Taiwan Approves $7.5 Billion Drone Budget as Chinese Naval Presence Surges Fourfold
Taiwan’s legislature approved a NT$240 billion — roughly $7.5 billion — special budget for unmanned military systems late last month, a major investment in drone warfare capability that comes as official data shows Chinese naval activity around the island surging to levels far beyond anything recorded a year ago. Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration reported that 244 Chinese vessels were observed in Taiwan’s surrounding waters in July alone, compared with just 58 vessels during the same month last year — more than a fourfold increase. Taiwanese officials say that since May, they have documented approximately 1,247 Chinese vessels operating in waters around the island, part of what analysts describe as a sustained campaign of naval presence intended to normalize China’s military footprint near Taiwan without crossing the threshold that would trigger a more forceful international response. China’s People’s Liberation Army also continued its long-running pattern of aerial incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, though the August numbers offered a partial counterpoint to the naval trend: the PLA conducted 125 such incursions during the month, less than half the rate recorded during the same period in each of the two previous years. Analysts tracking the shift say the decline in aerial incursions alongside the sharp rise in naval activity may reflect a deliberate strategic recalibration by Beijing, shifting the weight of its pressure campaign from more visible and internationally scrutinized air incursions toward a less dramatic, harder-to-counter buildup of maritime presence that accumulates gradually rather than in single, headline-grabbing incidents. China’s coast guard has maintained a steady drumbeat of incursions specifically near Taiwan’s outlying islands as well. Four separate China Coast Guard incursions occurred near Kinmen Island in August — on the 5th, 13th, 19th and 29th — continuing a pattern of roughly four monthly intrusions that has held steady since February 2024. Separately, two Chinese coast guard vessels entered restricted waters around Pratas Island on August 18, an atoll far to the south that sits closer to the Philippines than to Taiwan’s main island but that Taipei has controlled and garrisoned for decades. Taiwan’s government has responded with a combination of legislative and military measures aimed at hardening the island’s defenses against exactly the kind of gray-zone pressure campaign China appears to be waging. The newly approved drone budget, which cleared Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan on August 27 with support from opposition lawmakers who have not always aligned with the governing party on defense spending, is earmarked for unmanned systems procurement and for building out Taiwan’s domestic drone manufacturing industry — a recognition among Taiwanese defense planners that relying primarily on imported systems from the United States and other partners leaves the island vulnerable to supply disruptions in a crisis. The Executive Yuan formally endorsed the opposition-backed measure shortly after its passage, an unusual instance of cross-party alignment on a major defense initiative in Taiwan’s often fractious legislature. Taiwan’s military followed the budget’s passage with live-fire artillery drills on August 27 that specifically integrated unmanned systems alongside traditional platforms like howitzers and armored vehicles, a combination officials said was designed to incorporate “tactical lessons learned from the war in Ukraine,” where drones have transformed frontline combat in ways that militaries around the world have scrambled to study and adapt to. Taiwanese defense officials have been especially attentive to how cheap, mass-produced drones have been used in Ukraine both for reconnaissance and for direct strikes against armor and personnel, seeing clear parallels to how a Chinese invasion force crossing the Taiwan Strait might similarly be vulnerable to distributed, low-cost unmanned systems deployed at scale. Beyond the military dimension, Taiwan’s Central Election Commission has approved a referendum question asking voters whether to repeal the island’s long-standing “nuclear-free homeland” policy, which has kept Taiwan’s nuclear power plants offline or headed toward decommissioning for years. The push to revisit that policy reflects growing concern among Taiwanese officials about the island’s energy vulnerability in a potential blockade scenario, since Taiwan currently imports the vast majority of its energy needs, primarily as liquefied natural gas delivered by sea — precisely the kind of supply line that Chinese naval and coast guard vessels operating in the surrounding waters could threaten to interdict in a crisis, giving Beijing a coercive lever over Taiwan’s economy and daily life without firing a shot. On the U.S. side, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security has opened an investigation into Apex Logistics, a Singapore-based transportation and logistics firm, over allegations it facilitated illegal exports of advanced semiconductors to China in violation of U.S. export controls. If the investigation results in formal charges, officials say it would mark the first legal action taken against a transportation and logistics company specifically for its role in chip smuggling, rather than against the exporters or end-users more typically targeted in such cases — a potential expansion of enforcement that could have ripple effects across the broader logistics industry that moves sensitive technology components around the world, given how much of that industry currently operates on the assumption that liability rests primarily with shippers and manufacturers rather than the intermediaries that physically move the goods. Taken together, the naval buildup, Taiwan’s defense response, and the expanding U.S. enforcement posture on chip exports reflect a relationship between Washington, Taipei and Beijing that continues to grow more tense across multiple fronts simultaneously, even without a single dramatic flashpoint driving the headlines. U.S. officials have said China’s military activities near Taiwan “unnecessarily raise tensions,” a formulation that has become a standard part of Washington’s response to nearly every escalation in the strait over the past several years, even as the underlying trend lines — more ships, more coercive economic pressure points, and now a referendum revisiting one of Taiwan’s most fundamental energy policies — suggest the strategic picture is shifting in ways that go well beyond any single incident. The timing of Taiwan’s defense buildup is also shaped by the broader U.S.-China relationship, which observers say is being closely watched for signs of where the next Trump-Xi summit…
Private Payrolls Add Just 38,000 Jobs in August, Missing Forecasts Again
