Flock Safety faces a growing public outcry over concerns that its surveillance technology could be misused.

Donald Trump has always believed himself to be an expert at what he calls “nuclear,” due to the fact that his uncle, John Trump, was a physicist who taught at MIT. The president has made it clear on numerous occasions that his uncle’s expertise transferred to him due to the Trump family’s superior genes. 

It’s too bad Dr. Trump died in 1985, because the president could use a refresher course on the subject. He certainly hasn’t learned anything new by virtue of the Oval Office. 

We may never fully know what led Trump to start his war with Iran, which has been going on for nearly six months. Whether he was feeling his oats after the successful kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or by Israel’s assurances that the Iranian regime was so weak it would crumble quickly under American bombardment, Trump decided to make the move on impulse without having a specific goal or strategy other than “winning.” 

As the war has dragged on, Trump’s stated motives for the offensive have also changed. First, the administration claimed he wanted to liberate the Iranian people. Then it became regime change, then removing Iran’s capability to threaten its neighbors and finally, almost as an afterthought, the president said it was to prevent them from developing a nuclear weapon. Understandably, the administration was reluctant to use that rationale at first since Trump had already declared that along with Israel, he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program following joint airstrikes in 2025. But as the war has progressed into a standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil was flowing freely before it began, the issue of nuclear weapons is all they have left to explain the debacle. 

Trump and administration officials have taken to declaring that the economic sacrifices Americans are making for his war are patriotic gestures to ensure that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon — a pledge that had already been successfully obtained through the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated under President Barack Obama, which Trump tore up upon taking office the first time, and then supposedly obtained again through the force of several bunker-buster bombs in 2025. According to the polls, most Americans aren’t buying that claim. 

At the same time, still sulking that U.S. allies didn’t rush to jump into his Iran quagmire, Trump has decided to pick up where he left off in 2020 with his alleged good pal Kim Jong Un and punish America’s longtime ally South Korea by canceling some military exercises after the country, in his words, “refus[ed] to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Anyone else would have seen how insensitive such a comment would be to a country that has been forced to stand by as the unhinged, totalitarian dictatorship to its north built up a nuclear arsenal aimed at them and their allies, all while the U.S. brayed about “denuclearization.” 

In 2006 it was confirmed that North Korea had successfully conducted an underground nuclear test and was on its way to building a bomb. By the time Trump took office in 2017, according to estimates, the country had enough fissile material for 60 weapons and they were rapidly developing a ballistic missile program. At first Trump did his usual insult-and-threat routine, and he then hit upon the idea that he could personally talk Kim out of the program. The famous bromance began.

When Trump held his first summit with the North Korean leader, giving him the international prestige he had always wanted while getting nothing in return, the president was asked how long he thought it would take for North Korea to denuclearize. “Well, I don’t know, when you say a long time,” he said. “I think we will do it as fast as it can be done scientifically, as fast as it can be done mechanically . . . It’s a 15-year process. Assuming you wanted to do it quickly, I don’t believe that . . . You’re talking about a very complex subject. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, gee. Let’s get rid of the nukes.’”

He also mentioned his Uncle John. 

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For all the “beautiful letters” Trump exchanged with Kim, by the end of his first term, North Korea had kept enriching plutonium at a rapid pace, developing short-range missiles thought to be meant for tactical weapons purposes, and in October 2020, it unveiled a massive intercontinental ballistic missile designed to carry multiple warheads that could theoretically overwhelm U.S. defenses. There was no word on whether Kim sent Trump a nice note telling him about it.

Today, North Korea and Russia have formed a strategic partnership in which the North Koreans supply soldiers and arms against Ukraine and Russia provides food aid and advanced technology in return. They have become vital allies. As we know, Trump thinks he is very close with both leaders, so there is no threat from either that he needs to worry about. At this point, he just wants to punish allies he believes have not followed his orders, and he has shown a willingness to use whatever levers he has. 

In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of an argument that raged in the 1950s over “who lost China.” The idea was that the left, and specifically the Truman administration, had allowed the country’s communist revolution to prevail, a notion that fed into the red-baiting Cold War rhetoric that dominated the national discourse for decades. In fact, the escalation in Vietnam and the subsequent quagmire that resulted could largely be attributed to the Democratic Party’s fear of being blamed for “losing Vietnam.”

We now find ourselves in a similar situation at the hands of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and the stakes are high. It can be argued, as it was with China, that there is no single action that could have prevented North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons. Despite great efforts to use the diplomatic and economic route to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it’s supposedly been made clear now that any president can simply come in and abrogate them, so what’s the point? 

The problem stems from the contrast between the way Trump — in contrast to all other presidents — has treated the North Korean leadership and the way he has gone about dealing with Iran. His cloying deference to Pyongyang and his crude antagonism toward Tehran have sent one very strong message to every country on the planet: Get a nuclear weapon as quickly as possible if you want the United States to treat you with respect. 

There’s a question historians will one day ask of this era: Who started the global nuclear arms race? The answer to that is complicated, but one name will always rise to the top of any list: Donald Trump.

The post Donald Trump has made the world go nuclear appeared first on Salon.com.

On the latest episode of Equity, we wonder why the DOJ is investigating startup board seats.

OpenAI is calling for California to strengthen SB 53, an AI safety bill that the company previously opposed.

U.S. battery startups pulled in $500 million in grants from the Department of Energy, throwing a lifeline to an industry that was on the ropes after EV incentives were slashed.

A few things are certain in life: death, taxes, LeBron James playing professional basketball — and Americans’ belief that crime is getting worse. Since Gallup began asking about national crime in 1989, a majority of respondents said they thought crime in the US was higher than the year before in every survey year except 2000, 2001, and 2025. Even in that last year, 49 percent still said more crime was happening. It’s perhaps the archetypal example of negativity bias, the mental habit of giving more weight to bad news than good.

Last week, the FBI put some numbers on just how big that bias is. The American murder rate — which peaked in 1980 at 10.2 per 100,000 — fell to an estimated 4.1 per 100,000 people in 2025, matching the rates recorded in 1955 and 1956 for the lowest ever measured in the country. The violent crime rate (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) fell 9.7 percent, the largest single drop since J. Edgar Hoover was running the bureau in 1936. 

That much is known. But what’s not known for sure about the crime drop is almost everything else. Adam Gelb, who runs the Council on Criminal Justice, says that there is no single or easy explanation for the historic lows, while Jeff Asher, the analyst who spotted this decline before nearly everyone else, agrees. For every leading candidate — federal pandemic spending, some normalization after the 2020 social collapse, better violence prevention, even the decline of drinking — there is a corresponding hole. 

But there is one American city where researchers can point to a specific program, measure what it did, and put real numbers on it. And it just happens to be the city that spent 50 years — and five award-winning seasons on HBO — as America’s shorthand for murder.   

What Baltimore did

Baltimore recorded more than 300 homicides a year for most of the last decade, and more than 200 for most of the past half-century. In one month, July 2015, 45 people were killed — an astounding figure for a city of just around 600,000 people at the time. 

But Baltimore finished 2025 with 133 homicides, the fewest since 1977 and about 60 percent fewer than in 2020. Through the first eight months of this year, the city has seen 60 murders, and the police commissioner’s target is to stay under 100. 

What caused this? Three things at once.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy identifies the few people most likely to shoot or be shot — two groups that heavily overlap — and sends people to their doors with two messages: you are on our radar, and here is housing and job training. Separately, the longer-running Safe Streets program puts outreach workers with real street credibility between disputes, aiming to interrupt them before they become shootings.

That’s the harm reduction element. There’s also a tough-on-crime component. The state’s attorney office says it has secured 2,129 convictions since 2023 across several gun-related violent-crime categories, with over 1,700 of those defendants incarcerated. 

Meanwhile, Baltimore’s homicide clearance rate reached 60 percent by mid-2026. Its nonfatal-shooting clearance rate was 54 percent, up more than 12 percentage points from a year earlier. Criminologists have long held that the certainty of being caught deters criminals more than the severity of the sentence, and more successful shooting investigations are a common thread where violence is falling around the country. 

How do you tell whether a program worked, or whether a city just got lucky? Drug trials get a control group; cities don’t. Baltimore got one almost by accident: the strategy launched in the city’s Western District in 2022 and nowhere else, which left the rest of the city as a comparison.

