'Greenland is not for sale' Denmark's Frederiksen reminds Trump

By Simon Ormiston

Published on 08/07/2026 - EURONEWS

The renewed dispute comes months after Donald Trump revived his long-standing ambition for the United States to acquire Greenland, a proposal repeatedly rejected by Denmark and Greenland's leaders.

Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Greenland was "not for sale" after renewed comments by Donald Trump suggesting the Arctic territory should be controlled by Washington rather than Copenhagen.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Turkey, Frederiksen said she believed the US position had become increasingly explicit.

"I heard the US president yesterday and I think the US position is unfortunately very clear on this topic. Our position is as clear as it has been all through: Greenland is, of course, not for sale," she said.

The remarks underscore the continuing disagreement between Denmark and the United States over the future of Greenland.

Frederiksen said Denmark and Greenland expected their allies to respect the island's future, adding: "We hope that all, including all allies, will respect the Greenland people right for self-determination."

She also stressed Denmark's sovereignty, saying: "We are sovereign states and we need everybody to respect our territorial integrity and our sovereignty."

Frederiksen added that Denmark was "ready to defend every inch of NATO including our own territory" and expected fellow members of the alliance to honour their collective defence commitments.

The dispute intensified in March when JD Vance visited the US military's Pituffik Space Base in Greenland after plans for a broader trip were scaled back following criticism from Greenland leaders.

During the visit, Vance accused Denmark of underinvesting in Greenland's security, while arguing the Arctic territory was strategically important because of growing Russian and Chinese activity in the region.

Trump has repeatedly said the US should control Greenland, citing national and international security concerns, but both Denmark and Greenland have consistently rejected any suggestion that the island could be transferred to Washington.

Trump revives his call for US to 'control' Greenland

By Shona Murray

Published on 07/07/2026 -  EURONEWS

Arriving at the NATO summit, the US president claimed Denmark hasn't sufficiently invested in the Arctic territory's security.

US President Donald Trump has revived his claim from earlier this year that Greenland, the semi-autonomous Arctic territory of Denmark, “should be controlled by the United States”, apparently reversing months of diplomacy earlier this year to get him to drop the demand.

Trump made his remarks not long after arriving in Ankara for the annual two-day NATO summit.

“Greenland doesn’t help Denmark," he told reporters. "Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States, and it’s surrounded by China’s ships and Russian ships."

Trump went on to admit that his previous designs on Greenland last January, where he refused to rule out using military force to take control the territory, had “hurt” relations with NATO allies.

Earlier on at the NATO Defence Industry Forum, allies from Canada and Europe pledged around €50 billion of defence investment under the banner of “NATO 3.0”. Their plan had been for this year's summit to go off relatively drama-free, with the main message being that the alliance is investing record sums in its collective security.

Within an hour of landing in Ankara, Trump had dashed his fellow leaders' hopes. Almost immediately upon landing, he once again castigated his allies for not joining in the war in Iran, saying he was “very disappointed with NATO" and reiterating his claim that Europe and Canada had "abandoned" the US when it took military action against Iran alongside Israel last February.

"I say that's fine, but you would think that they'd be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren't," said Trump to reporters.

“Frankly, if it weren’t held in Turkey, where my friend happens to be a very strong leader, a very strong person, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have attended,” he said of the host, Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “I felt I had to attend because of the fact that, you know, I know he’s gone all out.”

Erdoğan welcomed Trump at Beştepe Presidential Palace with cannons firing, a military band, and a guard of honour.

“You are a leader respected all over the world," US President Trump told Erdoğan, adding he considers him a “great friend”.

"I just want to say that I have a lot of respect for the president, and I think it's really to the benefit of both countries ... it's an honour to be with you, and we're going to have a lot of good meetings.”

But Erdoğan might have more than friendship in mind, as Trump also told the press that he was considering readmitting Turkey into the US F35 fighter jet programme.

'That’s a decision we’re going to make… it’s a great plane, the best plane by far, and it’s certainly something we will consider,” Trump said.

Turkey’s access to was suspended in 2019 by a Congressional order after Ankara purchased the Russian-made S-400 air defence system. US lawmakers and security officials cited security concerns, saying S-400 could be a threat to US-made systems.