Private employers added just 38,000 jobs in August, according to data released Wednesday by payroll processor ADP, falling well short of economist forecasts of 48,000 and marking the weakest month of hiring since January — the latest sign that the labor market’s slowdown from earlier this summer has not meaningfully reversed. The August figure also represents a step down from July’s revised gain of 46,000 jobs, suggesting the deceleration in hiring has continued rather than stabilized. The report lands two days before the Labor Department releases its own more comprehensive nonfarm payrolls report Friday, which economists expect to show a considerably stronger 56,000 new positions — a notable divergence between the two measures that, if it holds, would still represent a substantial rebound from July’s shocking loss of 23,000 jobs on the government’s official count. The unemployment rate is projected to hold steady at 4.1% in Friday’s report. The sector-by-sector breakdown in ADP’s data paints a mixed picture of an economy adding jobs unevenly rather than uniformly slowing across the board. Education and health services led all sectors by a wide margin, adding 45,000 positions on their own — meaning that without healthcare and education hiring, the broader private sector would have posted a net job loss for the month. Leisure and hospitality added a further 16,000 positions, while financial activities and the catch-all “other services” category each contributed 6,000 jobs. The weakness was concentrated in goods-producing and traditionally cyclical sectors. Manufacturing shed 17,000 jobs, continuing a rough stretch for American factories that have faced elevated input costs tied to this year’s tariff increases alongside softer demand in key export markets. Professional and business services, a category economists watch closely as a leading indicator for the broader labor market, lost 16,000 positions. Natural resources and mining, along with trade, transportation and utilities, each shed 5,000 jobs. The combination suggests employers in more economically sensitive industries have grown more cautious about adding headcount even as service-sector hiring in areas like healthcare continues largely unabated, insulated by demographic demand that doesn’t ebb and flow with the broader business cycle the way manufacturing and corporate services do. Wage data in the report told a more complicated story about the state of the labor market than the headline job-count numbers alone. Workers who stayed in their current jobs saw annual pay gains of 4.4%, a solid if unspectacular figure by recent historical standards. But workers who switched employers saw considerably faster wage growth of 7.3%, a gap ADP’s chief economist attributed to shifting compensation patterns driven partly by demographic turnover in the workforce and partly by the early effects of AI-related disruption reshaping which skills and roles command a premium in today’s job market. That widening gap between “stayer” and “switcher” wage growth has historically been read as a signal of at least some underlying tightness in specific pockets of the labor market, even as the top-line hiring numbers soften. The report adds a fresh data point to an increasingly consequential debate inside the Federal Reserve, which meets September 15-16 to decide on interest rates under new Chair Kevin Warsh. Warsh has been vocal about prioritizing the fight against inflation, which has remained elevated relative to the Fed’s 2% target for much of the year, even as the labor market has shown clear signs of cooling since the July jobs report first rattled markets with its unexpected contraction. Wednesday’s ADP numbers, while not as dire as July’s shock, do little to resolve the tension the Fed faces heading into its meeting: whether to hold rates steady to keep fighting inflation, or begin cutting to support a labor market that has now posted two straight months of underwhelming hiring data by two different measures. Markets have shown some sensitivity to the report, with traders adjusting rate-cut probabilities modestly following the release, though the more consequential data point for the Fed’s actual decision will likely be Friday’s official government jobs report and the following week’s Consumer Price Index reading, both of which will land in the two weeks before the September FOMC meeting. Economists caution against reading too much into any single month’s data given how volatile job-growth figures have been over the past year, but note that a second consecutive month of ADP data undershooting expectations, even a much less dramatic shortfall than July’s, reinforces a broader narrative of labor-market softening that has now persisted long enough to be difficult to dismiss as simple noise. For workers and job seekers, the practical effect of the slowdown has been a labor market that increasingly rewards those willing to change jobs over those who stay put — a dynamic reflected clearly in this month’s wage data — even as overall hiring across large swaths of the economy, particularly in manufacturing and professional services, remains notably subdued compared with the pace seen through most of the past several years. The divergence between ADP’s private-sector count and the government’s broader payrolls survey has itself become a recurring point of discussion among economists this year, since the two reports have told noticeably different stories in back-to-back months. ADP’s methodology draws on actual payroll processing data from the millions of businesses that use its payroll services, giving it a real-time window into private hiring, but it excludes government employment entirely and can diverge from the Labor Department’s survey-based approach in any given month due to differences in sampling, seasonal adjustment, and which businesses happen to be included. Economists generally caution against treating either report in isolation as the definitive read on the labor market, preferring instead to look at the trend across several months of both series together — a trend that, over the summer, has consistently pointed toward softening even as the exact monthly figures have bounced around. Retailers and small businesses in sectors like hospitality, which continued adding jobs even as manufacturing and professional services contracted, say they are still seeing steady consumer demand heading into the fall, a note of relative optimism that stands in some tension…
North Korea Stole 76% of All Crypto Hack Value Worldwide in 2026 Using Just Two Attacks
North Korean state-linked hackers accounted for a staggering 76% of all cryptocurrency stolen worldwide through the first four months of 2026, according to blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs, with two attacks alone netting the regime a combined $577 million even as international sanctions continue to formally cut it off from the global financial system. The two operations, carried out weeks apart in April, showcased increasingly sophisticated tactics that blockchain security researchers say represent a marked evolution from North Korea’s earlier, cruder hacking playbook. In the first attack, on April 1, hackers targeted Drift Protocol, a decentralized finance platform built on the Solana blockchain, stealing $285 million through a scheme that unfolded over months. The attackers spent weeks on social engineering — building trust with people who held authorization credentials — before spending roughly three weeks staging the theft directly on the blockchain itself. They ultimately exploited a feature of Solana’s transaction system known as a “durable nonce” to get the platform’s security council signers to pre-authorize transactions without fully realizing what they were approving, then executed 31 separate withdrawals in a rapid-fire window of approximately 12 minutes once the theft began in earnest. A separate North Korean group struck again just over two weeks later, on April 18, this time targeting KelpDAO through a cross-chain bridge built on the LayerZero protocol. That attack netted $292 million by compromising the remote procedure call nodes that platforms use to communicate with the blockchain, exploiting what researchers described as a single-verifier design flaw that allowed the attackers to push through fraudulent transactions without the additional layers of verification more robust systems require. In the aftermath, the Arbitrum Security Council managed to freeze roughly $75 million of the stolen funds before the hackers could move them further, but the bulk of the money was successfully laundered through THORChain, a decentralized cross-chain exchange that has become a favored laundering route for stolen crypto precisely because it allows funds to be swapped between different blockchains with minimal friction and limited centralized oversight. Combined, the two attacks totaled $577 million and, despite representing