That’s what a team of economists and criminologists used. They measured the Western District against Baltimore neighborhoods that hadn’t started the program yet, and over 18 months the number of people shot there, fatally or not, ran about 30 percent below that stand-in. Killings alone fell by a similar share, but deaths are rare enough that chance couldn’t be ruled out. Police made no more arrests than before. Arrests for serious violent crime rose 81 percent.

A second, looser test set the whole city against a composite of other big American cities and put Baltimore’s murder rate about 25 percent below it. The authors are careful with that one: too much changed in Baltimore at once to say how much it the strategy was responsible for.

Murder is contagious

Baltimore’s success is built on two ideas, and they came from two very different places. 

The first came from a doctor named Gary Slutkin, who spent the 1980s and early 1990s fighting tuberculosis in San Francisco, cholera in Somali refugee camps, and AIDS across Africa. He came home to Chicago in 1995, a year the city recorded over 800 homicides. 

When Slutkin examined the city’s shooting maps, they looked familiar. Clustered in space, clustered in time, and spreading case to case — murder resembled the outbreaks he used to fight. Slutkin reasoned that the way to treat violence was to treat it like cholera: find the people most likely to transmit. Interrupt the transmission. Change the conditions that let it spread. Slutkin built the model into a program called CeaseFire, now Cure Violence Global, and its Baltimore descendant is Safe Streets.  

The second idea came from a criminologist. David Kennedy, working in Boston in the 1990s, found that 61 gangs with about 1,300 members — under 1 percent of the city’s young people — were tied to at least 60 percent of its youth homicides. Get those people in a room with police, prosecutors, and community elders, tell them plainly what comes next, and the shooting slows down.

That approach is called focused deterrence. Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy is a version of it. To see how it works over a longer period of time, take a trip across the Atlantic to Glasgow in Scotland, which in the early 2000s was considered the murder capital of Europe.

In 2005, in the midst of that wave of violence, Glasgow’s Strathclyde Police established a Violence Reduction Unit that operated with a basic thesis: evidence shows that violence can be prevented. Among other interventions, the unit sent trauma surgeons into schools to describe what a blade does to a face and stationed outreach workers at hospital bedsides to reach victims in the vital hours after an attack, the moment when retaliation can still be stopped. 

In 2024-25, Scotland recorded 45 homicide victims, the fewest since comparable records began in 1976 and down from 96 two decades earlier. Every case was solved.

Pull the handle

So we have clues to why crime has dropped so much, but not clear conclusions. As successful as Baltimore’s group violence strategy has proved, a 2023 study of a similar street-outreach effort in Boston found no effect whatsoever. And the latest evaluation of Baltimore’s own Safe Streets — 11 sites, each measured against a stand-in version of the same neighborhood without the program — produced numbers that sound terrific but settle very little: youth homicides down 42 percent and youth shootings down 21 percent, but neither is strong enough to rule out chance. And while some sites saw youth homicide fall by as much as 100 percent, two sites saw it rise by 42 and 89 percent. 

Some experts, like the UC Irvine criminologist Emily Owens, argue the crime decline has been so widespread and similar — big cities and small, red and blue governments — that the true cause is some larger social change rather than what any one city is doing. Nor can we be sure the fall will continue. Billions in federal pandemic relief money has supported many of the programs that have worked well in places like Baltimore, and that money is already running out. But we can identify one reason why it happened, and learn from that success. 

As it happens, Gary Slutkin was not the first doctor to look at a map of the dead and see a pattern in it. In September 1854, a cholera outbreak was killing hundreds of people in London’s Soho district. A doctor named John Snow had mapped the outbreak and saw the dead were clustered disproportionately close to the district’s Broad Street water pump. Snow had a theory that water was connected to the disease and convinced a Soho parish board to remove the handle of the pump. 

Nobody in Soho at that moment could have told you what caused cholera. It would only be 29 years later that someone would definitely identify the responsible pathogen, and in doing so, explain why Snow’s intervention worked. But the explanation could wait. The dying stopped that month in Soho, just as it is stopping in Baltimore and around the US today. And that’s what counts.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

Even as Donald Trump’s war against Iran drags on with no end in sight, let alone any sort of victory for the U.S., there’s another conflict America will definitely never win: the drug war. Even though “war” is somewhat metaphorical here, it has always been waged like one, with military-grade equipment used to police neighborhoods, support clandestine spying operations and aid in the invasion of cities. But given that the main opponent of the Drug Enforcement Administration is, well, drugs, which don’t possess the ability to surrender, there can never be an end to this war, only further escalation.

At the same time, it was announced Wednesday that the DEA is helping to investigate the death of actress Hayden Panettiere earlier this week, apparently as the result of an overdose. No official cause of death has been announced, but Panettiere was open about her struggles with addiction, chronic pain and domestic violence. While her sudden death at the age of 36 is nothing but tragic, I question the DEA’s involvement as a good use of federal resources. Panettiere’s passing wasn’t the result of some high-level cartel assassination or a major drug trafficking operation, it seems to have been a sadly routine accidental poisoning. 

But as with the death of actor Matthew Perry in October 2023, which the DEA also jumped on, superstar overdoses are attractive bait for an agency that thrives on celebrity energy and little else. Such a high-profile investigation may lend the DEA a veneer of competence, but its billions in annual funding have done little to stop the tide of deadly overdoses plaguing the U.S., or to make a meaningful dent in the flow of drugs entering the country. The investigation of Perry’s death — which, it must be emphasized, was a result of drowning while on ketamine, not purely an overdose of the drug itself — did ultimately result in several arrests, but it produced no significant reforms for addiction treatment or healthcare access.

What’s interesting is that, according to the Associated Press, the DEA is itself being investigated for allegedly allowing the powerful opioid fentanyl to flood into New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 in yet another of their many botched undercover operations. The agency is accused of letting drugs “walk,” meaning that fentanyl deliveries were permitted to happen to build bigger cases against drug traffickers. On Monday, a Justice Department internal watchdog announced a review of this controversial tactic, which may have resulted in overdose deaths and/or injuries, which are exactly what the DEA is supposed to prevent.

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The irony here is extra thick when you recall that the Trump administration designated fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” last year. Does that make the DEA a terrorist organization, or perhaps “enablers” of terrorism? Imagine if the Department of Homeland Security, using similar methods that the DEA allegedly utilized in New Mexico, allowed white supremacists to blow up a few bridges so they could get a bigger conviction against them.

This underscores the absurdity of labeling fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction in the first place. The drug is used safely every day in virtually every hospital in America, and in fairness, most users who ingest the drug do not die immediately. Many don’t die at all. It’s an opioid, not sarin gas. More importantly, the hysterical  label does nothing to help people struggling with addiction or to reduce overdose deaths. It does, however, give cover for Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ongoing campaign to blow up boats in the Caribbean, which has widely been condemned as a war crime.

 

Whether it’s spreading myths about “rainbow fentanyl” in kids’ Halloween candy, or promoting the ludicrous lie that simply touching fentanyl can cause an overdose, the DEA is a bigger source of drug misinformation than that kid in your high school who channeled a lot of Joe Rogan. For all the phony celebrity investigations, in more than 50 years the DEA has made little progress in ending the war on drugs, let alone making America healthier. And there’s a reason it will never work: Addiction is a health problem, not a policing problem. It can’t be solved with more cops or more guns. Amid all the talk about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there are other three-letter agencies that deserve the same fate.

The post The DEA is a bigger joke than ever appeared first on Salon.com.

The US Department of Justice announced on Friday that TikTok will pay $400 million to settle a lawsuit filed in 2024 over allegedly violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). In the lawsuit, the DOJ alleged that TikTok collected data from children without notifying parents or obtaining consent and did not delete the accounts when parents requested.

TikTok is set to pay $300 million right away and will pay a further $100 million "upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered against TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly," the DOJ says in a press release. The settlement is "one of the largest recoveries ever o …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Ten or 15 years ago, Friedrich Merz would have seemed a wildly unlikely candidate for the role of savior to Europe’s liberal democracy. Spoiler alert: He still does. 

But the internal decay of European politics has reached a critical stage, whose stakes were made abundantly clear by the ludicrous spectacle of Donald Trump and JD Vance berating Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for insufficiently groveling before the Orange Throne. This was not the historical moment Merz expected, and it definitely isn’t the one he wanted. But for better or worse, he looks to be Europe’s last man standing.

