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The Supreme Court affirmed on Tuesday that that birthright citizenship is the law of the land. The decision, by Chief Justice John Roberts, upholds the clear meaning of the Constitution and knocks down the Trump administration’s attempt to deny citizenship to thousands of newborns every year. It’s no exaggeration to say that the case was a test of whether this would remain a nation where everyone is born on equal legal footing, or whether the country would revert to a caste system in which one’s place in society is determined by the status of one’s parents. And the decision was scandalously close.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote in his 5-4 majority opinion. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

But Roberts’ sweeping ruling commanded only a bare 5-4 majority on the meaning of the Constitution’s citizenship clause. Justice Brett Kavanaugh would have struck down Trump’s executive order based on Congress’ previous codification of birthright citizenship, but does not believe it is required by the Constitution. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented. That math is too close for comfort.

Court-watchers generally expected an overwhelming rebuke for Trump in this case, with perhaps one or two dissenters. Instead, birthright citizenship—and with it the promise of a casteless society of equals—hangs by a thread. To be clear, if one Democratic appointee leaves the court while Trump or another Republican is president, the promise of equality for all under the law may fall.

On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to deny birthright citizenship to the children of temporary visitors and undocumented people, claiming that such a policy is the proper interpretation of the citizenship clause. But the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution after the Civil War, states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The only exceptions, carved into the jurisdiction requirement, are the children of ambassadors, invading armies, and, at the time, American Indians under tribal authority. Today’s decision upholds this long-held understanding of the Constitution.

This isn’t the first time the court has ruled that the citizenship clause means what it says. In a landmark decision in 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the court found that birthright citizenship is the rule for virtually everyone born in the United States. Today’s court upheld all of Wong Kim Ark. “We see no reason to depart from that view today,” Roberts wrote. While the decision is a rebuke of Trump, the majority didn’t need to take this case in order to shut down Trump’s executive order—as the majority acknowledged today, it was already unconstitutional under the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment and Wong Kim Ark. Today’s ruling, Trump v. Barbara, didn’t change that. Some may nonetheless credit the court for striking down Trump’s order and point to it as evidence that the court is not overly obsequious to the president—though it has used recent terms to grant him vast new powers and reserved rebukes for rare occasions. But this case is too close to give the court any credit—instead, it portends a dark future, despite Roberts’ fulsome defense of birthright citizenship.

The very fact that the country came within one or two votes of undoing our system of birthright citizenship is a sign of how far the Trump administration has succeeded in throwing into contention the country’s most basic freedoms. The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was added to the Constitution after the Civil War to overturn Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to Black people. But the amendment’s drafters went further in writing a broad rule for the ages, ensuring that no future politicians could discriminate against a disfavored minority by taking away their citizenship and consigning them to a permanent underclass. Roberts’ majority opinion affirms this: “The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to repudiate Dred Scott,” Roberts wrote. “However, the goal was even grander—to put the ‘great question of citizenship’ ‘beyond the legislative power’ altogether, to settle the issue once and for all.”

Nevertheless, the Trump administration tried to undo that final decision. If Trump had succeeded, thousands of newborns each year would grow up deprived of the social welfare benefits and opportunities afforded to citizens—a permanent, stigmatized subclass unable to escape their lack of legal status. Restrictions could have also applied retroactively, ultimately ensnaring millions.

The Trump administration’s arguments were legally absurd. Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the term “jurisdiction” implied a compact of allegiance in exchange for the government’s protection, and that this can only be achieved if the parents have permission to stay indefinitely in the country. But the allegiance-for-protection rule is nonsensical because it would have excluded the emancipated people whom the amendment was explicitly intended to grant citizenship. Moreover, the requirement of permanent residence—what Sauer termed “domicile”—would hand politicians the right to deny citizenship to classes of people because the legal definition of domicile can be changed by Congress or, possibly, the president. It’s a theory that would have essentially nullified the citizenship clause.

