“Iran has rejected US President Donald Trump’s claim that negotiations with Washington are underway, with the country’s Foreign Ministry insisting that no talks are currently taking place between the two sides. In a statement on Monday (July 27), the ministry said Iran was ‘not engaged in any negotiations with the United States’ and dismissed suggestions that Tehran had sought to restart dialogue, saying such an approach was ‘not in our DNA’. Instead, it claimed it was Washington that had requested talks, according to Iranian news agency Tasnim. The remarks came despite a pause in the recent military confrontation between Iran and the United States, with both sides refraining from launching fresh strikes for a second consecutive day.” (07/28/26)
“One of the defining failures of modern American government has been the steady erosion of Congress’s constitutional authority over war. The Constitution grants Congress — not the president — the power to declare war. Congress decides to go to war. The president wages it. Over the past several decades, presidents of both major parties have increasingly treated military intervention as an executive prerogative rather than a congressional requirement. The last six presidents have not reflected distinct foreign policy doctrines but a uniparty continuum of executive overreach.” (07/27/26)
“The Trump administration on Monday asked the Supreme Court to intervene in a legal fight over President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, escalating the dispute 99 days before the November midterm elections. The emergency request came after a federal appeals court, in a 2-1 decision Saturday, left in place an order blocking key parts of Trump’s executive order issued in March that directs federal agencies to create voter eligibility lists and restrict U.S. Postal Service delivery of ballots not tied to those lists. A coalition of 23 states argue Trump lacks authority to impose federal rules on elections administered by state and local officials.” (07/27/26)
“People like working from home. It lets us avoid commutes. It lets us live closer to family. It seems especially good for the parents of young children, and it could even boost birth rates. This seems like an indisputable tech success story. Thanks to a plethora of modern technologies and applications—the internet, smartphones, VPNs, video calls, instant messaging platforms like Slack, cloud-based software and documents, and so on—remote work has become a possibility for more people than ever, and that’s a good thing. But are we all kidding ourselves about the benefits of remote work? Are we suffering from false consciousness? Do we only think we like it while it’s actually making us miserable somehow?” (07/27/26)
“The U.S. walked out as France addressed a United Nations Security Council meeting on Ukraine on Monday, accusing its longtime ally of ‘disingenuous grandstanding’ over French comments comparing the U.S. to North Korea, Russia and other authoritarian states regarding votes on human rights issues. The move followed a tense weekend exchange between the two permanent Security Council members on X in which France blasted Washington for joining Russia, North Korea and seven other countries in voting against a proposal to extend the term of Volker Turk as the U.N. rights chief for four more years. … The U.N. General Assembly on Friday voted overwhelmingly to extend the term of Turk, an outspoken critic of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s conduct in Gaza who has also called for investigations into deaths in U.S. immigration custody. The term extension has been opposed by Russia, Israel and others, with Washington threatening to reassess its funding and engagement.” (07/27/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“It seems obvious that, if one’s concern is status rather than real income, we are in a zero sum game, that if my status increases relative to yours, yours must have decreased relative to mine. That point of view seems to support the approach to politics that sees it mainly as a question of who gets to benefit at the expense of whom, of which side who is on. Like many things that seem obvious, this one is false. It is true that my status is relative to yours. It does not, oddly enough, follow that if my status is higher than yours, yours must be lower than mine, or that if my status increases someone else’s must decrease. Status is not, in fact, a zero sum game.” (07/27/26)
“City Council Speaker Julie Menin says she’s far more responsible than Mayor Zohran Mamdani; here’s his chance to prove her wrong on at least one front: the council’s obscene bid to shower $10,000 bonuses on public-school teaching assistants. United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew threatens ‘all-out war’ if the mayor vetoes the bill to award the cash, but the mayor owes the UFT nothing — and it’s his duty to the general public to say no. No city union should ever get a raise outside the collective-bargaining process: Since City Hall can’t cut union pay in other ways, it’s robbing the taxpayers if it doesn’t make labor negotiate for any hike.” (07/27/26)
“The U.S. FDA has approved Freenome’s blood-based colorectal cancer screening test for older adults, paving the way for partner Abbott to launch it in the U.S. this fall, the companies said on Monday.
Shares of Freenome were up about 4% in morning trading. … The test, SimpleScreen CRC, detects signals linked to colorectal cancer from DNA fragments circulating in the blood. Abbott is likely to market SimpleScreen to people who do not complete or decline stool-based screening tests, Brennan said.” (07/27/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Sarah McLaughlin
“Vakho Sanaia, a journalist with Formula TV, wrote a Facebook post in June sarcastically encouraging others not to call [Georgian] Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili and Member of Parliament Lado Bozhadze ‘dicks.’ On July 10, the Tbilisi City Court fined Sanaia around $2,300 for the post. Sanaia responded to the ruling with two more comments: ‘I wrote a post, saying ‘don’t call Papuashvili and Bozhadze d*cks’ [sic] and they fined me ₾6,000. Well, go ahead and call them that, then,’ and a joke that the decision meant the court was therefore declaring Papuashvili and Bozhadze ‘dicks.’ Sanaia soon learned the Division for Combating Hate Speech was pursuing an investigation of these two new posts, and last week he was sentenced to 14 days in prison on top of his original fine.” (07/27/26)
