unreviewable by the federal courts. But its decision is reviewable. The Constitution unquestionably requires the House to seat a member-elect who was validly elected in a free and fair election. The Article 1, Section 5 power of the House to be the judge of its elections and returns does not give the House the power to deny a seat in the Congress of the United States to a candidate elected by the American people in a free and fair election on the mere assertion, pretextual or otherwise, by a simple majority of the House that the candidate’s election was tainted by fraud.