Birthright citizenship, and with it the idea that anyone born here has a shot at succeeding in this country, is deeply ingrained not only in American laws and institutions, but also in our national identity. The very notion of the American dream is that once here, you and especially your children can succeed. If legal status is inherited, the dream is shattered. That is the real import of the Trump administration’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship; not just to launch a cruel and chaotic experiment in sending federal officers into maternity wards, but to rewrite the fundamental character of the country, from a society of legal equals to one of inherited caste.

The dissenters would have given Trump all or nearly all of what he wanted.

But the citizenship clause doesn’t mention parental status, it refers to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” By arguing that a child’s citizenship depends on the immigration status of their parents, the administration’s arguments departed from the text of the 14th Amendment and the history of its creation. “That’s part of the understanding of the birthright citizenship clause—that whatever the sins of the parents are, the clause breaks that connection,” Cristina Rodríguez, who is now dean of Yale Law School, told me last year. “What matters is where the individual was born.” Rodríguez has called the citizenship clause our “constitutional reset button,” ensuring that “each generation starts fresh, and we don’t worry about status because of what’s in our past.”

In a concurrence that spotlights the role Black people played in shaping the 14th Amendment, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hammers this point. “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation,” she wrote, “not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”

To bolster his weak arguments about the past, Sauer also relied on the assertion that the government needs power to restrict birthright citizenship for national security concerns. “We’re in a new world now, where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who is a US citizen,” he told the justices at oral arguments. Chief Justice John Roberts responded with a zinger that signaled that the court wasn’t buying it: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Kavanaugh, however, bought Sauer’s contention that the 14th Amendment didn’t constrain the political branches from responding to modern-day immigration challenges by exempting the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors.

Three dissents presented fractured ideas about why some or all of Trump’s executive order is legal. Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito all believe that the 14th Amendment does not give citizenship to the children of temporary visitors, which would include people who have lived in the US for years as, for example, students, doctors, or professors. Alito and Kavanaugh think Trump can likewise bar the children of undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship. Thomas and Gorsuch reserved judgment on the status of an undefined group of undocumented immigrants who have been in the country of a long time—though they don’t specify how much time. Taken together, the dissenters would have given Trump all or nearly all of what he wanted.

Thomas, in a long dissent joined by Gorsuch, launches into an alternative history of citizenship since the founding. Whereas the majority recognizes that the framers of the 14th Amendment were incorporating the long-tradition of citizenship by place of birth, jus soli, imported from British common law, Thomas argued that the Americans never adopted what he derisively referred to as a “feudal” principle. Instead, he argued that the US only gave citizenship to the children of people “domiciled” in the country. To Thomas, the 14th Amendment applied only to the freed people after the Civil War because they were domiciled in the US and owed no allegiance to a foreign power—interpreting the rule as limited to one period and one population. “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support,” he wrote.

Thomas’ dissent is littered with references to bunk scholarship hastily put forward over the last year by a small band of radical scholars who tried to give academic cover to the executive order. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I have detailed, they spent the past year attempting to muddy the historical record. Despite their tortured arguments, they helped move the Overton window, as one Trumpian scholar boasted after oral arguments, and Thomas approvingly cited two of those professors’ work.

Perhaps Alito’s solo dissent is the most shocking, not only how far it would go in undoing our system of citizenship but also for the racial animus that jumps out of the language. Alito argues that “subject to the jurisdiction” excludes anyone subject to another power, and thus excludes children who would also be afforded citizenship in the home country of their parents. He names some of those countries, including Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Alito despairs at the “problem” of undocumented immigration, describes American citizenship as “precious,” states that the current rule “degrade the concept of United States citizenship,” and frets that today’s ruling invites more undocumented immigration. In upholding birthright citizenship, Alito warns that his colleagues have “made a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.” It does not take much parsing to see the racial anxiety animating Alito’s dissent.