just 3% of the total number of crypto-theft incidents tracked globally in 2026, accounted for the overwhelming majority of the dollar value stolen across the entire industry during that period — a reflection of how selectively and effectively North Korean hacking units have come to target the largest, most lucrative platforms rather than pursuing high-volume, low-value theft. The scale of the haul lines up with a broader pattern researchers have documented in North Korea’s cyber operations over the past several years, in which state-linked hacking groups — most prominently the Lazarus Group, a unit widely believed to operate under North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau intelligence agency — have increasingly targeted decentralized finance platforms, crypto exchanges and blockchain bridges as a primary funding mechanism for the isolated regime. Separate reporting from Bloomberg has put North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s cumulative windfall from crypto theft and related illicit financial activity at roughly $22 billion, a sum that analysts say has become an increasingly important funding stream for a government that remains subject to some of the most extensive international sanctions of any country in the world, largely over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The persistence and scale of the thefts have raised uncomfortable questions for the broader cryptocurrency industry about whether current security practices at even well-established platforms are adequate against a persistent, well-resourced state actor. Unlike criminal hacking groups motivated purely by short-term profit, North Korea’s units operate with the backing, patience and operational security resources of a nation-state, allowing them to invest months in reconnaissance and social engineering before executing a theft — an asymmetry that has repeatedly proven difficult for even sophisticated crypto platforms to defend against, since it targets human trust and institutional processes as much as it does purely technical vulnerabilities in code. U.S. and allied officials have long argued that North Korea’s crypto theft operations directly subsidize its weapons programs, helping the regime work around the formal international financial sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council and individual countries including the United States. That argument has taken on renewed urgency as North Korea has continued to expand its ballistic missile testing and, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, deepen military cooperation with Russia amid the ongoing war in Ukraine — cooperation that has reportedly included North Korean troops deployed to support Russian forces in exchange for military technology transfers, adding another dimension to concerns that sanctions-evading revenue streams like crypto theft are helping fund activity with consequences well beyond North Korea’s own borders. Industry groups and blockchain security firms have called for stronger cross-platform information sharing and more robust verification standards for the kinds of bridge and cross-chain infrastructure that both the Drift Protocol and KelpDAO attacks exploited, arguing that the current fragmented approach to security across thousands of independent DeFi platforms leaves systemic vulnerabilities that a sufficiently patient and well-funded attacker — state-sponsored or otherwise — will continue to find and exploit. Whether the industry moves quickly enough to close those gaps before North Korea’s hacking units identify the next one remains, based on the pattern of the past several years, very much an open question. U.S. Treasury officials have continued to add sanctions designations against individuals and front companies linked to North Korean cyber operations throughout the year, part of a broader effort to disrupt the laundering networks that convert stolen crypto into usable funds for the regime. But enforcement officials and blockchain analysts alike acknowledge that sanctions targeting individual wallets or front companies have had limited success in actually stopping the underlying theft, since decentralized platforms like THORChain are specifically designed to resist the kind of centralized control that would let a government freeze or block transactions the way it can with a traditional bank. Some lawmakers in Washington have pushed for legislation that would impose stricter know-your-customer requirements on cross-chain bridges and DeFi protocols, arguing that the industry’s continued resistance to centralized…
House Passes Stopgap Funding Bill, Averting Shutdown Before Midterm Elections
The House of Representatives passed a short-term government funding bill Tuesday by a lopsided 370-48 vote, sending the measure to President Trump’s desk and averting a government shutdown just weeks before voters head to the polls in the November midterms. The stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, keeps federal agencies funded generally at current spending levels through December 11, buying Congress additional time to negotiate full-year appropriations bills without the immediate pressure of an October 1 funding cliff. The Senate had already approved the measure by an overwhelming margin before it reached the House floor, and with Trump’s signature considered a formality, the bill is expected to become law well before the current funding deadline expires. The lopsided vote margin reflects a rare moment of bipartisan alignment on a piece of must-pass legislation, particularly notable given how badly the last two funding fights went. Lawmakers in both parties have been eager to avoid a repeat of 2025’s shutdown chaos, when the federal government endured a 43-day lapse in funding followed by a separate, even longer 76-day shutdown limited to the Department of Homeland Security — the longest shutdown of any single federal department in U.S. history. With midterm elections just two months away, neither party wanted to be blamed for a third disruptive funding lapse in as many years, a dynamic that appears to have driven Tuesday’s smooth passage far more than any newfound spirit of bipartisan cooperation on the underlying spending questions that remain unresolved. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole framed the bill as straightforward good governance, telling reporters it provides “certainty that the government will remain open, certainty that our service members will be paid.” House Speaker Mike Johnson struck a similar tone, crediting Republicans for delivering the result and saying the House GOP is “continuing to do the grown-up thing, get the job done” — remarks aimed as much at midterm voters weighing which party can be trusted to keep basic government functions running as at colleagues on the floor. Democrats offered a more qualified endorsement. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, pointed to a provision delaying a proposed rule that would have given Trump-appointed officials new authority to halt federal grants for programs they deem misaligned with the administration’s policy agenda, calling the delay “an important first step.” But DeLauro made clear Democrats see the underlying policy fight as far from settled, warning that “whether a community receives disaster relief should not depend on who they voted for in the last election” — a pointed reference to Democratic concerns that the administration could eventually use grant-approval authority to reward friendly states and jurisdictions while punishing others. The bill includes at least one other notable policy provision beyond the topline spending extension: language preventing the Department of Homeland Security from transferring funds internally to boost Border Patrol’s budget beyond what Congress has already appropriated, a restriction that reflects ongoing congressional efforts to maintain oversight over how immigration enforcement dollars are actually spent even as the administration has pushed to expand enforcement operations through other channels, including the National Guard deployments and ICE surges already underway in several major cities. The relatively narrow scope of the bill — a straightforward extension of current funding levels rather than a comprehensive rewrite of federal spending priorities — reflects a deliberate strategy by leadership in both chambers to keep the legislation simple enough to avoid the kind of ideological riders that have sunk previous funding bills. Appropriators on both sides have signaled they intend to use the roughly three-month runway before the December 11 deadline to try to negotiate full-year spending bills covering the various federal agencies individually, rather than relying on another continuing resolution when the current one expires. Whether that effort succeeds is an open question; previous attempts at regular-order appropriations have repeatedly broken down over disputes on individual agency budgets, immigration enforcement funding, and policy riders attached by both parties, which is part of why the government has now operated under a series of short-term patches for much of the past several years rather than the full-year budgets that were once the norm. The bill’s passage removes one significant source of uncertainty from the political landscape heading into the fall campaign season, allowing both parties to turn their full attention to the redistricting fights, the state of the economy, and other issues expected to dominate midterm messaging without the added complication of a government shutdown playing out in the final stretch before Election Day. Still, the December 11 deadline means the underlying funding fight has only been postponed, not resolved, and lawmakers on both sides say they expect a more contentious round of negotiations once Congress returns from the elections to face a lame-duck session that will need to produce either full-year spending bills or yet another short-term extension before the holidays. For federal workers and contractors who lived through last year’s back-to-back shutdowns, Tuesday’s vote offers at least a few months of certainty. Whether that certainty extends much beyond December remains very much in the hands of a Congress that has struggled repeatedly in recent years to complete its most basic constitutional task of funding the government it oversees. The timing of the new deadline is itself politically significant. By pushing the next funding cliff to December 11, congressional leaders in both parties effectively guaranteed that the fight over full-year spending bills will unfold in a lame-duck session immediately following the midterms, when the incentives facing individual lawmakers shift considerably. Members who lost reelection bids in November will have less political exposure to worry about when casting votes on politically difficult spending bills, while members who won will be looking ahead to a new two-year term rather than an immediate election. Congressional aides in both parties have said privately that lame-duck sessions, for all their reputation as chaotic and rushed, have historically proven more capable of producing genuine compromise on appropriations than sessions held in the shadow of an looming…
SNAP Turns 62 With Enrollment Down 11% Nationally as New Work Requirements Take Hold
The federal food stamp program marks 62 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act into law on August 31, 1964 — an anniversary landing this year amid the steepest enrollment decline in the program’s modern history, as expanded work requirements and eligibility restrictions passed last year work their way through the system. More than 4 million people lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits between July 2025 and April 2026, according to federal data, with nationwide participation falling from roughly 42 million to 37 million recipients — an 11% decline in less than a year. More recent estimates put the total number of people who have lost benefits since the changes began at over 5 million, with enrollment continuing to decline in every state, according to Lauren Bauer, an economist at the Brookings Institution who tracks the program. The changes stem from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the sweeping tax and spending package Congress passed in July 2025. The law significantly expanded SNAP’s work requirements, mandating that more adults prove they are working or volunteering at least 80 hours a month to keep receiving benefits. Groups newly subject to those requirements include veterans, homeless individuals, young adults aging out of the foster care system, parents with children between 14 and 17, and adults between the ages of 55 and 64 — populations that had previously been exempted from SNAP’s work-requirement rules in whole or in part. The law also eliminated federal food aid eligibility entirely for certain categories of noncitizens, including refugees, asylum seekers, and victims of domestic abuse or human trafficking who had previously qualified for assistance regardless of immigration status. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the expanded work requirements alone will reduce SNAP participation by an average of 2.4 million people per month over the 2025-2034 period, a scale of reduction that budget analysts describe as one of the largest deliberate contractions of the program’s reach since its modern form took shape in the 1970s. Children have not been spared: at least 1 million children lost benefits across the 19 states surveyed in one recent analysis, even though most of the new work requirements are aimed at adult recipients rather than families with young children directly. The impact has landed unevenly across the country. Arizona has seen the steepest decline of any state, with enrollment falling to roughly half of the previous year’s level — a drop of more than 400,000 participants. Louisiana, Florida and Oklahoma have also recorded significant enrollment drops as the new eligibility rules and paperwork requirements take hold, according to state-level data reviewed by researchers tracking the rollout. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has offered a different read on the numbers, attributing the enrollment decline primarily to “a better economy” and arguing that many people leaving the rolls were “taking the program that shouldn’t have been” receiving benefits in the first place — framing the drop as evidence the new work requirements are successfully targeting the program toward those who genuinely need it. Policy analysts studying the data have pushed back on that explanation, noting that unemployment has remained essentially flat over the same period while food prices have continued to rise, a combination they argue points toward the policy changes themselves, rather than a strengthening labor market, as the primary driver of the decline. Beyond the immediate eligibility changes, the law sets up a more structural shift in how SNAP is funded starting in 2027, when states will be required to help cover the program’s costs for the first time in the program’s history. SNAP has historically been funded almost entirely by the federal government, with states responsible mainly for administrative costs rather than the benefits themselves. Tim Shaw, a policy expert at the Aspen Institute, said the new state cost-sharing requirement creates a serious long-term risk for the program’s reach, since most states are legally required to balance their budgets every year and have far less fiscal flexibility than the federal government to absorb a new, potentially large and unpredictable expense. “More than 60 years of food assistance could soon come to an end” in some states, Shaw warned, raising the possibility that a handful of states could eventually scale back their participation in the program