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Reuters reported that USPS' final rule requires states to provide lists of voters who received mailed ballots to the agency, implementing the executive order Trump signed in March after years of calling for tighter rules on voting by mail and pushing the false claim that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud. Under the rule's terms, USPS would not collect party affiliation or inspect ballot contents, but would not collect or record party affiliation and will not inspect ballot contents... USPS will maintain data from the exterior of the envelope, including address and barcode information.

The rule text acknowledges that two federal courts, in California and Massachusetts, have issued injunctions currently barring USPS from proceeding. The Massachusetts case is the more recent: Fox News reported that U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted a preliminary injunction preventing the USPS from implementing or enforcing Section 3 of Executive Order 14399 for the Nov. 3 midterm elections, or any earlier federal election. That ruling built on an earlier one; Talwani had previously blocked several provisions of the executive order in June, finding they likely exceeded the president's authority, and the appeals court left that injunction in place July 25, while the administration's appeal proceeds. The ACLU, which represented plaintiffs including the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, said the court found "the executive branch has no authority to regulate elections" and recognized that the executive order is currently causing "irreparable harm" to both voting rights groups and voters by creating confusion.

Publishing the rule regardless does not itself violate the injunctions, since USPS has said it will be formally published on August 26 but USPS will take no action to implement the order unless a court lifts the injunction, but it signals the administration's intent to move the moment any legal obstacle is lifted. That intent is reinforced by the pending appeal: the Trump administration has made an emergency request to the U.S. Supreme Court to lift that injunction; that request is pending, and the Department of Justice has previously indicated it could escalate further if lower courts do not rule in its favour.

The dispute fits a pattern the ACLU says extends beyond this single order: this executive order is President Trump's second attempt to seize control of federal elections by executive fiat, issued despite injunctions from three separate federal courts blocking a previous 2025 executive order on similar grounds. Voting rights groups argue the mechanics of the rule pose a direct threat to ballot access, since Trump's rule could allow USPS to refuse to deliver ballots to eligible voters if they are not on approved lists or if states fail to comply with new federal requirements. The Brennan Center for Justice has separately warned that the order's central aim is to let USPS decide who may vote by mail and instructs it to refuse to deliver ballots sent by anyone not included on newly created federal mail voter lists, a shift in authority over election administration that plaintiffs say usurps power the Constitution assigns to the states.

Go deeper: Lawfare's analysis of the executive order's legal mechanics, the Brennan Center's breakdown of the order's provisions

US President Donald Trump said on 22 August 2026 that he "views the strait of Hormuz as an American territory right now," according to remarks reported in an Al Jazeera live briefing, while claiming Iran "would love to make a deal, but they're not ready to make the right deal in my opinion." The comments came as the war between the US and Iran, now in its seventh month since fighting erupted on 28 February, showed no sign of resolution. Trump made the remark alongside a jab at his own military campaign, telling reporters, according to Political Wire, "We don't even know if we won."

The claim is not new. Trump first floated declaring Hormuz American territory on 14 August, telling a crowd on Long Island that "after we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I'll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States." Days later he posted a map of the waterway on Truth Social captioned "New US Territory," prompting Iran to reject the threat outright. Parliament speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said the strait "will remain Iranian," and Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi wrote that "the Strait of Hormuz cannot be taken over by a tweet, nor by an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing a decree, nor by an election speech. Iran is neither afraid of threats nor intimidated by a show of force."

The strait, which normally carries about a fifth of the world's traded oil, has been at the centre of the conflict since Iran restricted traffic through it after the war began. Tehran has tied any reopening to Washington ending its naval blockade, lifting sanctions, releasing frozen Iranian assets and paying war damages, while a June memorandum of understanding meant to halt military operations broke down within weeks amid claims of violations on both sides. Trump's envoy and son-in-law Jared Kushner said last week that the US and Iran were having "very positive and active conversations," a claim Trump himself has since denied, insisting no talks are scheduled and that "the Naval Blockade remains in full force and effect."

Legal experts cited by Al Jazeera say Trump's related proposal to impose a toll on shipping through the strait would breach international law governing free maritime transit, and Trump has not explained how the US would enforce a territorial claim over waters bordered by Iran and Oman. CNN's analysis of the standoff notes that shipping traffic remains severely restricted, "underscoring Tehran's ongoing leverage over Hormuz" regardless of the rhetoric from Washington. The declaration also follows a pattern: since returning to office, Trump has threatened to annex Greenland, absorb Canada and take control of the Gaza Strip, without acting on any of those threats.

Experienced and award-winning writers, directors and producers are being paid from $12 to $200 an hour to teach AI models the intricacies of their jobs, from writing a screenplay to devising a shooting schedule. The work is being taken up amid a broader slump in entertainment-industry jobs: shoot days in LA fell 48% between 2021 and 2025, according to FilmLA Research, and jobs in motion picture and sound recording industries declined 28% from 450,000 in July 2022 to 326,000 in May 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

One contributor, screenwriter Ruth Fowler, compared the work to being "handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession". Fowler wrote and created Rules of the Game, a BBC One drama starring Maxine Peake, and co-wrote the screenplay for Little Disasters, a series for Paramount Plus starring Diane Kruger. She told the Guardian she began training AIs "because I was thinking: wow, I'm always broke", adding: "I think production is down by 35% or something insane. So everybody was like: 'what do we do?'" Her tasks have included training an AI to devise a detailed schedule for a hypothetical two-day shoot, including identifying necessary filming permits, potential location hazards, daylight conditions for photography, lists of personnel per shot and cast needs such as child protection. Fowler had earlier detailed the experience in a widely circulated essay for Wired, co-published with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, in which she described doing 20 of these contracts for five different platforms over eight months, calling it "bad."

