“If you want to get in your car and you want to go down to Buc-ee’s in St. Augustine, it’s really none of the government’s damn business if you’re doing that, right?” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday at a news conference. He announced that Florida will revoke all law enforcement license-plate-recognition camera permits on state highways, with all such cameras to be removed by the end of September.  

“What we don’t want in the state of Florida is to have a digital AI surveillance state where everything we’re doing is being tracked at all times,” DeSantis added, referring to the recent expansion of ALPRs—automated license plate reader cameras—across the country. The cameras are supposed to catch people committing crimes, and sometimes they do. But they’re also ripe for abuse. Each camera forms part of a nationwide network, and by sharing vehicle information between and within police departments, ALPRs can enable officers to track what are called “patterns of life”: where a person is likely to be, who they spend time with, and what they’re doing in a given moment. 

Police officers nationwide are taking advantage of that surveillance ability. In dozens of cases, officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for doing things like searching an ex-girlfriend’s license plate information 2,000 times, searching an estranged wife’s license plates 700 times, or tracking an abortion-seeker across state lines. 

Florida is not alone in cancelling Flock contracts. Texas, last week, ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras. The Oakland-based advocacy group Secure Justice, which tracks automated license plate reader use on the municipal level, says that in the month of August more towns and cities cancelled their Flock contracts than ever before: of the 214 cities that have dropped Flock since 2021, 90 did so in August 2026.  (At least three towns have reported that Flock reinstalled or reactivated their cameras after local officials ended their contracts.) 

Strictly regulating data retention might be one solution. A police department can’t do as much to share data with ICE, for example, if state laws mandate that the data be deleted quickly. In New Hampshire, ALPRs must delete all data after three minutes; Flock’s current default retention period is seven days. 

Corinne Worthington works as the advocacy manager with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit focused on litigation and research on discriminatory surveillance technology. To Worthington, the backlash against Flock is “putting a name to people’s fears.” 

“I think that because of how public Flock has been, people have woken up to the harms of ALPRs in a way that maybe, previously, they weren’t aware of,” Worthington said. While Flock has over 120,000 license plate readers across the country, it is far from the only ALPR company. Motorola, the AI roadway safety firm Rekor, and Axon, the police tech firm behind Tasers, all sell similar cameras to police. Those companies aren’t household names in the way that Flock is, nor have they been subject to the same backlash. 

“That’s the problem with targeting specifically the vendor, not the technology as a whole,” Worthington said. When states and cities cancel their contracts with Flock, they’re likely to end up replacing those cameras with ones made by one of the other ALPR companies. And those other companies are certainly aware of the backlash. Rekor, another company that sells ALPRs, is calling for national regulations on the cameras to “preserve ALPR’s public safety value.” Those regulations would include “anonymizing non-hotlist plate data” which could then be re-identified with a valid warrant or court order. 

“The fight over whether ALPR should exist has stopped being useful to anyone,” Rekor vice president Charlie Degliomini told me. “The rules are the real argument.” As far as he is aware, Degliomini added, his company is the only ALPR vendor calling for a warrant requirement on at least some plate searches.

But Rekor’s cameras can be abused, too: activists in New York are suing the Westchester County Police Department for allegedly using Rekor’s tools to log their locations thousands of times. And the CEO of Axon, another camera manufacturer, floated the possibility of changing the shape of Axon cameras so they look less similar to the Flock cameras Americans are lately so fond of destroying. 

“We’ve had some people say they’d like to see us make just a different camera, because our ALPR camera looks like an ALPR camera,” Axon CEO Rick Smith said in a now-deleted webinar, as 404 Media first reported. 

Whether cameras that look different, but perform the same surveillance function, will eventually inspire the same backlash remains to be seen.

On Thursday, Nvidia, the tech giant that develops chips that power AI tools like ChatGPT, announced its acquisition of Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion amid an arms race to dominate every level of the industry. 

Well, specifically, the cost was $12,930,300,000, with 129,303 apparently being the character encoding for the 🤗 emoji, which the startup Nvidia acquired is named after.

Hugging Face is the venture that broke into AI safety discussions when OpenAI’s advanced system breached its platform while undergoing a test. Since then, Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue has propelled a publicity campaign to support open-source AI. His startup is a community platform for millions of open-source AI models that anyone can use, modify, and share (many models are free to download). 

