“Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, news about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs has vacillated between two four-letter words: fear and hype. As a result, about two-thirds of Americans believe AI will lead to fewer jobs, while the overpromising of AI’s potential has helped lead to a similar proportion of Americans not using AI much or at all in their jobs. By last year, however, surveys of AI’s actual impact in the workplace had started to roll in. And many indicate a move toward enhancing the application of reason, analytical judgment, and other skills of humans – and redefining intelligence to levels beyond the limits of a machine or the brain. One federal survey in the New York-northern New Jersey area found that a large share of businesses using AI are retraining workers to utilize the technology with no significant reductions in employment.” (03/18/26)
“Iran executed a 19-year-old champion wrestler in a public hanging Thursday along with two other people who were arrested during the brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters in January. Saleh Mohammadi, a rising star from Qom, was allegedly tortured to confess to the capital crime of waging war against God, with the teen executed without a fair trial, according to human rights groups. ‘His execution was a blatant political murder, part of the Islamic Republic’s pattern of targeting athletes to crush dissent and terrorize society,’ Nima Far, a human rights activist and Iranian combat athlete, told Fox News. Mohammadi, along with fellow protesters Mehdi Ghasemi and Saeed Davoudi, were accused of killing two police officers ‘with knives and swords’ during the January protests, according to Iranian state media. Mohammadi was arrested during the brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters in January.” (03/19/26)
“Conservatives [sic] celebrated Tuesday after a federal appeals court denied California’s request to narrow a Supreme Court ruling on transgender policies, two weeks after the high court dealt the state a major blow in the same case. ‘California has now lost at the district court, lost at the Supreme Court, and been turned away by the Ninth Circuit,’ Executive Vice President of the Thomas More Society Peter Breen said in a statement. ‘The state has repeatedly tried to paint parents who don’t immediately accept their children’s assertion of a new name and gender as ‘abusive.’ The courts have resoundingly rejected that premise.’ The Supreme Court had temporarily blocked California officials on March 2 from interfering with school policies that require parents to be notified if their child identifies as transgender.” (03/19/26)
“We’re in the midst of the quietest government shutdown in American history. For 34 days, funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been blocked in a standoff over the Trump administration’s deeply unpopular immigration enforcement, something the White House has finally realized is such a public opinion disaster that they’ve stopped calling it mass deportation. The biggest public-facing side of this shutdown is Transportation Security Administration workers, who have now worked without a paycheck for a month. But aside from frustration about longer airport security lines, there’s been little pressure on Washington to end the impasse. On Wednesday, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) had his confirmation hearing to run the department that currently has no funding. While his rhetoric was softer, he didn’t really offer many thoughts about the issues in the dispute.” (03/19/26)
“Three dozen state and local governments have challenged the Trump administration’s reversal of a landmark Obama-era scientific ruling which held that greenhouse gases were a threat to public health. The lawsuit seeks to overturn the administration’s repeal last month of the 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ that underpins US policies aimed at lowering emissions from cars, power plants and other sources of planet-warming emissions. Several environmental organisations filed a similar lawsuit last month. President Donald Trump touted the climate change rollback as a major achievement, calling it a victory over the Democratic Party’s ‘radical’ energy and climate policies. The petition filed in the US Court of Appeals argues that overturning the ‘endangerment finding’ violated provisions in the Clean Air Act. The group challenging the administration includes 23 states and 17 cities, counties and state agencies, among them New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.” (03/19/26)
“The official response to my column Monday about the FBI’s failure to prevent four recent Islamic terror attacks has been unsatisfactory, to say the least, and the personal attacks by FBI Director Kash Patel’s private PR operatives have been downright deranged. None of which is reassuring when it comes to the FBI’s preparedness to handle a heightened terror threat on home soil. It’s not Patel’s fault that our foremost domestic counterterrorism agency has been degraded and politicized under his predecessors, but it’s his job to fix it fast and his defensiveness suggests a problem. The most alarming case involves Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a convicted ISIS terrorist who was on supervised federal release when he yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ and opened fire on an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., last Thursday, killing the instructor before being killed himself.” (03/19/26)
“US civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, who was known for advocating for the rights of farm workers, has been accused of sexual abuse. Dolores Huerta said in the 1960s, Chavez, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union (UFW) with her, once ‘manipulated and pressured’ her into having sex, and on another occasion forced her. It comes after the New York Times published an investigation that detailed allegations from Huerta and two other women, who said Chavez groomed and sexually abused girls who were involved in the labour movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Chavez, who died in 1993 aged 66, rallied California’s farmworkers from the 1950s to push for improvements in working conditions, and led national boycotts and marches. The news has prompted Los Angeles and other communities to consider renaming places, schools, and streets named after Chavez.” (03/19/26)
“For over 250 years, Americans have relied on the United States Postal Service for timely processing of their mail, no matter the conditions. After we dropped it in a box or gave it to a letter carrier, we could count on our mail being postmarked on that date so that our bills and tax returns aren’t late and our election ballots are counted. Unfortunately, this trust is now increasingly risky, since we can no longer rely on USPS to postmark mail on the day it’s collected. As part of former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s broader cost-cutting and restructuring plan, the Postal Service has stopped its practice of picking up mail at the end of every day from all post offices. This means your ballot or bill payment could sit there until the following morning or even longer before being postmarked at a huge processing center.” (03/19/26)
“The Trump administration said Thursday that it has launched investigations into 13 states that require state-regulated health insurance plans to cover abortion. The probes are the latest in a long-running dispute between the political parties on how to interpret a provision, known as the Weldon Amendment, that’s included in federal spending laws each year. It bars states from discriminating against health entities that don’t provide, cover or refer for abortion. When Democrat Joe Biden was president, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office said the provision didn’t pertain to employers or other health care sponsors. The Trump administration said this year that it does. The administration says that potentially puts states with abortion coverage requirements in violation of the law, because they may not allow employers or other health care issuers to opt out. It said it was sending out letters to gather more information from those states.” (03/19/26)
“In 2023, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party held a slim, single-seat majority in the Minnesota State Senate and control of the State House and Governor’s Mansion. It had been a decade since the last Democratic trifecta in the state, which like many similar moments of prior eras, produced only incremental wins for progressives and the Left. Since the financial crisis and Great Recession of the early Obama era, a core group of community and union organizers in Minnesota had been building what they called ‘alignment’. It would go beyond the traditional coalitions so many of us were used to — ones coalesced around a single fight but too pragmatic to inspire people to action. Real power building, I was told, would require something different: An ability to work across organizations and ideologies while holding up bigger sets of common, universal demands.” (03/19/26)