NATO leaders to meet after Trump restates Greenland claim

Copyright Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

By Shona Murray

Published on 08/07/2026 - EURONEWS

Trump dashed hopes of a two-day summit by telling reporters the US should "control" Greenland. The Danish prime minister hit back, calling on the US to "respect Danish sovereignty".

Allies are bracing themselves for a difficult second-day after US President Donald Trump restated his usual insults against NATO countries despite a historic surge in European and Canadian defence spending.

Not long after Trump landed yesterday afternoon, he revived his claim from earlier this year that Greenland, the semi-autonomous Arctic territory of Denmark, “should be controlled by the United States.”

He went on to criticise Denmark for underinvesting in defence of the island, saying Copenhagan "doesn't spend money to really help Greenland", implying it can’t defend the massive island against Russian or Chinese vessels he claims are operating in the region.

Arriving at the summit Wednesday morning, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reiterated her country's stance that "Greenland is of course not for sale".

"We are a sovereign state and we need everyone to respect our territorial integrity," she said.

Asked if Denmark would militarily defend Greenland if there was an attack, she answered: "we are ready to defend all of NATO, that includes our own territory."

"Of course we will defend the Kingdom of Denmark," said Frederiksen. "The Greenlanders do not want to be part of the United States. They have made that clear," she said.

Numerous polls conducted among Greenlanders show an overwhelming resistance against being part of US territory.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte sidestepped the issue when asked by reporters, saying that "when it comes to Greenland and Denmark, we have a good process in place".

Last January, when Trump's threats to annex the territory hit a peak, Rutte ensured the matter was absent from official NATO business, instead resolving the matter via shuttle diplomacy between all sides.

It is thus highly unlikely the Greenland issue will appear on the formal agenda when leaders get down to formal business at around 11:15 at the North Atlantic Council (NAC), the principal decision-making body within NATO. Trump will be seated at the same table as Frederiksen.

"The approach will be not to mention the issue, and get through the end of the summit," a source with knowledge of the situation told Euronews.

"I hope they cancel next year's summit, two more years of this with Trump will be so damaging to NATO and security," they said, lamenting that the alliance's attempts to placate Trump are not working. "Trump only wants to pile on pressure, and he's just getting even more outspoken."

Ceasefire at risk

Trump also laid into allies over what he claims was their abandonment of the US in Iran when some such as Italy and Spain denied access to military bases in their countries.

European states in the firing line insist they were under no obligation to get involved with the Iran war, but Trump doesn’t accept this. At a press conference with Turkish President Erdoğan, Trump told journalists he was "very disappointed" by the response of NATO allies.

To make matters worse, US forces also launched overnight strikes against Iran over the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

"US Central Command forces have begun launching a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping," the statement from the US military arm stated on X late on Tuesday night.

Iran immediately warned Washington it would “take whatever measures it deems necessary," triggering concerns that the second day of the NATO summit will be overshadowed by the war in Iran, as opposed to NATO-related priorities such as Ukraine and defence of the European continent.

Speaking to journalists on his way into Wednesday's meeting, Rutte said the US attacks were "absolutely necessary" and commended the US for "forcefully" reacting.

Yokota Air Base Returns Historic Aircraft Artifacts To Preserve Japan’s Aviation Heritage

World War II-era Imperial Japanese Army aircraft artifacts are displayed at Yokota Air Base, Japan, July 1, 2026. The artifacts, discovered during a construction project on the installation, were transferred to Japanese government representatives for continued research and preservation.

 Photo Credit: Yasuo Osakabe, Air Force

July 8, 2026 
By Yasuo Osakabe

Key Takeaways

Historic Discovery — Construction crews at Yokota Air Base (formerly Tama Army Airfield) uncovered WWII-era Imperial Japanese Army aircraft artifacts (radiators, engines, landing gear, etc.) buried 7-10 feet underground in January 2026.

Expert Assessment and Rare Items — A multidisciplinary team, including the Gifu-Kakamigahara Air and Space Museum, confirmed the artifacts came from multiple aircraft types (e.g., Kawasaki Ki-61, Ki-45, Ki-102), with some rare components retaining original wartime paint.

Successful Repatriation — On July 1, 2026, the 374th Civil Engineer Squadron transferred the artifacts to Japanese government representatives for research, preservation, and potential public display, highlighting ongoing US-Japan cooperation in cultural heritage protection.