If we flash back to the bygone days of the late 2000s, Merz’s future looked to be in the past: He was Angela Merkel’s defeated right-wing rival in the Christian Democratic Union, the mainstream conservative party that has dominated German electoral politics since the fall of the Nazi regime, first in the former West Germany and then, less convincingly, in post-1990 reunified Germany. Merz left politics and racked up millions in the private sector as a corporate lawyer, including a five-year stint as board chairman at BlackRock Germany, a major branch of the world’s largest asset management firm. 

He returned to the CDU in 2018 as the anti-Merkel, vowing to spice up the party’s usual agenda of pro-business fiscal “austerity” and free trade with staunchly pro-American foreign policy and a dash of hard-right anti-immigration policy. Even amid the continent-wide political chaos caused by the Syrian migrant crisis and the rise of fascist-flavored parties in one country after another, it still took three tries for Merz to get himself elected party leader after Merkel’s retirement. 

After “winning” Germany’s recent federal elections, in what may be remembered as a textbook example of Pyrrhic victory — the CDU finished first with 28.5 percent of the vote, slightly better than its worst-ever result in 2021 — Merz will now be forced to preside over an awkward coalition of center-right and center-left parties, whose primary purpose (at least on the home front) will be to fend off further advances by the not-quite neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. If you want to find a silver lining to the German elections — and frankly, that isn’t easy — it would be this: While the AfD finished second with 20.8 percent of the vote, basically doubling its 2021 total, there’s no evidence that Elon Musk’s enthusiastic endorsement (or Vance’s slightly less overt endorsement) did them any good. 

On the international front, as last Friday’s contretemps in the White House threw into sharp relief, Merz will become the leader of the largest and most important member of the European Union at precisely the moment when it must “achieve independence from the U.S.,” to use his own words from a post-election press conference. On one hand, Merz is something of a black box, an untested leader who has never held a position in government and whose entire career seems mismatched to this perilous fork in history’s road. On the other, he appears to grasp the magnitude of the current crisis, and has so far given no indication that he will seek accommodation with either Germany’s far right or their MAGA pals in Washington. 

Merz has described the attempts by Musk and various other Yank interlopers to meddle in Germany’s elections as “no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” and suggested that under Trump the U.S. appeared “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” This marks a startling reversal for the man described by German journalist Jörg Lau as the most pro-American politician in Germany and “a lifelong believer in the transatlantic security alliance” (i.e., in NATO, which Trump seems determined to demolish). That may also reflect a sense of injured pride and betrayal: Clear back to Konrad Adenauer in the 1950s, the CDU has always presented itself as a staunch American ally, largely aligned with what we’d now have to call the vanished orthodoxy of the pre-Trump Republican Party.

At the same time, Merz has described the startling surge of the AfD as “the last warning to the political parties of the democratic center” to reach consensus on immigration policy, economic reforms, a shared European defense strategy and numerous other thorny issues. Germany found itself under “massive pressure from two sides,” he said — presumably meaning the U.S. and Russia — along with significant internal divisions: The AfD dominated in the economically struggling states of former East Germany, while Merz’s party won in the more prosperous west. (The rapidly fading Social Democrats won in Berlin, and almost nowhere else.) In historical terms, Merz concluded, it was “five minutes to midnight for Europe.”

So, damn! Will this acrid-tongued, 69-year-old multimillionaire, a child of the rural Catholic haute bourgeoisie — he was raised in the house his mother’s family built in 1752 — turn out, against all odds, to be the statesman the world needs now, ideology and partisan affiliation aside? Is he a latter-day Churchill standing astride the tides of history, ready to push back Vladimir Putin on one side and Trump on the other? 

Of course the real answer is that no one can see the future and it’s likely to surprise us: Maybe! It’s just about conceivable that Merz, now liberated from his previous pro-American views and in a forced marriage with his domestic political opponents, will reveal that kind of strength. But honestly, that scenario requires a world-historical level of wishful thinking. 

For one thing, as Lau observes in the Guardian essay quoted above, Merz was effectively for Donald Trump before he was against him. He ran as an overtly MAGA-curious candidate during his failed campaign for CDU leadership in 2018, and only weeks ago pushed a harsh non-binding resolution on migrant policy through the Bundestag with the AfD’s support. That Trump-style political maneuver, meant to shame outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz by capitalizing on a series of violent attacks committed by immigrants, did not technically violate the “firewall” that prohibits Germany’s mainstream parties from forming coalitions with the far right. But as Lau suggests, it may have led normie voters to wonder whether Merz could be trusted.

Merz isn’t the only mainstream European conservative to turn bearish on America; it’s starting to look like a trend. Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin is an old hand, having made world headlines back in 2003 by opposing the U.S. war in Iraq in an eloquent U.N. address. He’s now considering a 2027 presidential campaign, in hopes of fending off rising far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. In a recent interview with the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, de Villepin outdid Merz, proclaiming that “America can no longer be considered an ally of Europe” and that the world now finds itself divided between “three illiberal superpowers: Russia, China and the U.S.”

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Both Merz and de Villepin see the opportunity, in the latter’s words, for “a European awakening of democracy.” That’s an inspiring phrase, but one that avoids the larger historical question: Can the existing European order that elite political leaders like them are so eager to defend actually be saved, in anything like its current form? You don’t have to be a Trumper or an ultra-leftist to observe that the so-called Western alliance has been decaying for some time; one of Putin’s guiding principles, which has yet to be falsified, is that if he jabs it in the right spot it will collapse altogether. Rethinking the relationship between Europe, America and the rest of the world shouldn’t be left to JD Vance and his buddies in the nationalist new right. 

It’s difficult to imagine that Merz — by all accounts a person of highly conventional ideas, atop a fragile coalition with a narrow political mandate — is ready to seize that portfolio. Even a cursory reading of German history suggests darker parallels: Merz looks and sounds an awful lot like the pro-business upper-crust German conservatives of the early 1930s, who assumed they could dominate the radical upstart with the dopey mustache and his dimwit followers. Those guys were astride the tides of history too, but not in a good way.

Of course the past does not predict the future; it shapes it. That cautionary tale still has considerable resonance for Germans of Merz’s generation, even if many people in that country and elsewhere around the world have grown tired of hearing it. Those who fail to learn from history, as Salon contributor Mike Lofgren said to me recently, are doomed to repeat famous quotations. Whatever Friedrich Merz does with his improbable starring role on the world stage, let’s hope his lessons are in order.

The post Can this guy really save Europe from Elon Musk? appeared first on Salon.com.

Two years after the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, it has reached a $400 million settlement.

The security review is being performed by the Idaho National Laboratory, and the research is being funded by a company -- or a group of companies -- in the electric and autonomous vehicle industries.

Donald Trump’s war against Iran is going so well that the U.S. is now yanking the USS George Washington from the western Pacific to relieve the beleaguered USS Abraham Lincoln, which is stationed off the Iranian coast in the Northern Arabian Sea. 

The move is significant on both fronts. While the switch will be a godsend to the weary sailors aboard the Lincoln, who have faced deteriorating living conditions and reported suicide attempts during their historic deployment of over 260 days and counting, the Washington was the Navy’s last aircraft carrier stationed in Asia. Its exit represents a remarkable abdication of American military power in the region.

At the same time, the president has ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea. Seoul seemed blindsided by the announcement, but judging from Trump’s social media post, which underscored his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea,” it appears that one reason for America’s diminishing military presence on the Korean Peninsula also has to do with Iran. The move reportedly came after the South Korean government refused to assist the U.S. in military actions in Iran. “I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, “and they said, ‘No thanks!’” 

This is all great news for China, which has already dispatched its top envoy to South Korea, seemingly to fill the void Trump is creating. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will meet with Korean President Lee Jae Myung to discuss North Korea and global issues, creating an “unusually favorable moment for Beijing,” according to Han Lin, China country director at the Asia Group, who spoke to Bloomberg. “Washington is signaling flexibility toward Pyongyang while simultaneously creating uncertainty in Seoul,” he said, adding that “China can use that gap to bolster diplomatic influence.”

Once again, China embodies the pseudo-Taoist “Does nothing. Wins.” meme, but that hasn’t entirely mollified fears that Beijing will invade Taiwan. Those worries have caught the attention of The National Interest, a magazine founded in 1985 by neoconservative Irving Kristol and attached to a think tank established by former President Richard Nixon, who saw the potential for Chinese dominance in world affairs. The magazine, which has more recently become a mouthpiece for Russian concerns, has published hand-wringing features on how munitions depletions are putting Taiwan at risk. Such depletions are a consequence of the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, of course, but it’s not clear that China wants or even needs to take advantage of this gap, at least not by dropping bombs.