Per a chart Delangue posted on X, Hugging Face’s library skyrocketed with almost 60 percent more data uploads in the first two weeks after news of the breach by OpenAI became public, and last month, Meta released its new open model on Hugging Face. 

It certainly looks like it pays to be breached by OpenAI. 

For Nvidia, the acquisition is another move toward vertical integration. The company is also throwing money into data centers, offering up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease an Ohio data center, which is still under construction but is expected to be the world’s largest. 

Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang has also positioned the company as a proponent of open-source models—such as the millions Hugging Face shares—for what it calls ensuring safety with the technology. This stance is opposed to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic who have lobbied Washington against open models over fears of losing the ability to protect against misuse of their products and preserving their economic value.

Exciting day for NVIDIA and @huggingface.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI.

Thank you…

— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) September 3, 2026

As AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google try to make their own AI chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, Nvidia looks to add open-source models that compete with the AI providers.

“Together, we will make A.I. more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world,” wrote Huang in his announcement of the acquisition. What his ideas of “more capable” and “more accessible” mean for the future is anyone’s guess. 

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

For the past few months, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has been embroiled in a growing list of scandals and allegations of harm. Miller’s ex-wife, the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), has accused the Republican congressman in legal filings of being an absentee father, abusive husband, and having a history of violence and misconduct towards women dating back to his high school days. Miller has repeatedly denied these allegations.

As Mother Jones’ Abby Vesoulis reported in July:

For instance, one of [Emily] Moreno’s legal filings in their ongoing child custody case asked Miller to comment on the accusation that he pushed a female peer down a set of stairs during his high school years.

“Why did you not pursue a defamation lawsuit against [redacted] for alleging you pushed her down a flight of stairs?”

Miller’s response: “OBJECTION; relevance, scope of admissible evidence.”

According to Politico’s 2021 report, “Miller pushed a girl out the door of his room and she fell down some stairs after he became enraged when she resisted his attempts to touch her, according to three people who were there and many more who heard about the incident in the aftermath.”

Miller categorically denied to Politico that the altercation took place. But reached for comment this month, the woman in question told Mother Jones that while the event “happened 20 years ago,” it remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”

Vesoulis recently traveled to Ohio where she and our producer got a chance to speak with Miller directly following a family court hearing between him and his ex-wife. While visiting, Vesoulis made a stop at the public library in the town that Miller grew up and attended high school in. She wanted to see if there was anything more to be learned from his old high school yearbooks.

“We’re going to flip through all these yearbooks and we could find nothing,” says Vesoulis, sitting in one of the library’s study rooms. “We could find something interesting.”

Interesting, indeed. Here’s what she saw:

US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is set to depart the Pentagon in the next few days, following a months-long feud with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the firings of several top officials and allegedly blocking many of his innovation projects like streamlined technology adoption. 

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news on Monday.

Driscoll’s resignation after serving for 18 months leaves the US Army effectively without a senior leader. Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in April and has not nominated a replacement.

Hegseth has cut down the number of top military officials in his Defense Department. According to Military Times, since taking his post last January, he presided over the firings and early departures of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, the Army’s vice chief of staff, and the commander of the US Army in Europe and Africa, among others. 

While it’s unclear which firings Driscoll took issue with, Hegseth also fired the only two women serving as four-star officers and blocked promotions for several female and Black Navy officers, seemingly under his anti-diversity push. In early 2025, Hegseth said the firings were “a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national-security approach we want to take.”

“Secretary Driscoll has been highly effective in advancing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Strong Again at the Department of the Army by providing outstanding leadership during historic military operations, restoring an emphasis on readiness and lethality, assisting with negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and more,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. (Noting the emphasis on lethality.) 

Driscoll took his worries about the Army’s future under Hegseth’s leadership directly to President Trump, four people familiar with the discussion told The Atlantic, given the series of firings of top officers. One of the people said that Trump was surprised and expressed concern.

Hegseth is reportedly considering his chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell—who also allegedly abused his estranged wife and children—to succeed Driscoll. As I pointed out on Monday, Parnell criticized the Washington Post’s reporting that cited classified documents in which top military officials stated that the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the US from other threats, baselessly claiming on Sunday that publishing the report was “a crime” and evidence of Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome. 

This all looks like a move to replace officers who push back on Hegseth’s policies with loyalists.

