Run the 2026 list in one go and the scale becomes hard to argue with. BuzzFeed cut a third of its staff after Byron Allen’s takeover. GB News proposed cutting roughly a third of its own after building what it described as groundbreaking automated workflows. The Washington Post cut hundreds in February, about a third of the business. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution went for around fifty jobs, fifteen percent of staff. CBS News cut about sixty-six people, six percent, and closed CBS News Radio in the process.

Eight winners and finalists in this year’s Pulitzers used artificial intelligence somewhere in their reporting. That fact sits awkwardly next to a year of layoffs blamed on automation, and both things are true at once, which is the part worth working through. The AI that wins prizes and the AI that eliminates jobs are being deployed by different people for different reasons, and conflating them makes the industry’s conversation about this worse.

Monday opened with two officials describing the same negotiation in incompatible terms. The American position is that talks with Iran are being kept deliberately quiet, that the pressure now is economic rather than diplomatic, and that Tehran is broke enough to have trouble paying its own soldiers. The Iranian foreign minister said, a few hours earlier, that there are no talks. Not stalled talks. None. He added that Iran will not sit down while Washington keeps breaking the June agreement.

The Trump administration has finalized a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that opens the door to the Kingdom enriching uranium on its own soil, forgoing the strictest nonproliferation conditions that arms control advocates had pushed for. The deal, structured as a 30-year “123 Agreement,” is designed to give US companies a central role in building out Saudi nuclear infrastructure, including a domestically sited enrichment facility, while generating billions of dollars in contracts for the American nuclear industry.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who spent more than two decades in the U.S. Senate and emerged as one of Washington’s most influential voices on defense and foreign policy, died Saturday night after what his office described as a brief and sudden illness. He was 71. A medical examiner’s preliminary findings pointed to an aortic dissection as the cause of death, according to officials familiar with the case. Graham had recently returned from a trip to Ukraine.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. It signed, then unsigned, and has spent two decades constructing a legal and diplomatic wall against the institution the statute created. The current confrontation — sanctions on court officials, visa bans, statutory authorization to extract Americans held at The Hague — is not an improvisation. It is the enforcement phase of a position Washington has held since 2002. That position rests on four arguments.

Donald Trump’s posture toward Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of this week’s NATO summit in Ankara has been striking even by Trump’s own standards. He has praised the Turkish leader as a “hell of a leader” and a good friend, floated reversing a seven-year-old ban on F-35 sales to Turkey, and pushed a $700 million-plus jet engine deal through over bipartisan objections on Capitol Hill. None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reasons behind it say as much about Trump’s own instincts as they do about Erdogan’s skill in exploiting them.

To the Members of Congress, Regulatory Agencies, and Policymakers, We write to urge restraint. As you consider new rules for artificial intelligence, we ask you to resist the instinct to regulate first and understand later. The history of transformative technologies — the printing press, electricity, the internet — teaches the same lesson every time: premature regulation calcifies incumbents, chills experimentation, and rarely protects the people it claims to serve. Innovation needs room to fail.

The Trump administration notified Congress on June 24 that it intends to sell more than $700 million worth of GE Aerospace F-110 engines to Turkey, enough to power roughly 80 units for Ankara’s indigenous KAAN fighter program. Congress now has a narrow, fifteen-day statutory window to introduce a joint resolution of disapproval. That window is closing, and it should be used. The case against the sale is not abstract. Turkey still operates the Russian-made S-400 air defense system it purchased in 2019 — the same purchase that got Ankara expelled from the F-35 program in the first place and triggered CAATSA sanctions that remain in effect today.

The same agreement produced two verdicts this week. Wall Street read the US-Iran memorandum of understanding as the end of a war, sent oil below $79, and pushed the major indices to records. A senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee read it as a hollow ceasefire that settles nothing. Both verdicts are defensible, because they are measuring different things — and the gap between them is the story.