Hundreds of people fill a downtown street for a protest, waving signs and chanting as they march past businesses and government buildings. Overhead, a police drone records video of the crowd. Nearby traffic cameras and license plate readers capture faces, vehicles and movements along the route.

With artificial intelligence, experts say, hours of footage can be analyzed in minutes, making it easier for police to track or target a participant long after the demonstration ends.

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Why the OpenAI Escape Is the Most Worrying AI Mishap Yet  (Economist)
Containing the technology is getting harder

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Why the OpenAI Escape Is the Most Worrying AI Mishap Yet  (Economist)
Containing the technology is getting harder

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On July 13, President Trump made it clear that the nuclear-related Pickaxe mountain facility is on the U.S. target list. In an interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, the President stated, “We have eyes on it and Pickaxe mountain is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right in the front door…We’re watching Pickaxe Mountain very closely. We don’t see any activity there.” Trump finished the interview with a more definitive statement: “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain.

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Today, before a tank explodes, before a trench is overrun, and before an artillery battery is silenced, someone is usually recording.

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Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are changing the nature of modern warfare through AI-enabled decision-making.

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The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism.

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Description
A source told reporter Renee Dudley something she found hard to believe: that Microsoft was running tech support for the Department of Defense through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary. The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.

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Trump Pushes Chinese Election Threat, but Files Show Russia’s Heavy Hand  (Alan Feuer and Dustin Volz, New York Times)
Intelligence documents that the White House released to back up President Trump’s claims about China highlight Russian efforts to influence U.S. elections.

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What to Know About Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain  (Anushka Patil, New York Times)
The fortified underground complex, in central Iran, is about one mile away from the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

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Seeking to stop a “flood” of court cases freeing immigrants from mandatory detention, the Trump administration is asking an appeals court to put three immigrants back in detention.

The immigrants were freed by Texas federal judges in February and March in a case that was upheld by an appeals court panel for Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, which found that such immigrants have the right to bond hearings within 90 days of being detained. That decision was reversed by the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hold a full hearing on the case in September. 

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On an early April morning, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents approached Y.R. in the parking lot of her Dallas-Fort Worth area apartment as she was about to head to her construction job.

Y.R., a 37-year-old undocumented Honduran immigrant who came to the U.S. in early 2022, had spent nearly a year filling out government forms and submitting to a background check and DNA test to get custody of her niece and nephew, who had been stuck in a federal shelter after they crossed the Texas-Mexico border in the spring of 2025.

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At Coyote Canyon, the challenge was not just whether a drone could be detected by radar or whether a sensor could spot movement across rough terrain. The bigger question was whether all that information could move through a portable security system fast enough to help people make decisions in the field.

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In a world where trust in institutions is mostly in decline, levels of trust in science remain relatively high. Yet at the same time, belief in scientific conspiracy theories, such as hushed-up effects of vaccines or airplane “chemtrails”, is also widespread.

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“We should draw a sharp distinction between oil as a cause of war and oil as an instrument in warfare,” says Dag Harald Claes.

He is a professor of political science at the University of Oslo and has researched oil, energy, and international politics for many years.

Claes has recently published a new book examining the role of energy and oil in wars and conflicts.

Oil has come to symbolize modern war and conflict, he explains.

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Chinese AI labs have stunned the world, again. In the space of about a month, Chinese AI start-up labs Z.ai and Moonshot have each launched a model that is nearly as intelligent as competitors from OpenAI and Anthropic but far cheaper. Silicon Valley start-ups are already using Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, and Moonshot’s Kimi-K3 likely isn’t far behind in that market.

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When the Strait of Hormuz first closed at the start of the 2026 Iran war, the world braced for the “largest energy crisis in history.” Before the conflict began, almost 20 percent of the world’s traded oil passed through the narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Iran’s blockade of the strait effectively erased 15 million barrels per day from circulation overnight. 

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Trump Owes Americans a Better Explanation About Iran  (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
Two more Americans have died. Meanwhile, the president’s rationale for war keeps changing.

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The Slow Death of the Global Commons  (Robert A. Manning, Foreign Policy)
Hormuz is a sign of worse things to come.

This Tiny Missile Could Solve Europe’s Defense Crisis  (James Rothwell, Telegraph)
£8k Kreuger interceptor dubbed ‘a flying cellphone with a warhead’ tested at secret Swedish location - and could save Nato from Russia.

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President Donald Trump used a nationally televised address Thursday evening to release intelligence that he said showed American voting systems are vulnerable to foreign attack and that China acquired data on 220 million U.S. voters. He accused officials within the U.S. intelligence community of suppressing those threats and concealing the danger from him and the public.

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