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Beijing has watched closely as the U.S. and Russia, in its invasion of Ukraine, have damaged their economies, weakened their militaries and destroyed their global reputations while still losing the wars they started. No one wants to say that risk of a Taiwan invasion is completely gone, but China’s motivation to do so is likely pretty low. Why invade some place if you basically already control it? Just keep doing nothing and keep winning.

But more tangibly, it’s becoming clearer by the day that the bloated military machine the U.S. has run for decades is running out of steam. An exclusive report published Tuesday by the Washington Post details how the Pentagon is considering reducing its military footprint in the Middle East, notably because American military bases in the region have repeatedly gotten pummeled throughout the Iran war. If this happens, it would mark a substantial pivot from how American forces have operated in the region post-9/11.

 

All of this may be welcome news to anyone who opposes the world police stance of the U.S., but Trump kicking out the crutches of our ailing empire could also swing in a disastrous direction. As former U.S. ambassador to South Korea Joseph Yun detailed to CNN, the void the U.S. leaves is prompting more countries, including North Korea, to look more toward nuclear weapons as a deterrent against future aggressors. 

As anyone who has studied nuclear proliferation will tell you, this is a dangerous game: The more countries that rely on nukes for peace, the greater chance there is of a nuclear holocaust, whether it’s triggered accidentally or intentionally. The slow decay of American hegemony may be good news for many people in the world, but it could also create new existential risks as China reemerges as a global superpower.

In the meantime, it probably won’t hurt to start learning Mandarin on Duolingo.

The post Trump’s Asia pullback is a gift to China and North Korea appeared first on Salon.com.

The affordability and availability of healthcare is emerging as a top concern for Americans, with some recent surveys ranking it easily as the top concern. Voters are upset with rising costs, and federal cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies threaten to leave millions more uninsured. 

Progressive candidates, who have won major primaries this cycle, have been eager to offer Medicare-for-all as a solution. Polling suggests there is broad support for the idea, even if most American voters aren’t sure what the phrase means in practice.

But Democrats have also been fighting about Medicare-for-all for the last decade, with battles reaching a fever pitch in the 2020 presidential primary. The popular slogan has been most closely associated with Vermont Senator and two-time presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, whose federal Medicare for All Act would enroll virtually every American into one national plan and largely eliminate private health insurance. Six years later, plenty of Democrats still remember bitter arguments over whether to replace private insurance or build on it, dividing the party over an issue they otherwise agreed was a top priority.

Yet there are emerging signs that the party is not about to experience déjà vu when it comes to healthcare politics. In interviews over the last few weeks, activists, pollsters, and policy experts sound cautiously optimistic that the Democratic healthcare wars might finally be headed for a collaborative truce. And Abdul El-Sayed, the buzzy Michigan progressive who wrote a book on Medicare-for-all, is campaigning for US Senate on a version that would let people keep their private health insurance, a potentially major shift. In a recent interview, El-Sayed went as far as to say, “as long as it reduces the power of healthcare corporations, expands healthcare, and does so publicly, I’m for it.”

In the meantime, Democrats have been busy building a new stockpile of ideas. New and serious healthcare proposals are circulating among lawmakers and potential 2028 presidential contenders, ranging from breaking up healthcare monopolies and expanding public drug manufacturing, to regulating hospitals and establishing new public options, meaning government-run health insurance plans that people can choose to buy instead of private insurance.

Next year is shaping up to be particularly painful. Health insurers want to raise Obamacare premiums by a median of 15 percent, on top of a roughly 20 percent jump this year, and starting in January, millions on Medicaid will have to prove they’re working to keep their coverage. Higher premiums and new hurdles to staying on Medicaid will land right as the next presidential campaign gets going.

That’s part of why the drafting feels urgent. Major healthcare legislation is rare, and the groups crafting these proposals think the next window may be opening.

“People have moved on from messaging; people aren’t staking out extreme positions to move the Overton Window,” said Neale Mahoney, a Stanford healthcare economist who has been reviewing many of the new proposals and advises the Kitchen Table Project, one of the groups developing them. “I think people are very much in the ‘what is something that could actually work?’ phase.”

What Americans really think about Medicare-for-all

One reason healthcare experts are feeling hopeful that reform may play out more amicably this time is that the fight that consumed the last one — whether everyone would be forced off their private plans — may not happen. Medicare-for-all supporters themselves seem tentatively open to paths beyond the strict single-payer program outlined in Sanders’ bill.

This is also significant because to many Americans, “Medicare-for-all” means having the option to enroll in a public health insurance program, but to keep their employer health coverage if they want.

The ambiguity over private insurance became the single biggest source of confusion and infighting among Democrats the last time they debated Medicare-for-all. A 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found over half of Americans thought Medicare-for-all meant you could keep your private insurance, a finding that led presidential primary candidates to finger-point and flip-flop on the question for months. Kamala Harris, for example, initially backed Sanders’ bill in her presidential run, but later renounced her support after facing questions about whether she’d back abolishing private plans. 

New polling suggests Americans’ ideas about Medicare-for-all remain largely the same today. A March 2026 survey led by the center-left Searchlight Institute and Impact Research, a progressive polling firm, found that while 60 percent of Americans agreed that Medicare-for-all would create a single-payer health system, 61 percent also said Medicare-for-all would allow people to keep their current private health insurance plan if they preferred to.

Another recent survey led by Searchlight, the Democratic polling firm Tavern Research, and the progressive media organization Zeteo found that support for government-run health insurance was least attractive to voters when it included mention of the elimination of private and employer-sponsored plans and that it would be funded through higher federal taxes. Asked directly, 70 percent said they’d rather keep their current coverage than enroll in a federal plan similar to Medicare.

Battleground state focus groups held this past spring by the Democratic research firm Navigator found that while nearly all wished the country’s healthcare system was “universal” and “affordable,” few could say what separates one healthcare reform label from the next.

Put differently, most voters, including most Medicare-for-all supporters, seem open to a range of approaches that improve access to affordable care. 

Mahoney, the Stanford health economist, thinks what’s new is that Democrats are realizing they don’t have to choose between improving the coverage people have now and building something better over time, like a strong public option. There’s a growing recognition among experts, he said, that people are being squeezed right now, while deeper structural problems keep mounting underneath, like an insurance system tied to employment that would only grow more precarious if AI drives waves of layoffs. 

Natasha Murphy, the director of health policy at the Center for American Progress,  a liberal think tank, said voter research has led them to recommend new “short-term solutions” that can bring healthcare costs down now. “Candidates and elected officials would serve themselves and their constituents by focusing on the more immediate benefits,” she told me, “while continuing to talk about universal coverage and broader-scale change” that could take a decade or more.

Adam Gaffney, a prominent single-payer advocate who previously served as president of Physicians for a National Health Program, believes Americans indicating support for “Medicare-for-all” in polls broadly support a national insurance health system, but it doesn’t mean that everyone therefore knows “everything in Bernie’s bill, or Jayapal’s bill, or [Physicians for a National Health Program] proposal” since “very few people do.” 

Gaffney says he’s not opposed to incremental reforms on the path to single-payer, though he does believe voters interpret “Medicare-for-all” as one insurance program that covers everyone, just as they generally know that Medicare covers all people above age 65.

The 2028 test

Whether Democrats can actually sustain a tentative peace on healthcare will likely depend on how the next presidential primary season shakes out.

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who is considering a run, is a vocal Medicare-for-all supporter closely aligned with Sanders — yet both have enthusiastically endorsed El-Sayed and continue to stump for him. Would Ocasio-Cortez campaign on Sanders’s bill specifically, or on something like El-Sayed’s broader healthcare vision? How would she handle disagreements with rival plans, which at times became heated in 2020? And where will groups like the Democratic Socialists of America draw their lines for endorsements?

Weighing in on the topic recently on his political newsletter, journalist and Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias noted that El-Sayed’s recent remarks characterizing Medicare-for-all as more aspirational than any specific piece of legislation may help build a “permission structure” for all kinds of center-left Democrats to run on worthy healthcare reform ideas. 

