June 16, 2026

Photo credit: Anadolu / Contributor / Anadolu via Getty Images

Adam Hamawy is likely to be elected to the House of Representatives in November, representing New Jersey’s deep-blue 12th Congressional District. His primary victory earlier this month effectively secured his election, given the minimal effort to oppose him.

Hamawy has a questionable past. He was accused of lying in court to protect the terrorist who inspired the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And he interned for a foundation that allegedly served as an Al Qaeda front. 

“That so little opposition materialized against a candidate whose record would trouble many Americans says something about the state of the Democratic Party and about the relative strength of groups that might have opposed Hamawy,” Jesse Arm and Danielle Shapiro write. “The party’s elected officials, donors, unions, advocacy groups, activist networks, and online influencers often pull in different directions, with no leader possessing the authority or willingness to impose discipline. As a result, candidates who the party might have successfully sidelined in the past can now rise largely unchecked through activist ecosystems and fractured primaries.”

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Public school Gifted and Talented (G&T) programs have their problems. Parents report feeling unimpressed by the teaching quality, and many of the programs ultimately serve the interests of teachers and organized labor more than those of students and families.

Even so, eliminating the programs “would further expose high-performing students to the failing general public education system. This would likely accelerate public school disenrollment,” John Ketcham writes. “But if the alternative to G&T is school choice, public schools would have stronger incentives to use new programming to improve educational quality and compete for students.”

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The House Appropriations Committee’s FY2027 education spending bill would direct much of the Department of Education’s Safe Schools account toward school-based mental-health programs. This move reflects how Congress has redefined school safety around mental-health interventions despite weak evidence that such programs improve student outcomes.

Manhattan Institute Fellow Carolyn Gorman argues that lawmakers should reject the bill and refocus federal school-safety funding on schools’ core educational mission. Citing various reviews and studies, she demonstrates that universal screening, awareness campaigns, and expanded counseling services often increase diagnoses and referrals without improving attendance, academic performance, or other measurable outcomes.

“House Republicans need to wake up here,” Gorman wrote. “Youth mental health matters. But funding mental-health mission creep in the education system is not the way to address it.”

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American embassies are getting uglier. Several new buildings illustrate the risk of working with modernist architects on such important structures.

The worst might be the American embassy in London, “which manages to unite hideousness with banality,” Theodore Dalrymple writes. The American embassy in Maputo isn’t much better. In Dalrymple’s words, it “looks as if a giant Parmesan cheese is expected to fall from the sky at any moment and will need grating as it lands.” Or consider the American consulate in Milan, which Dalrymple calls “a study in architectural incompetence and visual vandalism.” 

Read more about America’s newest embassies, and why Dalrymple believes modernism is “inherently inhuman.”