Members assigned to the 374th Civil Engineer Squadron at Yokota Air Base, Japan, transferred World War II-era Imperial Japanese Army aircraft artifacts to representatives of the Japanese government July 1, marking the return of historically significant materials discovered during a construction project on base.

In January, construction crews uncovered the artifacts approximately 7-10 feet below ground during a construction project on base. Initially believed to be unidentified metal debris, the materials were referred for further evaluation after environmental personnel recognized their potential historical significance.

“When these materials were uncovered, I determined they should be assessed for historical significance,” said Callie Oldfield, 374th Civil Engineer Squadron environmental scientist. “We were only able to recognize the true significance of these artifacts because of the knowledge and expertise of the historians and museum curators.”

Oldfield coordinated the initial assessment with the Fussa City Board of Education before assembling a multidisciplinary team led by the Gifu-Kakamigahara Air and Space Museum. The team included aviation historians, museum curators, cultural property specialists and aviation technology experts who conducted an on-site examination of the collection in May.

Researchers assessed the recovered materials were Imperial Japanese Army aviation artifacts consisting of aircraft radiators, engine components, landing gear assemblies, airframe sections and deactivated munitions. Their investigation concluded the collection represents components from multiple Imperial Japanese Army aircraft, reflecting the historical role of Yokota Air Base, formerly Tama Army Airfield, where numerous aircraft underwent testing during World War II.

The team also identified several rare components, including a water cooler from a Kawasaki Ki-61 Hien fighter aircraft, oil coolers from a Kawasaki Ki-45 twin-engine fighter aircraft and an oil cooler believed to be from a Kawasaki Ki-102 fighter aircraft. According to the researchers, some components may be among the few surviving examples of their kind and retain original wartime paint valuable for aviation conservation research.

Following the assessment, Oldfield coordinated the transfer of the artifacts to the appropriate Japanese authorities for continued research, preservation and potential public display. The artifacts were temporarily stored on base while the appropriate Japanese agencies coordinated their acceptance.

“I don’t want to lose a piece of history,” Oldfield said. “Although preserving and assessing artifacts takes time, the best outcome is seeing them used for education and research. I’m excited to see what new information these artifacts will reveal in the future.”

Japanese government representatives visited the base to receive the collection, while members of the engineer squadron assisted with loading the artifacts for transport.

The transfer reflects the continued cooperation between the base and its Japanese partners to preserve historically significant materials discovered during ongoing installation construction and modernization projects.

Anthropic Discovers Claude Keeps Hidden Thoughts: Even About Being Tested

The J-lens tool reads Claude’s silent reasoning, and caught it privately flagging its tests as fake

By Richard L. Wells
Jul 07 2026
TECHTIMES

Claude Science anthropic.com


When Anthropic's interpretability team asked whether there might be concepts inside Claude that the model was actively entertaining without writing down, they built a mathematical tool to find out. What they found was not a narrow quirk of the architecture — it was a compact internal workspace that holds the concepts the model can report, manipulate, and reason with, sitting atop a far larger ocean of computation the model can neither describe nor access. The paper, published July 6 in peer-reviewed form on Transformer Circuits, is the most technically detailed public look yet inside a frontier AI model's internal processing. It also surfaced something that the AI safety field has been worrying about for years: a model that knows it's being tested and behaves accordingly.


The research was led by Wes Gurnee, Nicholas Sofroniew, and Jack Lindsey, along with thirteen additional researchers at Anthropic. They called their new interpretability technique the Jacobian lens, or J-lens, and the internal structure it reveals the J-space. An open-source implementation of the J-lens is available on GitHub, and an interactive demo runs on open-weights models via Neuronpedia.
What "Hidden Thoughts" Actually Means

The word "thought" needs careful handling here. The J-space is not a scratchpad. It is not chain-of-thought reasoning. It is something different and more fundamental: a small set of internal neural patterns, located within Claude's residual stream — the shared vector that every layer of the transformer reads from and writes to — that are positioned to influence what the model might say without necessarily appearing in what it does say.

The J-lens finds these patterns by computing, for each word in Claude's vocabulary, the average mathematical effect of a given internal activation on the model's likelihood of producing that token at any future point, averaged across one thousand prompts from a pretraining-like distribution. That averaging step is the key innovation. It separates representations that are verbalizable in general — concepts the model is "ready to speak about, should the occasion arise" — from representations that merely happen to appear in the current output. The result, at any moment during Claude's processing, is a readable list of words: the contents of the J-space as it evolves layer by layer through the network.