“The single most important thing that El-Sayed can do to win moderate support is to leverage his credibility with the left into ending the destructive Medicare for All wars that have paralyzed the Democratic Party for the past 15 years,” Yglesias argued. 

The reverse might help too. Single-payer supporters have long suspected a public option is meant to defuse pressure for bigger change, and moderates could answer that by stating plainly they want a plan that grows to cover nearly everyone — not a patch for people falling through the cracks.

In Jacobin earlier this month, the socialist writer who publishes under the pseudonym Carl Beijer urged leftists to hold the line on single-payer healthcare. He noted that El-Sayed’s position is almost identical to the stance that Democrats like Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren got slammed for by the left for proposing back in 2020. The Sanders wing of the party, Beijer stressed, held back then that any plan that allows for private insurance has no right to associate itself with Medicare-for-all. The risk now, he argued, is that rather than serve as a stepping stone to single-payer, a private option would let the rich opt out, and voters who’ve opted out don’t tend to fight to fund what they’ve left behind. He mused that socialists may be more willing to let El-Sayed off the healthcare hook because of the uncompromising stance he’s taken on Israel, but that the underlying issues had not changed. 

Beijer’s warning is that agreement this easy is agreement about nothing. The next presidential primary is where we’ll find out where the real differences remain.

BRUSSELS — China has dragged the EU’s foreign subsidies rules into its wider trade dispute with Brussels, just as the two sides enter a crucial stretch of negotiations.

Beijing’s Ministry of Justice has ordered Chinese companies not to hand over information to EU officials in investigations under the FSR — the bloc’s tool to ensure that players in the single market don’t receive unfair support from abroad.

The notice explicitly mentioned the European Commission’s in-depth probe into JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce giant that is trying to acquire Germany’s Ceconomy, the parent company of consumer electronics retailer MediaMarkt, in a €2 billion deal.

The move appears aimed at adding pressure on Brussels midway through a renewed trade dialogue between the EU and China, with negotiators engaged in intense closed-door discussions over how to narrow the EU’s €1 billion-a-day trade deficit in goods with China. 

The Commission is expected to hold a videoconference with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce in September that would pave the way for a trip by trade chief Maroš Šefčovič to Beijing in early October. 

The Commission will debrief EU leaders at a summit a few days later. That could be a make-or-break moment for the bloc to decide whether constructive engagement is enough to rebalance the trading relationship — or whether Brussels needs to defend Europe’s trade interests more forcefully.

“China has consistently opposed the EU’s abuse of unilateral tools such as the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) to suppress Chinese companies,” a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce told reporters on Thursday. 

“I would like to emphasize that China and the EU have established a Trade and Investment Consultation (TIC) mechanism and reached a consensus on managing differences through dialogue and consultation,” the spokesperson added.

“We hope the EU will work with China to promptly correct its erroneous practices in the FSR investigation and strengthen communication through intergovernmental dialogue. China will closely monitor the EU’s actions and will take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard national security and the legitimate rights and interests of enterprises.”

No discrimination

The Commission maintains that the FSR does not discriminate against companies on the basis of where they’re headquartered. 

“The FSR is completely, fully compliant with WTO rules as it applies to all companies irrespective of their nationality, and its objective is to ensure that all companies doing business in the EU, including Chinese ones, are treated equally and compete on an equal footing,” spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. 

According to Beijing, the EU is requesting too much information as it investigates whether JD.com’s deal is unfairly backed by Chinese state support.

“In the JD.com case, the EU has again arbitrarily and unreasonably demanded a wide range of information from relevant Chinese banks that is irrelevant to the investigation,” the Ministry of Commerce spokesperson said.

The Commission worries that JD.com may be benefiting from unfair advantages in the form of preferential financing, tax incentives and grants provided by the Chinese government that could give it a competitive edge in the EU market once the transaction is finalized.

JD.com offered remedies this week to address the Commission’s concerns, in what is typically a sign that talks are at an advanced stage. The company declined to comment.

Beijing’s intervention could even jeopardize the acquisition, according to Dirk Gotink, a center-right Dutch MEP and a member of the European Parliament’s International Trade Committee who is closely following the case.

“They’re being taken hostage by a political process,” he said, calling Beijing’s move “a unilateral escalation.” 

Camille Gijs contributed reporting. This article has been updated.

MANCHESTER, England — On the day in June that Andy Burnham ended his nine-year term as mayor, Manchester’s authorities sent him off with a parting gift: a wingback chair whose shiny fabric was printed with the city’s trademark worker-bee symbol and its rallying cry “we do things differently here.”

One month later, Burnham moved to 10 Downing Street, the sprawling Georgian terrace in London replete with mice, net curtains, cranky heating and patchy phone signal from which six other prime ministers have struggled to run Britain in the last decade. But the worker-bee chair did not accompany him on the trip south. It moved just a half-mile, through a city that was once the engine of the industrial revolution but for more than a century has struggled for balance against the political, economic and military power consolidated in the capital.

The chair now sits beside a 10-seat conference table in what Burnham calls “No. 10 North,” a refurbished 1980s office block he has chosen as his auxiliary seat of power. What remains of the largest empire the world has known is now governed most Fridays from above a discount cocktail bar, where Burnham has replaced Downing Street’s concentric rooms of gatekeepers with clinically lit floors of open-plan desks. Staffed by several political allies from his time in Greater Manchester and decorated with a gold record of The Queen Is Dead, the 1986 album by Manchester band The Smiths, it is Burnham’s “comfort zone,” a person who has worked with him said — “an homage to his time” as mayor.

No. 10 North is more than Burnham’s own Manc-a-Lago, where he retreats ahead of weekends at his family home nearby. The prime minister, who succeeded Keir Starmer as the benefactor of a Labour Party putsch on July 20, has made it a central aim of his premiership to move power and money out from limestone buildings on Whitehall, the old heart of London’s civil service — by centralizing some of Whitehall’s power further in No. 10 North, and handing other parts of it to local leaders outside government. He is banking Labour’s political future, and that of the British center-left, on being able to reverse a decades-long decline of England’s former industrial heartlands, one that fueled a political polarization and drove the 2016 vote for Brexit.

“What we’re bringing is a different type of energy,” Caroline Simpson, the mayoral authority’s former chief executive whom Burnham has tasked with heading up his new northern outpost as deputy chief of staff, told POLITICO Magazine in her first interview since assuming the role. “That’s really the point about No. 10 North — to connect our places, connect devolution back into the heart of governing.”

Burnham’s political opponents — and, privately, some civil servants, who have seen past prime ministers try to move power out of London — have derided the Manchester office as a gimmick, a soundstage for a politician attuned more to optics than policy detail. (No. 10 North is “absolutely not” a gimmick, insists Simpson.) The office is already up and running, but some of the basic details of how it will geographically redistribute power — such as how funding or boundaries will be configured — have not been worked out. An early test of Burnham’s commitment to redistributing his government’s sparse finances will come on Oct. 28, the day of his first budget, and in a cross-government spending review in 2027.

POLITICO Magazine spoke to 28 current or former civil servants, political officials, regional officials, advisers and politicians to illuminate what life is like inside No. 10 North and the broader policy vision it reflects. Many were granted anonymity to speak frankly about the workings of Burnham’s government. Downing Street declined to comment on the specifics of this article, beyond making Simpson available for interview.

Burnham took office on a pledge to “rewire Britain.” He has to rewire the house first.

Moving to Heron House

The incoming prime minister discussed the idea of setting up No. 10 North with his closest aides ahead of the June special election that sent him back to Westminster, a person with knowledge of the conversations said.

But the idea was kept secret from all but his innermost team until Burnham announced it in late June. He did not even tell Simpson about it in advance. “It all happened very, very quickly,” she said.

After winning the June special election, Burnham scrambled to make No. 10 North a reality. He wanted to put it in Manchester — but where, exactly, wasn’t clear. He told an interviewer in early July that his preferred site was the planned Manchester Digital Campus in the Ancoats area of the city, but the site he named will only open fully in 2032. Burnham’s team looked at options for other government buildings in Manchester during a few frantic weeks of transition talks with the civil service.

