We’re back! And so are Ukraine’s key backers. On the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, leaders meet in Kyiv this Monday to discuss new pledges of support for the country. 

On the podcast, Zoya Sheftalovich and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Nick Vinocur discuss what support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is looking to secure from the Coalition of the Willing ahead of another difficult winter.

Next we look at elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany is on course for a sweeping victory. If it wins an outright majority, its lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, could become the first AfD state premier. 

Plus: e-scooters get a reprieve until the end of the year in Brussels, much to Nick’s delight. The Brussels government announced it had found a way around a legal ruling that threatened to remove the scooters from the streets on Sept. 1. 

Questions? Comments? Get in touch! You can message us or send a voice message to our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

Die Sommerpause ist vorbei und Kanzler Friedrich Merz blickt entscheidenden Wochen entgegen. Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert, wie gefährlich seine schlechten Umfragewerte und die anstehenden Ost-Wahlen für die gesamte Koalition werden könnten.

Pünktlich zum ukrainischen Unabhängigkeitstag überrascht der britische Premier Andy Burnham mit der Freigabe von Storm-Shadow-Marschflugkörpern. Hans von der Burchard ordnet ein, warum dieses Vorpreschen Merz beim ewigen Streitthema Taurus in Bedrängnis bringt.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview reagiert der ukrainische Botschafter Oleksii Makeiev gelassen auf Wladimir Putins aktuelle Drohungen. Er fordert, Moskaus Einschüchterungen nicht nachzugeben, und hofft auf frischen Verhandlungsdruck durch die erwarteten US-Unterhändler.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

Mehr von Rixa Fürsen gibt es auch hier:
Instagram: @rixafu | X: @rixa_fursen.

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LONDON — The U.K.’s Brexit settlement scheme left a woman stranded at a foreign airport — after confusing her for her identical twin sister and stopping her from boarding her flight home.

The error is the latest in a string of problems caused by the system’s design affecting tens of thousands of EU citizens living in Britain.

When Brexit hit, EU nationals already resident in the U.K. at the time were given “settled status” granting them the right to stay once free movement ended.

But instead of getting a physical document to prove their status, the Home Office decided they would only be given a digital “eVisa” stored on a Home Office computer.

Just one problem: the information in the eVisa computer isn’t always correct. The Home Office system sometimes gets confused, including, POLITICO has learned, between identical twins.

Known issue

The system’s problem with identical twins is a “known issue,” the Home Office told Nidia Webb over the phone as she tried to work out why she had been stranded in a foreign country.

When Webb, who has lived in the U.K. for eight years, tried to fly home from a holiday in Spain earlier this month, she was denied boarding at the gate.

The problem? Her settled status wasn’t showing up in the system. The flight departed without her.

After spending hours on the phone with a Home Office helpline, the problem became clear.

“My digital settled status had become linked to my identical twin sister’s details rather than my own, meaning my status could not be properly matched to my identity,” she told POLITICO.

“I was informed that this is a known technical issue affecting some twins within the Home Office system.” The Home Office did not dispute her account and said it would be contacting her to ensure the issue was resolved.

Webb was assured over the phone that she would get an update when the issue with her eVisa account had been fixed. But in a result which failed to inspire confidence, the Home Office sent the confirmation email to her twin sister.

“I had no idea the issue had been corrected until I was allowed to board my flight home,” Webb said — a fact which compounded an already stressful situation.

“Had I not spent hours on the phone trying to resolve the matter, I have no idea how long I could have remained stranded abroad,” she added.

Webb was forced to pay for a new flight home out of her own pocket — money her travel insurer said she should try to recover from the Home Office.

The eVisa database keeps a record of a person’s full name, date of birth, nationality, and a facial photograph. But these traits are by definition often a very close match for identical twins, including Webb, whose name is similar to that of her sister.

Many such cases

Monique Hawkins, acting CEO of the3million, which campaigns for the rights of EU citizens living in the U.K., said problems with the eVisa system sometimes left people unable to prove their identity when they needed it most.

“We have seen many cases where someone else’s immigration status is entangled with another person’s eVisa account. We had hoped, after repeatedly raising this issue, that the Home Office had taken more steps to prevent it happening. It just shows how, despite claims that the eVisa system is highly resilient, it can fail people at the critical moments they need it to work,” she said.

Hawkins said it was “crucial that people have a genuinely stable means by which to prove their status” and described the digital-only system as “rushed,” adding: “We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation, as carriers and the Home Office play a blame game shifting responsibility between each other.”

While a Home Office spokesperson did not dispute Webb’s account, they defended the eVisa system, arguing it had worked for many people.

“Over 10 million people have already successfully used eVisas to prove their immigration status,” the spokesperson said. “As we expand our digital system, we are committed to data accuracy and ensuring that the safeguards in place to support eVisa users are accessible to anyone reliant on the digital system. In the rare cases where errors are identified, the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours.”

More than 76,000 people have their names, immigration status, or photographs mixed up in the U.K.’s immigration database, the Guardian reported in 2024. This number includes other nationalities subject to eVisa and not just EU citizens.

Webb’s story comes after POLITICO revealed that the European Union’s own digital border system, EES, is also sometimes confused by identical twins.

As identity and border systems are increasingly digitalized, twins are facing more problems across the board, say campaigners. “Too often twins are considered as one as opposed to as individuals and we urge those making these technological decisions to consider twins’ individuality,” Rafi Cooper, head of communications at Twins Trust, said.

For most of Russia’s years-long war against Ukraine, Russian civilians have been relatively insulated from Kyiv’s attacks. That is changing. 

Since July, Kyiv has broadened its long-range drone campaign beyond conventional military targets, intensifying strikes on Russia’s oil and gas industry and hitting the vast warehouses of Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon. 

While these are primarily intended to cause economic damage, in the words of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “to bring the war back home – to Russia,” they also mark another important shift. Ukrainian authorities are increasingly seeing Russian civilian casualties as a price they are prepared to pay for taking the war deeper into enemy territory. 

The numbers help illustrate the change. In 2025, Ukrainian attacks inside Russia killed 253 civilians, according to the United Nations, which says it was not able to independently verify the numbers. This year, in the month of July alone, Russian authorities reported that 79 civilians were killed and 601 injured, a marked increase in the casualty rate. 

Zelenskyy has said that Wildberries is a legitimate target because it has been “used by the aggressor to ensure the supply of sanctioned components for the production of drones and navigation equipment.” Russian soldiers supplement their equipment by purchasing items from Wildberries.

Maryana Bezuhla, a Ukrainian lawmaker and one of the most outspoken critics of Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s military leadership, is unapologetic about the increased risk to civilians. “Russia’s logistics system is used to wage the war of aggression against Ukraine,” she told POLITICO. “Russia has been targeting Ukrainian civilians all the years of the war.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied accusations from Ukraine that Wildberries handles military supplies but conceded to journalists that “the situation is indeed difficult” for the company. 

There is no indication that Ukraine is deliberately targeting civilians — even as Russia continues to hit apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure with ballistic missiles and drones. And yet, there is no indication that the rising civilian toll in Russia is causing Kyiv to reconsider its approach. 

“It is a very important thing to stress from the outset, that any civilian casualties resulting from Ukrainian attacks are collateral damage,” said Jaroslava Barbieri, Ukraine expert at Britain’s Chatham House. “No Ukrainian strikes have deliberately targeted civilian districts.”

“But we know that Russia has been systematically targeting Ukraine’s critical energy infrastructure and civilian districts with the deliberate intent to cause civilian casualties,” she added. “That’s an important underlying distinction to draw.”

On Friday, a Russian drone attack on a busy shopping mall in Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s hometown, left 16 people dead and more than a 130 wounded, including children. The strike was a double-tap — that’s when second attack on a target is conducted around half-an-hour later and is designed to catch first responders, a tactic used frequently in northern Syria.

Since the war began, Russian officials have consistently denied their forces intentionally target civilians and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has instead accused Ukraine of deploying troops and heavy weapons close to civilian infrastructure. 

Russia has “a clear pattern” of targeting Kyiv and other urban centers with large civilian populations, Rosemary DiCarlo, the U.N. under-secretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs, told the U.N. Security Council in July.

The U.N. has verified that at least 16,874 Ukrainian civilians, including 820 children, have been killed since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale assault on the country in 2022. Ukrainians believe the toll is likely higher, arguing there are many unrecorded deaths near the front lines and on territory occupied by Russian forces.

DiCarlo also expressed concerns about Ukraine’s drone attacks. “Any attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, wherever they occur, are a clear violation of international humanitarian law,” she said. 

It is an argument that infuriates Ukrainian officials, who bristle when asked about the risks to Russian civilians with the tactical switch. Even asking the question triggers accusations of echoing Moscow propagandists. “You are helping Russia by pushing this civilian stuff,” a presidential aide said. He declined to answer when asked whether Ukrainian commanders adhere to any pre-strike procedures to assess risks to civilians.

The change in tactics has alarmed some European officials, according to Adrian Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and author of Battleground Ukraine, who regularly meets with senior European officials and diplomats. “They have always been low-risk and fearful of Russian escalation,” he said.

The shift, he added, has been enabled by Ukraine’s growing ability to manufacture its own long-range drones and by cuts in U.S. assistance that have reduced Washington’s leverage over Kyiv. “There will be noncombatant casualties, but in an existential war you can’t fight with a hand tied behind your back,” Karatnycky said. “Ukraine’s ability to counterpunch is a relatively new phenomenon.” 

How will the Ukrainian attacks play out in Russia — will they weaken Putin politically?  Tim Willasey-Wilsey, a former U.K. diplomat now at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank in London with close ties to Ukraine’s defense ministry, said Kyiv must try to minimize civilian casualties with the long-range drone campaign. 

“There are some risks,” he said. “As we know from the history of warfare, the bombing of civilians tends to actually harden people’s resistance rather than weaken it. Just think of the London Blitz, but also Ukraine now. And second, there is a danger of losing what still is a remarkable degree of Western support for Ukraine.” 

“But you cannot wage war without casualties,” he added.

BERLIN — It’s not the kind of photo op German Chancellor Friedrich Merz would likely want to frame for his office wall: him standing next to Ulrich Siegmund, the far-right politician a national magazine recently labeled the country’s “most dangerous man.”