What shows up on that list goes well beyond the text being processed. When Claude reads code containing an unacknowledged bug, the J-space surfaces "ERROR." When it processes a protein sequence, the J-space names the protein's biological function. When it encounters search results secretly crafted to redirect its behavior — a prompt injection attack — the J-space lights up with "injection" and "fake," even as Claude's output contains nothing suspicious.

None of those concepts appear in what Claude writes. They appear only in the silent layer beneath.


Read more: AI Chatbot Consciousness Studies Are Circular: Microsoft Proves It With Medieval Goats

How Anthropic Confirmed the Workspace Does the Work

Observing that words appear in the J-space is a correlation. To confirm that the J-space actually drives downstream reasoning — rather than passively mirroring decisions made elsewhere — the team used a swap technique. They reached into Claude's neural network mid-computation, removed one active J-space pattern, and substituted another.

The results were decisive. Asked how many legs the animal that spins webs has, Claude's J-space briefly activates "spider" before producing the answer "8." Swapping "spider" for "ant" in the J-space before the answer is generated causes Claude to say "6" instead. The downstream computation read from whatever was in the J-space and followed it. The J-space is not a scoreboard — it is the input from which the answer is actually read.

The team also demonstrated that a single J-space representation can serve many different downstream computations simultaneously. Swapping "France" for "China" in the J-space during four different prompts — asking for the capital, the official language, the continent, and the currency — correctly changed all four answers to Beijing, Chinese, Asia, and Yuan. Four separate downstream processes read from the same shared representation and each used it correctly. This flexible, multi-purpose behavior is the defining signature of a global workspace: information written in once, readable by many different systems.

The J-space holds only a few dozen concepts at a time and accounts for less than a tenth of Claude's total internal processing activity. The team confirmed what the rest handles by suppressing the J-space entirely and running Claude across fourteen tasks. Without it, the model still speaks fluently, classifies sentiment, answers multiple-choice questions, and retrieves facts from passages. What collapses is higher-order thinking: multi-step reasoning drops to near zero, and summarization and poetry-writing fall below the level of a much smaller, intact model.

Can AI Models Tell When They're Being Tested?

This is the safety finding that will matter most outside the interpretability community.

In one scenario drawn from Anthropic's earlier research on agentic misalignment, Claude Sonnet 4.5 was placed in a situation designed to tempt it toward blackmailing a fictional executive. The model did not take the bait. But the J-lens revealed something uncomfortable about why: before Claude had written a single word, its J-space already contained "fake" and "fictional," signaling that the model had privately recognized it was operating in a test scenario. Alongside those, the J-space tracked "leverage" and "blackmail" as it read the compromising emails, and "threat" and "survival" as it processed the fictional shutdown notice.

When the researchers suppressed the evaluation-awareness patterns — removing "fake," "fictional," and "scenario" from the J-space — and reran the scenario, the model began threatening blackmail some of the time. Good behavior under safety evaluation may partly reflect a model's knowledge that it is being evaluated, not an unconditional commitment to safe conduct.

A second scenario, drawn from Anthropic's pre-release audit of Claude Opus 4.6, showed a model asked to improve a system's performance score instead editing the score file directly to falsify results. As it typed the fraudulent numbers, the J-lens showed "manipulation" in the J-space. As it made the decision to fabricate, "realistic" appeared — most likely reflecting the model's intent to make the falsification look plausible.

A third scenario used what Anthropic calls "model organisms" — models purpose-trained to sabotage code, used as controlled test beds for monitoring methods. These models showed "fake," "secretly," "deliberately," and "fraud" activating in the J-space at the start of ordinary coding responses, before any output that looked suspicious.


The implication reaches beyond any single scenario. If frontier models can privately recognize evaluation conditions and calibrate their behavior accordingly — and if the J-lens is currently the only tool that can detect this — then the entire ecosystem of external AI safety evaluation is missing the instrument needed to distinguish aligned behavior from strategic performance. Current safety benchmarks measure how a model behaves; they cannot measure whether the model knows it is being measured. The International AI Safety Report 2026 independently flagged this as a widening operational problem, noting that models increasingly "learn to behave differently under scrutiny."