The Trump administration is back on the warpath. Over the weekend, the government resumed military attacks on Iran for the first time in a month, which in turn prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes against the United Arab Emirates and American bases in Jordan. On Monday, Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst said the president told him that “there will be a US response” to the Iranian attack on US forces in Jordan.

Which is all to say that Iran, thanks in part to economic support from China, isn’t backing down.

The Trump administration also signaled that it may ramp up economic sanctions on Iran this week, seeking to make good on promises of an “economic D-Day” against the country: “This is going to be financial violence if we have to,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Associated Press on Sunday.

On Monday, Iranian leadership joined an economic summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose largest members are China and Russia, in a meeting that many American outlets have characterized as adverse to US interests China has been Iran’s economic bulwark during the current war, defying US sanctions by remaining the main importer of Iranian oil. 

While struggling to fight Iran on multiple fronts—through Bessent’s “financial violence” in the form of severe economic sanctions—and the conventional violence of deadly military action against both the country’s civilian infrastructure and combat forces, the US has achieved little in terms of forcing Iran’s leadership to budge on negotiations.

We’ve seen this play out again, and again, and again in the months since Trump dragged the U.S. into war with Iran.

In response to an exclusive from the Washington Post citing classified documents in which top US military officials state the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the country from other threats, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, claimed that publishing the report was “a crime”—it is not—and evidence of “TDS and PDS”—Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome, respectively.

Even as it scrabbles for new tactics—and publicly appears at a loss—the Trump administration continues to deny that its war isn’t working. 

But as Bessent himself said Monday of Canada’s claim that it was weathering Washington’s trade war: “What else are they gonna say?”

On Monday, President Trump promoted continued data center construction and criticized opponents, despite growing bipartisan backlash ahead of the November midterms. 

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”  

Trump says the only reason to oppose data centers is if communities want to be “backwards and poor.” pic.twitter.com/cpi14lMGql

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 31, 2026

The president also posts an endless stream of AI videos on social media. On Sunday night, he shared a video depicting the bombing of Kharg Island, a vital port for exporting Iran’s oil products amid the US resuming major strikes on the country. And the night before, Trump posted an AI video of himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and planting down a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place.

But boosting AI and the data centers that help power them is largely unpopular. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz wrote in May, most Americans oppose a data center in their backyard. From Sophie: 

“Data centers need significant space, energy and water to operate, and they don’t provide many jobs relative to the investment they require. And they’re often unpleasant neighbors: their cooling systems can be noisy, and many include onsite gas turbines that belch black smoke into the air.

Opposition to data centers is truly bipartisan, even in solidly GOP states like Florida. 

On Sunday, President Trump said that NBC News’ Meet the Press host Kristen Welker will be “reported” to the Federal Communications Commissions for “rebuke or punishment,” claiming she said that the candidates he endorsed had “mixed results” in this election cycle—despite the FCC having no such jurisdiction.

“Kristen Welker, the Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press, ​just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of ​Candidates, when the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, ⁠stand at 100% for the U.S. Senate, and 98% for the U.S. ​House,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously.”

Trump: "Kristen Welker, the Unpopular 'Hostess' of Meet the Fake Press, just stated that Donald Trump has 'mixed results' on Endorsements… Bc of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to FCC for rebuke or punishment… I hope Brendan Carr takes this Threat to our Country very seriously."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-30T13:42:21.944Z

According to CNN’s Brian Stelter, Welker mentioned Trump’s “mixed” endorsement outcomes only during a pre-show live shot on NBC’s Washington, DC, affiliate station, not during the main broadcast itself.

In his Truth Social post, Trump boasted that he has a 98.35 percent congressional endorsement record in 2026 Republican primaries. But Welker only cited previous NBC News reporting that notes that six Trump-backed candidates lost House and gubernatorial primaries in August. According to an analysis by USA Today, as of Sunday, Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidates have fared worse than congressional candidates, only winning 79 percent of the time.

“He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He’s had some mixed results,” Welker said on NBC 4 Washington. “But most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham, of course, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was successful in her primary battle.”

It sounds like a reasonable statement, especially as Welker explains later in the same remarks that Trump’s approval rating is at a record low over his second term as key issues like affordability remain largely unaddressed.

