September 25, 2026

Photo credit: JOHN MACDOUGALL / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Last month, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Masar Badil, a pro-Palestinian group, as a front for the PFLP. And in 2024, the U.S. designated the Samidoun network as a PFLP front.

Even so, the groups appear to be doing just fine. One of Masar Badil’s youth affiliates secured a plea deal after occupying the University of Washington campus. And in November, the group will host a conference in Toronto—“3 Years of Al-Aqsa Flood,” which is how Hamas refers to the October 7th massacre.

“Across North America, a growing number of affiliate groups increasingly cast themselves as Samidoun’s successors,” Stu Smith writes, “adopting a politics of ‘strategic risk’ and ‘intentional sacrifice in pursuit of the liberatory struggle,’ and normalizing ‘revolutionary violence.’ More decisive action is needed to curb this growing threat.”

Read more about the organizations and their rising influence.

Passed in 1971, the Hecht-Calandra Act requires top-performing New York high schools to admit new students based on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT).

New York City Councilmember Lincoln Restler and Deputy Speaker Nantasha Williams want to repeal the law. Earlier this month, they released an Excellence and Integration Plan for the city’s specialized high schools. The plan calls for schools to consider grades, teacher recommendations, student essays, and “applicant backgrounds” in admissions. It also proposes increasing enrollment and restricting a program for disadvantaged students to the 15 poorest school districts.

“The Restler-Williams plan does nothing to fix the city’s nearly 1,600 other public schools, where most eighth-graders cannot do middle school math and one-third of students are chronically absent,” Wai Wah Chin writes. “Instead, it seeks to dumb down New York’s eight top high schools, so admired around the world that Chinese delegations have even visited one of them (Stuyvesant) to study how it works.”

Read her take.

Trash; public urination; homeless people on the subways; intoxication: New Yorkers deal with a lot on a daily basis. Quality-of-life 911 calls are up 8 percent from a year ago. And just 34 percent of residents last year said their quality of life was “excellent” or “good.”

Artificial intelligence can make a difference here, Josh Appel argues. The technology can make it easier for local officials to act based on data the city already collects.

Take drag racing. The city logs 311 complaint records and collects data on traffic volume, speed violations, and patrol schedules, among other valuable information. “However, these data aren't synthesized because it would be nearly impossible to plug these streams into a single output,” Appel explains. That’s where AI comes in. “A vision model can process the camera footage to flag the telltale mark of a drag racer’s burnout. A text model can parse 10,000 complaints and tag them by behavior, time, and location.” AI can then predict where drag racing is likely to take place, and government agencies can use that information to locate speed cameras or patrol more strategically.

Read more.