A summer afternoon in a French city centre, seven years ago. A man in a red shirt talks with his hands, mid-argument, while the crowd behind him drifts across the square. Fifty metres away, a riot squad in black moves up behind a shield wall, and a handful of demonstrators push a homemade barricade of tarpaulin and umbrellas across the tram tracks. Off to one side, students carry a red banner in Italian about Sicily and war, which has nothing to do with the local grievance and everything to do with the fact that these crowds have started to share a circuit.

Status Two informal straw polls have been held in the Security Council on the succession to António Guterres, whose second five-year term expires on 31 December. Neither produced a candidate with nine encourage votes, the threshold that would signal a Council majority. The declared field has doubled since March, from four candidates to eight. The lead changed hands between the first poll and the second. The successor takes office on 1 January 2027.

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.