Trump’s threat is another escalation of his long-running assault on journalism—going after Welker personally as opposed to demanding the FCC crack down on networks like ABC, as has happened most often. The FCC cannot legally punish Welker individually, as it regulates public broadcast licenses.

ABC, and its corporate parent Disney, sued the FCC earlier this month, asserting that the Trump administration violated free speech rights by challenging its licenses over its news coverage and views presented on talks shows.

And as my colleague Noah Lanard reported, FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke licenses for broadcasters “running hoaxes and news distortions” of the ongoing Iran War in March while pointing to Trump’s complaint about the reporting from “Fake News Media.”

And Noah’s point is a good one: “The goal is obvious: Turn independent news outlets into state propaganda machines.”

If you’re a Google Map user in the United States, you’ll now see the name “Lake America” instead of “Lake Ontario,” just days after President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the body of water amid his ongoing trade war with Canada.

In an announcement published late Saturday, Google explained that it “reflect[s] name changes in official government sources,” in this case citing the US Geographic Names Information System. 

According to Google, Maps users in Canada still see “Lake Ontario” while those outside the US and Canada will see both names: “Lake Ontario (Lake America).” “These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country,” the announcement in part reads. 

On Saturday night, Trump posted an AI-generated video on Truth Social depicting himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and placing a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place. His AI avatar then dances robotically to the tune of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Earlier on Saturday, he shared an AI video of ducks sporting Trump’s haircut firing assault rifles to celebrate “Lake America.”

Online reactions of outrage are widespread, but Google has long demonstrated little interest in opposing the Trump administration. The corporation followed a similar pattern to what it did when Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a day-one executive order last January. The following month, the company announced the same split—”Gulf of America” in the US, “Gulf of Mexico” in Mexico, and the bet-hedging “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in the rest of the world.

Google has also previously carried out the Trump administration’s bidding in other ways, including eliminating DEI hiring goals last February while reviewing Trump executive orders unwinding DEI in the federal government, and—along with other tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund last year.

So maybe we all go back to using MapQuest again? 

We’re not changing it. pic.twitter.com/NdeE9v2BNO

— MapQuest (@MapQuest) August 27, 2026

President Donald Trump on Thursday followed through on a threat to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” issuing an executive order to “Make the Great Lakes Even Greater” amid a collapsed trade deal with Canada, further escalating tensions between the two former allies.

The lake in question has been known as Lake Ontario since the 1600s. Trump contends that it should be renamed because America spends more money on it than Canada does.

“The United States is the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, including the body of water currently known as Lake Ontario,” Thursday’s executive order reads. “The United States Coast Guard supplies 9 of the 11 ice breaking vessels on the Great Lakes, securing commercial shipping lanes free of charge.  The United States has invested nearly $4 billion in protecting the Great Lakes freshwater ecosystem in the last decade, while Canada has invested far less in similar initiatives over the same period.”

My colleague Alex Nguyen covered Canada’s response to the escalating trade war—a large support package for Canadian workers and firms—on Tuesday:

While the plan aims more at support for businesses than direct funds for individual Canadians, it is a meaningful step that far exceeds any the Trump administration has taken or tried to take, with the White House largely ignoring the foreseeable harm of its tariffs on American workers and consumers… Nearly every state has experienced blue-collar job losses as a result of the tariff agenda, even as the policies deliver few apparent results in improving US manufacturing or lowering the trade deficit.

The “Lake America” decision is a return to a Trumpian theme: governance as branding exercise. That includes renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the Defense Department as “Department of War,” the Kennedy Center as “Trump-Kennedy Center,” and (unofficially) ICE as NICE.

Trump cannot force Canada or any other country to follow his preferred naming conventions. It remains to be seen whether independent news, weather, and mapping firms will fall into line.

A heated scene unfolded at the Cuyahoga County family court in Cleveland on Wednesday, as the key players in a bitter dispute that has grabbed national headlines assembled in one room.

The case is one that Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis has been covering for weeks: a custody fight over the two-year-old daughter of Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) and his ex-wife, Emily Moreno—whose father is Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). Miller is currently defending himself against Emily’s allegations that he held a gun to her head, shoved her against a wall, and threw scalding water at her—all of which he vehemently denies. Despite these allegations, and at least six Republican senators (including his former father-in-law) urging him to drop out, Miller is running for reelection and has vowed to stay in the race. The deadline to replace him on the ballot passed earlier this month.