The 14th Amendment is the cornerstone of our democracy. It was supposed to provide equality under the law, to ensure rights to all, and to preserve those rights through a casteless system of birthright citizenship. Not long after ratification, however, the Supreme Court began chipping away at the meaning and enforceability of the amendment. The Roberts Court has picked up where its predecessors in the 19th century began, from rolling back programs and laws aimed at racial equality to allowing insurrectionists to run for office. On Tuesday, the court held back from dismantling the fundamental right to birthright citizenship, but with a slim majority that makes the reprieve not just a relief, but a warning.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear a challenge to state and local bans on assault weapons, a move that could destroy restrictions on semiautomatic weapons like AR-15s—which are popular with mass shooters.

While the court chose not to adjudicate the issue last year, four of the court’s six conservative justices at the time expressed their opposition to such bans on Second Amendment grounds. The issue will be taken up in the court’s next term in October.

The specific bans that will be challenged originate in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois—part of the greater Chicago area. Connecticut’s law is directly related to the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, in which Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults with an AR-15, a shotgun, and two semiautomatic pistols.

“We will not back down from defending Cook County’s long-standing ban on assault weapons. These weapons of war are designed to inflict maximum carnage and have no place in our communities,” Cook County State’s Attorney Ellen O’Neill Burke wrote on X. “Countless victims have already endured the devastating impact of gun violence. We will defend this lawful ordinance before this nation’s highest court to continue protecting the people of Cook County.”

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Donald Trump claims to have a trick up his sleeve to upend birthright citizenship—though his plan to do so would most likely run afoul of the law.

The president downplayed the Supreme Court decision Tuesday that killed his attempts to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, claiming that he and his allies could “easily make it up in Congress through Legislation.”

“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” he wrote on Truth Social. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”

But that’s simply not true. Any attempt to change or alter birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, since the right was enshrined in the Constitution in 1868 when Dred Scott was overturned and the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.

Accomplishing that would require a level of coordination and bipartisanship seemingly beyond the current Republican Party. A constitutional amendment requires a supermajority—two thirds of both the House and Senate—to pass. Alternatively, the issue could technically be put to a Constitutional Convention, though two thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three fourths of the states.

The president was still embittered by the ruling hours after it was read at the bench, writing in a separate post that he “would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN.”

In another post, Trump went on to claim that while the Supreme Court’s birthright ruling was a “loss” for his second term agenda, he had actually won the “biggest and most consequential Decision” when they extended him (by a 6-3 margin) sweeping new authorities over some two dozen agencies that were originally intended to be independent. That included granting him the ability to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The ruling allows states to ban transgender student athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s teams, but doesn’t require it. States like California can keep their current policies.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has come under fire for going on a European vacation, adding to concerns that he could lose his Senate race and flip the seat to Democratic rival James Talarico. The conservative Daily Mail posted video of Paxton in Dulles Airport boarding a plane en route to Reykjavik, Iceland, alongside conservative Christian influencer Tracy Duhon. Paxton is still legally…

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Look, I get it. Democrats have been burned by hopes for a Texas miracle so many times that it feels risky to place stock in this year’s Senate race. But a new poll of the contest from The New York Times finds a dead heat, with Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton each earning 47 percent of likely voters. In short: This is a real race. In Texas.

Some have reacted with consternation to this poll, because previous ones had Talarico slightly up. This is, in my view, the wrong reaction. The Times poll is the gold standard—if this survey finds a tie, the race truly is a dead heat, meaning it’s actually winnable for Talarico. This was always going to be close. It will be very hard for Talarico to win. But it’s doable.

Talarico’s candidacy is an object lesson in what happens when liberals speak forcefully on behalf of what they truly believe—and here the Times poll sheds some light. For instance: Majorities of Texas voters say Talarico has “good character” and “the right moral values,” whereas majorities don’t say that of Paxton. And more see Paxton as extreme (49 percent) than see Talarico (43 percent) that way.

What should we make of this? Paxton and the entire GOP-MAGA apparatus are spending enormous sums of money to tar Talarico as unmasculine based on his previous positions on gender and religion. Talarico has walked back some of them. But, critically, he hasn’t done this fearfully and defensively.

Instead, Talarico has characterized the criticism as ludicrously trivial, and has highlighted how absurd it is for Paxton—who has a long trail of corrupt and adulterous conduct—to criticize the manhood of others. His tone toward Paxton has been one of incredulity: This corrupt lowlife is claiming he’s a man’s man and a good Christian? This guy? Seriously?