And yet, such a picture might soon be hard for Merz to avoid. On Sept. 6, Siegmund is set for a sweeping victory in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. If his far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party secures an outright majority in the state parliament, Siegmund will likely become premier, and his party will have broken through the political “firewall” that has kept it out of all federal and state governments since its founding in 2013. 

It would be a historic triumph for the AfD and a shock to Germany’s political system.

As premier, one of Siegmund’s earliest duties would be to take over the annually rotating chair position of the regular conferences of Germany’s 16 state premiers. The role usually comes with a visit to Berlin and a joint appearance with the chancellor before the press.

Calling this uncharted territory would be an understatement. “The AfD is questioning the fundamental decisions made by the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949,” Merz once said.

The chancellor is not alone in his concern. All other major parties, and large parts of the German media, see the AfD as a threat to the country’s liberal postwar order. Yet, if the party takes power in a state for the first time, the political establishment will no longer be able to keep it at arm’s length. While normal relations may be out of the question, at least for the foreseeable future, Germany’s federal system requires a minimum of cooperation and mutual support.

So how would the German establishment deal with a state governed by the AfD?

POLITICO put this question to officials in the federal government and several state governments. The reluctance to answer was striking, especially among Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. Senior party figures and state ministers either refused to comment or would not be quoted by name.

The hesitation is understandable. The CDU and the CSU once owned the political space to the right of center. Today, the AfD is eating into it. State ministers from both the Social Democrats and the Greens were more prepared to discuss strategy on the record.

The conversations for this article were dominated by a single concern: domestic security, especially the protection of intelligence information, given the AfD’s advocacy for closer ties with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

According to Social Democrat Georg Maier, who serves as the state of Thuringia’s interior minister, Siegmund’s party has “good channels” to Moscow. “If the AfD provides the minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt, the champagne corks will be popping in the Kremlin,” he told POLITICO.

Although there is no playbook yet for containing an AfD government, the thinking in Berlin and several state capitals has already moved well beyond the abstract.

Option 1: Hold extra informal meetings

One way to limit the AfD’s access to sensitive discussions could be to simply have more discussions. In addition to the gathering of state premiers that Siegmund would be expected to chair for a year, Germany’s states regularly coordinate through a network of ministerial “conferences.” Among the most important is the conference of interior ministers, where some of the country’s most pressing security and intelligence matters are discussed.

One possibility being considered is to keep holding the regular meetings of the interior ministers but also organize separate gatherings for particularly sensitive issues. Only Germany’s 15 other interior ministers would attend these meetings, without the representative from Saxony-Anhalt. Several ministers confirmed this hypothetical scenario to POLITICO.

The idea builds on a long-established practice in German politics. State governments are informally grouped into so-called “A” and “B” states, depending on which political camp holds the governing majority: Social Democratic-led governments on one side, conservative governments on the other. Before major conferences, both camps coordinate internally.

Applied to the AfD, this model would put the ostracized government on one side and everyone else on the other.

Christoph Degenhart, a professor emeritus of constitutional law and former judge at Saxony’s Constitutional Court, said the idea is definitely conceivable. “How long that would work and whether the courts would tolerate it is, of course, another question.”

Option 2: Erect a wall

One of the biggest worries regarding the AfD is its closeness to Moscow, according to Maier.

Specifically, the minister’s biggest concern is an AfD-led interior ministry. Whoever runs such a department, he said, gains access to highly classified information. And yet, excluding the entire state from Germany’s domestic intelligence network would not be possible; public safety, including protection against terrorist attacks, would rule that out.

“But we can build Chinese walls into our joint information systems, barriers that block certain information,” said the minister. He laughed briefly. “‘Chinese walls’ fits perfectly here. The AfD doesn’t just have a soft spot for Moscow,” he added.

What information would Maier wall off? “We would have to keep all intelligence relating to right-wing extremism and the entire area of espionage away from the AfD,” he said. Such a “preventive segmentation” would be legally possible, he added, citing legal advice he has obtained. It could also be implemented relatively quickly. “Government formation is not going to happen overnight,” he said.

Patrick Harr, a spokesperson for the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, rejected all accusations of closeness to Russia. “That’s complete nonsense,” he said. “We don’t have a red telephone to Moscow.”

“We talk to everyone, whether West or East,” he added. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to hand over files. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. If and when we get access to such information, we understand our responsibility as a party of government.”

But Konstantin von Notz, a Green member of the Bundestag and deputy chair of its intelligence oversight panel, pointed to Austria’s far-right Freedom Party’s (FPÖ) time in government as a cautionary example. After entering government in 2017, the FPÖ took control of the interior ministry. The following year, police raided Austria’s domestic intelligence service and seized sensitive data, including information from allied agencies.

Western intelligence partners then restricted the sharing of confidential information, while Austria’s service temporarily pulled back from working groups of the Bern Club — an informal network of Western intelligence services, officially on a voluntary basis.

Germany could face something similar under an AfD government, said von Notz, if for example the country’s allies suspected Russia would be able to access the database used by Germany’s domestic intelligence services to exchange information on extremists, spies and other security threats. 

“The British, the Americans, the Poles, the Ukrainians — nobody would share information with us anymore for fear that everything would be passed on to Moscow,” warned the Green politician.

Option 3: Cut off their funds

Another instrument mentioned both by AfD figures and the party’s opponents is Germany’s fiscal equalization system, which helps poorer states with money from wealthier ones and additional federal funds.

Saxony-Anhalt has depended on this system for decades. In 2025, it received around €2.8 billion according to preliminary figures — nearly one-fifth of its state budget.

Reducing or even halting such payments would be one way to make life harder for an AfD government, or to coerce the party to behave in ways the political establishment finds acceptable. Within the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch, this scenario is seen as a real risk. 

The legal hurdles, however, would be high. Danyal Bayaz, the Green finance minister of Baden-Württemberg, one of Germany’s wealthier contributor states, chose his words carefully. “The fiscal equalization system is anchored in the constitution and is not an instrument that can simply be changed according to the political weather,” he said.

He then added a caveat: A federal state based on solidarity, said Bayaz, depends on shared commitments to the rule of law. If a state government were to call those principles into question, or pursue legally dubious special paths, that would affect trust and cooperation with the federal government and other states, “including in financial matters.”

Bayaz’s spokesperson stressesdthat this was the minister’s personal assessment, not an agreed position of the state government — a coalition led by the Greens, with the CDU as its junior partner.

Option 4: Deploy the nuclear option

The most powerful constitutional instrument would be Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the Bundesrat — the chamber representing the states — may take “necessary measures” to compel a state to fulfill its legal obligations. In plain English: Berlin could force a state government to obey federal law.

The provision has never been used. In the reporting for this story, no one interviewed brought it up on their own — perhaps out of conviction, perhaps out of fear that merely mentioning it would play into the AfD’s hands before the elections.

Within AfD’s right-wing intellectual circles, federal coercion has long been treated as a realistic scenario. In 2025, publisher Götz Kubitschek, whose estate lies in Saxony-Anhalt and who the New York Times once labeled “the prophet of Germany’s new right,” told POLITICO this is what he would expect to see happen.

A potential trigger can only be guessed at. If, for example, an AfD government in Saxony-Anhalt failed to provide for even the most basic needs of asylum seekers, the federal government could intervene with binding orders to restore those services, eventually through a federal commissioner with the authority to issue instructions to the state and all its authorities.

Would all this work?

Whatever Germany’s political establishment does to contain the country’s first AfD government, this fall or later, the risks are obvious. Measures meant to defend liberal democracy could also feed the AfD’s central grievance and that of many of its voters: that the establishment refuses to accept the party even when it wins.

Public opinion on this is more divided than it once was. A representative poll from July found that only 42 percent of Germans still considered it right for the Social Democrats and the CDU to refuse cooperation with the AfD; another survey showed that support for the exclusion strategy had fallen to 46 percent, down from 54 percent in early 2025.

Doing nothing out of the ordinary may well be the safest option for established parties. The AfD has spent years thriving in opposition, turning its rivals’ mistakes and broken promises into political fuel. But it has never governed. Once in office, it could become mired in incompetence and internal infighting, sparing its opponents the need for special defensive maneuvers.

Key figures in the AfD’s own orbit are aware of this danger. “They have to prepare like the biggest overachievers,” Kubitschek told POLITICO in 2025 regarding Siegmund’s state party. Benedikt Kaiser, another influential far-right intellectual and aide to an AfD member of the Bundestag, also advised caution if the party wins an outright majority: “In the first 90 days of government, the AfD has to pursue a politics that does not create fear,” he said, mentioning “family benefits, free school meals, things like that” as examples.

Even as Germany’s political establishment considers ways to contain an AfD state government, the party’s intellectual leaders are fretting over a more immediate concern: Simply governing could prove a more effective constraint on the party than any measure the country’s political mainstream can devise.

Welcome to Week 2 of Canberra Playbook.

If you’ve been forwarded this newsletter, you can sign up free here.

ESSENTIALS

• Bumper night tonight on ABC (featuring Barnaby Joyce and lobbyists)
• National Cabinet Agenda revealed
• AI “super users” tend to be late career employees

DRIVING THE DAY

CABINET IS IN PERTH TODAY: Everyone’s job is to pretend the WA GST deal is good macroeconomics. Chin up, Jim Chalmers, you can do it! The Prime Minister did this at a Labor fundraiser Sunday night hosted by Roger Cook.

NATIONAL CABINET AGENDA: Taking place Wednesday, the agenda seen by Playbook doesn’t include GST revenue splits or NDIS reform implementation. Instead it’s:

1. National AI Standards
2. National Firearms Reform
3. Ending Gender-Based Violence
4. Fuel Supply Update
5. H5 Avian Influenza Update

And Queensland Premier David Crisafulli will fight Anthony Albanese over AI frameworks on Wednesday, The Australian reported this morning. He wants mandatory local consultation on data centers, protection of water supply and no requirement that the center be run on renewable energy. Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the Albanese government would consider using constitutional powers to override Queensland’s objections.