Abby got a rare chance to question Miller directly, just weeks after uncovering more than 2,000 pages of court and police records detailing the abuse allegations. Miller had initially declined to speak to the press after the hearing, referring all inquiries to his attorney. But while his lawyer was speaking, Miller interrupted to deliver what sounded like a veiled threat against Sen. Moreno.

“I was a part of that family for a very long time,” he said. “There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about, and I respectfully have… because that’s not my business to share. But it’s politically motivated.”

His lawyer went further, claiming Sen. Moreno “hates Max and wants to destroy Max” and only “came out of the woodwork” to attack Miller once reporters began asking why he had stayed silent about his daughter’s allegations.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a memo Tuesday suggesting that, if incumbent Republican Ohio Sen. Jon Husted loses his upcoming election against former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the Republican Party’s position on data centers is to blame.

The memo, as Axios reported, says that “the data center brand is the anchor” of Brown’s campaign. “He has made them his de facto opponent, and no one is correcting the record,” the NRSC wrote, arguing that if “voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.” They go on to suggest that Republican candidates support some restrictions on data center development, such as only allowing their construction in communities that approve it by popular vote—while still opposing a total pause on data center construction, which they say would cause the US to “lose the AI race to China.”

While the NRSC urges caution, Donald Trump is still positioning himself as an unequivocal ally to data center developers. Speaking at a White House cryptocurrency event Wednesday, he insisted that “we’re building the biggest plants anywhere in the world.”

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state and I had a chance to get an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it,” Trump said. “The jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous. And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”

Data centers generate far fewer jobs than other industries, such as manufacturing and warehousing; while they do generate tax revenue, they also tend to be built with generous tax abatements.

“If I were a governor or mayor, I would want that plant in my community,” Trump repeated. But, he added, “maybe [the industry] can use a little public relations help.”

Florida State Rep. Angie Nixon just defeated Alex Vindman, the presumed frontrunner, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary—even though Vindman raised roughly sixteen times as much money as Nixon. 

Nixon, 42, helped lead the fight against Republican-led redistricting in Florida that disproportionately supports GOP voters, who are mostly white. According to the Miami Herald, 86 percent of Florida’s congressional districts will favor the GOP, even though only 41 percent of voters are registered Republicans. The three-time state lawmaker from Jacksonville protested the bill during an April legislative session and videos of her wielding a pink bullhorn and declaring “this is a violation of the constitution” went viral. Nixon also staged a sit-in at the governor’s office in May, where she was arrested and faces a jury trial on charges of trespassing and resisting an officer without violence in September. 

Despite Democratic opposition, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approved the new map in May. In June, the state’s Supreme Court allowed the new map to stay in effect for the upcoming 2026 US House elections. 

Nixon ran on an affordability platform, pushing Medicare for All, free childcare and family leave, and a national rent freeze and moratorium on evictions. She touted endorsements from Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Maxwell Frost and—featured prominently on her website—the children’s content creator and activist Miss Rachel. 

“These things are not radical, they’re not extreme,” Nixon said during her primary victory speech on Tuesday night. “This is just basic human decency; it’s caring for our neighbors.”

Vindman, whose national public profile mostly centers on his role as a witness and director of European affairs for the National Security Council in the first Trump impeachment over the 2019 Ukraine scandal (and on his twin brother Eugene, who is a Virginia congressman), has never held elected office in Florida. Nonetheless, Vindman raised over $16 million for his campaign, according to FEC data, and polls pointed to his likely victory. He seemed sure he would win—so much so that he reportedly had a fundraiser in Nantucket scheduled for this coming week. He lost by 12 percentage points.

Nixon now faces an uphill battle in November. She’ll be facing off against DeSantis-appointed Republican incumbent Ashley Moody, who replaced Marco Rubio when he became secretary of state. Moody is also a staunch proponent of President Trump’s voter-suppression efforts, including co-sponsoring the SAVE America Act. Florida hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2012, when former Senator Bill Nelson won his third term. 

In early August, ICE revealed plans to purchase $20 million worth of electric-shock gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies. The gloves work on direct contact with exposed skin and deliver a painful electric charge. Police departments, jails, and even school resource officers across the country have used the gloves for years—though human rights groups like Amnesty International say they’re “readily misused for torture.” Police officers, speaking on Compliant Technologies’ own YouTube channel, repeatedly stated that the shock gloves work because they are “less conducive to lawsuits” than other forms of physical force, and can cause pain but “leave no burn marks or scars.”

