Vol. 1, No. 61
Argued takes on the news of the day.
Accenture is the world's biggest seller of AI transformation. Its own guidance cut, and the selloff it set off in India, suggest the technology it's pitching is hollowing out the work it sells.
Federal enforcers blocked the JetBlue-Spirit merger to protect flyers from higher fares. Spirit died anyway, fares are at a four-year high, and the lesson is bigger than one airline.
On July 1, a new rule lets the Education Secretary strip loan forgiveness from workers whose employers have a 'substantial illegal purpose.' The vague standard is a tool every future administration inherits.
Federal agents say they stopped an explosive-drone plot aimed at a White House event. The harder problem is that the law for detecting and downing drones still leaves most local police without the tools.
The Pentagon reverted Indo-Pacific Command to its old name, Pacific Command, calling it a nod to history. But with Washington warming to Beijing and India hedging, erasing the 'Indo' reads as a snub New Delhi won't miss.
The justices just agreed to decide whether the government can detain people for months without a bond hearing. Strip away the immigration politics, and the real question is about due process for everyone.
A U.S. military strike on Monday pushed the boat-campaign death toll past 200, with no charges, no evidence shown, and no real vote in Congress. The bodies are the smaller scandal. The precedent is the larger one.
Wall Street is judging Fox's $22 billion Roku deal on the price. The bigger story: a content giant just bought the screen 100 million homes use to reach its own competitors — and the remote that points there.
Almost no one expects Kevin Warsh to cut rates at his first Fed meeting this week — which is exactly why it proves nothing. The real test of the Fed's independence comes at the meeting nobody's talking about yet.
Crude slid to multi-month lows the moment Washington and Tehran announced a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But gasoline falls slowly, the deal isn't signed, and one analyst still sees $5 gas before July 4.
The U.S.-Iran deal stops the shooting, lifts the naval blockade and reopens the Strait of Hormuz. But it leaves Iran's nuclear program, the reason the war began, to a 60-day negotiation that hasn't started.
Washington ordered the Census to drop the statistical 'noise' that shields your data, calling it honest. In practice it does the opposite — blurring local detail and making real people easier to unmask.
Trump's 250-foot triumphal arch has won over the design boards he appoints. The one approval the law actually requires, a vote in Congress, is the one nobody is waiting for.
The Small Business Administration has stopped backing loans to lawful permanent residents — taxpaying, legally settled, citizens-in-waiting. It's a self-inflicted wound dressed up as enforcement.
SpaceX just pulled off the largest IPO on record and made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. The engineering milestone is real. So is the public's deepening dependence on one man's company.
Section 702 lapses today, and both parties had a hand in it. But the reason a routinely renewable spy law became impossible to save traces back to one decision: who Trump insisted on putting in charge of intelligence.
Markets read Wednesday's soft core CPI as proof inflation was cooling. The next morning's wholesale report told a different story — and it points at a war Washington keeps treating as someone else's problem.
Sweden, once a champion of classroom screens, will ban phones in schools this fall. It's an admission the digital-classroom experiment failed, and a challenge to a U.S. still fighting this out district by district.
Alabama insisted nitrogen hypoxia was quick and painless. The Eleventh Circuit found it presents a substantial risk of serious harm, and a judge endorsed a firing squad as the less cruel alternative.
Brussels just forced Meta to reopen WhatsApp to rival AI assistants in its first interim antitrust order in 17 years. The remedy is blunt. But the case is a window into where the AI battle is actually being fought.
The company that vowed to build its own AI just made the iPhone's marquee feature lean on its biggest rival's models — and locked everyone in Europe and China out of it. The demo was the least interesting thing onstage.
The court may be right that only Congress can set the fee. But the goal was right: H-1B has become a channel for cheaper foreign labor, and these high-paying jobs should go to Americans, not the lowest global bidder.
Soccer's own U.S. league banned two players for life over a yellow-card bet. As the World Cup opens on American soil, three states still let sportsbooks take the most manipulable wager in the game.
Trump's new executive order asks AI companies to share their most powerful models with the government before release. It calls that voluntary. The leverage it quietly builds won't stay that way.
A new NPR/Ipsos poll says most teachers fear AI is dulling students' thinking. The number that should actually move districts is the gap between the rules leaders say exist and the ones teachers can find.