POPCORN ALERT: One Nation’s star recruit Barnaby Joyce is the subject of tonight’s Australian Story, 8.00 pm AEST on ABC — preview here. If you tune in, you might want to stick around for …

LOBBYISTS BACK IN THE CROSSHAIRS: Four Corners will tonight examine a system that sees politicians outnumbered in Parliament by those trying to influence, 8:30 p.m. AEST on ABC. We cover the new lobbying registration system lower down, including the new $140 fee for registering for a lobbyist badge to access Parliament unescorted.

Rule of Threes: ABC’s 7.30 Report host Sarah Ferguson is under fire in The Australian for failing to disclose an outside executive producing role for two years.

BY THE NUMBERS

ONE NATION’S MIGRATION CONFUSION: David Farley came across as a credible new MP in his Insiders appearance Sunday — but didn’t dispel the question of why he’s even in One Nation. His migration messaging suggests there’s little difference between government migration projections for 2026-2027 (about 230,000 net overseas migration, or NOM) and One Nation’s policy.

By the NOMbers: Farley referred to the party’s migration target (130,000) as “true NOM,” and then reeled off a list of migration agreements that wouldn’t be included in that number, such as PALM and backpacker visas. In that approach, One Nation would be advocating higher migration than the government projects, possibly up to 260,000. That would be getting close to the most recent official NOM count of 306,000.

Pauline Hanson was cleaning up the confusion on socials.

NOM-inal control: Remember when the Coalition got in trouble for being unable to distinguish permanent migration (a target which the government has some control over) from NOM (notoriously difficult to control because it includes working holiday makers and depends on number of departures)?

TEN INVESTIGATIONS, ONE REPORT: Rick Morton has examined the National Anti-Corruption Commission’s tendency to finalize investigations but not publish investigation reports, for The Saturday Paper.

NACC “finalized” ten investigations in the 2024-25 financial year, per its annual report, but only released one investigation report. In some cases the body appears to be splitting hairs over what is “finalized” vs. “completed” to avoid reporting obligations, Morton reported.

PARLIAMENT’S LOBBYIST TAX

Lobbyists are now required to hand over $140 in order to stalk the halls of Parliament House, as part of changes to the sponsored pass system introduced back in June, reports Miriam Webber.

The new system requires two parliamentarians to sign your form for access. The Department of Parliamentary Services told Playbook the fee relates to “the increased volume of sponsored cards issued.” The fee does not apply to advocacy and community groups.

Orange pass holders have until Oct. 31 to reapply, and you will be added to the federal lobbyist register, which also enforces a code of conduct.

The government claims the changes go “beyond any measures implemented since the opening of [today’s] Parliament House over 35 years ago.”

Playbook hears: The reapplication process is painful — lobbyists are placing multiple calls to DPS but getting no sense given of when applications will be processed. If you know more, you know how to reach us.

Did you know? 42 percent of all the lobbyists on that register are former government representatives, per the Attorney General’s register.

Yes, but: Most lobbyists won’t make it onto the register, because they work in-house. A previous estimate said the register only captured 20 percent of Australia’s lobbyists.

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

CARNEY BUCKS TRUMP, AGAIN:  “They asked too much and offered too little,” Carney said over the weekend, applying retaliatory tariffs after Trump reintroduced 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods.

Inside the 72 hours that cratered the deal.

TRUMP IS FIGHTING HIS TRADE WAR ON A SKELETON ARMY: The U.S. Trade Representative’s office is attempting to manage an expansive tariff agenda with its smallest staff in two decades. That’s creating legal risks and unintended consequences.

DEMOCRATS LOOK TO INVESTIGATE TRUMP’S CRITICAL MINERALS DEALS: POLITICO’s Hannah Northey and James Bikales report that Democrats angling to take back Congress want deep investigations into President Donald Trump’s ever-expanding critical mineral spending spree — and the industry is taking note.

Action alert: Australian business leaders considering financing packages — in some cases over $1 billion — will need to decide whether they want to sign up for possible congressional scrutiny that could put their companies under a microscope.

Trump earlier this month unveiled more than $3 billion in federal backing for a slew of projects, adding to the some 160 deals that Trump said the administration has struck.

Investigations are also percolating in the Senate, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and others circling around Cantor Fitzgerald and Oklahoma-based USA Rare Earth, which recently closed a $1.3 billion government loan.

THE PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW

JOHN ROESE — “IT’S GOING TO WORK OUT, BUT IT REQUIRES A LOT OF THOUGHT”

The DELL Technologies Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer spoke to Ryan Heath about the trials of AI regulation and what not to worry about.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What AI mistake should regulators avoid? 

You can’t regulate the technology. If you specify technology under AI regulation, by the time you publish, it’s not the same technology. But you can regulate behavior and intent.

You don’t have to agree with us, but you do need to be very close to the practitioners.

Coordinated governance at the national level is essential: I have over a thousand jurisdictions around the world telling me what to do. They never talk to each other.

Where is your head at, on AI and jobs? 

We are doing a terrible disservice talking about AI and its intersection with jobs. Agents don’t do jobs, they do work.

Every job in the world — we looked at 6,400 — contains work that shouldn’t be done by humans anymore. There are no jobs that will not be disrupted, but very few jobs completely go away.

[But] if we repurpose people to the wrong jobs or we do nothing, it gets very ugly. It’s going to work out, but it just requires a lot of thought.

What does that mean for people reading this interview? 

Expert level work continues to be a human thing, it gets redefined. Interaction with people becomes a bigger and bigger piece of the human job.

Should we change how we talk about agents?

Using phrases like, “an agent is a digital worker” — people hate it. Putting an agent in your org chart is the equivalent of putting a word processor in your org chart.

What’s coming next?

The next five years are gonna be characterized by the digitization of work, not the replacement of jobs. Governments around the world as part of their sovereign strategy will all have digital skills and skills transformation policies.

Most people are stuck in thinking AI equals chatbots.

Exactly [and it’s not true]. Take hygiene agents: this is high autonomy, low complexity, boring work. There’s no human associated with them, and they just do boring work that people should be doing that they aren’t. The first one we built simply cleans up our CRM database.

It’s boring, it’s not the Terminator.

Is that where the value comes from?

We have a term we use internally, called an AI super user. We created a culture that encouraged experimentation [with AI] and what we saw was the emergence of people that became hyperproductive.

They all had the same tools, but certain people would suddenly operate an order of magnitude better. Once you find them, you have to study them.

The average demographic of a super user was late in career. We found knowing the tool is half of the problem. Knowing what problem to solve is the other half, which is fairly deep institutional knowledge.

For us, the goal is: create as many super users as possible. I think it will shape how we actually shift our workforce.

Your 2026 AI “word of the year” was governance. What will it be in 2027?

It’s probably going to be “jobs.”

WHILE WE HAVE YOU

We’ve heard that Playbook is not accessible on Department of Defence computers. If you know someone in the department who should have seen this warning to defense bureaucrats from shadow defence minister James Paterson, please text or email them the link.

CANBERRA MEETS WORLD

BEIJING SEIZED ANU ACADEMIC PASSPORTS: The incident occurred in 2024, Natasha Bita reported for The Australian. ANU continued a flagship Joint Science College with Shandong University for another two years, until the Australian government last week ordered the joint venture shut down.

ANU under the microscope: ANU’s Lesley Seebeck gives the Chancellor role some forensic examination, laying out the ways new Chancellor Gordon de Brouwer might be squeezed by the federal government, which unlike other universities, controls the institution.

THE AUSTRALIAN-BORN UK MP REVIVING THE FIGHT FOR ASSISTED DYING: Melbourne’s Lauren Edwards, now a U.K. Labour MP, is restarting a stalled process to legalize assisted dying in England and Wales — and she’s taking inspiration from Australia, POLITICO’s Noah Keates reports.

Edwards argues her legislation is “preferable and has stronger safeguards” than Australian systems — unbearable suffering is not a criterion for eligibility in her bill. MPs passed fellow Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last year by 314 votes to 291. It failed to become law after delays in the House of Lords.

ICYMI: PUTIN TAKES AIM AT AUKUS, from Latika Bourke.

EMBASSY ROW

FAREWELL, HELLO: EU ambassador Gabriele Visentin has his farewell drinks Tuesday before wrapping up work Aug. 28. We’re getting ready to welcome his replacement, Lawrence Meredith from Ireland, who is currently the EU ambassador to New Zealand.

STATE OF THE NATION

ACT JOINS GUN BUYBACK SCHEME: The Commonwealth will fund 75 percent of the compensation and administration costs of the scheme and all firearm destruction costs for the ACT (for NSW a 50/50 split was agreed). There are about 23,000 licensed firearms in the Territory.

Around 1,000 license holders will be affected by a proposed ACT firearms cap.

NATIONAL CABINET 

JONNO-ING FORCES: Labor and the Coalition could soon reach consensus on proposed benchmarks for AI, on the national cabinet agenda for Wednesday, Paul Sakkal reported.

Opposition spokesperson for home affairs, Jonno Duniam, told the SMH it’s “essential that the parties of government work together” against any potential campaign by One Nation against data centers.

One important sticking point is a feud over the use of fossil fuels to power data centers, which give firms such as Google, Anthropic and ChatGPT computing power to respond to searches, create new models, and produce videos.

Data center wars: Labor-led Victoria — when not caught up in political turmoil — has been making a bid to win data center investment. The Coalition wants to make NSW state the AI capital of the southern hemisphere.

PARTY ROOM

ONE NATION

Slick team shapes up: Will Glasgow reports Chris Taylor’s getting rave reviews as Hanson’s new chief of staff. He’s joined in the Canberra operation by Maxwell Pryor (ex-Australian Banking Association), but spokesperson Richard Henderson is shifting to Cory Bernardi’s team in the South Australian parliament.

“Please Explain” is back with new episode: The video series remains world-class political messaging.

Tony Abbott joins Pauline Hanson … in court: Hanson wants the High Court to overturn her racial vilification conviction. And the man who triggered her 2003 prison sentence for electoral fraud (now president of her chief rival party) is siding with her. Poor Angus.

ICYMI: Hanson has also been subject to death threats.