A few days before he took power, Burnham and the civil service agreed on a temporary solution: Heron House, a red-brick office block that was renovated in 2019. No. 10 North occupies a floor that had been prepared for use by GCHQ, the U.K.’s intelligence and cyber-security agency. GCHQ was happy to vacate the floor; one senior government official said the agency was “bending over backwards to be helpful,” since it still has senior figures in other parts of the building who will find it useful to be near the PM. Less happy about the arrangement: Greater Manchester Police, which has been under more strain thanks to the burden of protecting the PM and building. It had an initial back-and-forth with London’s Metropolitan Police about when each force should be responsible for Burnham’s security, a person with knowledge of the talks said, and has raised concerns about who will pay the long-term bill. A Greater Manchester Police spokesperson said the force was still working with government departments on security arrangements and “the cost of this is yet to be determined.”

There was a recent model for moving a core government function from Westminster to the north, and Burnham’s team is relying on some of that expertise. Former PM Boris Johnson opened government offices outside London including the Treasury, which launched a campus in the north-eastern railway town of Darlington, conveniently near then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s large family home in North Yorkshire.

Beth Russell, the senior official who leads the Darlington campus, has been advising on the setup of No. 10 North. But the projects are not the same; Darlington has around 350 Treasury civil servants across all ranks (plus more from eight other departments) while No. 10 North currently has only 50 or so, many of them necessarily senior. That means Darlington’s boasts to have recruited 80 percent of its staff locally, including from nearby schools, are unlikely to be repeated in No. 10 North.

Heather Scott, the veteran Conservative who was leader of Darlington Council at the time, argued local recruitment had made the project a success; some young people “never thought that they would have an opportunity to work for a government office.” Local staff may also think (and therefore make policy) differently, because they live outside London. “They’re not in £5 Gail’s coffee world,” said one Labour official, referring to a high-end chain bakery.

Burnham has, though, poached many members of his old mayoral team to No. 10 North — some of them based fully in Manchester and others splitting their time between there and London. Simpson will be a political special adviser while others will be non-partisan civil servants including John Wrathmell, who influenced thinking on “Manchesterism,” Burnham’s vision of putting the needs of a place above political ideology by combining private investment with state intervention. They were joined in recent weeks by Amy Davies, who ran Burnham’s calendar as mayor; she has been given the job of executive assistant to the PM, according to two people with knowledge of the appointment. (No. 10 does not routinely comment on staffing matters.) Other civil servants who join No. 10 North will already have been based outside London or want to return to where they grew up.

But in the meantime, civil servants have descended on Manchester from afar. No. 10 North’s Director General Sam Lister — its most senior civil servant — was only appointed on the Friday before Heron House opened to staff the following Monday, July 20 — the day Burnham took power, two people with knowledge of the process said. Lister declined to comment for this article (civil servants are ordinarily barred from speaking in public). Department heads were asked to suggest staff who might transfer to No. 10 North less than a week before it opened. One senior Whitehall official described the process as a “tap on the shoulder” and said the method for choosing people had been “unclear.”

Many of the 50 or so civil servants currently in No. 10 North are still based outside Manchester — which is 180 miles from London — and living in hotels for part of the week. That includes Lister, whose commute from his north London home was photographed covertly by the Mail on Sunday. After the story broke, officials were advised to stay across a variety of hotels to keep a lower profile, an official with knowledge of the process said.

Civil servants assigned to work at No. 10 North have been turning up before 8 a.m. on Fridays to secure desks that Burnham will walk past. Some ministers hot-desk. Simpson has her own office, there is a suite for ministerial use and officials are “buying the nicer furniture that comes with being the center of government,” the same official with knowledge of the process said.

Cheerleaders for the No. 10 North agenda argue this rush to action shows the team is trying to do something that British governments seldom manage — behave like a start-up. Lister wrote on LinkedIn that the unit “must maintain an agile, scale-up, non-hierarchical mindset” to work, “solving problems in real time rather than waiting for perfect answers.”

Therefore officials are anxious not to appoint too many civil servants; a person with knowledge of the planning said the total number of civil servants in No. 10 North is likely not to exceed 150, a tiny number compared to the thousands who already work in government offices outside London.

Those who do move permanently will each be able to claim up to £14,000 in relocation costs under existing rules, said the same official with knowledge of the process quoted above. They would not be expected to take a pay cut.

And then it may all churn again. Putting No. 10 North in Heron House is still only a medium-term arrangement and is unlikely to last until the nearby digital campus is open in 2032, said the same person with knowledge of the planning quoted earlier. That means Burnham’s team is looking at whether it can move somewhere else — neither Heron House nor the digital campus — in the coming years.

Burnham has pledged to work from the office every week, mostly on Fridays. (Burnham’s advisers say he will have visited five times in the month since becoming prime minister.) Despite his love of casual clothes, some of the trappings of his office follow him around. Downing Street sent its front-of-house staff up north with Burnham during his visits; aides suddenly found themselves being waited on with cups of tea.

In recent weeks the Manchester base has become such a focus of conversation that Burnham insiders have begun referring to London’s most famous street address as “No. 10 South.” Those who work there now find themselves on the receiving end of the north-south insecurity. One Labour official retorted: “No, we are No. 10!”

Downing Street and the surrounding streets still hoard the vast bulk of state power; the old Georgian building is the one with the famous black door and Larry the Cat, the feline who has lived at No. 10 longer than several prime ministers. No. 10 North has no real cat, said Simpson — but it does boast a cardboard cutout of Larry.

“Our building at the moment is tricky,” Simpson explained. Unlike Downing Street, where Larry can come and go as he pleases, Heron House has security keypads that cannot be operated by paws.

All roads lead from London

Burnham is far from the first British PM to try to break London’s hold on Britain — the result of a highly centralized government, based in a city of global finance and tourism that is more than three times the size of its nearest U.K. rival.

London was always the seat of Britain’s establishment, but northern cities — as the seat of the industrial revolution — once held a power of their own. The first steam train ran through Darlington; Manchester has a statue of Abraham Lincoln in honor of mill workers who refused to touch slave-picked cotton. (It is next to the back door of No. 10 North.)

“There was a time during which people in the north had a load of control, agency and power by virtue of being part of the industries that powered this country — by having powerful MPs, councils that were well-funded, community institutions and organizations that were coherent and well-embedded in their in their place,” said Oliver Coppard, the Labour mayor of South Yorkshire, a county west of Manchester that includes Sheffield. “Those things have all gone, or largely gone, and communities are fractured. So people don’t have agency; they don’t know who to reach out to get things to change.”

Thirty years ago the U.K. had ceremonial mayors instead of empowered municipal ones, and no true parliaments for the nations outside England. Since then there has been an endless ratchet of pledges to move power outside Westminster. Labour’s Tony Blair set up democratic bodies for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London, but kept centrally-run agencies for England’s regional development (Simpson worked in one of them). Conservative David Cameron followed with his “northern powerhouse,” which gave some English cities mayors and funding deals. Boris Johnson, who built his profile as London’s mayor, extended the model to rural areas, seizing on the regional divides that drove the 2016 Brexit vote with his promise to “level up” Britain.

Yet England is still “very centralized” compared to the U.S. and its system of federalism, argues Simpson: “We are one of the most centralized countries in the Western Hemisphere. We have very little true devolution.” Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a business lobby group, added: “Our country is basically designed so we only have a federal government, we have no state government.”

And so Burnham, who decided in 2016 in a pub in Westminster that he would quit London, where he was serving in parliament and had previously been in cabinet, and run for mayoral office, now pledges to go further still. His plan is shaped by those nine years as mayor, when he was infuriated by how the system worked in practice — or didn’t.

He has vowed to extend devolution to more areas of England and go beyond the traditional focus on economic investment, looking also at public services such as bus networks. He is planning to tidy up the messy patchwork of boundaries for police, health and fire services that he confronted in the role. He says he will give mayors more true economic freedom; they will be allowed to spend an allotment of national income tax, and commit to more expensive projects without national approval, giving them a predictable income stream rather than forcing them to chase new grants each year. Regional officials will have less frenzied oversight from Whitehall. (One senior Labour figure in a mayoral authority joked that they had to tell the central government how many thumb tacks they had bought.)

“The conversation is completely different from what it was,” said Greg Clark, the Conservative minister for decentralization under Cameron in the early 2010s. In the early 2010s, he explained, “the direction was very much centralization. There was no real debate about devolution from the city deals onwards. These things have now become irreversible.”

