A new app called HyperTexting is making it easy to surf the web as it is to scroll through a social media feed. The app was created by Caleb Hailey, a 20-year tech veteran. He was inspired to build the app after seeing Twitter lose its way over the years.

This week Donald Trump got a new airport named after him and a bridge in Tennessee was named in his honor. Trump is also planning to add his signature to U.S. dollars and issue a 3-inch commemorative gold coin with his face. The State Department is printing 40,000 Trump-branded passports.

At least 100 people got sick after drinking raw milk in Idaho, 11 of them were hospitalized. Raw milk is legal and regulated in Idaho but it's not tested for the pathogens that make people sick. The state veterinarian has seen five or six raw-milk outbreaks on his watch.

Zheng Yuhuang was teaching a business seminar in Beijing when an attendee called the police. He was taken aside for questioning and his social media accounts were wiped clean. The episode renewed discussion about political surveillance in Chinese higher education. Chinese universities have expanded systems of student “information officers” and other political reporting mechanisms.

Edward Carr looks at the Wrecking-ball revolution in the U.S. as a revolution against the world America created. Donald Trump dumped 66 international bodies, including 31 UN agencies. Marco Rubio declared that the post-war global order is obsolete and being used against the West.

Olivia Karp wrote an essay for Global Voices' July 2026 Spotlight series, "Statelessness". She argues that climate change increases the risk of statelessness. Pacific Islands such as Tuvalu and Fiji are vulnerable to climate-related disasters. There are gaps in protection and policy on climate change and statelessness, which need to be addressed.

Colossal Biosciences and the Trump administration announce a partnership on June 25, 2026 to preserve cells, tissue and DNA from threatened and endangered species. Colossal and the Fish and Wildlife Service will collaborate to identify high-priority actions and the government will provide a list of which species it wants to prioritize.

JPMorgan sees Wall Street's shift toward private blockchains as a deeper threat to Bitcoin than Strategy selling its BTC. Swift, Citi, HSBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, Wells Fargo, and Itaú Unibanco will begin testing live tokenized deposit payments on its new blockchain ledger. 50 firms, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq, and NYSE, joined its tokenization working group, with limited production trades planned for July 2026 and a full launch in October.

Taiwanese prosecutors raided the premises of Evergreen Marine as part of an insider trading investigation linked to one of the world's largest containerlines. Ukraine has sharply escalated its campaign against Russian shipping and oil infrastructure over the past week. The proposed sale of ZIM Integrated Shipping Services to Hapag-Lloyd and Israeli private equity firm FIMI is facing its most serious political challenge yet. The Panama Canal is preparing to tighten draught limits for neopanamax vessels again.

AI wealth is about to bring a third wave of tens of billions of dollars a year into philanthropy. The current effective giving ecosystem moves about $2B per year to effective charities and programs. This amount is a fraction of the more than $600 billion per year spent on philanthropy in the United States alone.

It's been 11 years since China's sweeping "709 Crackdown" that saw hundreds of human rights lawyers, legal advocates, and activists detained or questioned nationwide. Wu Shaoping is now living in the United States and working as the chairman of the "Overseas Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Association". He believes the crackdown fundamentally altered the environment for China's human rights lawyer. Wu believes that China will eventually move toward greater judicial independence.

11 people removed by the United States arrived in Eswatini on 8 July. If confirmed, it is the fourth known transfer operation under the US-Swedish third-country removal arrangement. Amnesty International has documented the serious human rights consequences of these transfers, including arbitrary detention, restrictions on access to lawyers, denial of due process and the risk of onward refoulement.

There were 11,775 deaths caused by law enforcement in the U.S. between 2003 and 2024, including 11,505 adults and 270 children. The number of adult deaths rose from 363 in 2003 to 809 in 2024, and for children under 18, the annual deaths increased from 8 to 37, a rise of over 362 percent. More than 10,300 of the deaths were caused by gunshots. Black and Hispanic Americans faced a higher risk of death caused by police than White Americans.

Ali Khamenei was killed by the United States and Israel on the first day of the war in February. The new leadership used his death to breathe new life into its Islamist martyrdom ideology. A fall of the regime seems even more unlikely today than it did in January. The ruling Revolutionary Guard feels strengthened because it has stood up to two overwhelming opponents. The country is economically in ruins and the middle class is sinking into poverty. Donald Trump is unlikely to return to war.

U.S. intelligence officials claimed in 2024 that a Russian satellite launched 2 years earlier was testing components for a future nuclear antisatellite weapon. Scientists are working on three proposals that would search for such weapons in space. The Pentagon knows the damage a nuclear explosion in space can cause. In 1962, it detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear weapon, called Starfish Prime, 400 kilometers over Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty explicitly bans placing nuclear weapons in orbit.

Board of Peace wants to establish a humanitarian pilot zone in Rafah area of south Gaza. The idea is to have Israel pull back its troops from the designated area and be replaced by soldiers from the International Stabilization Force. The committee of Palestinian technocrats tasked with replacing Hamas in governing the Strip would work with the ISF to vet the tens of thousands of Palestinians coming from the Hamas-controlled “red zone” into the “green zone’ that to date has been occupied by the IDF. The Board of Peace hopes that the pilot humanitarian zone will serve as a model to separate civilians from Hamas.

The death toll from the June 24th earthquakes in Venezuela has reached at least 3,811. 17,907 people are homeless and 16,740 injured. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez has called for international restrictions on Venezuela to be lifted in order to receive more assistance for the earthquake recovery. She has also appealed to Britain’s King Charles III and the International Monetary Fund to release their frozen gold reserves.