LIBERALS 

Tony and Michaelia take Dorothy Dixers on tour: The Opposition doesn’t get Dorothy Dixers in the Parliament’s chambers. So they’re inventing the X version. Such as Sen. Michaelia Cash asking Abbott why Australian values matter.

Andrew Bragg issues annual report on himself: Another week, another innovation from the NSW Senator. It’s more back-slap than 360-degree assessment.

Practical Magic — Tim Wilson’s AI workshop: Small businesses in Wilson’s electorate of Goldstein will be getting day-to-day tips from Google on how to integrate AI into their workflows.

CROSSBENCH

Secret ballot for AI committee: A name will be drawn out of a hat when Parliament returns next month, unless two candidates withdraw. We’re told independent Sen. David Pocock, Greens Sen. David Shoebridge and United Australia Party Sen. Ralph Babet have put their hands up.

AGENDA ASSISTANT

The Education and Employment Legislation Committee will hear from unis and peak bodies including Universities Australia and The Group of Eight in a public hearing on the Universities Accord Bill (from Canberra).

Several committees are on tour this week: 

Queenscliff (Victoria): Community and heritage groups will give evidence on Defence estate management in a public hearing of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee (from Queenscliff Town Hall).

Brisbane: Groups including the Queensland Council of Unions and Multicultural Australia will speak to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration as it continues an inquiry into the value of skilled migration to Australia.

Launceston: Standing Committee on Regional Development, Infrastructure and Transport will hear from Tasmanian councils for its inquiry into local government funding.

Adelaide: Community Affairs References Committee is running two inquiries. One probe into the Support from Home Program; and another will hear from epilepsy expert and advocacy groups.

Amplify Alliance will host an off-the-record session with Greens senator David Shoebridge for rising Gen Z and Gen Y leaders in the not-for-profit space. The ticketed event is scheduled for 2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at East Hotel in Canberra.

Former minister for communications Paul Fletcher will give opening remarks at the International Institute of Communications “Secure and Sovereign?” event in Melbourne, starting from 5:30 p.m.

NSW Minister for Skills Steve Whan will give the keynote address at the National Skills Week 2026 NSW conference in Sydney.

AFTER HOURS

PROUD PARENT: If you follow Greens Sen. Sarah Hanson-Young on social media, you’ll be aware Kora Young has released her first single — PTSD — on Spotify. You might not have realized that’s her daughter! You can listen here.

COMMUNITY CORNER

PLAYBOOK FEEDBACK

Former submarine commander Rear Admiral Peter Briggs responded to POLITICO’s interview with Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy.

“Minister Conroy is misinformed on both counts regarding Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU) submarine propulsion. Contrary to his claims, LEU-powered submarines do not require a return to France for reactor refuelling, nor is the process an insurmountable operational hurdle. France’s Marine Nationale routinely conducts mid-life refuelling during standard 10-year Full Cycle Dockings (FCDs), completing the entire overhaul in under 18 months via designed-in casing hatches. These refuellings could easily be performed locally in Australia.”

Briggs’ full reply is on Malcolm Turnbull’s Substack page.

MEA CULPA: The editor-in-chief of the Saturday Paper is of course, Erik Jensen.

LOCAL CANBERRA

RIDE FOR FREE! Steve Evans reports that in two years of the tap and go MyWay+ system, not a single fine has been issued in the ACT for fare evasion. That’s easier to do on the tram than bus, because there’s no passing by a driver to get on.

EXPRESS YOURSELF: Federal departments have started their annual bidding war for new graduates. And, like everyone else, they’re determined to hook you in five seconds. Here’s the Education effort.

RESTRAINT OF TRADE? Journalists are able to buy merch — we’re talking cufflinks, wine glasses et al — from the Senate merch shop, but not the House of Representatives.

Said one reporter: “I’m a big nerd. I want the merch. Let me at it.”

We looked into the complaint, and “journalist” is not a protected attribute in Australia (just a subsidized one, if you’re lucky enough to negotiate a News Bargaining Incentive deal). Because refusing to sell you wine glasses does not prevent you from working as a journalist or earning an income, there’s no legal case here.

MOVE OVER ONZIEME: Bar Nova opens this Wednesday, putting a new spin on the popular Kingston dining corner.

HIRING

Anthropic is looking for a community engagement manager on data centers, based in Australia. (h/t to Cam Wilson for spotting it first). More details here.

The Australian Antarctic Division is looking for someone to head its assets and infrastructure branch. More details here.

JOIN THE CYBER RESERVE FORCE: Cyber professionals have a new opportunity to contribute directly to Australia’s national security through a new specialist workforce shipping skills into the Defence Department.

MOVES

Ed Cavanough has switched roles to be Head of Policy at The McKell Institute.

Manohar Thyagaraj is now Head of Strategy and Government Relations at Austal.

Lizzie Butterworth is the new CEO of the Australian Festival Association.

Tammy Shipperley is now senior media officer at the Australian Land Conservation Alliance.

Adam Pullman has been promoted to assistant secretary for armoured fighting vehicles at Defence.

Keara Shaw is now an assistant secretary of policy and program management at DFAT.

Geoff Cousins is trying to unseat Woolworths chair Scott Perkins.

ANNIVERSARIES

60 YEARS SINCE WAVE HILL WALK-OFF: Vincent Lingiari and more than 200 Gurindji, Mudburra and Warlpiri people stood up and claimed their rights 60 years ago Sunday, initiating strike action that paved the way for the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

BIRTHDAYS

Belated wishes for Lynton Crosby, former MP and CEO of the Night Time Industries Association, Paul McLeay, and comms consultant Kate Scanlon, formerly of Allens and the RBA who all celebrated Sunday; and James Massola for Friday.

President Donald Trump‘s summer-long celebration of America’s 250th birthday ended Sunday the only way it possibly could: with race cars, fighter jets, a presidential limousine, an operatic tenor and a bald eagle flying over Washington.

The inaugural Freedom 250 Grand Prix transformed streets surrounding the National Mall into an IndyCar course, bringing thousands of spectators to the capital for what was billed as the finale of Trump’s months-long patriotic celebration.

And subtle, it was not.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump opened the festivities by taking a ceremonial lap around the course in the Beast, the presidential limousine. Melania, making a relatively rare public appearance, wore a bright white top and black pants — an optimistic color choice for an afternoon of race cars.

Tenor Christopher Macchio, a Trump favorite, performed the national anthem. A trained bald eagle flew over the starting line. Military aircraft roared overhead. Even the Qatar-gifted Boeing 747 now serving as Air Force One joined the spectacle, flying above the course escorted by fighter jets as Trump and Melania circled below.

Trump then waved the green flag to begin the race before watching from a glass-enclosed presidential viewing box.

The spectacle capped months of Freedom 250 events that have repeatedly combined national birthday celebrations with Trump’s personal taste for pageantry, including a UFC fight on the White House lawn and other sporting and patriotic events.

The race itself took weeks to build. Streets around downtown Washington began facing restrictions in July as crews constructed the temporary circuit, and some closures will continue into September while it is dismantled.

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Once the green flag fell, drivers raced 147 laps through Washington, with six cautions and several crashes interrupting the afternoon.

Driver Kyle Kirkwood ultimately survived the chaos, winning the first IndyCar race held on the streets of the nation’s capital. Christian Lundgaard finished second and Will Power third.

For all the presidential pageantry surrounding it, the unusual setting earned praise from the drivers. Kirkwood called Washington an “incredible place” to race.

The event was designed as the grand finale to this summer’s Freedom 250, Trump’s version of America 250.

With a bald eagle, fighter jets, Air Force One, the Beast and race cars roaring through the nation’s capital, Trump certainly didn’t send the celebration out quietly.

The post Freedom 250 grand finale: Race cars, Air Force One and one bald eagle appeared first on Salon.com.

LONDON — Britain is still lagging behind Australia when it comes to assisted dying. But one Labour MP who has seen the debate in both countries is hoping she can push forward a thwarted attempt at change in the U.K.

“If I had six months to live and I was facing a potentially very frightening, very painful, very uncomfortable death, I would want to be able to have the choice to choose to end my life surrounded by my family,” Lauren Edwards, who became an MP in 2024 — and hails from Melbourne, Australia, tells POLITICO in an interview.

Edwards’ support for assisted dying is shaped in part by the laws in Victoria, where she still has family. In 2017, it became the first Australian state to legalize assisted dying for people expected to die within six months, or 12 months for those with neurodegenerative diseases, and who face unacceptable suffering. 

Though Edwards argues her own legislation is “preferable and has stronger safeguards” than the Australian model — unbearable suffering is not a criterion for eligibility in her bill — she found it helpful to see how assisted dying has worked in practice the last time British MPs tackled this issue.

It’s an experience from which many in Labour still bear the scars — and on which new Prime Minister Andy Burnham already appears to have drawn a line in the sand.

Stepping forward 

MPs passed fellow Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last year by 314 votes to 291. But it failed to become law after delays in the U.K.’s House of Lords.

Now Edwards is reintroducing the bill — and is adamant that the groundbreaking social change can succeed this time around.

It means that next month, the House of Commons will once again be thrust into a divisive vote on a matter of conscience, deciding whether to legalize assisted dying in England and Wales for terminally ill adults judged as having fewer than six months left to live.

“When Kim’s bill came up, I did have conversations with my dad about how things have gone in Australia,” Edwards says. The situation reassured her compared to “more extreme examples” like Canada, where a terminal condition is not required for patients to be eligible, but instead an irreversible, “advanced state of decline” and “unbearable physical or mental suffering.”

Next year, Canadian eligibility for assisted dying is set to be expanded to include individuals whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness, though this change has been repeatedly delayed.

Sense-checking the legislation with family down under was “really important” when weighing up whether to support Leadbeater’s earlier proposals, she says.

Edwards has Australian friends who have settled in Britain too — and contrasts a friend able to attend his mother’s assisted death in Australia with British families currently worried about prosecution for helping relatives to die. U.K. law punishes the offense with up to 14 years in prison.

“[The] status quo is not neutral. It is not benign,” Edwards argues. “It is a situation where, if we don’t make this legislative change, unfortunately, we will be allowing that pain, fear and isolation.”