Other Hollywood professionals have made similar moves. Screenwriter and author Robin Palmer has been lending her skills to training AI, spending 30 hours per week teaching chatbots how to produce compelling creative writing through roles with Mercor. She compared grading AI-generated scripts to mentoring an apprentice, saying, "They're turning in work and you're looking at, 'Does this work structurally, how is the characterization, are there clunky transitions?' I really like seeing how AI is improving. It's almost like working with a student and saying, 'Yeah, you're getting better.'" She has acknowledged that peers in the industry might view the work as tantamount to "crossing the picket line," a reference to the 2023 Hollywood strikes in which fears about AI displacing writers, actors, animators, editors and location scouts were central grievances.

The pay on offer varies widely by platform and seniority. At Mercor, one of the firms recruiting displaced entertainment workers, writers are paid between $50 and $150 an hour to label, rate, and rewrite AI responses, with an average rate of about $95 across more than 30,000 contractors worldwide. Mercor's chief executive, Brendan Foody, has said AI labs are eager to enlist people with deep domain expertise, telling CBS News: "We hire everyone ranging from chess champions to wine hobbyists to help train [AI] agents to be better, because ultimately we want them to know how to give better advice in a chess match or recommend what wine you should have with dinner." But the income has proved unpredictable: writers on these platforms have described project pipelines that surge and vanish without notice, with one month of $9,000 in trainer earnings followed by a month with zero qualifying tasks.

The dynamic sits alongside an unresolved fight over AI and film labour that began during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, when the union demanded that "AI can't write or rewrite literary material; can't be used as source material; and MBA-covered [contract-covered] material can't be used to train AI." The contract eventually reached left the door open for studios to use writers' own material for training in some circumstances, and contains no outright prohibition on studios using scripts they own to train AI systems, though writers retain the right to assert that their work has been exploited in training AI software. Guild leadership has since pressed studios to take legal action against firms allegedly using members' work as training data without consent.

Go deeper: Ruth Fowler's original essay for Wired and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, CBS News on the rise of AI-trainer work across professions

In an interview with state broadcaster IRIB that aired on 22 August 2026, Al Jazeera reported that Iran has threatened to treat nearby countries as enemies and target their interests if they join a United States campaign to cripple its economy, with Rezaei issuing the warning in a Saturday interview with state broadcaster IRIB. Rezaei put it bluntly: "We're telling all nearby countries not to join the US economic war. Otherwise, we will consider them as enemies."

Central to the threat is the Strait of Hormuz and the routes that bypass it. Rezaei said Iran would target oil-shipping routes out of the Persian Gulf, alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz, if neighbours join what he described as the economic war against Iran. According to CNN, Iran has in recent weeks been allowing a number of Iraqi oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, in the latest example of Tehran granting selective access to the vital waterway, even as Rezaei threatened to shut down all traffic if any of Iran's neighbouring countries enter President Donald Trump's economic war. He went further still, saying "If they start such an action, we will not allow a single drop of oil to pass through the Persian Gulf." Rezaei also claimed Iran had shipped 70 million barrels of oil "in the past one or two months alone," suggesting that was despite the US blockade of Iranian ports that resumed in mid July. The US Department of Energy, for its part, has said oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has averaged between 8 million and 9 million barrels per day as ships attempt "dark transits" through the waterway, with tankers turning off their transponders to shuttle oil out to waiting customers.

Rezaei's appointment on 9 August 2026 as head of Iran's top security body was itself read as a hardening of Tehran's posture. He replaced Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, and the Times of Israel noted that his appointment was the latest shuffle at the top for the politburo-like Supreme National Security Council, which has a range of political opinions and rivalries and is adapting to the loss of several senior officials in the war. A former commander of the Revolutionary Guard who led the force during the 1980s "Tanker War" in the Gulf, Rezaei has a long record of confrontational rhetoric toward Britain and the United States over tanker seizures and military strikes. Foreign Policy has described his elevation, alongside a wider reshuffle by supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, as part of an effort to rebuild Iran's senior command structure after heavy losses among military leaders in successive rounds of war since June 2025.

The dispute over Hormuz has taken on added weight given Donald Trump's repeated and contested claim that the strait constitutes US territory, a claim Iran rejects. Iran's foreign ministry reinforced that rejection over the weekend, with Al Jazeera reporting that it decried the incoming US measures as an assertion of "extraterritorial sovereignty" over United Nations member states. With roughly a fifth of the world's traded oil passing through the strait, any move by Tehran to extend threats to the alternative routes Gulf states have relied on to circumvent it would widen the risk of confrontation across the region's shipping infrastructure.