18-year-old Syeisha Johnson was charged with assault inflicting serious bodily injury on an unborn child, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury after allegedly taking the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol to end a pregnancy at 31 weeks in July. Her boyfriend was also arrested and charged with negligent child abuse.

Johnson found out she was pregnant at 20 weeks in June, and then ordered the abortion pills online to be shipped from Virginia. According to the police report: “On July 29, 2026 Ms. Johnson began having abdominal pain and sat down during the day to help with the pain. She sat on the toilet and gave birth to a child.”

Johnson turned 18 in June, meaning she was past the North Carolina requirement for minors to get parental permission for an abortion, however the state bans most abortions after 12 weeks.

Her story comes the same week a recording was released of a call between acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and faith leaders, where Blanche promised that the Trump administration would work to ban mail-order abortion pills nationwide.

what the national guard is supposed to be for!

Amir Hassan, the Trump-endorsed Congressional candidate for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District GOP primary, may have lost the primary vote this week due to voters believing he was Muslim.

The candidate, who is a former army veteran, said throughout his campaign that he had converted from Islam to Christianity, but this did not convince some Republican voters.

On his campaign website, Hassan, who is African-American, stated that he "recently reaffirmed his commitment to Christ" and stated that "Jesus Christ is his Lord and Saviour".

But despite this, his candidacy received backlash from right-wing Americans from Trump’s MAGA fanbase.

Late last month, after Trump announced his endorsement on his Truth Social social media page, several users replied with comments saying they wanted "no Muslims" in office. One questioned Hassan’s loyalty to the US, while one questioned Trump’s choice, saying he had "lost his mind" with his endorsement, and that there were “enough Muslims” in government.

Noting Barr’s resistance to Trump in 2020, Hasan asked: “If the midterms don’t go Trump’s way this fall, is there any world in which Todd Blanche stands up to Trump if he’s asked to find some fake evidence of voter fraud, or are we screwed now?”

“We’re screwed,” Cobb said bluntly.

“Great,” Hasan said. “That’s what I suspected.”

The lettuce outbreak. As of CDC's August 5, 2026 update — still the most recent as of this writing on August 9 — the multistate outbreak linked to Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce stands at 6,358 illnesses across 15 states, with at least 278 hospitalizations and 2 deaths, both in Michigan. Illness onsets run from June 22 through July 31, 2026.

https://archive.ph/0yavc

The moderate Democratic representative Ed Case has seen off a progressive challenge to retain his party’s nomination for the US House of Representatives election in Hawaii’s first congressional district.

Case, who has represented the district in Washington DC since 2019, prevailed in Saturday’s primary over Jarrett Keohokalole, the state senator.

Keohokalole, 43, had argued during the campaign in Hawaii that the time had come for a new generation of political leadership in the state.

With 91% of votes counted, Case had won 60% of the vote, according to the Associated Press. Keohokalole, in second place, had 36.1%.

As part of a planned Texas data center, Amazon is investing in an on-site power plant that could reportedly become the largest source of climate pollution in the United States.

U.S. Strategic Command increases the likelihood of nuclear war during its annual Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, Nebraska on Wednesday and Thursday this week, at which “a more aggressive nuclear vision focused on strengthened deterrence and production is front and center,” Hans Kristensen, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project.

Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, was identified as being behind a change in US nuclear strategy that would place greater emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons, a change that would make them more likely to be used.

Colby’s change would de-emphasize the long-standing requirement for ‘damage limitation’ capabilities, which calls for a massive strategic nuclear attack against a U.S. nuclear adversary to try to destroy as many of their nuclear forces as possible.

Raising a discussion of “damage limitation” at this point is little more than part of the effort to make nuclear war conceivable, and no longer “off limits.”

Adding more tactical nuclear strike options would complicate the tenuous nuclear deterrence relationships the United States maintains with other nuclear-armed states and increase the risk of nuclear war.

Without a firm rejection of the option to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, and by building and fielding more tactical nuclear weapons the administration is signalling its intention to use them against enemy forces and industrial infrastructure in a conflict. Once nuclear weapons are used in a conflict involving another nuclear-armed state, there is no guarantee that any use of nuclear weapons, even on the smallest scale, could reliably be expected to remain limited

In October 1969, nearly 14 years into the Vietnam War and only months before the first civilian draft lottery, Daniel Ellsberg decided that Americans deserved to know the truth. The military analyst photocopied thousands of pages of classified documents and, after U.S. senators refused to release them, leaked them to the public in 1971—demonstrating that the U.S. government had known early on that the war was a lost cause. 

While most Americans are familiar with the story of the Pentagon Papers, far less is known about the man who risked everything to leak them. Released posthumously in 2026, Truth And Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope is a stunning collection of Ellsberg's previously unpublished writings, exploring the inner world of America's most famous whistleblower: from his continuous anti-war activism and advocacy against nuclear weapons, to his personal struggles surrounding the death of his mother and sister as a teenager. 

Compiled from decades of handwritten notebooks and journal entries, the book offers an intimate portrait of Ellsberg's moral and intellectual life, revealing the convictions that shaped his extraordinary career. Current Affairs sat down with Ellsberg's sons, Robert and Michael, and his longtime assistant Jan Thomas—the latter two of whom co-edited the volume—to discuss Ellsberg's legacy and what readers can still learn from his example.