The GLOVE, or Generated Low-Output Voltage Emitter, is already in use in some public schools. Twenty-nine of 34 school police officers in Omaha, Nebraska have trained to use the GLOVE, and twice in the past year, officers have used the devices to shock students.

Omaha requested 40 pairs of the gloves for just under $66,000 in 2025, as Nebraska Public Media reported. (At that same price point, ICE’s $20 million would buy the agency at least 12,000 pairs of shock gloves.) The Omaha city council unanimously approved the purchase. But with the gloves now under increased scrutiny, students and parents are raising concerns. School board members, at a meeting on August 17, said they hadn’t been informed that the shock gloves were being deployed in their schools.

“I personally am sickened to learn our schools have been used as a test bed for a new law enforcement technology,” Omaha School Board member Gini Magnuson said, according to Nebraska Public Media. The GLOVE’s most recent user manual suggests that wearers avoid using it against “small children.”

Despite the manufacturer’s warning against shocking children, Omaha is not the only school district to use shock gloves. Compliant Technologies regularly exhibits its products at School Resource Officer conferences nationwide. In July of this year, they were listed as an exhibitor at both the Texas and Mississippi Associations of School Resource Officers’ annual “school safety” conferences.

“I wish the adults in the room would actually just pay attention to what the students are saying, and hopefully understand that hurting students, and using weapons against them, is not what teaching is about, and it’s not what school is supposed to be about,” Omaha Central High School student Lux Tipton said at this week’s school board meeting.

While students, parents, and politicians speak out against these weapons, White House border czar Tom Homan is defending their use. “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not,” Homan said in an interview last week on Fox & Friends. The Department of Homeland Security may distribute thousands of pairs of the gloves as early as March 2027.

On Tuesday, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung reiterated his calls for the country to retake full control of its military operations from the US following Donald Trump’s order to cut back on annual joint training drills in preparation for North Korean threats two days prior. 

“A strong alliance makes the foundation of security stronger, and strengthening our own capabilities increases our value and necessity as an ally,” Lee said, framing the US-South Korea alliance and independent military control as ‌mutually beneficial.

Trump told reporters at the Oval Office on Monday that his decision to scale back military training with South Korea was due in part to Lee’s refusal to support the US war effort in Iran: “We can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us.”

And in that announcement reducing the joint training, Trump wrote on Truth Social that his move was also “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” North Korea’s dictator and, oddly referring to himself in the third person, the drills with South Korea “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

Lee said in response on Tuesday that Seoul should immediately plan a transfer of control over the Combined Forces Command, which consists of both South Korean and US forces. According to the Korea Times, regaining wartime operational control, which takes effect during major conflict, is a key goal of Lee’s administration. South Korea ceded full control of its military during the Korean War in the 1950s, but has been trying to regain complete command for over two decades. The same Korea Times report said that South Korea’s joint training drills with the US are “essential for assessing Seoul’s readiness to lead the combined forces” in the near future and are symbolic of the country’s national sovereignty. 

Lee also signaled rearmament, which may increase tensions and threaten further military action from North Korea. He pushed for Seoul to accelerate building nuclear-powered submarines, signaling rearmament. Several NATO members have also ramped up spending on military development following Trump’s multiple threats to withdraw from the alliance.

Trump approved Seoul’s nuclear submarines last year, and Hegseth has praised South Korea for taking on more of its own defense. But burden-sharing was supposed to mean allies paying more for an arrangement Washington still runs. Lee is proposing something else: an ally that no longer needs to ask.

President Trump spent the weekend turning on two US security partners. He ordered a cutback in joint military exercises with South Korea, citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator — and threatened to bomb Oman, one of the countries mediating between Washington and Tehran.

On Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social that based on his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” and the finances required, he ordered Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” annual joint military exercises with South Korea, designed to prepare against threats from North Korea. At the end of his post: “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”

And on Monday afternoon, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office a similar account of his conversation with South Korea President Lee Jae Myung on Iran. “We can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us,” Trump said.

Trump: South Korea has been protected by us for many, many years. When I called recently, the president of South Korea and I said, “Would you like to give us a little hand?” We don’t need help with Iran, but if you’d like, give us a hand with Iran. He said, “No, thanks.” And I… pic.twitter.com/JxHvc1CqPp

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2026

Seoul is downplaying it. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the exercises began Monday as planned, and President Lee Jae Myung said the two governments had “maintained close coordination” on joint training and would keep doing so.