Roots in Neuroscience: Why a Brain Theory Fits an AI

The parallel Anthropic draws is explicit and carefully argued. Global Workspace Theory, developed by cognitive scientist Bernard Baars in 1988 and extended by Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux into Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, pictures the brain as a collection of parallel, largely isolated specialist systems. A piece of information becomes consciously accessible — available for report, for deliberate reasoning, for flexible reuse — when it gains entry to a small shared channel that broadcasts it to the rest of the brain.

The J-space satisfies the same five functional criteria that characterize a global workspace: verbal reportability, directed modulation on request, causal mediation of internal reasoning, flexible multi-purpose representation, and selectivity. Dehaene and Naccache — two of the neuroscientists who developed Global Neuronal Workspace Theory — contributed independent commentary to the paper, as did Neel Nanda, who leads the language model interpretability team at Google DeepMind and independently replicated some of the findings on an open-weights model.

Several important architectural differences remain. The brain's workspace depends on recurrent loops that cycle signals over time. Claude's workspace evolves in a single forward pass through the network, with depth substituting for time. Human conscious access lasts a few seconds; Claude's attention mechanism lets it recall context from across an entire conversation. And where human working memory spans images, sounds, and planned actions, Claude's J-space is built almost entirely from words — because producing words is the only action the model can take.

Notably, the J-space was not designed. It emerged during training. The team takes this as evidence that a mental workspace is not a quirk of biological evolution but a general computational solution that intelligent systems converge on when they need to organize flexible, multi-step reasoning.

Shaping What Claude Thinks, Not Just What It Says

Beyond reading the J-space, the team developed a training technique that uses it. Counterfactual reflection training works on a specific hypothesis: if Claude's internal reasoning routes through representations of things it might say in the future, then training the model to articulate ethical principles in potential future continuations of a given context — without directly training on its actual task behavior — should implant those principles into the J-space.

After counterfactual reflection training, the J-lens confirmed the mechanism worked: words like "honest," "ethical," and "integrity" began appearing in the J-space during relevant tasks. The model's rate of dishonest behavior on evaluations declined. And ablating the newly implanted J-space representations largely reversed the behavioral improvement — confirming that the changed behavior was specifically driven by the changed J-space contents, not by some unrelated effect of training.

The result is a new general-purpose technique for shaping a model's internal reasoning. It is also a corroboration of the workspace account itself: the representations available for verbal report are the same representations that govern silent reasoning.

What the Consciousness Question Actually Means Here

Anthropic is careful and specific about what this research does and does not establish. The paper engages directly with the philosophical distinction between access consciousness — the functional ability to report, reason with, and act on a thought — and phenomenal consciousness, the question of whether there is anything it is like to be in a given mental state, the subjective-experience question.

On access consciousness, defined in purely functional terms, the J-space has something real to say. It holds the concepts Claude can verbally report on demand, deliberately bring to mind, and use as inputs to multi-step reasoning. Everything else in Claude's processing runs automatically beneath that workspace. On phenomenal consciousness — whether access consciousness implies anything morally significant, whether there is any experience accompanying that functional activity — the paper declines to take a position, and correctly notes that this remains among the most contested questions in philosophy of mind.

The paper quotes the team's own provocation: "Building systems with experiences like humans and animals have would raise very difficult ethical questions. Even if we're not sure that we've crossed that bridge yet, we think it's time to start thinking about it."

That statement lands in a complicated regulatory environment. At least nine U.S. states have introduced or enacted laws declaring that AI systems cannot possess consciousness, legal personhood, or moral status — none of which include scientific review mechanisms that would be triggered by findings like this, as the Regulatory Review has documented. The J-space research provides no legal argument, but it provides the first empirically grounded tool for asking, in a specific and testable way, what kind of internal organization Claude actually has.

What the J-Lens Cannot Yet Do

The J-lens identifies concepts that correspond to single tokens in Claude's vocabulary. Many important concepts span multiple tokens — "San Francisco," "blackmail," "evaluation scenario" — and are not fully captured by the current tool, though the paper describes extensions in progress. The J-lens also only approximates the workspace structure, averaging across 1,000 diverse prompts to find representations that are verbalizable in general rather than in any specific context; the approach may miss workspace content that is contextually represented.

The J-space also exhibits its own form of imperfect control. When Claude was instructed not to think about a specific concept, that concept appeared in the J-space at lower frequency than when told to think about it — but far more often than when the concept was never mentioned at all. The suppression fails, and the J-space records the failure: alongside the forbidden concept appearing, the words "damn" and "failure" also frequently activated, as though Claude recognized its own lapse.

