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What Can Be Done About President Trump’s Slush Fund?
Others have examined the details and criticisms of Trump’s slush fund, noting that its aim is to financially reward people who have broken the law in order to serve Trump’s interests. Here, I focus on legal issues and remedies.
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DHS Threatens to Halt Customs Processing at Airports in Sanctuary Cities
Major airports across the country could soon freeze customs processing and cancel all international flights if sanctuary cities continue bucking federal immigration enforcement operations.
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Who Is Accountable When AI Goes Global?
The existing patchwork of AI standards and governance frameworks can both create and worsen cross-border harms from AI deployment. A central coordinating mechanism could help mitigate these risks. Can the United Nations play this role?
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Can an AI Chatbot Be Held Liable in Cases of Death?
A growing number of lawsuits aim to hold OpenAI responsible for what plaintiffs say is their chatbot’s role in people’s deaths. Northeastern experts wonder if widespread change will occur because of them.
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Trump Promises End to America’s Slush Fund Shortage
The whole idea of Trump’s $1,776 billion so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is grotesque on several levels: the funds are meant to go to the president’s political allies; these funds will be awarded by a committee staffed with the president’s allies; and the Fund is duplicative of a program that already exists—except that the new version lacks the minimal safeguards against awardee bias that judicial monitoring of settlements supplies. This cronyist subsidy flouts legal and constitutional norms.
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East Texas Could Be the Key to Developing Critical Lithium Supply for the U.S. Military
Texas lawmakers proposed a bill to allow private-sector lithium mining companies to work on certain military bases.
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The Open Signal: How Mobile Phone Location Data Can Expose and Endanger American Troops
The architecture of the commercial mobile ecosystem favors exposure over concealment. As long as warfighters carry devices designed for convenience inside an economy designed for surveillance, the United States will remain vulnerable to enemies who can turn a phone’s signal into intelligence and intelligence into a strike.
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To ‘86’ Occasionally Means to Kill but Usually Doesn’t: A Linguistic Investigation into the Instagram Threat Charge Against James Comey
The Comey indictment states that “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” Comey’s post “as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump.” This is not the case. Looking across dictionaries, linguistic corpora, and user-generated dictionaries, a general speaker of contemporary American English would interpret the “eighty-six” in Comey’s post as an expression of opinion, a desire to “eject” the president from office.
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DHS Quits Granting Green Cards—Almost Entirely
DHS announced Friday that it will cease granting green card applications except in extraordinary circumstances. Every legal immigrant must leave the country—that is, self-deport—even if they are qualified for a green card and even if leaving would disqualify them.
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How a Proposed Green Card Application Policy Change Would Disrupt Lives by Assuming Legal Immigrants Are Evading the Law
As with other announcements during the second Trump administration, the real goal of the new policy may be to discourage immigration rather than effecting direct policy changes.
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New Cornell Center on Democracy Will Support Democratic Principles at Home and Abroad
As the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, and amid concern about democratic backsliding globally, Cornell University has launched the Cornell Center on Democracy to mobilize leading scholars to strengthen democracy through rigorous research, democratic education and public engagement.
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Who Has Authority to Deal with Drones? In Most of Europe, That’s Unclear
Europe’s growing drone problem is a governance problem. The hardware exists. What is missing, across most of the continent, is the legal authority to deploy it, the jurisdictional clarity to coordinate it, and the political will to mandate either.
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The AI Race Isn’t Real
The notion of an AI race against China is at the center of the administration’s deregulatory turn. In Congress and the private sector, an AI race against China is also frequently invoked as a reason to favor light regulation of domestic AI companies, even in the presence of serious threat models. But the idea of an AI race that must be won at all costs is wrong. It is fundamentally flawed as a descriptive matter and normatively defective.
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The Making of a Mythos: AI-Enabled Cybersecurity and the Emerging Architecture of Access
Anthropic’s release of the frontier AI model Claude Mythos Preview has caused significant trepidation, as its autonomous code-reasoning capabilities surfaced previously undetected vulnerabilities across major operating systems and software infrastructure. The architecture of access, being constructed around such capabilities, creates an asymmetry in access. India needs to secure critical infrastructure by updating, modernizing or replacing legacy systems.
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More Perspective on the Cash-for-Capitol-Attackers Fund
President Donald Trump’s attempt to engineer a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for those in legal trouble for promoting his interests is one of the most notable legal stories in recent memory. It points not only to corruption but to a march toward authoritarian rule imposed by way of the streets. Trump intends to use public money to reward followers who broke the law, often violently, to keep him in power despite the election returns. That sends a dangerous message that if they try that again, they may come out not just with a get-out-of-jail pardon, but with a fortune.
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The long view
The Drone Threat to America’s Cities
Drones are coming for our cities. The tech is cheap, the threat is real, and our defenses are nearly nonexistent. To avoid that ugly reality, we need to come up with better ideas, and we need them fast. Because ready or not, the drones are coming.
Remotely Coerced Violence: 764, The Com Network, and the Hybridization of Threats
Nihilistic violent extremism is best understood as a victim-driven, youth-centered online ecosystem in which status, belonging, and identity are earned through the production, circulation, and escalation of harm. It combine sadistic online exploitation, cybercrime, self-directed violence, animal abuse, school-violence threats, and terrorist or violent-extremist conduct.
Combat Experience as a Strategic Resource: Lessons of the Red Army Purges
Since January 2025, the Defense Department has removed, replaced, or forced the early retirement of a remarkable concentration of operationally experienced senior officers. What is the impact of these removals on combat effectiveness, which is Secretary Hegseth’s own widely shared standard? I believe the impact is negative. In fact, the impact of those decisions on combat effectiveness constitutes a strategic liability of the Defense Department’s own making – the depletion of a vital resource central to the Secretary’s sought-after lethality.
How Cybercriminal Networks Evolve into Global Security Threats
Cyberattacks have become an increasingly common part of modern life, disrupting hospitals, schools, businesses and governments around the world. New research points to a new threat: online communities can also spread political extremism.
‘Nihilistic Violent Extremism’ Isn’t a Thing, and I’m Tired of Pretending It Is
“Nihilistic violent extremism” (NVE) is a term used to bring together an array of hateful actors who, working online, try to convince people to kill themselves, produce child sexual abuse material, and other hateful actions. But the term confuses more than it helps—NVE is too vague a concept and encompasses too wide a range of behavior, leading to misunderstanding, poor analysis, and potential response mistakes.
Bookshelf: The Next China Is Still China
Could another country replace China as the world’s economic growth leader, or could China reset for a new phase of economic leadership? This is the key question Joe Ngai and Nick Leung address in their new book.