In October 2024, an independent review of assisted dying in Victoria by the state Department of Health’s Centre for Evaluation and Research Evidence found the system to be safe and “operating as intended” with “no reports of ineligible individuals” accessing substances to end their lives.

However, access to assisted dying varies across the vast state — which is only slightly smaller than the entire U.K. — and just “a few practitioners” deliver the majority of care. Victoria has been urged to press the central Australian government for more funding.

Choice of priorities

Back in the U.K., the main political parties have agreed that the decision to legalize assisted dying should be a matter for parliament, rather than any one administration. MPs were not whipped to vote in any particular way on Leadbeater’s bill, and the issue is treated as a matter of conscience.

But there was tacit endorsement for the most recent attempted overhaul from the top of Keir Starmer’s government. Before entering No. 10, Starmer promised broadcaster Esther Rantzen — who has stage four lung cancer — that he’d make time for a vote in parliament.

Leadbeater’s bill also received technical support from civil servants in the Department for Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice to ensure its workability.

New Prime Minister Andy Burnham appears to have other ideas. Burnham was not an MP when assisted dying passed the Commons last year and abstained in a 2015 vote during a previous stint in parliament.

More strikingly, when asked about his stance on the issue last month, Burnham said “the fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care” needs to happen first — and argued it would be “very challenging” to introduce assisted dying without substantial progress on these two running policy sores.

Edwards remains bullish. She commends the PM’s commitment to sustainably funding social care — Burnham has kicked off cross-party talks on the issue and asked for a speedier inquiry — and she insists his professed skepticism hasn’t put her off.

“It’s really important that we consider them together,” Edwards says of social care and assisted dying. “I don’t think that there is a reason to delay” changing the law, she argues, highlighting £125 million provided by Starmer’s government for adult and children’s hospices. (A Public Accounts Committee report said this one-off funding did not directly pay for service delivery or solve financial problems facing the sector.)

Edwards’ bill has a four-year implementation period. That means if it becomes law next year, assisted dying wouldn’t be permitted until 2031. She believes the two systems can work on a “dual track” and that poor palliative care won’t incentivize people to access assisted dying. 

“I don’t necessarily think that lack of care is a motivator for this option,” she argues. “I think it’s a last resort when physical suffering really can’t be relieved.”

From MPs to peers

A majority of Starmer’s Cabinet backed the bill last time, including Health Secretary Yvette Cooper and Justice Secretary Alex Norris — but only 12 MPs need to switch sides for the bill to fall, making the margins tight. Indeed, suspended Labour MP Karl Turner told POLITICO he’ll vote against the bill after abstaining last June.

“People’s views are largely what I expect them to be when we next vote on this,” Edwards argues. “We haven’t seen any significant moves away from people who were supportive of the bill.”

Then there is the substantive question of the House of Lords. Edwards condemns the “small minority” of peers she blames for filibustering the previous bill. She said she is happy to work with peers on good faith amendments in the “scrutiny process” this time around.

The pro-assisted dying camp will be relying on a little-used pair of laws — the Parliament Acts — which would, in narrow circumstances, allow a bill to be passed despite being deadlocked or defeated by peers in the House of Lords again. “I want to get it back to [peers] ASAP so that they will have the maximum amount of time to finish the job of scrutinizing,” Edwards says.

An impassioned opposition campaign last time around argued Leadbeater’s bill was not safe. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, while neutral on the principle of assisted dying, said it could not support her plans due to a lack of clarity about their profession’s role in the process and whether adequate resources are in place.

While Edwards may struggle to win over Burnham, she hopes to “sit down and have a conversation” with the prime minister before MPs return from recess in September.

One open question remains: how Starmer himself will vote. As prime minister, he voted for it, but didn’t explain his reasoning. Now freed from the constraints of government, Edwards hopes Starmer will make an intervention. 

“He has a well-known legal background, is very considered and is obviously a really crucial voice,” she says. Starmer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump has some beef with the price of beef.

American ranchers — many of them among his most reliable supporters — have some beef with his solution.

Trump announced Friday that the United States would temporarily allow up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef to enter the country without triggering higher out-of-quota tariffs. He said exporters had committed to selling the beef at 25% below current market prices.

“This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

But the plan has prompted unusually sharp opposition from cattle producers and Republicans representing ranching states, who say importing discounted foreign beef will undercut the American producers Trump has promised to protect.

“What a slap in the face to American cattlemen & consumers,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., wrote. “Worse than socialism!”

Massie argued that temporarily dumping cheaper foreign beef into the American market could lower prices without giving U.S. ranchers an incentive to raise more cattle.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., also criticized Trump’s approach, instead endorsing Massie’s PRIME Act, which would loosen federal restrictions on meat processed at smaller local slaughterhouses and sold within the same state.

If Trump really wanted to lower beef prices he would support Massie’s PRIME Act which allows individual states to permit local custom slaughterhouses to sell individual cuts of meat directly to consumers, restaurants, and grocery stores within that same state. But instead the… pic.twitter.com/feQtEmoqTy

— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) August 21, 2026

“If Trump really wanted to lower beef prices he would support Massie’s PRIME Act,” Greene wrote Friday, also calling for country-of-origin labeling on imported meat. “Why won’t the Republican elected President support these legislations which are America First?” she asked.

The criticism comes amid a growing rupture between Trump and former MAGA allies including Greene and Massie, who increasingly accuse the president of abandoning the “America First” agenda they once championed.

They aren’t alone on beef.

Beef prices have reached record highs as the American cattle herd remains near its smallest size since the 1950s. Years of drought, wildfires and high operating costs led ranchers to reduce their herds, which can take years to rebuild.

The American Farm Bureau Federation warned Trump’s proposal could cause “long-term damage” to cattle producers, while Republican lawmakers from major cattle states have also pushed back.

Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy said he advised Trump against the plan, noting that many of the ranchers affected are MAGA Republicans. Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer, herself a cattle rancher, said lowering grocery prices cannot come “at the expense of American producers.”

Trump dismissed those concerns Friday.

“The ranchers are great; they’re my people. I love the ranchers,” he told reporters.

But consumers want lower prices, Trump said, and the foreign beef would provide “a little help.”

The post “They’re my people”: Trump shrugs off concerns of MAGA ranchers’ beef appeared first on Salon.com.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised the growing use of artificial intelligence in classrooms Sunday, even as she acknowledged there is little evidence yet showing how the technology affects student learning.

During an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, McMahon pointed to Alpha School in Austin, Texas, where students spend the first two hours of their school day wearing headphones and learning in front of computers with teachers monitoring their progress.

“The beauty of that is that a student almost has a one-on-one tutor,” McMahon said, explaining that AI programs can adjust instruction based on how quickly individual students are learning.

Her comments come just days after the Education Department issued new guidance telling schools to evaluate educational technology based on evidence that it improves student outcomes.

But when Bash noted that generative AI is too new for comprehensive long-term studies and asked whether students were effectively becoming “guinea pigs for chatbots,” McMahon acknowledged the evidence is still developing.

“There aren’t a lot of metrics available now,” McMahon said.

Still, she praised what she witnessed at the Austin school. “Oh, it’s working wonderfully and they’ve been doing it now for a few years,” she said.

Schools across the country are already wrestling with how much artificial intelligence belongs in education.

Thirty-seven states have issued guidance on AI in schools while districts that initially focused on preventing students from using chatbots to cheat are increasingly introducing AI literacy programs designed to teach students both how to use the technology and recognize its limitations.

Those limitations can be significant. During a recent AI training session for educators in South Carolina, an AI-generated world map misspelled Mali as “Mail,” labeled Egypt “Sopth” and replaced Libya with a country simply called “Africa.”

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McMahon said schools should monitor whether AI tools actually improve student outcomes and remove those that don’t. She also emphasized that AI should not replace human teachers.

“Nothing should replace that one-on-one teacher interaction with students,” McMahon said, calling for “AI with guardrails.”

The question facing schools may increasingly be where those guardrails should go. McMahon said parents should be able to object when they believe AI isn’t helping their children, while acknowledging schools are still learning what effective AI education looks like.

“It’s how effective are the teachers being able to interact with the students and work with them,” she said. “Students need to be able to communicate with each other.”

The post Are kids “guinea pigs for chatbots”? McMahon backs classroom AI use appeared first on Salon.com.

When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz finally rose to power in May 2025 after years of political failure and an inconclusive election, he already faced what looked like an impossible situation. He had Donald Trump on one side, a few months into an increasingly erratic and vindictive second term, and the rapid rise of the neofascist far right in Europe, and specifically the Nazi-curious Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, on the other. 

Merz’s party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union, had just “won” a federal election in Germany with 28.5% of the vote, the second-worst result of its entire post-World War II history. The AfD had literally doubled its vote share, to nearly 21%, but enthusiastic support from Elon Musk, JD Vance and other MAGA ambassadors failed to push it over the top (and may even have backfired). Merz was able to forge an awkward governing coalition with the center-left Social Democratic Party, the CDU’s longtime ideological opponents. The “firewall,” an agreement that Germany’s mainstream parties will do everything possible to block the AfD from power, had held for the moment.

If Merz briefly became a leading figure in optimistic media narratives about liberal democracy fighting back against extremism — alongside wounded-duck Emmanuel Macron in France and since-deposed Keir Starmer in Britain — that didn’t last long. After 15 months in power, Merz’s popularity has sunk to sub-Trump levels, while the AfD seems poised to become the largest party in upcoming state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, in Germany’s scenic and historic heartland. 

Merz once vowed to cut the AfD’s support in half, essentially through a combination of appeasement and opposition. He could undercut the far right’s electoral appeal, he suggested, by cracking down on “irregular immigration” but not going all the way to MAGA-style mass deportation, and by shoring up the German welfare state and reducing wasteful spending. (Across party lines, Germans still support a social safety net that seems remarkably generous by American standards.) 

In the judicious language of The Economist: 

None of this has worked. Irregular immigration has plummeted, but the AfD has simply moved further right, now raging against “culturally foreign” workers and urging “remigration” (a slippery term that can mean anything from deporting asylum-seekers to ethnic cleansing).

The CDU/SDP government is widely seen as inept and bureaucratic, which is exactly what tends to happen in “grand coalitions” between parties with fundamental disagreements about the nature of society. Meanwhile, the AfD has gone from 10% support in 2021 to almost 30% in some national polls this year. 

