Tough Questions for International Law

by Mihai Coca-Constantinescu, JURIST

Within the span of one week, Romania was struck twice by drones originating from the conflict in Ukraine: first by an aerial drone in the city of Galați on May 29, and then by a maritime drone that exploded in the Port of Constanța on June 5. The two incidents, unprecedented in their proximity and severity, have reignited urgent debates about the legal and security implications of modern drone warfare spilling across international borders.

by Bill Weinberg, Freedom News

Evidence of the existential threat posed to humanity by artificial intelligence accrues day by day.

The United Nations on June 4 issued a call for a “responsible AI ecosystem,” warning that daily use of AI is having a vast and insufficiently appreciated environmental impact. The appeal came after a United Nations University study predicting AI’s global water use will match the needs of all 1.3 billion people in Africa south of the Sahara by 2030. The report also warned of a growing challenge from electronic waste, with AI infrastructure projected to generate up to 2.5 million metric tons of e-waste annually by 2030.

by Vishal Sharma, JURIST

In the first week of February 2026, the geography of human intelligence officially detached from the Earth. With a landmark filing to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on February 4, SpaceX proposed a network of one million solar-powered satellites designed not for communication, but for computation. This "Orbital Data Center" system, bolstered by the recent SpaceX-xAI merger, aims to move massive AI workloads into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The rationale is a matter of cold physics; Earth is running out of "cool."

The Iran Strikes and the Rule of Law

by Mohamed Arafa, JURIST

The most striking aspect of the Trump administration’s legal argument for the attack on Iran is that, in practical terms, it simply does not exist. When President Donald Trump announced that the United States was "at war," he claimed the strikes were intended to eliminate "imminent threats from the Iranian regime," yet offered no evidence to support that assertion. The historical incidents he cited—the 1979-1981 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, the 1983 bombing of US Marine barracks in Lebanon, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole—occurred decades ago. Trump even suggested that Iran’s leaders "knew [about] and were probably involved" in these events, while emphasizing that the US had "completely and totally obliterated the regime's nuclear program" last year. Beyond these historical episodes, the administration presented no proof of any current, imminent threat from Iran. Under international law, imminence requires a threat that is instant, overwhelming, and leaves no alternative means of response—a standard plainly not met here. Particularly alarming is the explicit targeting of foreign leaders. The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei came less than two months after US forces attempted to seize Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, signaling a troubling expansion of precedent for US interventions abroad. Deliberately targeting heads of state is prohibited under international law and the New York Convention, to protect political stability and to avoid escalating conflicts unnecessarily.

Why AI and Nuclear Ambitions Are Outpacing Space Law

by Vishal Sharma, JURIST

The recent unveiling of Russia's Selena project, a nuclear power plant slated for the lunar surface by 2035 under the joint Russo-Chinese International Lunar Research Station program, has been hailed as a triumph of engineering. But beneath the proposed cooling towers lies a volatile reality. We are about to place the highest-stakes technologies of the 21st century—autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) and nuclear fission—on a legal foundation that has been frozen since the Cold War.

by Nava Thakuria, CounterVortex

Trouble-torn Burma (also known as Myanmar or Brahmadesh) is heading for the first general elections since the military coup of February 2021 that ousted a democratically elected government. The seating of a new parliament will mark the re-opening of the bicameral body which was suspended when the military junta seized power. However, several prominent political parties will be barred from the three-phase polling to start on December 28— including Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), which won the last general elections held in November 2020. The new elections, with only those parties approved by the military junta participating, are rejected by the opposition as a "sham." Results are expected by the end of January.

White Supremacy's Push to Rewrite the Constitution

by Timothy Benston, The Black Eye

Birthright citizenship in the United States was never a bureaucratic detail or an immigration loophole. It was a direct assault on white supremacy's original theory of this nation—that Black presence was permissible only as labor, never as belonging. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment sought to end that theory for good. Their language was meant to close the door on the idea that one's worth could be inherited from whiteness or revoked by power. If you are born here, you are of here. That amendment did not just welcome formerly enslaved Black people into the civic body; it attempted to inoculate the Constitution itself against the return of caste.

Pardons for the Convicted, Drone Strikes for the Suspected

by Ingrid Burke Friedman, JURIST

This week, President Donald Trump pardoned a man federal prosecutors described as the architect of a "narco-state" who moved 400 tons of cocaine to United States shores. In September, the US military began killing people on Caribbean vessels based on unproven suspicions they were doing the same thing on a far smaller scale. The strikes have drawn allegations of war crimes; the contradiction has drawn bipartisan scrutiny.

Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández walked out of a federal penitentiary in West Virginia on December 2, after Trump issued him a "full and unconditional" pardon. Hernández had been serving a 45-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2024 of facilitating the importation of more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States over nearly two decades. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time that Hernández had "abused his position as President of Honduras to operate the country as a narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity, and the people of Honduras and the United States were forced to suffer the consequences."