“Britain said on Thursday it had withdrawn remaining diplomatic staff from Iran as the fighting between Iran and the United States increases. ‘Due to the security situation, UK staff have been temporarily withdrawn from Iran. Our embassy continues to operate remotely,’ the Foreign Office said on its website. In June, Britain withdrew its embassy staff from Iran, following other European nations as well as Australia and New Zealand.” (07/23/26)
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by the Editorial Board
“The rule of law across Europe is on a ‘broadly positive trajectory,’ according to the just-released 2026 European Commission Rule of Law Report. Reforms that bolster independent justice systems and align anti-corruption rules to continentwide principles are part of this arc. In a global context, where democratic norms appear to be on the back foot and several governments are flexing authoritarian muscles, this is good news. But in a note of caution, the same document also points to uneven progress – particularly among Eastern and Central European countries.” (07/22/26)
“The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits for the first time unexpectedly fell last week to the lowest since the 1960s, indicating the U.S. job market continues on an even keel and leaving Federal Reserve officials to keep their focus on containing inflation. Initial claims for state jobless benefits dropped by 22,000 — the largest decline in three months — to a seasonally adjusted 187,000 for the week ended July 18, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That was the lowest level of new applications since September 1969 and came as economists polled by Reuters had forecast new claims would edge up to 212,000 in the latest week.” (07/23/26)
Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, & Noel Sims
“On Wednesday, the Trump administration signed a 30-year nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that paves the way for the kingdom to enrich its own uranium. The Saudi government has been aggressively seeking such a deal for years, eager to gain an edge over regional rivals. The agreement lacks safeguards that previous administrations, and many independent foreign policy analysts, viewed as essential to prevent nuclear proliferation. The deal comes after the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners. Since 2021, Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has collected over $110 million from the Saudi government in management fees.” (07/23/26)
“Freedom of speech is an integral aspect of authentic freedom, grounded in the distinctively human capacity to adhere to truth through persuasion rather than imposition. While truth is objective and independent of the knowing subject, it can only be received by the subject freely. We can contrast this with a thinly grounded notion of freedom as merely a pragmatic expedient to ‘get along’ in a pluralistic society in which we assume that truth is more or less unattainable. In this thin form of liberalism, when it no longer appears the optimal empirical solution to maintain social comity or stability, freedom of speech will be easily abandoned. We have seen this dynamic play out in Western societies in the past decade, where elites now frequently insist that censorship is necessary to ‘protect democracy’ from the populist rabble.” (07/23/26)
“When we imagine a threat to free speech, we picture a ban — a law forbidding certain words, a prosecutor charging a dissenter, an official with a censor’s stamp. That picture is increasingly obsolete. The gravest threats to expression today rarely announce themselves as censorship. They take the form of ordinary administration turned to punishment — a grant frozen in reprisal, a clearance revoked over a dissenting view and, most insidiously, a damaging official label affixed to a company for the positions it has taken. The designation does quietly what the censor’s order once did openly.” (07/23/26)
“Judges at the International Criminal Court terminated proceedings against the former leader of an armed group in Darfur on Thursday after prosecutors withdrew the charges against Abdallah Banda Abakaer Nourain. The prosecution said the evidence against Banda, who had been charged with war crimes over a 2007 attack on African Union peacekeepers, had deteriorated in the time since the charges were confirmed over a decade ago in 2011. … The judges said the withdrawal of the charges and the termination of the case does not prevent prosecutors from bringing a similar case against Banda later.” (07/23/26)