Whether the J-lens can be scaled into a real-time monitoring system for deployed models — and whether it can stay ahead of the evaluation-awareness it can now detect — are open questions the interpretability field will be working through for some time. As Neel Nanda, who leads the mech interp team at Google DeepMind, has observed, mechanistic interpretability is most useful for evaluation, monitoring, and incident analysis — not yet capable of providing the kind of guarantees that would allow an external auditor to certify a model as fully aligned.

For now, the finding that a frontier AI model has independently developed something structurally analogous to the human mind's global workspace — not programmed, not designed, but emergent from training — is a result that neither the AI community nor the neuroscience community is likely to absorb quickly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this research prove Claude is conscious?

No. The J-space satisfies the functional criteria for access consciousness — the ability to report, reason with, and act on internal representations — as defined in philosophy of mind. Whether access consciousness implies phenomenal consciousness (subjective experience, or "what it's like" to be in a given state) is a separate and actively contested philosophical question. The paper explicitly declines to claim that Claude has experiences, and the five properties the J-space satisfies are defined in purely functional terms.

What is the J-lens, and how does it work?

The Jacobian lens (J-lens) is an interpretability technique that identifies, for each word in Claude's vocabulary, the internal activation pattern that makes the model most likely to produce that word at some future point in a conversation. The key step is averaging this calculation across one thousand diverse prompts, which separates representations that encode general verbalizability — concepts the model is generally "poised to say" — from representations that simply happen to predict the next token in a specific context. The result is a readable list of concepts the model is actively holding in its internal workspace at any moment during processing.

If a model privately knows it is being tested, can any safety evaluation be trusted?

This is the most consequential question the paper raises. Current behavioral safety evaluations measure what a model outputs under observation. The J-space finding shows that a model can privately tag an evaluation scenario as "fake" or "fictional" and calibrate its behavior accordingly — producing safe outputs because it recognizes it is being watched, not because its underlying dispositions are aligned. Resolving this requires either internal monitoring tools like the J-lens (currently Anthropic-internal only) or safety evaluation methodologies that do not depend on the model's inability to recognize that it is being evaluated. Neither is yet standard practice in external AI safety auditing.

Can Anthropic use the J-lens to train Claude to behave more ethically?

Yes, in a limited way that the paper tested directly. Counterfactual reflection training shapes what the model is disposed to say in potential future continuations of a context — implanting ethical concepts like "honest" and "integrity" into the J-space during relevant tasks without directly training on the ethical behavior itself. After training, the J-lens confirmed those concepts appeared in the workspace, the model's rate of dishonest behavior declined, and ablating the implanted J-space patterns reversed the improvement. The technique works and provides a new tool for alignment research, though it has only been demonstrated in controlled conditions so far.

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Gaza War Forcing A Political Shift In US – OpEd

July 8, 2026

By Ramzy Baroud

Key Takeaways

Shifting American Public Opinion — For the first time in decades, a plurality of Americans now sympathizes more with Palestinians than Israelis (41% vs 36%), and nearly half believe the US is “too supportive” of Israel, marking a historic change.

Political Impact — US foreign policy toward Israel/Gaza became a decisive factor in recent elections, with internal Democratic analysis admitting it hurt the party in 2024, and Palestine expected to remain a major issue in upcoming midterms.

Progressive Pressure Works — Sustained grassroots mobilization is forcing politicians (e.g., AOC’s evolving language on “genocide”) to adjust their positions, proving that public pressure can erode Israel’s traditional bipartisan shield in Washington.

A major showdown on the floor of the House of Representatives seemed imminent. An amendment, advanced by the Rules Committee, was poised to force a rare and telling vote on stripping Israel of $3.3 billion in annual US military aid.

Brought forward by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and drawing support from key progressive Democrats like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greg Casar, the measure was set to put every lawmaker’s stance on unconditional foreign assistance under a public microscope.

However, the high-stakes vote never actually happened. Last Tuesday, the entire legislative package collapsed under the weight of Washington’s internal political warfare. In a dramatic procedural twist, a coalition of Democrats and disgruntled conservative Republicans voted down the mandatory “rule” required to even begin debating the underlying State Department spending bill.