Meanwhile, Talarico has offered up a vision of masculinity that’s rooted in rectitude and integrity, in showing loyalty to neighbors (including immigrants, i.e., showing loyalty when it’s politically hard), in selflessly serving the community, and in protecting the vulnerable, all of it rooted in his own Christian faith.

Along those lines, here’s another striking Times finding: Talarico is leading by 27 points, 58-31, among independents. That’s probably too rosy, but it’s instructive. The real GOP game plan is to smear Talarico as a vaguely alien (read: homosexual) figure who isn’t one of “us” Texans. Talarico’s response is to be forthright on what he really believes—to say what he means, and mean what he says—while tarring Paxton as the person of truly low character. For now, it’s appealing to independents. The poll also finds Talarico winning 9 percent of Trump voters.

It would be wildly premature to conclude from this poll that all this is working sufficiently to win Texas. Talarico will get bludgeoned by hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads. And the poll shows Paxton holds a huge lead in areas of the state outside the big urban centers. Talarico is badly trailing among working-class whites, and he’s 8 points behind among all working-class voters.

Still, there’s cause for optimism here. To win, Talarico needs some Trump voters and a lot of independents. He’s on track to do that, though he’ll have to win more working- class voters and cut into Paxton’s non-metro margins. While the Democratic brand is tarnished here (53 percent say the party is too far left), Talarico is mostly escaping that.

Winning in Texas also requires running up huge totals in the Latino-heavy border counties—and here the poll delivers another surprise. Talarico is trouncing Paxton among Latinos by 61-29, or 32 points. This is a big deal. Trump’s success at winning Texas Latinos fueled all the post-2024 talk of a major realignment. But those gains have evaporated, even in Texas.

What happened? Well, Trump’s mass deportations, for starters. Texas voters approve of Trump on immigration by a bare 50-49—not great for this deep red border state. But Latinos disapprove by an extraordinary 64-33, with 60 percent disapproving strongly. That’s remarkable—it helps explain how Trump squandered those Latino gains.

Trump is hovering over all of this. The Times poll finds his overall approval underwater at 44-52. He’s faring worse on the economy (43-55), the cost of living (39-60), and the war (41-57). Those numbers are quite bad for Texas. And it gives Talarico an opening in another sense.

As I argued last month, Talarico and a number of other Democrats are developing a new moral language for the era of “Late Stage Trumpism.” The broad idea of a new politics is gaining traction: E.J. Dionne and Jennifer Szalai both have good pieces detailing how Democrats are embracing a newly moralized politics. They’re talking about the common good, depicting corruption as a moral scourge, and casting both liberalism and democracy as ways of life rooted in ethical public conduct, in mutual respect among differing citizens.

Yet one central ingredient to this should be an indictment of the moral and spiritual rot that MAGA has inflicted on our common life. This can coexist with good-faith outreach to Republicans and even some Trump voters.

Here’s where “Late Stage Trumpism” comes in. All that’s left is the corruption, the self-enrichment, the naked cruelty, the ethnonationalism, the upward transfer of oligarchic wealth, and the stoking of petty enmities as political bloodsport.

I don’t know how directly Talarico can criticize Trump by name—a majority says Talarico will “oppose Trump too much.” But he’s facing a candidate who perfectly exemplifies the very worst of MAGA, and most people just want to get past MAGA’s nonstop degradations already. Talarico needs to speak to that MAGA fatigue without appearing too partisan. It’s a tall order: Winning in Texas will be hard. But even if he comes close, it’ll suggest that a new politics is emerging from all the wreckage.

Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan said he is aware of “questionable, long-term threat actor communications” between a threat hunter who is still employed with the security firm and a cybercriminal, and called this “poor judgment.” “In one particular exchange, our current teammate disclosed to a threat actor that law enforcement had reached out to them about the threat actor,” Hanslovan said in a blog post, addressing a former employee’s accusations that the current Huntress analyst is an insider threat to the company. “While this disclosure was not illegal, it reflected poor judgment,” he wrote. The incident came to light last week when former Huntress security operations analyst Ben Folland, who left the company in February, alleged that “another Huntress employee passed communications from US law enforcement to a cybercriminal, Devman, who is actively and publicly targeting my family and me.” Devman is a ransomware operator, believed to be located in Russia, who uses modified DragonForce code built on top of the leaked Conti source code. Folland alleged that this insider, still employed by Huntress, was “caught by the FBI,” and that their involvement with Devman “would cause significant reputational damage to Huntress and, in my view, continues to put clients at risk.” “If you are an employee at a cybersecurity company, you should not be helping cybercriminals,” Folland said. “You should not be informing them of active investigations. You should not be engaging in cybercriminal activity yourself.” At the time, Hanslovan said he “firmly disagree[d]” with Folland’s accusations – but declined to provide additional details about what happened between the employee and the criminal. In the Tuesday blog post, Hanslovan elaborated further and said that he believed that the communications did not constitute insider activity. “As a result of the investigation, my team implemented more robust policies for our researchers, coached teammates on engaging with threat actors, and took appropriate administrative actions,” he wrote. “While we haven't found evidence of illegal conduct, insider activity, or additional disclosures, we are continuing our investigation. Due to the privacy rights of our teammates, we will not comment further on the investigation.” Folland disagrees. In a Tuesday LinkedIn post responding to Hanslovan’s blog, he asserted that the communications between the Huntress analyst and Devman “meet the definition of an insider threat.” When the FBI reached out to the Huntress employee for intel on Devman, “She immediately forwarded the exact FBI communications to the threat actor, including screenshots containing FBI agent names,” Folland claimed in his post on LinkedIn. “She informed Devman that law enforcement was actively looking into him. She also refused to cooperate because they wanted Devman.” According to Folland, the FBI notified him of this incident with the current Huntress analyst. The Register reached out to the FBI for comment and did not receive a response. “This was not just ‘poor judgment,’” Folland wrote. “This was a Huntress employee taking sensitive knowledge about a law enforcement approach and passing it directly to the person being investigated. If someone inside a bank warns a fraudster that police are investigating them, nobody would describe that as merely ‘poor judgment.’ They would call it what it is – an insider.” Huntress declined to comment further. ®

Republican Representative Thomas Kean Jr. is back at work, and finally explained Tuesday why he went missing in March without any explanation.

In a speech on the House floor, Kean said that he was hospitalized on doctor’s orders for depression. He noted that it was a “difficult speech” for him to make as he is a private person and talking about himself doesn’t come naturally, but said that “I believe I owe an explanation to the people of New Jersey’s 7th district, my colleagues in this chamber, and to the American people for my actions.”

Kean said that months ago, he underwent medical testing at a hospital and was diagnosed with depression. While Kean didn’t believe he would need a long-term hospital stay, he said he was advised to remain put by doctors. Early on, he didn’t understand his condition, he added.

Rep. Tom Kean says his absence from the House was due to depression pic.twitter.com/AbQRdc4d88

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2026

“It is physical. It is emotional. And until you experience it yourself, it is difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be,” Kean said. He said he was hesitant to accept his doctors’ advice that a long-term stay would be the fastest way to recovery, given his obligations to his family, colleagues, and constituents.

“But, as the over 48 million of my fellow Americans being treated for this illness have come to discover, there is no timeline for healing. There is no timeline for recovery. Only the work of getting better, one day at a time,” Kean said.

It was a heartfelt speech, but the New Jersey congressman failed to explain why his social media accounts continued to post regularly and his office still introduced legislation while he was missing. Kean’s financial disclosures showed that he was also trading stocks in April while he was ostensibly in the hospital, and his reelection campaign racked up travel expenses showing him using Uber and Amtrak in San Francisco, far from his constituents, in that same month.

If Kean’s depression was so severe that he needed hospitalization, how does he explain personally trading stocks and racking up travel expenses on the other side of the country? Kean also missed several important votes in Congress, including on the budget. He’s not in a safe Republican district, either: Donald Trump carried it by just one percentage point in 2024, and Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill won it by two last November.