There’s a growing consensus that the firewall, or Brandmauer in German, has failed, but much less agreement about exactly why that happened or what opponents of far-right nationalism or neofascism should do about it. Although I doubt anyone in Germany is inclined to take history lessons from an American, I would suggest that in both countries the failure to suppress the fascist uprising speaks to fundamental flaws in liberal democracy, and that the bitter lessons of the Trump/Biden/Trump era may prove instructive.

What we have perhaps learned during the second Trump term — let me emphasize “perhaps” — is that the only way out is through. The temporary return to “regular-order democracy” and the rule of law under Joe Biden (a tragic and pathetic historical figure, for sure) was a damaging illusion. Forceful resistance to the Trump virus has been crucial, for moral and symbolic reasons as much as anything else, but the only effective cure, it would seem, lies in widespread exposure to its most toxic effects. 

To give Merz credit, he seemed to understand the historical moment and tried to embrace his role as Europe’s last man standing against tyranny. It was “five minutes to midnight” on the continent that had birthed liberal democracy, he announced, and the reawakening of fascism was “the last warning to the political parties of the democratic center” to reach consensus on immigration policy, economic reform, a shared European defense strategy and other thorny issues.

But from the beginning Merz was about the last person you’d pick as defender of democracy, circa 2026. He’s more like a time traveler from the glory days of neoliberalism, a pro-American, pro-business multimillionaire with a wardrobe full of €3,000 suits, a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” under his arm, and an entire career of close ties to transatlantic high finance and the Reagan-era Republican Party. Photoshop him into a 2005 summit meeting alongside Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac, and he’d fit right in. Today? Not so much.

It’s also true, as German journalist Jörg Lau has observed, that Merz was essentially for Trump before he was against him. He first ran for the CDU leadership in 2018 as an overtly MAGA-friendly candidate, vowing to push the party back toward the right both on immigration and what we might now call “wokeness” after the downfall of longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel. If he didn’t exactly promise to make Germany great again, that was the general idea. 

In short, this was the wrong guy pursuing the wrong strategy, in a manner that should sound familiar to American liberals and progressives: endless triangulation and compromise on right-wing policy goals, while refusing to stand on any bedrock principles except the increasingly shaky proposition that we’re decent people and the other side is dreadful. Furthermore, the mainstream German parties’ efforts to demonize or marginalize the AfD only seem to have activated public sympathy and increased its appeal, much as the congressional investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection and Jack Smith’s indictments of Trump only hardened his support.  

One could argue that a more vigorous prosecution of Trump and his allies, or for that matter an outright ban of the AfD, might have produced different results. But as they say, we are where we are. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the German firewall is that since the AfD has never held power anywhere, it can make increasingly outlandish, ultra-MAGA promises with no consequences and no accountability: It will deport literally all “foreigners,” up to and including the second- or third-generation descendants of immigrants, and pour money into the welfare state while reducing taxes and bringing back full employment. 

Very little of that will happen in the real world, presumably. But in another echo of the second Trump regime, the AfD feels no need to compromise or moderate its positions, because its grassroots energy is driven by extremism. “We don’t think about how to make ourselves nice so that the CDU asks us for a coalition,” one AfD legislator told the Economist, while another said that those within the party who advocate moving toward the center have already lost the argument, since “our election results are getting better and better without us being forced to change.”

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From this side of the Atlantic, the inescapable conclusion is that Merz’s firewall is doomed, and that sooner or later his party will reach an accommodation with the AfD or simply surrender to it. That’s likely to end his political career and fracture the CDU; see also the current relationship between the British Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. That’s a prognosis, not a recommendation, and should not be confused with James Carville’s infamous doctrine that Trump-era Democrats needed to “roll over and play dead.” 

What we are starting to perceive in the U.S., I believe, is a more difficult but ultimately more hopeful path forward. It may be necessary for Germany to go through its own period of far-right triumph, which will be especially painful for obvious historical reasons, in order to convince the public that fascism (whether old-style or new) offers no legitimate answers to inequality, alienation or global disruption. Those who stand up for their ideals and principles without compromise, and seek to communicate them clearly, certainly won’t win every election, and they may well suffer for their convictions. But they also have a better chance of turning the tide against tyranny than the professional prevaricators in business suits with bankers standing behind them. We’ve tried that, over and over. It has never worked.

The post What if the fascists win in Germany? appeared first on Salon.com.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday flatly rejected a call by his former defense chief to send the country to the ballot box.

“I believe that during a war like this, elections in general pose major risks,” Zelenskyy told journalists — including POLITICO — behind closed doors.

A vote “right now would be a tsunami for the state, one that would divide Ukraine,” the Ukrainian president said. He added that his strategy is “to bring the country to the end of the war and preserve an independent and sovereign state.”

His remarks come after former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov — ousted from his government role in July following a controversial reshuffle — called for elections earlier this week.

“If our partners offer us specific conditions under which elections can be held … safely, legitimately and democratically,” with the participation of soldiers on the front line and citizens who fled to other countries to escape the war, “then let’s discuss it,” Zelenskyy continued. But “it is impossible under the conditions we have right now, when Putin refuses to agree to any form of ceasefire,” he argued.

Fedorov has emerged as a rival to the current president. In a video address Tuesday, he argued that “people cannot endlessly live in a state where they do not understand why certain decisions are made.”

But his appeal has been criticized by both Zelenskyy allies and opposition members: Elections — which are suspended under Ukraine’s martial law, in place since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022 — would only strengthen the Kremlin’s position and sow division. “I have genuinely had, and continue to have, a very positive attitude toward Mykhailo,” the president said of Fedorov. “We have been through a lot together. “But I believe that he is either going himself – or is being pushed – toward the wrong things.”

Fedorov seems undeterred and doubled down in comments to the BBC on Sunday, saying he has a “moral right” to raise the topic of elections. “If I cannot share my ideas and be open about them with my own society, then what are we fighting for?”

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.

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When you’re looking at a thread of social media bots sharing the same five replies to AI-generated slapfights between anthropomorphic fruits, it can be hard to remember the internet used to be a lively place. Enthusiastic message boards, blogs dedicated to any niche you could find in any hobby, news and culture websites as renowned for sharp commenters as their stable of writers. This was a time when your blogroll was nearly as important as your friend list, a period where a well-curated feed on Google Reader (RIP) denoted good taste as much as a co-sign from the arbiter of taste Derek Guy does today. 

The web never quite reached the global utopian vision of its 1990s early adopters, but for about two decades it was a good hang. Like a neighborhood bar or a bowling alley, the internet was a place you could reliably go to have fun and occasionally learn something from semi-strangers who shared your interests. The internet was rife with what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places,” a space separate from home and work that encouraged social interaction and bred cohesion in communities. 

“Third places remain upbeat because of the limited way in which the participants are related. Most of the regulars in a third place have a unique and special status with regard to one another,” Oldenburg wrote in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place.” “It is special in that such people have neither the blandness of strangers nor that other kind of blandness, which takes zest out of relationships between even the most favorably matched people when too much time is spent together, when too much is known, too many problems are shared, and too much is taken for granted.”

Oldenburg was pushing back against restrictive zoning and suburbanization, arguing that fully residential neighborhoods weakened the societal fabric of the United States. For a time, the internet did put a Band-Aid on this problem, bringing isolated communities together and providing the sort of crosstalk they couldn’t hear on the abandoned sidewalks of gated developments.

At the risk of dating myself even more than I already have, I had a few websites that I visited daily from the family room of my suburban home. Often I’d sign on to read the takes of sharp commenters over the writers who provided the digital parlor. 

In the same way I’ll now swing through my local bar or corner coffee shop to see who’s around, back then I’d find time every day after school to give the forums and comment sections a once-over. I’d scroll down and take in a guerilla column from a reader with an unprintable name and profile picture of a crudely drawn yellow Pokemon with a phallus for a nose. A bit farther down, I’d find the poster who spoke only in comments lifted from forums about the mallcore metal act Avenged Sevenfold. Heading over to the Gawker network of websites — prior to its Peter Thiel-backed demolition — I’d find what the nation’s bored lawyers had to say about news from the worlds of gossip, pro sports (Deadspin) and sci-fi (i09). While never quite as gratifying or grounding as a true third place you had to physically visit, these online hubs were the closest thing to cafes and churches that the infrastructure of the internet could offer. 

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The social media age — sometimes dubbed Web 2.0 to distinguish it from the less openly interactive earlier era of the internet — seemed to supercharge this impromptu rezoning of the information superhighway. Without needing to build a website or familiarize themselves with a forum, any netizen could start or join a conversation at any time. It ushered in a new kind of fun that was fresher, busier and airier than past listservs and chatrooms, the dank basements of internet interaction.

All that promise started to wither around 2015, as social media giants gobbled up more and more of the profits that kept earlier hangouts afloat. Facebook’s fraudulent video metrics struck a massive blow against the writers and editors that maintained these digital communities. Blogs and entire media networks shuttered in rapid succession. There were fewer places to hang out, and the ones that remained were less useful due to overcrowding. Facebook’s turn toward spam and fake news, along with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X), turned the one-time gathering places into crowded bazaars where vendors shouted for your attention. Reddit, once the internet’s premier place to talk about the news, was cannibalized by invite-only chatroom platforms like Discord and Telegram. 

Writers who remained employed on this hollowed-out web were increasingly left wondering where all their favorite haunts had gone. 

Here’s Dan Nosowitz writing for New York magazine in 2018: 

The other day, I found myself looking at a blinking cursor in a blank address bar in a new tab of my web browser. I was bored . . . What I really wanted to do was waste some time. But . . . I didn’t know how. I did not know what to type into the address bar of my browser.

Five years later, New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka declared “the social-media Web as we knew it . . . appears to be over.” “The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. Remember having fun online?” he wrote. “These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago.”  

This dearth of fun places to gather is nothing new in America, online or otherwise. We’ve seen it happen to our physical third spaces for decades. In his seminal 1995 essay “Bowling Alone,” Robert D. Putnam worried about the erosion of American social life — blaming television and the internet in part — for the decline in civic organizations and club participation. His book-length expansion, published five years later at the dawn of the social media age, worried that lonely entertainment would kill what was left of American socializing, and that collapse would lead to a new age of political extremism.