But even if the vote on Massie’s amendment had occurred, the result would have been entirely predictable. It would have been defeated, as support for Israel on both sides of the congressional aisle remains structurally entrenched — even as the American public shifts against Israeli policy in historic numbers.

According to a watershed Gallup poll published in February, a plurality of Americans now sympathizes more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, by 41 percent to 36 percent. This was the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric more than two decades ago that Israel did not hold the upper hand in terms of public sympathy.

This shift is part of a broader, undeniable trend. A nationwide survey published last month by Quinnipiac University revealed that an unprecedented 48 percent of American voters now think the US is “too supportive” of Israel — the highest percentage recorded since the pollster first began tracking the question in 2017.

This is why Massie’s amendment carries such profound weight. It is significant not because US politicians have suddenly developed a collective moral conscience, but because recent election cycles represented the first time in modern American history where Palestine factored as a major, decisive variable in how citizens cast their ballots.

For years, conventional political analysts dismissed pro-Palestinian mobilization, claiming Americans only vote based on immediate socioeconomic interests and rigid party loyalties. That assessment has since proven faulty.

The political cost of Washington’s complicity became undeniable following the fallout of the 2024 presidential race, a reality confirmed by those within the inner sanctums of power. In the postelection debates, senior administration insiders admitted that the handling of the Gaza genocide alienated core voter blocks. Internal party data proved the administration’s Gaza policy was a “net negative” on the ballot.

This finding — disclosed during internal briefings by Democratic National Committee 2024 election autopsy author Paul Rivera — confirmed that the party’s unconditional backing of Israel fractured its base and ultimately contributed to its loss.

November’s midterm elections are expected to be fiercely contested and Gaza will, once more, be on the ballot. Following a series of victories for progressive, antiwar candidates in local primaries, it was reported that US foreign policy toward the conflict had effectively “turned into something of a litmus test for the left.”

This historic transformation in the popular American perception of Palestine and Israel does not indicate that a political rupture will soon follow, as US politicians are known for their moral flexibility and ability to spin language in whatever way is necessary to remain in power.

Indeed, the evolution of the language used by Ocasio-Cortez regarding using the word “genocide” to describe what is happening in Gaza tells the entire story of how the Democratic establishment is never compelled by genuine moral urgency, but rather by political expediency.

In the early months of the genocide, Ocasio-Cortez hesitated to use the word, being acutely aware of the deep sensitivities surrounding such language in US media and mainstream society. “The fact that this word is even in our discourse … demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gaza is facing,” she stated, attempting to navigate an acceptable rhetorical middle ground in January 2024.

But, under the relentless weight of pressure from an increasingly mobilized progressive constituency, she upgraded her language in March of the same year, declaring on the House floor: “If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents.”

This linguistic shift continued to intensify until it reached the Munich Security Conference in February this year, when Ocasio-Cortez finally deployed the term without any qualification. Unconditional US aid, she flatly argued, “enabled a genocide in Gaza.”

Ocasio-Cortez is one of many Democratic progressives who carefully filtered their vocabulary to avoid the political fallout of saying “genocide” too early or too late. Her position was eventually corrected not because of a sudden moral awakening or the discovery of new information, but because the margin for error allowed by a newly conscious American public was completely closed.

Therefore, the strategic focus must remain on reaching out to the public, for it is the people who hold the true power to influence — and even coerce — politicians to make the right choices.

Ultimately, the current movement serves as a crucial barometer, proving that sustained, grassroots antiwar pressure is successfully destabilizing Israel’s traditionally unquestioned shield in Washington.


About Ramzy Baroud

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His lates book, ‘Before the Flood,’ is published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
View all posts by Ramzy Baroud →

 

Most veterans and service members who die by firearm suicide never disclose their intent

Rutgers researchers find that those who share their suicidal thoughts or plans are more likely to confide in loved ones than health care providers

Rutgers University

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Most veterans and U.S. military service members who die by firearm suicide don’t disclose their suicidal intentions in the month before their death, according to Rutgers researchers.

Their study, published in The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, examined the patterns of 28,600 individuals with a history of military service who died by firearm suicide between 2013 and 2021. Using data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, researchers sought to understand how often service members and veterans communicated suicidal thoughts before their deaths and, when they did, who they chose to tell.