Kean is not the first member of Congress to deal with depression: Former Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. was treated at the Mayo Clinic for bipolar depression in 2012 and later resigned that year, and former Representative Patrick Kennedy dealt with depression throughout his congressional career, receiving in-patient treatment in 2006 and 2009 and deciding not to run for reelection in 2010.

While Kean won his primary unopposed, he faces Democrat and former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett in November’s general election. Kean may not be able to escape scrutiny for his lack of transparency over the last few months.

A deportation flight from the United States arrived in Venezuela last Wednesday, reportedly carrying 146 Venezuelans, including seven children, deported under President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration efforts. But just hours after their arrival at a hotel in La Guaira, twin earthquakes struck the area, leaving the number of surviving deportees currently unknown. The twin earthquakes…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Supreme Court enshrines Trump’s racist bullsh-t into law…

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For those who can't move their fingers to type, a brain-computer interface that can help them communicate by decoding neural activity is a lifeline. Researchers at Meta have been working on a noninvasive - no surgery required - brain-computer interface that is better than its predecessors, but still far from practically usable after more than a year of work. Meta announced the second iteration of its system designed to pick up and decode brain signals that fire when users are typing, called Brain2Qwerty, on Monday. The researchers explained in a pair of papers released alongside the announcement that B2Q v2 was able to achieve an average word accuracy of 61 percent (78 percent for the best-performing participant), which they said was a considerable improvement over previous noninvasive BCI systems that typically achieved only single-digit word accuracy. B2Q v2 was trained on some 22,000 sentences typed by nine participants over the course of 10 hours, each of whom was outfitted with a magnetoencephalography (MEG) headset while typing. Meta then routed their brain signals through end-to-end deep learning algorithms and large language models trained to separate brain signals from brain noise. Non-surgical BCIs typically suffer from limited signal-to-noise ratios that make decoding difficult, and B2Q tested both MEG and electroencephalography (EEG) signals. EEG is more common in noninvasive BCI experiments, but Meta found MEG was far more effective at correctly decoding typed sentences due to its higher signal-to-noise ratio. “A central objective of this study was to quantify the impact of the recording modality on decoding performance,” the team wrote in one of their papers on the experiment. “While we expected MEG to surpass EEG, the magnitude of the observed difference was substantial.” According to the team's research paper published in Nature Neuroscience on Monday, the Brain2Qwerty system achieved an average character error rate of 29 percent using MEG, whereas EEG recordings produced an average character error rate of 65 percent. The large language models that were trained to decode the MEG data into comprehensible sentences that (ideally) mimicked the ones the participants typed were the final part of the equation, Meta’s researchers explained. “Fine-tuning large language models on neural data allows the system to leverage semantic context, bridging the gap between noisy brain recordings and coherent language,” Meta said in its B2Q v2 announcement. “We also deployed AI agents to explore optimizations for the decoding pipeline, with final training configurations selected manually by engineers.” That’s definitely an upgrade in performance, but it’s not exactly a promising, commercially viable pathway when recent surgical BCI systems are reaching 92 percent sentence-level accuracy in other experiments. Meta researchers argue the system's performance should continue improving as more training data becomes available, despite it still correctly decoding only around 61 percent of words on average. According to the team, B2Q v2’s accuracy “improves log-linearly with data volume,” which should mean that shoveling more data into the AI models behind B2Q v2 would continually narrow the gap. More data won’t fix the fact that training AI models to pick out typed words from brain activity is a bit useless when the target market doesn’t have the ability to type, which the Meta minds admit in the conclusion of their paper. The current design may work for patients with limited mobility, they note, but locked-in individuals unable to use their bodies in any way are unlikely to benefit. “Bridging the gap to locked-in individuals will likely involve adapting our task into a motor imagery paradigm and designing AI systems capable of robust generalization across participants,” the team explained. Additionally, the current B2Q system remains confined to the lab because it still isn't practical for real-time communication. Per the researchers, the transformer and language model B2Q uses require a trial to conclude before they can produce output, meaning there’s no feedback from B2Q until a participant is done being prompted with sentences and has typed them all out. Then there's the fact that B2Q "currently requires MEG segments to be aligned to specific keystroke onsets," which means the system still needs to know when users are pressing keys on a keyboard. Meta isn't sure it can get around that either, with the researchers noting that "the path toward achieving continuous decoding without these explicit triggers remains uncertain." In other words, what we have here is a neat experiment with some impressive improvements over prior noninvasive BCIs, but nothing that’s going to transform the landscape anytime soon. If Zuck is thinking he has another possible pivot to medical tech in the form of B2Q, he’s just as likely to beat the competition as he was when he decided to go all-in on the metaverse and crypto. ®