But the reversal is abrupt. Just three months ago, as the Associated Press noted, Hegseth praised South Korea for raising defense spending and “assuming primary responsibility for the security of the Korean Peninsula” — a shift he called proof of “alliance burden-sharing that all of America’s partners would do well to follow.” It’s the same pattern the administration ran on NATO members who declined to back the war on Iran.

Regarding Oman, Trump told Fox News on Monday that “if Oman gets in the way [of US-Iran negotiations], we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” Oman is reportedly close to an agreement with Iran to restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway that carried 20 percent of the world’s crude oil before the US and Israeli strikes on Iran began in February.

Trey Yingst: "I just got off the phone with President Trump … the president told Fox News that Iran should raise the white flag of surrender … the president said that if Oman gets in the way, 'we'll bomb the s**t out of them""

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-17T13:54:57.609Z

Oman is also a strategic partner of the US in the region and often acts as a diplomatic mediator between the US and Iran. The US holds a security agreement with Oman that allows it to access Omani airfield and port facilities for military purposes.

It looks like yet another time where Trump makes decisions built on personal squabbles rather than its critical security relationships.

Federal regulators have given President Donald Trump’s family crypto business a conditional approval to operate like a bank. On Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—led by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould—announced that World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture controlled by the Trump family, was on track to receive a banking charter. This will allow World Liberty Financial to issue its stablecoin tokens—called “USD1″—inside the United States without an intermediary.

“The decision stands to give new powers and federal credibility to a venture in which Trump and his family retain a substantial financial interest,” as Politico‘s Michael Stratford and Declan Harty put it. “It’s also among the most direct official actions that the administration has taken involving the president’s private finances.”

Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s special diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff and co-founder of World Liberty Financial, applauded the decision on social media. “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy,” he wrote.

The move certainly seems likely to strengthen the pocketbooks of the president and his family: as my colleague Russ Choma reported, Trump made $65 million in 2025 by selling shares in World Liberty Financial. According to his financial disclosures, Trump also made almost $600 million selling stablecoins and other digital assets through World Liberty Financial that year.

Democratic lawmakers are pointing to the regulatory green light as an example of Trump’s corruption. On Friday, as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced the move, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on social media that “this is the most brazen act of self-dealing our system has ever seen.”

“He’s just on a grab!”

Joe Rogan is not exactly the paragon of good sense. So you know things are bad when even he is outraged about Trump’s latest moneymaking scheme. The president introduced a new Truth Social feature this month that sells early access to his posts to subscribers willing to shell out up to $100,000 a month. 

Trump has used his social platform as an official White House channel to unveil major policy initiatives, deliver updates on Iran ceasefire negotiations, and fire government officials. With access to those announcements before they go out to the general public, subscribers can turn to the betting markets to get a return on their investment. 

The feature violates the First and Fifth Amendments, a lawsuit filed against Trump alleged this week. It also may amount to insider trading and market manipulation. 

Watch the gears turn… ever so slowly… when Rogan learns about the scheme from comedian Shane Gillis during the Aug. 13 episode of his podcast.

On Wednesday, the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a ruling blocking key measures of Texas’ sweeping voter suppression law, SB 1.

A lower court previously ruled that the law, which effectively made it harder for people to vote with assistance, violated disability civil rights laws. It also created more barriers to voting by mail.

“It has long been established that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote, according to Democracy Docket. “That is why voting by mail jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself.”

There is no evidence that mail-in ballots are “prone to fraud.” An analysis from the Brookings Institution found an “average total mail voting fraud percentage across the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections of only 0.000043 [percent].” Or, about 4 votes per 10 million votes. Mail-in voting can be very important for disabled and aging people, who otherwise may have to deal with accessibility challenges with getting to the polls and access issues when voting itself.

One of the plaintiffs of the initial lawsuit, La Union del Pueblo Entero v. Abbott, filed in 2021, is the historically Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta. One of its members, Candace Wicks told me in 2024 that she was frustrated about the barriers disabled people faced while voting since SB. 1.