altogether once the funding burden shifts. Some states have also begun restricting which specific food items SNAP recipients are permitted to purchase with their benefits, a separate trend that predates the 2025 law but has gained momentum alongside the broader push to tighten the program’s rules. Supporters of those restrictions argue they encourage healthier purchasing patterns among recipients; critics counter that they add administrative complexity for retailers and stigmatize recipients without meaningfully improving nutrition outcomes. Elaine Waxman of the Urban Institute pointed to what she described as one of SNAP’s core historical strengths now under strain: its universality. Before the recent changes, she noted, the program’s defining feature was that “it was available everywhere,” providing a consistent nutritional safety net regardless of which state a family happened to live in. With enrollment now falling unevenly by state and a state-funding requirement looming in 2027, that consistency is increasingly in question, with anti-hunger advocates warning that the practical experience of the program could soon vary dramatically depending on a family’s zip code in a way it has not for most of the program’s 62-year history. Food banks and local charitable networks in several of the hardest-hit states say they have already seen a noticeable uptick in demand as SNAP recipients lose eligibility, though most describe their capacity as strained rather than broken so far. Anti-hunger organizations argue that private charity was never designed to absorb the scale of need that a federal entitlement program covering tens of millions of people is built to address, and they warn that a further wave of state-level funding shortfalls in 2027 could push local food assistance networks well past their sustainable limits. Supporters of the new work requirements counter that a modest transition period of strained…
Supreme Court Lets Trump’s Mail-Voting Order Partially Take Effect, Injecting Uncertainty Into Midterms
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority handed the Trump administration a preliminary win Monday, pausing a lower-court ruling that had blocked key parts of President Trump’s executive order overhauling mail-in voting rules across two dozen states — even as a separate nationwide injunction keeps the order’s central mechanism frozen for now. Trump signed the executive order in March, directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile citizenship verification lists and requiring the U.S. Postal Service to obtain lists of eligible mail voters from state election officials. Under the order, USPS would deliver mail ballots only to voters confirmed on those lists, and election officials would be required to place specific verification barcodes on ballot return envelopes. The White House has defended the order as a necessary safeguard against noncitizen voting, though research on the subject has consistently found that noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is, in the words of election researchers, “infinitesimally rare.” U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani had blocked the order’s key provisions in June for 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, ruling that Trump “overstepped a president’s authority” under a Constitution that assigns election rule-setting power to state legislatures and Congress, not the executive branch. Talwani also found that the Postal Service, as an independent federal agency, has no legal authority to condition mail-ballot delivery on the kind of voter-list verification scheme the order envisions. The Supreme Court’s unsigned order Monday paused Talwani’s injunction specifically as it applied to those 23 states and D.C., allowing the administration to move forward with certain aspects of implementation there while the underlying legal fight continues. But the justices left a separate, broader nationwide injunction in place, meaning USPS still cannot actually begin restricting mail-ballot delivery based on the disputed voter lists anywhere in the country while the administration’s appeals proceed. The court was notably cautious in its own language, writing that its decision “does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell” — a signal that the justices were resolving only a narrow procedural question about which injunction applies where, not endorsing the order’s ultimate legality. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the ruling, warning that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections” at a moment when state election officials are already deep into planning for November. New York’s attorney general, whose office has been among those challenging the order, called the ruling a “painful setback” while vowing to continue pursuing the underlying legal challenge through the appeals process. The practical stakes of the ruling are tied tightly to the calendar. Administration officials have acknowledged that full implementation of the order would need to begin “as soon as early to mid-August” to be operationally ready before the midterm elections in November — a deadline that has now effectively passed, meaning that even with Monday’s favorable ruling, the legal and logistical hurdles remaining make it increasingly unlikely the order will be fully in effect in time to reshape how mail ballots are processed in this year’s midterms. That timing crunch has left election administrators in the affected states in an awkward holding pattern, uncertain whether to prepare systems for a new verification regime that may or may not be operational before ballots go out. Republican-led states that intervened in the case have appealed the broader injunction, arguing that Talwani’s nationwide order improperly extended relief to states that were never party to the original lawsuit and that federal courts should not be able to block a presidential directive on a nationwide basis based on a challenge brought by a subset of states. Democratic attorneys general and voting rights groups, meanwhile, argue that the administration’s own timeline concessions undercut its claim of urgency, suggesting the order’s real purpose was less about closing a negligible security gap and more about making mail voting logistically harder in states that rely on it most heavily. The dispute now heads back to the lower courts for further proceedings on the merits, with the Supreme Court’s Monday order settling only which injunction controls in the interim rather than resolving the constitutional questions at the heart of the case. Legal analysts following the litigation say a final resolution — whether from the appeals court or eventually from the Supreme Court itself on the full merits — is unlikely before the 2026 midterms are decided, meaning the order’s ultimate fate will most likely be determined only after this election cycle has already played out under whatever patchwork of rules happens to be in effect this fall. For voters in the 23 states and D.C. covered by Monday’s ruling, the immediate practical impact remains limited given the separate nationwide injunction still blocking USPS implementation, but election officials in those states say they are watching the appeals process closely, given how quickly the legal landscape has shifted over the past several months. The ruling arrives against a backdrop of intensifying legal and political fights over election procedure in the run-up to November, following on the heels of the redistricting battles reshaping House maps in more than half a dozen states. Voting rights groups have argued that the mail-voting order, the redistricting fights, and a series of other state-level changes to voter ID and registration rules amount to a coordinated effort to tilt the midterm playing field in ways that will be difficult for courts to fully sort out before votes are cast. Administration officials reject that characterization, framing each initiative as a separate, good-faith effort to address a specific and distinct integrity or fairness concern, whether in how districts are drawn or how ballots are verified. Election law scholars note that the fractured nature of Monday’s ruling — one injunction lifted, another left standing — is itself a reflection of how unusual this case is procedurally, since it involves overlapping lawsuits filed in different jurisdictions raising similar claims against the same federal policy. That fragmentation means the order’s legal status could…