The Freedom Fuel Network is selling gas at $3.47 a gallon at 25 gas stations in Philadelphia and New Jersey. The network has not publicly disclosed its business strategy and at least two major petroleum companies have distanced themselves from the White House-promoted operation. The company applied for a trademark on July 1, the same day Donald Trump promoted the network on social media.

The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Population Affairs published a notice of funding opportunity for service providers to apply for grants through the Title X program. The program provides low and no-cost birth control and other sexual and reproductive health services to 2.8 million people every year. The pronatalist movement is a far-right movement with roots in eugenics that promotes having more children.

Researchers in China have developed a radical sodium metal battery (SMB) design that can fully charge in just four minutes and will retain its capacity for years of use. SMBs are a form of ultrafast-charging, stable batteries that could one day be a cheap alternative to today's lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. They use a metallic sodium anode rather than a graphite or hard carbon anode and they are lighter and lighter than Li-ion batteries.

Iran's latest attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz sent oil prices sharply higher in recent days. Growing oil production, alternative export routes and new shipping patterns suggest Iran's ability to weaponize the strait may be weakening. President Donald Trump declared the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding and ceasefire "over" and warned his administration could again impose a naval blockade on Iran.

OnlyFans creators are inadvertently helping cybersecurity teams identify compromised government websites. They are fighting piracy by filing takedown requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to protect their stolen content. Scammers have been exploiting a specific vulnerability in how Google’s search algorithm works. More than 2,000 domains belonging to governments and educational institutions across more than 80 countries have received copyright takedown requests linked to adult content creators over the past 15 years.

Dr. Eyal Hulata served as National Security Adviser in the previous government under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. He led Israel's inter-agency effort to confront the Iranian threat. Israel should be proud of the two air campaigns against Iran, which pushed back the Iranian nuclear program. Iran's military and defense industry were badly degraded, but those achievements will be temporary if they are not followed up by ongoing pressure, sanctions, and intelligence operations. Lebanon's agreement with Beirut is the right approach, though Israel should not give up anything that compromises its security.

AI datacenters are a hot topic in the US politics. There are concerns about their environmental and economic impact. However, the focus on the datacenter issue obscures the bigger prize AI companies are after. They want to capture all the value created by entire industries.

On Chinese social media, people are sharing the latest move they have invented to get by: making human food. The hashtag "human food" has over 5.4 million views on a social media platform. The main ingredients for human food are those commonly seen in salads, such as green peppers, broccoli, mushrooms, corn, beef and shrimps.

A monitoring well at the Pinyon Plain uranium mine has been detecting rising arsenic levels since 2025. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality approved an application from Energy Fuels Resources Inc. to raise both the alert levels for arsenic and the limit of the toxic metal in the aquifer detected at the well by 10 percent. Local tribes and environmentalists say the decision threatens the region’s water quality and the public's ability to be alerted to groundwater issues at the mine. The company claims the arsenic issue is natural and not due to the mining.

People with mental illnesses can be discriminated against by AI chatbots. Large language models (LLMs) often produce stigmatizing statements when provided with information about a person’s health. An estimated one-third of U.S. adults are now using chatbots for health advice.

Vietnam wants to become an indispensable player in the physical layers underpinning artificial intelligence. The government plans to train 50,000 semiconductor engineers by 2030, launch a $100 million venture capital fund, increase public spending on science and technology, attract foreign investment, and secure domestic supplies of rare earth minerals. Vietnam is using economic statecraft to position itself within global value chains to fuel economic growth and sovereignty.

Beijing is trying to build the world’s dominant computing platform. America is treating the technology race as a technology race. China is treating it as a civilization-building project. History's great wars were won not by the single best weapon but by nations able to generate energy, build factories and produce the industrial output needed to prevail.

New York-Presbyterian is the dominant hospital chain in Manhattan with $11.5 billion in sales and a half billion in profits last year. It claims to be a rural hospital under Medicare rules, but it's an urban hospital under different Medicare rules that offer more money to hospitals in high-cost cities. This “dual classification” grift has exploded since 2016.

North Carolina has passed a law recognizing the CFTC's authority over prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket. The law taxes the platforms at 6% of their North Carolina-attributable net trading fees, versus a 23% rate on sports betting operators. More than a dozen states have moved to treat prediction markets as unlicensed sports betting. The CFTC has sued at least nine states to defend what it calls its exclusive jurisdiction.

The Prime Healthcare hospital Saint Joseph Medical Center in Joliet has filed paperwork with the state of Illinois to permanently close its pediatric inpatient unit. In April of 2025, the hospital temporarily suspended overnight inpatient pediatric care at the 13-bed unit citing low patient volume. The hospital, owned by California-based Prime Healthcare, filed for a permanent discontinuation of those services as of June 29, 2026.

The Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program has provided more than $100 billion to disaster areas over the last few decades. The program operates on an ad hoc basis, without permanent congressional approval, so most of its disaster grants take more than half a decade to execute and arrive too late to make a difference. Last month, Congress passed a major bipartisan housing bill with an endorsement from President Donald Trump. The bill's primary focus is on building more homes in areas that are suffering from housing shortages, but it also contains a provision that will turn HUD’s sporadic disaster aid into a permanent program.

At least 12 people have died in a wildfire in southern Spain's Almeria province as they tried to flee the flames in cars and on foot. Eight people were injured and 23 people are missing. The fire has burned more than 3,200 hectares (7,900 acres) of forest and farmland and is still burning.

Facewatch is a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury's, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves. It is launching a UK-first feature to alert police in real time when the most serious offenders trigger a live facial recognition match. Civil liberties groups have voiced alarm at the development, saying it had "shot on far ahead of the regulation" and was "upending the way retail crime was dealt with".