“Donald Trump championed international religious freedom in his first term, turning a long-standing bipartisan cause into a foreign-policy priority. His administration gave the Office of International Religious Freedom a higher position within the State Department’s bureaucracy, stressed religious freedom in its 2017 National Security Strategy and appointed officials focused on religious freedom at the National Security Council and United States Agency for International Development. Trump’s second term has been dramatically different. Trump has failed to issue statutorily required annual reports, inflicted DOGE-style cuts on religious freedom advocacy groups and demoted the religious freedom office within the State Department’s hierarchy. … Some religious freedom advocates have called the Trump administration’s new approach ‘a betrayal.’ But the challenges faced by international religious freedom extend far beyond the current White House.” (10/02/26)
“Two Iranian men conducted surveillance of a Manchester synagogue that was the site of a deadly attack a year ago as part of a plot to bomb it this year, a prosecutor said Saturday. Salam Ahmadyan, 36, and Rahman Salehi, 34, researched attacking the Heaton Park Congregation Synagogue in Manchester in northwest England and the Jewish Museum in nearby Cheetham Hill, the court was told. Ahmadyan and Salehi were arrested last month and charged Friday with engaging in conduct in preparation for terrorist acts. … Prosecutor Mark Luckett said the duo were directed by a third person believed to be in Iran who coordinated plans and provided instructions on making a homemade chlorine bomb.” (10/03/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“I believe that global warming is probably real, probably anthropogenic, may well impose net costs. This raises an obvious question: What, if anything, should we do about it? If I were dictator of the world and wished to maximize economic efficiency, the answer would be fairly obvious. Impose a tax on activities that create greenhouse gases designed to reflect the marginal cost they create. That is the standard economic solution, due to Pigou, for problems of negative externalities. Since the tax brings in additional revenue, combine it with a corresponding reduction in whatever taxes currently have the largest adverse effects. I do not, in fact, support carbon taxes. The reason is that I do not believe that, if imposed, they would fit the pattern described above.” (10/02/26)
“President Donald Trump has once again used an unusual method called a pocket rescission to cut U.S. government spending. Coming just days before the end of the federal government’s 2026 fiscal year on September 30, the move will cancel $810 million of the $7.45 trillion of spending authorized by the U.S. Congress. … The canceled spending represents about 0.01% of what Congress authorized for federal spending during the 2026 fiscal year. The amount of the rescission is a bit like finding you have an unexpected penny left over after spending ten thousand dollars. But coming with just five days left in the 2026 fiscal year doesn’t give Congress time to potentially override the President’s cost-cutting action before it expires. That’s left many Washington D.C. politicians angry over the maneuver.” (10/02/26)
“Tennessee’s prison chief is resigning after the failed [killing] of Christa Pike, which lawyers say was the fifth ‘botched’ [prisoner killing] under his leadership across two states since 2022. Frank Strada, the commissioner of the Tennessee department of correction, has faced mounting questions about the state’s highly secretive death penalty protocols since Wednesday evening when Pike became the first death row prisoner in the US to to be injected with lethal drugs and survive. … Death penalty lawyers said there were common threads in the five problematic [prisoner killings] under Strada, including the prisoners’ protracted suffering and questionable injection procedures, and argued that Lee should never have appointed Strada given his Arizona record.” (10/03/26)
“There are many bad arguments against capital punishment: that an innocent person might be wrongly convicted … that the willful taking of human life is categorically evil … that a death sentence cannot be reversed … etc. There are better arguments against capital punishment: One is that capital punishment is bad for the executioners (and, this being a republic, we are all executioners), which ought to be obvious to anybody who has been present at one of those festive ‘Burn, baby, burn!’ rallies death-penalty enthusiasts sometimes stage outside of an execution or to anyone who has heard Donald Trump hold forth on the subject. … Another argument against capital punishment is that we are not very good at it.” (10/02/26)