Is Now the Right Time to Go Back to School? Find Out in 2 Minutes
Now Is the Perfect Time to Go Back to School Question 1 of 7 14% 1 / 7 What’s mainly holding you back from going back to school? Cost → Not enough time → Not sure where to start → 2 / 7 What’s your current education level? High school diploma / GED → Some college, no degree → Associate’s degree or higher → 3 / 7 How soon would you want to start? As soon as possible → Within the next 3-6 months → Just exploring for now → 4 / 7 What class format works best for you? Fully online → Evenings / hybrid → On campus → 5 / 7 What’s motivating you most right now? A higher salary → A career change → A personal goal → 6 / 7 Have you looked into grants or financial aid before? Yes, but wasn’t sure what I qualified for → No, never looked into it → Not sure → 7 / 7 Are you ready to see what you might qualify for? Yes, show me now → I have about 2 minutes → Let’s see my matches → You’re a good candidate to explore your options Based on your answers, grant and aid programs may be able to help cover a meaningful part of your tuition. Get matched with schools that fit your goals — it only takes a couple of minutes. Get Matched With Schools → *Grant funding availability and amounts vary by program and eligibility. Not a guarantee of aid. Grant Programs Provide Up to $7,395 to Those Who Qualify For millions of working adults, the biggest barrier to finishing a degree isn’t ambition — it’s the assumption that school is out of financial reach. That assumption is often wrong. Grant funding, need-based aid, and employer programs exist specifically to help adult and returning students cover tuition, and many qualified people never apply simply because they never checked. $90,000 vs. $50,000 On an annual basis, median earnings for bachelor’s degree holders are about $90,000 — roughly 81% higher than the $50,000 median earnings of workers whose highest education is a high school diploma. (Based on national data, not school-specific figures; conditions in your area may vary.) Why So Many Adults Are Going Back Now Online and hybrid programs have made it far easier to fit coursework around a job, a commute, or a family schedule. Evening classes, accelerated tracks, and fully remote degrees mean “going back to school” no longer has to mean putting a career or a household on pause. At the same time, more employers are prioritizing degree-holders for promotions and higher pay bands, which has pushed many adults to finally close the gap. Here’s what tends to make the difference for people who follow through: They find out what they actually qualify for. Grant and aid eligibility varies widely by program, income, and enrollment status — the only way to know is to ask. They compare more than one program. Cost, format, and timeline can differ significantly between schools, even for the same degree. They talk to a real person. A quick conversation with a program representative can clarify aid options and answer questions a webpage can’t. See What Programs You May Qualify For → How It Works Getting matched with schools takes about two minutes. Answer a few questions about your goals and schedule, and you’ll be connected with featured programs and representatives who can walk you through what financial aid — including grants — you may qualify for. There’s no cost or obligation to look. If you’ve been putting off finishing a degree because you weren’t sure what it would cost, this is the fastest way to find out. Get Matched With Schools →
France’s Political Season Reopens With No Majority, No Budget, and a 2027 Race Already Underway
France’s political class returned from summer recess this week facing a familiar and worsening problem: a National Assembly with no working majority, a 2027 budget that must somehow pass anyway, and a presidential race that, with less than eight months to go before voters head to the polls, is already reshaping how every major party approaches the fall legislative session. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who has spent months trying to hold together a government that lacks a stable parliamentary coalition, has made passing a 2027 budget his central priority for the fall, but he is doing so under a self-imposed constraint designed to keep his own political future out of the equation. “I am not a candidate in the presidential election,” Lecornu said, an explicit attempt to signal that his budget proposals are being shaped by fiscal necessity rather than positioning for 2027 — a distinction he hopes will make it easier to find votes from lawmakers who might otherwise view any prime ministerial initiative through the lens of the coming presidential contest. Lecornu’s team has described the budget measures under consideration as deliberately “reversible,” a hedge intended to make the package more palatable to a fractured Assembly where no single bloc controls anything close to a majority. The budget fight is unfolding against a backdrop of sharpening ideological battle lines. Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, has staked out a position built around what he calls “ecological socialism,” combining traditional left-wing tax and spending priorities with climate policy, while explicitly ruling out any accommodation with the far right. Faure has warned that his party will not support any Lecornu-backed measure that draws backing from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, declaring flatly that “if…the far right supports it, we will vote to censure it” — a warning that any bill perceived as dependent on far-right votes will trigger a no-confidence motion from the Socialists, regardless of the bill’s substance. That dynamic hands outsized leverage to Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, who has used the summer to prepare the party’s platform for the 2027 campaign rather than negotiate over the current government’s budget. Bardella said his party has “worked hard this summer on a programme to get the country back on its feet,” language aimed squarely at voters rather than at his colleagues in the Assembly, and reflecting the extent to which the National Rally now positions itself as a government-in-waiting rather than a conventional opposition party working the current legislative session for incremental wins. On the center-right and center, Édouard Philippe of the Horizons party has tried to carve out space as a unifying figure capable of pulling together right-of-center and centrist voters wary of both the National Rally and the hard-left France Unbowed. Philippe has paired that pitch with a call for fiscal restraint, positioning himself as the candidate of budgetary seriousness against both a far right he views as fiscally reckless in its own way and a resurgent left pushing for higher taxes and spending. Adding another layer to the field, former Socialist President François Hollande has signaled his own 2027 ambitions are gaining momentum, calling for tax increases to address France’s economic strains — a notable break from the fiscal caution favored by Philippe and much of the governing center, and a sign that Hollande, who left office deeply unpopular in 2017, sees an opening to reposition himself for a political comeback. The immediate legislative agenda facing Lecornu’s government extends well beyond the budget itself. Lawmakers are also expected to take up an agricultural “rescue