Burnham’s policy vision is contained in a rare joint statement of his Cabinet on July 31, less than two weeks after he came to office. Thrashed out over pre-handover “access talks” between Burnham’s top aides and Antonia Romeo, Britain’s most senior civil servant, it said ministers had agreed to “the full shape” of how the government’s structure will shift power away from London before the next election. The seven-page PDF is “what people in No. 10 are excited about,” said Murison. Burnham deliberately imposed his end point without a detailed plan instead of letting Whitehall pore over drafts; one ally said it was to avoid his plans being “sanitized.” Romeo sees it as a foundational document too; she believes she could become the cabinet secretary who presided over the greatest change to the state in decades. Officials are now in what they privately call a 100-day sprint to produce a detailed policy paper in the fall that will set out more about how Burnham intends to actually implement the vision.

In their old jobs in the mayoral authority or elsewhere in Whitehall, No. 10 North aides had already looked to Germany and France for inspiration, including on the countries’ regional approaches to industrial strategy. Senior officials have also asked the BBC for advice after the national broadcaster relocated several operations to Salford — a district of Greater Manchester — in 2011. “The BBC didn’t just land as an island,” said Simpson. “The BBC created a whole creative sector around it.”

They may need the advice. The Cabinet document promises a “major transfer of powers, resources and functions” from central government to mayors and councils; that signals that Burnham intends to shrink Britain’s national civil service, which has billowed by 100,000 people in six years to around 550,000 after the Covid pandemic and Brexit. That will be “uncomfortable,” admitted the person with knowledge of the planning quoted earlier.

Burnham and his team have given no clue of how many civil servants they plan to cut. (“I don’t think they know,” said the official with knowledge of the process quoted earlier in this article.) Simpson said it will mean moving “significant resource from Whitehall” and into local areas, but added: “I am not going to put a figure on what that is going to look like.”

Nervous civil servants will be kept waiting. While Burnham’s October budget will set out much of the detail, the trade-offs may only appear in their starkest form in next year’s Treasury spending review. The small print of that will likely show that money is being held back from some Whitehall departments, especially outside the most politically contentious areas such as defense and health, to spend more on local and regional government. Burnham’s choices are even more difficult because Labour’s last spending review, under Starmer, frontloaded spending early on but tightened it after 2027.

One of the toughest decisions, on where to define the boundaries of police forces, could put Burnham in potential conflict with his home secretary, Shabana Mahmood. Mahmood had already been working on a plan to reduce the number of police forces and consolidate some of their functions. One person with knowledge of her thinking said she is generally skeptical of how well devolution can work in practice, though another said she is not ideologically against it. (The Home Office declined to comment on these specifics.)

There could be tension too with the Treasury, whose responsibility for local economic growth has already been handed to No. 10 North. Clark — who negotiated early city deals alongside Miatta Fahnbulleh, a former civil servant who is now a key Burnham ally in his Cabinet — recalled the finance ministry being “hostile” to his “subversive” push for devolution. “There’s a Whitehall preference for tidiness and for everything to be identical,” he added.

Another tricky and expensive decision will be around what to do with England’s private water firms, which have provoked public outcry by paying dividends while presiding over a creaking Victorian infrastructure. Burnham has promised greater “public control” of utilities but stopped short of promising full nationalization, and aides are still working through multiple options, including a mutual form of ownership and whether debt-ridden Thames Water could be split into two entities, one for London and the other for the surrounding region. On many issues, Burnham has identified problems without yet knowing the solutions.

Thus far there are many quiet skeptics of Burnham’s approach but few vocal critics. The skeptics tend to focus on two separate dilemmas: how do you meaningfully move money out of Whitehall and meet demands to raise spending on healthcare and defense? And after all the devolution promises that came before it, will No. 10 North prompt meaningful change?

One senior trade union figure said devolution in itself — which ties up the government in machinery changes and takes years to have an impact — does not “float the boat” of voters who are more concerned about the cost of living now. They voiced concern that the varying quality of leadership in each area could reinforce inequality, which would be ironic for a PM promising “good growth in every postcode.” Some MPs are already nervous that Burnham is running his devolution agenda from Manchester — a prospering city that has little in common with left-behind towns, or communities in England’s rural south west.

Then there is the existential question hanging over Burnham’s Labour — can empowering left-behind communities persuade voters to desert opposition parties, including Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK or the hard-right Restore Britain?

“This is the last bulwark against a fucking Farage-led government,” said one former Conservative government official. “I suspect it will be somewhat of a gimmick. But if it’s a gimmick that people respond to and vote for, is it all that bad?”

Some believe Burnham’s relentless focus on England’s individual regions misses the wider picture. “England as a constitutional and political entity does not figure,” said Jonathan Rutherford, who co-founded the socially conservative Blue Labour movement in the party. “And yet England is the place where the populist revolt is strongest. It’s where it originated. It was the strength behind the Brexit vote. It’s the source of the strongest form of nationalism — English, which is expressed through Reform and Restore.”

Others in Burnham’s own party worry that his plan could be too effective. After a series of strong electoral performances nationwide, Reform now controls many local councils, using its limited powers to scrap climate schemes, take down Pride flags and declare war on financial waste. A Labour government in London returning more authority to those councils would end up just empowering the opposition.

“I do worry about it,” said the senior Labour figure in a mayoral body quoted earlier in this story. They pointed out that mayors will soon have more say over police budgets and priorities. “You are putting quite a lot of power in the hands of people who could be quite malign in their intentions,” the senior Labour figure said.

Opposition parties sense an opportunity from Burnham’s extra funding; Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley in the north east, wants to hand money back to voters as a rebate. Burnham shut down the idea but Houchen told POLITICO Magazine he has spoken to Treasury officials and believes it will be possible, unless the government specifically blocks it. Simpson did not completely rule out such rebates, saying: “There’s going to be no ability to sit outside of the tax framework at a local level. That’s not what fiscal devolution is about. But flexibility about how that money is spent in a local area is going to be there.”

None of those concerns are deterring Burnham, whose allies say he can succeed because he will drive the devolution agenda personally from No. 10 North in a way no prime minister has done — and that he genuinely trusts the councils and mayors he’s empowering to serve their areas. “It is already changing things,” said Simpson.

Burnham’s team has met chief executives of mayoral authorities and hosted mayors for a meeting of a revived national economic council, set up by Gordon Brown in response to the 2008 financial crisis. There was potent symbolism in the way Burnham ran the meeting, forcing Cabinet ministers to listen and take note of the mayors rather than the other way round. Those at the table included the prime minister’s business adviser Varun Chandra, who is more used to talking to U.S. trade negotiators than regional leaders.

The prime minister told mayors he wanted to meet every two weeks.

‘It’s like Fort Knox in there’

Burnham has spent the last two weeks on a tour of the country he now leads, focusing on areas where Labour has fallen behind — a trial run for a general election the PM must call no later than 2029 to earn his own mandate for governing. It stands to be a five-way contest for power, pitting Labour against Reform and the Conservatives, Greens and Liberal Democrats, alongside Restore.

Almost no one in the Labour Party believes Burnham will be able to repeat the 172-seat majority that Starmer won at the last general election in 2024, leaving him a narrow window to do something radical while he commands the sway of parliament.

Burnham is already trying to connect his technical reforms to real change on the ground. The PM crisscrossed England this week with stops at the Wolverhampton Bus Terminal, where he announced the local mayoral authority would take control of the bus network, and to a homelessness charity in Newcastle where he asked local leaders to help his pledge to end rough sleeping. Newspaper front pages this summer have splashed repeatedly on a long-running plan to release some prisoners early because England’s Victorian jails don’t have enough room; one interview this week was dominated by questions about messages that Burnham traded with a person impersonating White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

All those issues are already crowding out his focus on reengineering the machinery of government. “I wish people might just engage with the seriousness of the proposition,” Burnham told The Times this week.

The vibes in Burnham’s inner circle remain good. “I’m not saying there aren’t going to be difficulties, but sometimes you’ve just got to get up and do it,” said one current government minister. “That was part of the problem under [Starmer’s] administration. There were always roadblocks; there was always a reason not to do something.”

And if Burnham is seeking to show he is among his people, the building itself does some of the work for him. Unlike Downing Street, imposing and behind iron security gates since 1989, Heron House sits on top of ordinary life in the city.