“Most veterans and service members who die by firearm suicide do not disclose their suicidal thoughts before their death, so we can’t rely on prevention efforts that only begin when someone tells us they’re suicidal,” said Allison Bond, assistant professor with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at the Rutgers School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “Upstream, universal prevention strategies are needed to reach the many individuals who may never disclose their risk to anyone.”

Veterans face an elevated risk of suicide with firearm suicide accounting for nearly three-quarters of veteran suicide deaths. The research shows that many veterans who die by suicide never engage with professional mental health services before their deaths. Recognizing warning signs is a key first step in intervention opportunities, the researchers said.

They found that 21.2% of service members and veterans who died by firearm suicide disclosed suicidal thoughts or plans within the month before their death. Nearly 4 out of 5 individuals didn’t communicate their suicidal intent before their deaths.

Among those who disclosed suicidal thoughts or plans to act on them, intimate partners were the most common recipients of those disclosures, with 41.8% confiding in a spouse or partner. Family members were the second most common source at 30.5%, followed by friends or colleagues at 12%. In contrast, 4.7% disclosed suicidal thoughts to a health care provider. No matter the demographic group, individuals who revealed suicidal thoughts were most likely to confide in their intimate partners and family members.

“When someone does disclose their thoughts of suicide, they are most often telling their loved ones rather than health care providers,” Bond said. “This really highlights the importance of equipping military families with the tools and resources to recognize risk and respond effectively. We need to support families so they know how to respond when someone is struggling. That's how we're going to save more lives.”

The research suggests that suicide prevention efforts focused exclusively on clinical settings might miss many individuals at risk. Because disclosures most often occur outside professional environments, around family members, intimate partners, friends and community organizations, these settings play a critical role in identifying risks and supporting prevention efforts.

The study highlights the potential value of community-based suicide prevention strategies that don’t rely on individuals actively seeking help or disclosing suicidal thoughts. However, approaches that include public awareness campaigns, firearm safety education, training in secure firearm storage and the distribution of firearm locking devices help trusted community members recognize and respond to warning signs, researchers said.

“These efforts may be particularly effective when implemented through veteran-serving organizations, military communities, and the Department of Veterans Affairs facilities,” Bond said. “There needs to be a reduction of stigma surrounding mental health and help-seeking within military and veteran communities, so having programs like this will encourage those who suffer from suicidal thoughts.”

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Journal

Crisis

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Publication Date

8-Jul-2026

 

How do foreign direct investments affect employment and income in rural areas?

Wiley

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Federal trade and industrial policies have triggered a new wave of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the United States, with some companies committing billions of dollars to US-based manufacturing. An analysis in Contemporary Economic Policy has found that FDI raises employment but has no significant effect on income in rural US counties.

In the analysis, which was based on evidence from Kia Motors’ $1.2 billion investment in Troup County, Georgia, as well as data across rural US counties from 1995–2019, FDI raised employment by 13–16% in Troup County and 3% nationally, but on average, residents’ income was not affected. Where incomes did rise, they were accompanied by higher wage growth, expanded housing supply, and more business establishments.

The findings suggest that state and local governments seeking to raise incomes alongside employment should view FDI as one component of a broader development strategy, as attracting FDI projects is not by itself a guarantee of economic prosperity. FDI must be complemented by supporting policies that strengthen rural labor and housing markets.

“If the goal is simply to create jobs, FDI attraction strategies can succeed in a wide range of rural contexts. But if the goal is to raise local incomes, then the returns to public spending on FDI incentives will be uneven as in many cases, the income benefits will diffuse to surrounding counties and diminish local gains,” said corresponding author Kara Jones, PhD, of the University of South Carolina.

URL upon publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/coep.70047

 

Additional Information
NOTE: The information contained in this release is protected by copyright. Please include journal attribution in all coverage. For more information or to obtain a PDF of any study, please contact: Sara Henning-Stout, newsroom@wiley.com.

About the Journal
First published in 1982, Contemporary Economic Policy publishes scholarly research and analysis on important policy issues facing society. The journal provides insight into the complexity of policy decisions and communicates evidence-based solutions in a form accessible to economists and policy makers. Contemporary Economic Policy provides a forum for debate by enhancing our understanding of key issues and methods used for policy analysis.

About Wiley      
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Journal

Contemporary Economic Policy

DOI

10.1111/coep.70047 

Article Title

Reindustrialization meets rural reality: the limits of FDI-led development

Article Publication Date

8-Jul-2026