plan” aimed at addressing financial strain among French farmers, along with a reform of the country’s sick leave policy — both politically sensitive measures in their own right that will require the same kind of fragile, ad hoc coalition-building the government has relied on for every major initiative since the last National Assembly elections left no party or bloc with a majority. The stakes of the budget fight are difficult to overstate in a political system still adjusting to a period of chronic parliamentary fragmentation. France has cycled through multiple prime ministers in rapid succession in recent years as successive governments failed to build durable coalitions, and a failure to pass a budget this fall would raise fresh questions about the viability of governing at all under the current Assembly’s composition — potentially reviving talk of new legislative elections or a fresh government reshuffle less than a year before voters choose a new president. Moderate figures across the political spectrum have used the start of the new session to warn against the further radicalization of French politics, cautioning that both a resurgent far right and an emboldened far left threaten the kind of pragmatic, compromise-based governance that a divided Assembly requires to function at all. Whether those warnings translate into actual cooperation on the budget, or whether the approaching presidential election simply accelerates the trend toward legislative gridlock as every major figure positions for 2027 rather than for the next fiscal year, is likely to become clear well before voters cast their first ballots. For now, Lecornu’s government remains dependent on a shifting, issue-by-issue patchwork of support from lawmakers who, in nearly every case, have far more to gain politically from distancing themselves from the current government than from helping it succeed — a structural problem that no amount of “reversible” budget language is likely to fully solve. The instability has broader implications beyond France’s own borders. As one of the European Union’s two largest economies alongside Germany, France’s ability to pass a credible budget carries weight for European bond markets and for the bloc’s broader fiscal credibility at a moment when several member states are already navigating their own debt and spending pressures. European officials have watched the past several years of French governmental turnover with concern, worried that prolonged instability in Paris could complicate joint EU initiatives that require French buy-in, from defense spending coordination to the bloc’s collective response to Russia’s war in Ukraine,…
Federal Judge Rejects Maxwell’s Bid to Keep Sealed Epstein-Case Documents Secret
A federal judge in New York has rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s constitutional challenge to a law forcing the release of long-sealed documents from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, clearing the way for another batch of previously secret materials from Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Maxwell to become public. U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled August 12 that the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in 2025, overrides the decade-old protective order that had kept the documents under seal. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year federal sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking, had argued the law was unconstitutional on three separate grounds, all of which Preska rejected in her opinion. Maxwell’s attorneys first argued the law violated separation-of-powers principles by improperly reopening a final judgment and directing courts how to rule in a specific case — in effect, they argued, Congress was doing a judge’s job by legislating a particular outcome in ongoing litigation rather than setting general policy. Preska disagreed, finding that Congress has clear authority to modify the rules governing grand jury secrecy through legislation, and that the original protective order sealing the documents was never meant to be permanent in the first place. The order, she noted, was explicitly modifiable “by the Court at any time for good cause shown” — meaning the parties involved never had an ironclad guarantee that the records would stay sealed forever. Maxwell’s second argument leaned on Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which generally bars disclosure of materials gathered through grand jury subpoenas. Some of the documents at issue were produced by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, the law firm that represented Giuffre, after the firm complied with a grand jury subpoena as part of the broader Epstein investigation; those materials were originally placed under seal by a March 2016 protective order. Preska found that Congress retains the authority to override grand jury secrecy protections through validly enacted legislation, undercutting Maxwell’s claim that the records were categorically off-limits regardless of what a later statute said. Maxwell’s third and final argument was that unsealing the documents now would violate her due process rights by stripping away a vested legal right to permanent secrecy that she claimed to have earned when the original protective order was issued. Preska rejected that framing outright, ruling that Maxwell never had “a vested right to total and perpetual secrecy” in the first place — a protective order, by its nature, protects information only for as long as a court determines that protection remains warranted, not as an unconditional promise that can never be revisited. The Epstein Files Transparency Act itself requires the Department of Justice to “make publicly available … all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” tied to a list of specified subjects, including Epstein and Maxwell by name. The law was the product of sustained pressure from lawmakers in both parties, along with victims’ advocates, who argued that years of piecemeal, heavily redacted document releases had failed to give the public a full accounting of who knew what about Epstein’s abuse of underage girls and when they knew it. Since the law’s passage, courts and the Justice Department have released multiple rounds of material, including a batch of roughly 3 million documents and photos made public by the DOJ in January, though critics on the House Oversight Committee have repeatedly accused the department of slow-walking the fullest disclosures and continuing to withhold material that lawmakers say should be released under the statute. Preska’s ruling did not set a specific date for when the newly cleared documents will actually become public. Records released under the Transparency Act typically go through a redaction process first, intended to protect the identities of Epstein’s victims and other private individuals named in the files who are not themselves subjects of the underlying allegations — a process that has, in past rounds of disclosure, taken anywhere from several weeks to a few months after a judge clears materials for release. It remains unclear from the ruling itself whether Maxwell’s legal team plans to appeal Preska’s decision to the Second Circuit, though her attorneys have signaled in past filings that they intend to keep contesting individual releases of sealed material as they come up, even as the broader legal fight over the Transparency Act’s constitutionality has now been resolved, at least at the district court level, in the government’s favor. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, sued both Maxwell and Prince Andrew in the years before her death, alleging she had been trafficked as a teenager. Maxwell settled Giuffre’s suit against her in 2017; Prince Andrew reached his own settlement with Giuffre in 2022. Epstein died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, a death that was officially ruled a suicide but that has continued to fuel public skepticism and conspiracy theories, adding to the political pressure that eventually produced the Transparency Act. Lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee, which has spent much of the past year pressing the Justice Department for fuller compliance with the law, have said they view the ruling as a significant step toward the kind of complete public accounting they have been demanding since the statute’s passage, even as they continue to argue that millions of additional pages remain improperly withheld. Whether this latest release meaningfully advances that broader effort, or simply becomes the next flashpoint in an ongoing legal and political fight over how much of the Epstein investigation’s paper trail the public is ultimately entitled to see, is likely to become clearer only once the newly cleared documents are actually made public in the weeks ahead. Preska’s decision is notable partly because it is not the first time a federal judge has sided with disclosure advocates over Maxwell’s objections this year. Her ruling followed similar findings from other judges handling related sealed materials from the broader Epstein docket, part of a pattern that has emerged since the Transparency Act’s passage: courts asked to weigh decades-old secrecy orders…
National Guard’s DC Deployment Extended Through 2029 at Projected $1.4 Billion Cost
The federal deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. has been extended through January 2029, stretching what began as a short-term crime crackdown into a multi-year presence projected to cost taxpayers roughly $1.4 billion, according to Defense Department estimates. President Trump originally ordered the deployment on August 11, 2025, framing it as a federal law enforcement surge aimed at bringing down violent crime in the nation’s capital. More than a year later, the mission has grown rather than wound down: as of August 4, more than 4,600 military personnel drawn from the D.C. Guard and units from 24 states and territories remain stationed in the city, working alongside federal law enforcement officers on patrols and other public safety functions. The administration points to concrete numbers to justify the extension. Officials credit the surge with more than 13,000 arrests since it began, and city crime statistics show an overall 20% drop in crime through August 7 compared with the same period in 2025, including a 32% decline in homicides, from 97 down to 66. Supporters of the deployment argue those numbers speak for themselves and reflect a level of coordinated federal-local enforcement that the city could not achieve on its own. Critics, including independent crime analysts, note a more complicated picture: violent crime in Washington had already been on a downward trend before the National Guard surge began in 2025, part of a broader decline in major-city crime rates seen across much of the country. That has fueled a debate over how much of the recent improvement can be credited specifically to the military deployment versus a continuation of trends already underway. The extension has deepened long-simmering tension between the Trump administration and D.C.’s local government over who controls law enforcement and public safety policy in the district. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has walked a careful line between cooperating with federal authorities and defending the city’s limited home-rule autonomy, acknowledged the district’s constrained position bluntly: “We don’t have voting representation in Congress. We don’t control the D.C. National Guard.” Unlike governors in the 50 states, D.C.’s mayor does not have direct authority over the district’s Guard units, which answer instead to the president — a quirk of the district’s unique legal status that has become newly consequential now that the deployment is expected to stretch across multiple years and, potentially, into a different presidential administration. Some members of the D.C. Council have been more openly critical. Council member Brianne Nadeau said the extended presence has taken a toll on residents’ sense of normalcy in their own city. “The fact that we still have the National Guard walking our streets a year later with no end in sight is really demoralizing,” she said, capturing a sentiment shared by other local officials who argue that a temporary emergency measure has effectively become a permanent fixture of daily life in the capital without the kind of public debate that would normally accompany a policy of that scale and duration. A lawsuit challenging the legal basis for the deployment remains pending in federal court, though legal observers have expressed skepticism about its odds of success, citing the district’s unusual legal status and the broad authority presidents have historically exercised over its Guard units. Unlike a Guard deployment to a state, which generally requires the governor’s consent, the president’s authority over the D.C. National Guard is considerably more direct, giving the White House wide latitude to extend the mission with comparatively little legal friction. The $1.4 billion price tag has also drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers from both parties have raised questions about the deployment’s long-term cost-effectiveness compared with alternative approaches, such as funding additional D.C. Metropolitan Police officers directly or investing in community-based violence-intervention programs. Defenders of the current approach counter that the National Guard’s visible presence provides a deterrent effect that a strictly local police response cannot replicate, particularly in high-traffic tourist and government areas of the city that carry outsized symbolic and security importance. The deployment has also become a flashpoint in the broader national debate over the use of military and quasi-military forces for domestic law enforcement, a debate that has grown louder as the administration has weighed similar deployments in other major cities experiencing crime spikes or high-profile public safety incidents. Administration officials have pointed to Washington as a proof-of-concept for the approach, arguing that the visible reduction in violent crime validates extending similar deployments elsewhere. Opponents warn that normalizing a years-long military presence in American cities, even one focused on ostensibly civilian law enforcement tasks, sets a precedent that could prove difficult to unwind regardless of which party controls the White House in the years ahead. For now, the roughly 4,600 troops remain a fixture of daily life in the nation’s capital, stationed at Metro stations, tourist landmarks and neighborhood patrol routes that, before 2025, would have been the sole responsibility of D.C.’s own police force. With the deployment now locked in through the start of 2029, the debate over its costs, benefits and legal footing is likely to remain a recurring feature of D.C. politics for years to come, well beyond whatever crime statistics ultimately emerge from any single year of the surge. The multi-state composition of the deployment has added another layer of political complexity. Guard units from 24 states and territories have rotated through the mission alongside D.C.’s own Guard, meaning governors in a range of red and blue states have had to decide whether to keep contributing troops to a mission that has become a symbol of the broader fight over federal versus local control of policing. Several Republican governors have framed their states’ continued participation as supporting law and order in the capital, while governors in a handful of Democratic-led states have faced pressure to withdraw their contingents, arguing the mission has drifted well beyond its stated purpose as a short-term emergency response. The financial structure of the deployment has also drawn attention from budget analysts. The projected $1.4 billion cost…