But the company is still claiming that New Glenn will return to flight this year.

Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts called out Justice Samuel Alito’s nonsensical argument about birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that children born in the United States to parents who were undocumented or temporarily in the country are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

In his separate dissent, Alito argued that immigrant parents, in order for their child to automatically be made an American citizen, could not be subject to any foreign power. But he contended that some people who had done “everything within their power to become United States citizens can be seen as no longer subject to any foreign power.”

But Roberts argued that this kind of “ad hoc exemption” was plainly inconsistent with Alito’s own interpretation of the Civil Rights Act.

“He does not explain how that exception can be squared with his view of the text, which (to repeat) is that anyone ‘automatically’ made a [‘national’] of his ‘parents’ native country’ was not entitled to citizenship,” Roberts wrote.

That wasn’t the only reason Alito’s dissent was a mess.

In closing, Alito argued that the majority’s interpretation “saddles this country with an ancient British rule that even the United Kingdom has abandoned,” referring to jus soli, or the right of soil. But the British government scrapped this law by passing the British Nationality Act of 1981—not by asking the courts to rewrite the nation’s founding documents.

Database management work will soon be mostly automated by AI agents, just like coding, according to the CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind the distributed database of the same name. Spencer Kimball told The Register that the proliferation of databases demanded by the explosion of AI agents in coding and business functions will mean that managing them in a largely manual way is out of the question. “Nobody's going to do manual work on a database, just like almost nobody's doing manual coding anymore,” he said. “A lot of people don't even know what’s within their code base anymore, like they only know the designs, specifications and guarantees. They're still verifying the software, but in the end they're just not down at the level of code, because it doesn't make sense. It's like nobody programs in Assembly,” he said. Kimball is among the tech CEOs with the commensurate background in software engineering to make such statements. He helped build Google’s Colossus distributed file storage system and, as a computer science student at UC Berkely, developed FOSS image editor GIMP, which continues to this day. In the time since, he has seen shifts in the level of abstraction before. “These cycles happen all the time. It's pretty easy to see what's coming next, because ultimately agents beyond coding are going to be increasingly complementing and supplementing human-driven workloads. They're going to use tools, tools are using APIs, and APIs are talking to operational databases, every single one. If you think about the implications of this massive scale-up of traffic, it means that operational databases are going to get busier, and a lot busier. We're talking about exponential scale-up,” he said. Cockroach Labs is not the only database company to see the level of AI agent demand on the enterprise as an opportunity. It’s where many vendors are positioning themselves. For example, vector database vendor Pinecone's idea is that by compiling a knowledge base of an organization's data structure and content, its technology can avoid burning through tokens back and forth between the data and AI agents. Tiger Data, the company behind TimescaleDB, has built Ghost, a technology designed specifically for developers working with AI agents, charging by compute, rather than by database. Cockroach Labs, whose customers include OpenAI, CoreWeave, Booking.com, and Cisco, is pitching the idea of an Agentic Database Cloud to address this demand. Among the elements will be elastic compute and storage separation, unified estate management, database virtualization and agentic operations. It expects to announce a product around this idea later this year. Nonetheless, in database estates, Kimball expects AI agents to act in an advisory role to avoid disruptions to operations. “You can imagine, the enterprise isn't eager to turn over the keys to production to an agent. These agents are a second pair of eyes,” he said. To this end, Cockroach has been building its own agents to improve its operations and how it manages databases. Kimball said it had built AI agents in a layered approach, giving agents sub tasks to perform and then allowing agents to manage those agents, and other agents that verify the approach taken. “There's all kinds of hand-offs, there's