What do the water system in Flint, Michigan, the electrical grid in Puerto Rico and your search engine have in common? They are all critical infrastructure – systems essential to everyday life.

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The Trump administration’s decision in January to suspend immigrant-visa processing for citizens of 75 countries was presented as a measure to protect the United States from immigrants who might become dependent on public assistance. On 21 August, however, a federal judge in New York struck down the policy, finding that the administration had exceeded the authority Congress gave the State Department and had unlawfully replaced individualized visa decisions with a blanket rule based on nationality.

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One of Iran’s responses to the joint U.S.-Israel attack of 28 February 2026 was targeting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. That did not stop the Trump administration from insisting that, notwithstanding blockades, sea mines, and the targeting of tankers, oil is still moving out of the Gulf at near pre-war levels. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been the most consistent messenger.

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MIT researchers have overcome a major challenge holding back the real-world deployment of microwave quantum technologies for advanced signal processing and secure communications.

The team developed a scalable platform that generates pairs of highly correlated radio frequency waves, without the need for bulky and expensive cooling equipment. In quantum technologies, these linked radio waves can be used for noise-resilient communication or high-precision radar and sensing. However, they’re usually only generated in research labs, under extremely cold conditions.

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The Trump administration’s decision to put $85.5 million of U.S. government money into a bauxite operation in Guyana looks, at first glance, like an oddity. Bauxite is not itself on the U.S. government’s list of critical minerals; Guinea, not Guyana, is the world’s largest bauxite producer; and Guinea is an Atlantic-facing country with which Washington has been seeking closer economic ties. Why, then, is the Pentagon putting equity capital into a Guyanese mine?

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U.S.

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The following is a speech delivered by ASPI executive director Justin Bassi at the Australian Defense Science, Technology and Research Summit, held in Adelaide from 4 to 6 August 2026.

Just over 10 years ago, I sat in the oval office with my then boss Malcolm Turnbull and President Obama listening to them debate the Thucydides Trap. This is a theory that has made Graham Allison famous but for which, in my view, there is no modern-day example – where the established power is so anxious about the rising power that it strikes at the rising power and starts a war.

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In late July 2026, Senator Rand Paul released portions of Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era diary entries and related communications as part of his continuing campaign to revisit the origins of COVID-19 and to scrutinize the governance of high-risk virology.

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Artificial intelligence may not create a new kind of terrorism, but it makes existing tactics cheaper, faster and easier. That is the central argument of a July 2026 report from the U.S.-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It is a convincing argument, but it leaves one question unanswered: Are different terrorist groups thinking about the technology in the same way?

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Give President Donald Trump credit for introducing this unsettling feature into American politics: the question is no longer whether a defeated president or party will accept an adverse result. It is, rather, whether,in an effort to stave off defeat, a president, unable to control elections directly, can still use the powers of the federal government to make an election harder to conduct, harder to trust, and harder to settle.

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