I don’t dispute that using the internet is a solitary activity. It was then and remained so even at the height of blogs and Weird Twitter. But over the last decade it’s become even lonelier, with algorithms and vertical video platforms like TikTok siloing users into consumption over interaction. Facebook turned from a place to share photos and event invites to a place where Boomers give themselves AI psychosis. Under Musk, X has transformed into a haven of bots looking to start fights for pennies. This era of scrolling alone has, as Putnam halfway predicted, coincided with a rise in asocial extremism.

There is some hope for people who remember those old internet communities, as well as the nostalgic youngsters who never knew a more wide-open internet. The internet as we knew it might have been torn down to the studs by Silicon Valley bigwigs looking to sell the wiring for scrap, but the bones are still good. Many people are already rebuilding. My favorite listservs are likely goners, both thanks to the obsolescence of the technology and the average age of users rapidly approaching “dead,” but you can see echoes of that chattier internet if you know where to look.

Defector, a cooperative founded by former Deadspin staffers, bills itself as “the last good website,” and an appreciative community of subscribers seem to agree. Music publications like Stereogum and Pitchfork have switched to a paid supporter model while fostering their communities of indie music obsessives in robust — and, in Pitchfork’s case, brand new — comment sections. Dinosaurs of Web 2.0 like Digg and Myspace have either relaunched or are considering it, thinking their friends-first model will be welcome in 2026.

Hopefully, I don’t sound as naive as those early internet optimists, who thought new shifts would usher in a golden age of humanity. But the early success of these smaller, people-first models is promising. Internet users have proven they’ll make a habit of swinging by these fledgling new spaces — if the conversation is interesting enough.

The post The internet is losing its third places appeared first on Salon.com.

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One man was injured in a shooting in Brussels’ Saint-Gilles municipality Saturday evening, just a day after gunmen targeted a police station in Anderlecht.

Saint-Gilles Mayor Jean Spinette told Belga news agency the victim didn’t suffer life-threatening injuries and linked the incident to narcotics-related crime. The shots were fired on a square known as “place des Deux Bancs,” associated with drug trafficking.

The attack comes one day after shooters carrying a heavy weapon targeted a police station in another Brussels municipality, Anderlecht, before fleeing on an e-scooter.

The violence marked “yet another wake-up call” for the Belgian capital, the region’s Minister-President Boris Dilliès reacted on X. “We will not let organized crime take over our city,” he added.

Dilliès said his government was taking measures to address the violence, including by appointing a Brussels commissioner for drugs, who will take on the role from September, and by restricting the use of e-scooters, which he said “unfortunately, are often used by criminals.”

The city’s top prosecutor Julien Moinil said that, given the target of Friday night’s shooting, “there is a clear intent to undermine authority” — but he added that “they will not succeed.” He explained that a lot of shootings are ordered from inside prison, calling for secure zones where phones cannot operate.

A third shooting followed early Sunday morning, when a bullet hit the window of an apartment near Porte de Hal.

Brussels recorded 57 shootings in the first seven months of 2026. Two people were killed and 21 injured, according to VRT.

KARMIEL, Israel — It was a gunshot to the head of a Palestinian militant that first exposed the gulf between Gadi Eisenkot and Benjamin Netanyahu.

In March 2016, two Palestinians armed with knives attacked Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, wounding one of them. The soldiers opened fire, killing one attacker and leaving the other wounded on the ground. Several minutes later, a 19-year-old Israeli soldier named Elor Azaria cocked his rifle, aimed at the wounded attacker’s head and pulled the trigger. Azaria said he had felt threatened.

The question of whether the soldier should face a military trial divided the country. To some Israelis, Azaria was no criminal but a soldier who had killed a terrorist. To others, Azaria had carried out an extrajudicial killing or even murder. He was eventually convicted of manslaughter by a military court.

Eisenkot, then chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, defended the decision to prosecute Azaria, arguing that shooting an attacker who had already been incapacitated was incompatible with the values of the Israeli military. Netanyahu sided with the soldier and called for him to be pardoned.

A decade later, the dispute still reverberates. 

A former member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, Eisenkot has seemingly overnight emerged as the prime minister’s most formidable challenger ahead of Israel’s parliamentary election on Oct. 27. His centrist Yashar! party — which he founded last year — was born out of rising discontent with Netanyahu’s response to the attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza that followed.

In several nationwide polls, Yashar! — a name that can be translated as “Straight!” or “Honest!” — has already overtaken Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party. Eisenkot’s supporters point to the Azaria case as evidence of their candidate’s high moral standards. Netanyahu’s allies, meanwhile, have revived it to portray the former military chief as too soft and too far to the left.

Rarely has an Israeli election been watched abroad with such anticipation. For much of the past 30 years, Netanyahu’s mix of right-wing nationalism and hardline stance on Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians and its neighbors has dominated Israeli politics. Eisenkot is promising his supporters that he can wrest the country in a new direction. 

“There are moments in history when, after a very charismatic and dominant leader, people deliberately choose someone less charismatic because they simply want peace and quiet,” said Shai Bazak, an Israeli former diplomat and communications figure who served Netanyahu as an adviser during his first term as prime minister. “They do not want all the drama anymore.”

“Eisenkot is a very nice person,” Bazak added. “He is not extreme. He is not particularly divisive. That makes it easier for people who traditionally vote for the right to move toward him.”

Whoever wins will have to navigate a radically different foreign-policy landscape.

Since Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s position on the world stage has fundamentally changed. The largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust drew a wave of international solidarity that receded in the following months and years as Israel responded with a war in Gaza. According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, both civilians and combatants — a figure widely considered reliable by the Associated Press, U.N. agencies and independent experts. Israeli military officials indicated at the beginning of this year that they agree that the overall Gaza death toll was around 70,000; in 2025 the IDF said it had killed more than 22,000 militants in Gaza and acknowledges that while it has tried to minimize civilian casualties, two to three civilians have died for every militant killed.

In several European countries, most notably Spain and France, criticism has grown as Netanyahu’s government has responded to attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah with what critics consider excessive military force, devastating large parts of Gaza and seizing a large swath of southern Lebanon.

Relations between Netanyahu’s government and the European Union have deteriorated to such an extent that Israel’s foreign minister no longer speaks to the EU’s top diplomat. On June 18, 2026, Gideon Sa’ar announced that he was severing all contact with Kaja Kallas after it emerged that during a visit to Mexico in May, Kallas had compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s apartheid system.

Israel’s traditionally close relationship with the United States has also come under strain. Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump did agree to jointly conduct military strikes against Iran aimed at preventing the Islamist regime in Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran has declared the destruction of Israel to be one of its overriding goals.

Yet Trump has also occasionally criticized Netanyahu. “What the fuck are you doing?” Trump reportedly asked the Israeli prime minister in June, referring to his offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump has so far stopped short of publicly endorsing Netanyahu for reelection.

Meanwhile, the conflict in Gaza and the war in Iran have driven down U.S. support for Israel, especially on the left wing of the Democratic Party and among parts of Trump’s MAGA coalition, making the debate over Israel a live political issue for both parties as they head toward midterm elections.

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As Netanyahu comes under growing pressure from Eisenkot, he is fighting back hard, seeking to turn the former army chief’s greatest strength, his security credentials, against him. “Eisenkot wanted to surrender. Netanyahu is fighting!” the prime minister declared in a recent campaign video.

“The campaign against me has begun,” Eisenkot told supporters at a campaign event earlier this month in the northern Israeli city of Karmiel. Speaking in a slightly hoarse voice, he launched his counterattack. “Netanyahu attacks his opponents in the same way every time, claiming: Only Netanyahu can provide security.”

Then he added pointedly: “We saw how that worked out on October 7.”

Eisenkot is demanding an independent state commission of inquiry into the failures of the military, intelligence services and political leadership surrounding the 2023 Hamas attack. In doing so, he also wants the prime minister himself to be held accountable. Netanyahu’s government has so far resisted establishing such a commission.

“If there is no commission of inquiry, it will hang over Israeli society like a curse,” Eisenkot said. He delivered his attacks on Netanyahu calmly, almost monotonously. Eisenkot is stocky, with the air of a chef who has been persuaded to leave his kitchen to greet an enthusiastic dining room. 

He is neither a charismatic nor a gifted speaker in the mold of Netanyahu. But he projects something that could become the most valuable currency in this election: trustworthiness. While Netanyahu carries the burden of an ongoing corruption trial, his challenger is widely regarded as a man of exceptional integrity.

An Israeli retiree named Josef Benjamin listened intently to Eisenkot’s speech in Karmiel, watching him with a critical eye. He had come to make up his own mind about the man who has suddenly become the talk of the country. “Eisenkot is a man of the people, a good man,” Benjamin said. “Netanyahu, on the other hand, rules like a king. He is no longer good for Israel and should step down.”

It is no coincidence that Eisenkot chose Karmiel. The city is predominantly home to lower- and middle-income Israelis and is a stronghold of Netanyahu’s Likud party. Over the course of just a few days, Eisenkot was making 15 appearances here in northern Israel.

The rally was a display of confidence: He wants to win over the prime minister’s voters. Among the roughly 300 people gathered in Karmiel’s municipal auditorium, there was plenty of gray hair, along with hearing aids and walking sticks. Young faces were rare.

Eisenkot has something of a paternal charm. He projects the experience of a man who has known both a remarkable rise and profound loss. He comes from modest circumstances. The son of Jewish immigrants from Morocco, he was born in the city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, far from Israel’s major metropolises. He grew up in Eilat, a Red Sea resort town on the country’s southern tip. 

In the military, he rose from an ordinary infantryman in the storied Golani Brigade to chief of staff of the IDF — appointed by Netanyahu, himself a product of intellectual circles and elite American universities. In one campaign ad, Likud mocks Eisenkot’s less-than-perfect English. Yet his popularity continues to rise.

Majd Yassin, an Arab Israeli in his 40s, likes the prospect of Eisenkot becoming Israel’s first prime minister with Moroccan Jewish roots. “I really appreciate that he addressed the problems facing Arab society. No one is really showing much interest in solving the problems we face in Israel’s Arab community, as Israeli citizens,” Yassin says. “I think Gadi Eisenkot recognizes these issues, and he has the ability to address them.”

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It is not only Eisenkot’s story of social mobility that makes him relatable to many Israelis, but also his family’s tragedy.

On Dec. 7, 2023, Eisenkot’s son Gal Meir was taking part in an operation to recover the bodies of two Israelis who had been abducted into Gaza on Oct. 7 and killed. As the soldier approached an open tunnel shaft, an explosive device detonated. The 25-year-old was critically wounded and later died in hospital.

Two of Eisenkot’s nephews were also killed in Gaza. Eisenkot does not make his loss a campaign issue, but most Israelis know exactly what his family has sacrificed. Netanyahu’s son Yair, by contrast, remained in Florida as Israel mobilized some 360,000 reservists in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, drawing criticism from Israelis who returned from abroad to serve. Netanyahu defended his son, saying Yair was volunteering in the United States and helping procure equipment for the military and emergency services.

Eisenkot now embodies Israel’s grief for its fallen sons and daughters — and the hope that the man whose profession was war might be the one to end it.

His popularity also reflects a yearning among many Israelis to once again place the country in the hands of a benevolent father figure, as Yitzhak Rabin once was. Rabin, too, had served as IDF chief of staff before entering politics, commanding Israel’s military during its victory in the Six-Day War. Until his assassination in 1995, he was the great hope for peace in the Middle East.

Does Eisenkot have what it takes to inherit Rabin’s mantle? Many highly decorated former military commanders have tried before him. According to an analysis by the Israel Democracy Institute, roughly two-thirds of former IDF chiefs of staff later entered national politics. Most failed. Ehud Barak did become prime minister, but his coalition collapsed after just 20 months. More recently, former IDF chief Benny Gantz, a centrist who once emerged as Netanyahu’s most formidable political rival, saw his party’s support collapse and is now likely to fail to make it back into the Knesset.

The military and politics ultimately operate according to very different rules. The armed forces are hierarchical; politics demands compromise — and therefore a particular ability to deal with people. 

Those are soft skills the military does not necessarily teach, said Danny Orbach, a military historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “In the army, Ehud Barak — an extreme example of a failed politician with a military background — could shout at his subordinates if they didn’t obey him,” Orbach added. “In politics, people simply walk away.” 

Orbach, however, considers Eisenkot a different kind of figure: “Eisenkot is very conscientious and deeply patriotic,” he said. “He means well. Without Netanyahu’s baggage, he may be able to rebuild relations with the EU and with certain segments of the Democratic Party in the United States.”

The military historian is more skeptical about Eisenkot’s lack of political experience. Eisenkot entered parliament only four years ago. He is also critical of positions Eisenkot took as a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet after Oct. 7.

“Had it been up to Eisenkot, he would have given in to pressure from the families of the hostages and ended the war,” Orbach said. “We would now be without the achievements we have made: 60 percent of Gaza under our control, and Hamas weakened and isolated.”

Eisenkot has argued that this presents a false choice: Israel could have struck a deal to bring the hostages home and resumed its campaign against Hamas later.

Generally, Eisenkot and his campaign team are trying to overcome such criticism with a promise of a better future. Even the choice of music at his campaign rallies makes the point.

An old Israeli peace song comes over the speakers: “Everything will be alright.”

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, The Telegraph, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

A Texas appeals court dramatically reduced the amount conspiracy theorist Alex Jones owes the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, cutting a nearly $50 million judgment to about $5.6 million.

The ruling Friday upheld $4.1 million in compensatory damages awarded to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis was among the 20 first graders and six educators murdered at the Connecticut school in 2012.

But the court reduced the $45.2 million in punitive damages awarded by a jury to $1.5 million, citing limits under Texas law.

Jones spent years falsely claiming the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and that the grieving families were actors participating in a government plot to restrict gun rights. The parents testified that Jones’ lies resulted in years of harassment and threats from his followers.

The Texas case is only one part of the massive financial judgments against Jones stemming from his Sandy Hook lies.

A Connecticut jury separately ordered Jones to pay nearly $1 billion to families of eight victims and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. A judge later added hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages, bringing that judgment to roughly $1.4 billion.

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Jones has fought the judgments for years through appeals and bankruptcy proceedings while continuing to operate Infowars.

The Texas appeals court said state law required it to substantially reduce the punitive portion of the Heslin-Lewis award, despite rejecting other arguments Jones made challenging the verdict.

The decision means the parents who spent years fighting Jones in court will receive a fraction of what the Texas jury believed his conduct warranted.

The children killed at Sandy Hook would now largely be young adults.

Jesse Lewis would have turned 20 in June.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s Pentagon has spent months restricting journalists’ access to the military. Now, the crackdown has reached a news organization created specifically to serve American troops and their families.

The Pentagon fired “Stars and Stripes” editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and Middle East reporter Lara Korte on Friday, citing insubordination after the journalists publicly defended the newspaper’s editorial independence. Publisher Max Lederer, who announced his retirement earlier this week after more than three decades at the publication, also received a separation notice.

The firings mark the latest escalation in Hegseth’s increasingly contentious relationship with the press. Last year, dozens of journalists surrendered Pentagon credentials rather than agree to new restrictions on their reporting. A federal judge later blocked key portions of the policy, but the Pentagon responded by closing the “Correspondents’ Corridor” used by journalists for decades and announcing plans to move reporters to an annex outside the building.

“Stars and Stripes,” however, occupies a unique place in American journalism.

The publication traces its history to the Civil War and has continuously served U.S. military communities since World War II. Although partly funded by the Defense Department, Congress has protected its editorial independence, allowing its journalists to report on the military without functioning as a Pentagon public relations operation.

That independence has increasingly collided with Hegseth’s vision for the paper.

In January, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said “Stars and Stripes” would be “custom tailored to our warfighters” and focus on “warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY,” while eliminating what he called “DC gossip columns” and Associated Press stories.

In April, the Pentagon fired Jacqueline Smith, the newspaper’s ombudsman, whose job was specifically intended to protect its editorial independence.

Slavin told the Associated Press that his refusal to accept military censorship was cited in his termination notice as insubordination. Similarly, Korte, who has reported extensively on the war with Iran, defended the newspaper’s role following her dismissal.

“Military families and service members have trusted us to share their experience with the world,” she said.

The crackdown also comes amid questions over how Hegseth determines who gets access to Pentagon information. According to reports, his wife, Jennifer Rauchet Hegseth, holds no official Pentagon position but has attended meetings with foreign defense officials and was included in a Signal chat in which Hegseth shared sensitive information about U.S. military operations.

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Meanwhile, “Stars and Stripes” continues doing what it has done for generations: reporting directly to military communities.

On Saturday, the newspaper reported that the USS Abraham Lincoln was finally leaving the Middle East after months supporting the Iran war without leave — news likely of particular importance to the thousands of sailors aboard the carrier and their families waiting at home.

The post Hegseth fires “Stars and Stripes” journalists, deepens Pentagon press crackdown appeared first on Salon.com.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia congresswoman, issued a blistering response Saturday morning after Donald Trump attacked her, Tucker Carlson and Thomas Massie as “LOSERS ALL” in a late-night Truth Social post. But Greene went considerably further than returning Trump’s insults, arguing that the president has abandoned the “America First” movement that once united them.

“We never changed, Trump did,” Greene wrote.

I wonder if it was being called a traitor at his own rally yesterday that caused him to dictate his lies and insult laden attack on Tucker, Thomas, and I, while he flew back on the plane.
It’s also the bad polling that I’m sure he’s seen by now.

He attacks us with such vitriol… pic.twitter.com/tM9e7PqTg0

— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) August 22, 2026

Greene accused Trump of becoming a “neocon puppet for Israel, corporations, big donors with special interests,” while pointing to their disagreements over foreign wars and the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

She also defended Carlson as “a serious Presidential contender,” arguing that young men who once supported Trump increasingly see the president as “an old fraud.”

The feud has been building for months, as Greene, Massie and Carlson have increasingly argued that Trump has abandoned the movement he once led.

While Greene and Massie publicly split with Trump months ago, Carlson’s break with Trump has been building for months, driven largely by the president’s decision to enter the war with Iran. In June, Carlson announced he would no longer support the Republican Party after decades of defending it.

“I’m out,” Carlson said. “And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.”

Now, that threat is beginning to take shape.

Earlier this month, Carlson hosted a small group that included Greene, Massie and Joe Kent, Trump’s former counterterrorism chief who resigned over the Iran war. Kent later said the group was attempting to build a new anti-war political movement and had encouraged Carlson to run for president in 2028.

Carlson has also laid out a 10-point political manifesto built around what he considers a return to “America First,” including ending foreign wars and reducing foreign influence over American policy.

The three represent an unusual rebellion against Trump because they haven’t abandoned MAGA politics. Instead, they argue that Trump abandoned the movement they supported, particularly his promises to keep the United States out of foreign wars.

Trump dismissed Carlson as irrelevant, although his Friday night attack suggested he isn’t entirely dismissing the political risk.

“Tucker’s ‘Views’ have fallen through the floor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, calling Carlson “totally irrelevant” and a “very Low I.Q. individual.”

But Trump also predicted that Carlson, if he ran for president, “could probably take a couple of points away from whatever the Republican ticket happens to be.”

The president also attacked Greene as a “Liberal ‘Fool’” and dismissed Massie as a “failed politician” and a “real JERK.”

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Trump’s attack prompted an even broader repudiation from Greene Saturday. She criticized his “name calling, absurd and reckless rhetoric” as “unbecoming of the office of the president” and compared him to “an internet troll.”

Greene, who was once one of Trump’s most fervent congressional allies, said she now believes the president has become a “Trojan horse” for policies he once campaigned against.

“In the past, I supported him because of the policies he professed to support and passionately campaigned on,” Greene wrote.

“I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier and wish I had never supported him.”

The post “I wish I had never supported him”: MTG fires back after Trump’s attack on “MAGA losers” appeared first on Salon.com.