agents that help with migrations, agents that help with slow queries, agents that can diagnose problems with clusters, because they've been given the institutional knowledge. For example, our entire Zendesk history for the last two years — every customer ticket, every issue, the resolutions — has been digested and cross-indexed. The agents we're building are the engineering of the prompts, the handoffs and the quality control,” he said. The “thinking” is done by foundation models, he said. “We have some open-source ones we use that are very, very fast and inexpensive. Those do more… prosaic and mundane tasks that you do a lot of, quickly.” Kimball said Cockroach also uses proprietary models including OpenAI gpt-oss and Claude Opus. “We're trying to provide a replacement for a lot of human labor. We provide corporate ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ for database roles, that once you used to have to hire humans for, but you simply cannot do that at 10x the scale, much less 100x the scale. You have to find that way to get these agents to do extremely useful work, very consistently, at a level that is as good or increasingly better than humans. Frankly, there are things the agents can do that are so grungy you couldn't hire a human to do it, such as constantly looking through log files, and investigating threads. It's just too boring,” Kimball said. As such, Cockroach expects to be able to increase the scope of its products and the number of customers it serves, but only modestly increase its workforce. “You can do different things right now with your resources. You can try to scale the human teams, or you can figure out how to make the human teams more efficient, and that's what we're doing internally. Fundamentally, this is what we're going to do for our customers, because if you anchor yourself to what’s possible today, then you might say, 'Oh, the AI is not completely ready,' but like the speed at which these things are changing makes it all but inevitable at some point in the near future,” he said. Whether Cockroach’s vision will become reality or not, the database market will have to respond to AI in the enterprise, spending on which shows no sign of letting up. Nonetheless, if agents need databases, and databases need agents to manage them, maybe it's going to be turtles all the way down. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• Topps celebrates Doctor Doom in new One World Under Doom cards for their Marvel Chrome 2026 trading cards.
• The cards depict a famous series where Doom becomes Sorcerer Supreme to fight vampires.
• The cards will drop July 1.

He’s been Marvel Comics’ greatest villain since he first appeared in Fantastic Four #5 way back in 1962. And few can challenge him for that title. We’re talking about Victor von Doom, the iron-fisted ruler of Latveria, and occasional God Emperor of Battleworld. Soon, Robert Downey Jr. will portray the mad monarch Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, raising his popularity profile even more. But before that, Topps Trading Cards honors one of the greatest modern Doctor Doom stories of recent years, One World Under Doom, with a new series of Chrome 2026 Marvel Comics cards. And you can exclusively check out several first images in our gallery down below:

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And below is the card back description for the Topps Doctor Doom One World Under Doom cards:

To stop a vampire onslaught, Doctor Strange gave up the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme to Victor von Doom. Later, Doctor Doom magically takes over every broadcast medium on the planet and declares himself Emperor of the World and ruler of this new United Latveria. As Earth’s Mightiest Heroes like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four scramble to fight back, world leaders shockingly welcome him with open arms. All hail Emperor Doom! 

These insert cards spotlight key figures and scenes from the recent One World Under Doom event, by writer Ryan North and artist R.B. Silva, capturing the scope and impact of Doctor Doom’s reign. This insert features a variety of cover art from the event, which was published in 2025. The artwork features iconic moments from the Marvel Comics event. This includes Doom wielding his full Sorcerer Supreme magic against the Dark Lord Dormammu, and fighting Red Hulk. Of course, Doom also takes on his oldest adversaries from the Fantastic Four, like Reed Richards and the Thing.

Topps/Marvel Comics

Fans can collect a dynamic 200-card base set filled with iconic heroes, villains, and fan-favorite characters pulled from across Marvel’s rich comic history. The new One World Under Doom cards appear in the 2026 Topps Chrome Marvel Comics, dropping on July 1.

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