It faces a busy public square above a Slug & Lettuce chain cocktail bar, a branch of the ubiquitous pie store Greggs and trendy cafes serving Vietnamese drip coffee and matcha from Kyoto. Shoppers sit on a bench next opposite the low metal barriers and police guards on the door. The Ferris wheel at the square’s Christmas market is so tall that last year riders could see down onto the six-storey building’s roof. The local marriage registration office is on the ground floor. “You don’t really notice it,” shrugged a groom, Max Harris-Green, while his bride posed for photos a few meters from the new heart of government.

Put simply, it looks boring. The entrance goes unnoticed by many of those walking past, save for the occasional passer-by taking a selfie by the door.

Getting into the building itself is harder than Downing Street, whose custodians swing open the black front door for guests who have cleared the perimeter. Visitors to No. 10 North go through one of several discreet entrances — one of them next to a Chinese restaurant favored by the former Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney — and successive doors. A Labour official said: “It’s like Fort Knox in there.” (No. 10 declined to give POLITICO Magazine a tour.)

Recent visitors speak of elevators with unmarked buttons, a bombproof room and special doors for agents who still work on other floors. Nearby during the lunch rush, one man in a shirt was overheard joking to three others: “Is this going on the MI6 credit card?”

But the success or failure of Burnham’s power shift will rest not on the building but the prime minister himself. Ironically for a man preparing to give up authority, Burnham will have to wield it firmly from the center to make his plan work. That even extends to where he sits.

No. 10 North will mean nothing without Burnham being there in person, said the official with knowledge of the process quoted earlier: “In the civil service, power always gravitates to the most senior people. You need the senior decision-making people there in person.” Former Chancellor Rachel Reeves was criticized for spending only five days working from the Treasury’s Darlington campus in almost two years after Labour took power. (Treasury officials insist she visited other places nearby.)

Burnham’s pledge to work from Manchester each week “can’t slip,” said one senior Labour aide, even as he faces more demands to travel abroad. “The whole center of power has to move there at the end of the week.”

Esther Webber contributed reporting from London.

Roblox is promising more changes to its child safety features following testing from Australia's online safety regulator, eSafety.

eSafety has been looking into concerns that the company hasn't been in compliance with Australia's Online Safety Act, including "allegedly failing to have sufficient measures in place to prevent contact between adults and children under 16." While Roblox has put some new safety measures in place, eSafety's testing this year found that the platform "continued to put children at risk, including allowing contact between children and adult strangers."

eSafety's testing found that:

adults could send connection req …

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It's wild that 13 years after Comcast said Americans don't need gigabit internet we're somehow back in this conversation. Especially since the private sector has delivered, albeit unevenly, on super high speeds in certain areas; …

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The safeguard was designed to prevent users from being overwhelmed by harmful content, but TikTok wanted to determine whether it made the app less engaging.

In August, Toru Hinkle was stocking shelves at their job at Target when they noticed two customers and asked if they needed any help. The men requested a price check on an item - but even after Hinkle told them the item was $20, the customers asked for the price again and again.

"After a while, I realized that I'm basically being pranked, and I noticed the glasses," Hinkle says, referring to the frames with a blinking light. They were the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and the customers were filming. Hinkle eventually called a store manager over, but the pranksters antagonized her, too - asking the price repeatedly, deliberately misgendering Hinkle …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When TIME Magazine released their “100 Most Influential People” list in 2017, it stood to reason that Jared Kushner would be listed. After all, Donald Trump had brought his son-in-law into the White House and given him a broad portfolio which, as the husband of the president’s favorite daughter, made him very powerful. Kushner couldn’t be fired. But the question of whether he was up to the job was pretty well answered by the man TIME chose to write the required encomium: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It’s hard to read the late secretary’s words as anything but damning with faint praise. 

Kissinger opened his short two-paragraph tribute by essentially saying that the presidential transition process is difficult and that a president who doesn’t know anything must depend on his advisers to help him through it. Then he wrote:

This space has been traversed for nearly four months by Jared Kushner, whom I first met about 18 months ago, when he introduced himself after a foreign policy lecture I had given. We have sporadically ­exchanged views since. As part of the Trump family, Jared is familiar with the intangibles of the President. As a graduate of Harvard and NYU, he has a broad education; as a businessman, a knowledge of administration. All this should help him make a success of his daunting role flying close to the sun.

That was it. In Kissinger’s accounting, Kushner’s only qualifications were that he went to college, was a businessman and knew the president. And we all know what happened to the guy who flew too close to the sun. 

As it happened, Kissinger had actually been quite involved with the Trump transition and knew exactly how ill-prepared they were. Shortly after the 2016 election, the 93-year-old had met with Trump, Kushner and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn at Trump Tower and traveled at their behest to China to meet with Premier Xi Jinping and set up an early bilateral meeting between the two leaders. (Trump, ever the bull in a China shop, immediately fumbled the agreement by taking a call from Taiwan’s president. Apparently, no one in the president-elect’s circle knew about the One China policy, or that no president had spoken with a Taiwanese leader since 1979.) 

Kissinger helped set up a so-called “Kushner channel” to certain powerful Chinese leaders — even as the young staffer was privately pursuing private Chinese business deals on the side. But by the time the secretary was asked to write that plaudit for TIME, it was pretty clear that he didn’t have much use for the new administration. 

That apparently didn’t matter to Kushner. Trump’s son-in-law appears to see himself as the Kissinger of this era, consciously modeling himself on the notorious diplomat, perhaps not realizing that the secretary’s foreign policy achievements were tempered by his reputation as a ruthless, immoral purveyor of realpolitik who left millions of dead bodies in his wake. Then again, it’s also possible Kushner knows that very well and is fine with the comparison.

While Kushner’s approach to world affairs is remarkably similar to Kissinger’s, the older man’s worldview was shaped by his ideology and academic understanding of world power dynamics. Kushner’s, on the other hand, is primarily influenced by his alleged business savvy; like his father-in-law, he sees everything through the lens of a win-win real estate deal. 

Kushner’s portfolio during the first Trump administration was wide-ranging. But his heart was in international relations, particularly the Middle East, where he had an intense interest in resolving the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By the end, he managed to orchestrate the Abraham Accords, an agreement normalizing diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Israel. The accords were controversial, with some calling it a useful first step, while others viewing it as a sop to commercial interests that ignored the Palestinians altogether. 

Although Kushner chose not to officially rejoin his father-in-law’s second administration, he is serving, along with Trump’s real estate buddy Steve Witkoff, as its special diplomatic envoy. So far, the duplicitous duo have tried and failed to achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine and failed to stop the war with Iran. The Gaza Peace Plan that had everyone strutting around declaring victory just a few months ago is stuck. 

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The exchange of prisoners took place as required by the agreement, and some aid has been allowed to flow, but the violence has continued. The current impasse hinges on Hamas disarming and Israel withdrawing, and neither side will make the first move. There appeared to be some movement a couple of weeks ago when Trump announced that his so-called Board of Peace had secured an agreement from Hamas to disarm and Israel to suspend all military strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s immediate rejection of the idea brought Kushner back into the mix to see if he could resurrect a little of that old Kissinger magic. 

After Syria and Egypt’s surprise attack on Israel in October 1973, Kissinger spent nearly two years on “shuttle diplomacy,” flying back and forth between Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem in search of a lasting peace deal. If managing a fragile ceasefire counts as a win, he was successful. But it took Jimmy Carter to broker the Camp David Accords six years later, which brought a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel.

Over the past few days, in an attempt to salvage the obviously empty Board of Peace agreement, Kushner traveled to Egypt, along with his fellow board member and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, to meet with leaders of Hamas. The trip raised the ire of Israel’s supporters in the U.S., including former ambassador Eliot Abrams, who accused Kushner of legitimizing a terrorist organization. The leader of Hamas said they will not disarm unless Israel withdraws from Gaza, so Kushner shuttled to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu, who basically told him to pound sand; Israel will not withdraw until Hamas disarms. They decided to establish some working groups to talk further, and the next day Israel struck a seaside cafe in Gaza City, killing seven people. 

Kushner gave the game away in an interview with Fox News, putting the full onus on Hamas to end the impasse. “If they don’t follow through now on their commitment,” he said, “everyone will see that they’re not genuine about peace, and then Israel will have a lot more support from the U.S. and others to go and finish the job.” 

Trump’s special envoy for peace didn’t explain what he meant by “finish the job,” but considering what Israel has already done, it’s pretty clearly a terrifying threat. Even Henry Kissinger was more subtle than that.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correctly reflect the events of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

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