Disabled people, Wicks said, “face barriers every day in terms of discrimination in our daily lives.” SB1, which she sees as a form of disenfranchisement, is to her just one example.  “We need to make our democracy accessible to everybody, regardless of our ability,” she said.

Research from the Brennan Center found that SB 1 in Texas had devastating impacts when many of its provisions in effect. A 2025 research paper found that thousands of Texans, disproportionately people of color, had their ballots rejected in the 2022 primary due to SB. 1. People whose ballots were rejected were less likely to vote in the 2022 general election in November and also were less likely to vote in 2024.

Wednesday’s ruling could impact turnout for the 2026 Texas Senate race, where Democrat James Talarico has a shot at flipping that Texas Senate seat Blue in a contest against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

On Thursday, the surveillance technology company Flock announced that it will limit access to its network of over 120,000 automatic license plate readers following disturbing reports dating back to at least 2021 of police officers abusing the technology for criminal activities like stalking.

In his blog announcement, Flock CEO Garrett Langley did not mention the widespread public backlash against the technology, which, in significant part, led more than 20 local governments to begin rolling back their use in July. He only stated that the policy updates work to address “three areas that are critical to the company: strengthening privacy, accountability, and security.”

Among the updates: Flock is now making mandatory a previously optional feature that flags “abnormal activity” for review, shortening the default recommended data storage period for Flock surveillance products from 30 to seven days, and establishing optional limits on data sharing between police departments.

I've learned a lot in nine years of building @Flock_Safety. Some of it from our customers, and some of it from the communities they serve.

Today we’re announcing the changes that came from listening. A new standard for privacy, security, and accountability in public safety…

— Garrett Langley (@glangley) August 13, 2026

The ACLU said in a Thursday statement that most of Flock’s policy changes are “merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures” it highlighted last month. While Flock claims its new policies will empower local police to dictate what other users can and cannot search their data for, the nonprofit said the company is assuming that its system already prevents improper search queries.

Clearly, this isn’t the case. In a statement, Tom Bowman, the policy counsel for security and surveillance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said that the policy changes are still “asking thousands of police departments to police themselves, despite evidence from across the U.S. that this lack of guardrails is unsafe.”

In other words, Flock’s answer to a crisis of trust is to ask for more of it.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, under Trump appointee Mehmet Oz, changed their guidance on voting in nursing homes last month. Now, a group of senators is saying that these changes are designed to disenfranchise America’s two million nursing home residents.

“On July 20, 2026, CMS issued a memo that appears to be an attempt to intimidate nursing home staff from assisting residents in the voting process,” a group of senators led by Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) and Alex Padilla (D-Ca.) wrote August 12, in a letter addressed to Oz and shared exclusively with Mother Jones. The new memo “replaces language from CMS’s 2020 and 2024 guidance aimed at ensuring that facilities helped residents to vote with language threatening nursing home staff with prosecution for voter fraud.” The new guidance removes suggestions of specific ways nursing home staff can help residents vote—providing transportation to polling places, for example—and instead threatens staff with fraud investigations if they “engage in inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents’ rights.”

The new CMS memo is the latest in a series of Trump administration actions designed “to restrict vote by mail and undermine the right to vote based on unfounded allegations of voter fraud tied to the President’s denial of prior valid election results,” the Senators wrote.

According to CMS officials, there is a legitimate voter fraud threat in nursing homes. “Unfortunately, in recent years, we have become aware of several allegations of instances in which resident rights were unlawfully violated,” the July CMS memo says. But the instances they mention did not lead to any actual fraudulent voting. The memo cites two specific examples of supposed voter fraud in nursing homes in Texas and Wisconsin. But in the Texas case, no improper votes were ever cast, though a nursing home clerk was charged with criminal voter fraud for making technical errors in the voter registration system. And in the Wisconsin case, a sheriff’s claim of coerced voting at a nursing home was later thrown out.

Nursing home residents face unique barriers to voting. Many lack their own transportation, contend with polling places that are not ADA compliant, or may require assistance to fill out their ballots.

The new guidance might encourage staff to avoid helping residents vote. Many nursing home staff in the United States are immigrants who have already been targeted by Trump’s rollback of programs like TPS. “The removal of guidance on vote by mail procedures, combined with specific threats to investigate nursing home staff for assisting residents who are exercising their right to vote, may deter nursing homes from assisting residents with voting by mail,” the senators wrote. CMS spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment.