Editor’s note: This piece is part of Lawfare’s collection “9/11 at 25: The Legal Architecture of the War on Terror, Twenty-Five Years On,” examining how 9/11 remains—or doesn’t—embedded in current legal and policy frameworks, a quarter century after the attacks. Read the full collection here.

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One of President Donald Trump’s closest aides, Natalie Harp, worked in the White House for more than a year without completing the normal security clearance process, according to a recent MS Now report.

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Artificial intelligence systems are starting to do more than answer questions. New AI “agents” can remember information from previous interactions, plan a series of steps and use digital tools to complete tasks.

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The argument in Washington over the past few months has been about whether to ban Chinese AI models or restrict them. What has been less examined is what Beijing intends to do with the open-weight – that is, publicly available and downloadable – models its labs have built. Beijing has started to answer that question, and not with one voice.

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A mother in New York State who claims to oppose vaccines because of her Catholic faith lost an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) this week—though Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted her application. For now, the woman’s kindergarten-aged son must be vaccinated to attend school. 

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The worst terrorist attack in world history occurred on September 11, 2001. Many security failures contributed to permitting the attacks to occur, including the inability of the legal immigration system to stop the 19 hijackers from receiving temporary nonimmigrant visas to travel to the United States. Fortunately, the system has improved, and vetting failures have become far less frequent after the attacks. 

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Argonne researchers study the movement of dust particles from concrete surfaces during a simulated radiological contamination scenario, measuring how pedestrians and moving cars affect the spread of the particles.

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As devastating wildfires continue to burn across the western U.S. and Canada this summer, they’re taking a serious toll on the electrical grid. Every year, wildfires, some sparked by birds or even high winds, cause significant damage to grid infrastructure.

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Reporting highlights

●  Evidence From Britain: A trove of evidence from Britain that became public only after the FBI closed its 9/11 investigation raises questions about a Saudi man who assisted two of the hijackers.

●  Suspicions: Material seized in 2001 from Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi student who had lived in San Diego, intensified suspicions about what he knew before the attacks.

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Friday marks 25 years since the September 11 terror attacks. Americans are spending the week remembering those who lost their lives and honoring the first responders and others who sprang into action to help. The attacks cast a long shadow, stretching beyond Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 to transform not just the United States but the world.

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It was 25 years ago today that the Western world completely changed following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. The shock of these horrific terrorist attacks caused a seismic shift in security policy both in Washington and Canberra. While the initial shock justified a major response, the focus on non-state and counterterrorist threats soon consumed a generation of national security policy, military resources, intelligence efforts and intellectual attention.

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When ADL published its first report on 9/11 conspiracy theories in 2003, it noted that the internet allowed an “unprecedented cross-fertilization of antisemitic ideas” and that they contributed to a “new form of global antisemitism.” The report also noted that these conspiracy theories were likely to endure and “form the basis of a new antisemitic canard that will linger for decades and be used to demonize Jews and Israel.”

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A federal judge has sided with Anthropic on its claims that the Department of Defense illegally retaliated against Anthropic’s protected speech by labeling the AI company a “supply chain risk.” The judge found that designation, intended to penalize Anthropic for telling the U.S. military it would not allow their technology to be used for mass surveillance of U.S.

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For decades, Sweden was known as one of Europe’s most welcoming countries for refugees. It took pride in pursuing one of Europe’s most generous asylum policies, and often presented itself as a humanitarian role model.

But today it has one of the continent’s most restrictive migration policies. That transformation has taken little more than a decade.

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Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution provides that the legislature of each state shall prescribe the “times, places and manners” of holding elections for the U.S. Congress, “but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” Congress has long used its override powers sparingly, and Republicans in particular have warned against both micromanaging how states do their job and the specter of a federal takeover. That remains the correct position, for reasons of practicality, election integrity and the safeguarding of the nation’s liberty.

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The September 11 2001 terrorist attacks were unlike anything the world had seen before.

For America, and the watching world, September 11 (or 9/11) seemed most like a Pearl Harbour moment – a devastating surprise attack by a distant enemy that demanded a response.

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Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson, dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision to stay a preliminary injunction against implementation of President Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting, wrote that allowing the plan to proceed could “foment chaos” ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. You’ll never guess what happened next.

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University of Illinois Chicago researchers say heightened federal immigration enforcement corresponded with about $1.26 billion in foregone retail and restaurant activity in Cook County, but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security dismissed the correlation between a good economy and illegal immigration.

Matthew Wilson co-authored the report by UIC’s Great Cities Institute that examined the heightened enforcement period beginning in January 2025.

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Casual observers of Venezuelan politics might have assumed that the US capture and removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January would guarantee the dismantling of his authoritarian regime and a rupture with Beijing.

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This story was co-published with RE:PUBLIC Lands Media, an independent, non-profit news organization covering public lands.​

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