On July 16, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a draft Third Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FNPRM) and Order in its long-running Promoting Telehealth in Rural America proceeding (WC Docket No. 17-310). The FCC's Rural Health Care (RHC) Program provides universal service financial support to help rural health care providers obtain telecommunications and broadband services at discounted rates, facilitating the delivery of telehealth to some of the most remote areas in the nation. According to the FCC's 2025 Universal Service Monitoring Report, nearly 14,000 health care providers received support from this Universal Service Fund program that year. The program disbursed $523 million in 2024, and the FY2026 cap is $744.2 million. The stakes in this proceeding are practical: for a rural clinic or hospital, the program can determine whether it can afford the connectivity that links geographically isolated patients to medical expertise. The draft FNPRM touches nearly every constituency in the RHC program. Health care providers in eight statutory categories—including not-for-profit hospitals, rural health clinics, community health centers, local health departments, community mental health centers, skilled nursing facilities, teaching institutions offering health care instruction, and consortia of these entities—are eligible to participate. Service providers, particularly in Alaska, where demand has concentrated, face the most direct changes: the draft FNPRM reexamines how the rates that determine their support payments are calculated and documented. And the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), which administers the Universal Service Fund, would see its responsibilities altered under several proposals. The FCC frames the entire package as an effort "to reduce burdens and costs on RHC Program participants while protecting the limited resources of the Universal Service Fund by preventing waste, fraud, and abuse," and asks commenters to explain how their positions further both goals.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved more than $74 million in California Advanced Services Fund grants to expand high-speed broadband infrastructure in underserved communities across California. The CPUC approved three CASF Broadband Infrastructure Grant Account resolutions totaling up to $74,095,939. The approved projects include:

• Surfnet Communications, Inc.: Up to $33,197,090 to construct the Santa Barbara Fiber and Central Coast Fiber Broadband projects, serving 1,293 unserved locations across Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties.
• WiConduit and GigabitNow: Up to $32,398,849 for the Forestville Connect Extension, Graton Connect, and Sonoma Coast Connect Extension projects, bringing fiber broadband service to 341 unserved locations in Sonoma County.
• Hankins Information Technology: Up to $8,500,000 for the West Marin Project, providing fiber broadband service to 154 unserved locations in Bolinas, Nicasio, Point Reyes Station, Stinson Beach, and surrounding communities in Marin County.

California can keep enforcing rules that require AT&T to offer basic phone service to new customers in its wireline territory, following a federal judge’s ruling. AT&T sued California in May in a bid to end the state’s Carrier of Last Resort rules that require it to offer telephone service to any potential customer in its territory. AT&T asked for a preliminary injunction that would prevent California from enforcing the COLR rules while the litigation continues. To win a preliminary injunction, AT&T had to show it is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that California rules are preempted by a Federal Communications Commission order. US District Judge Linda Lopez denied AT&T’s request for a preliminary injunction during a motion hearing, according to a docket entry. The case is in US District Court for the Southern District of California.

Scientists have warned for decades about the possibility of Kessler syndrome, a scenario in which orbital debris collisions perpetuate an unending cycle of collisions. A major cascade would scatter countless reflective fragments throughout low Earth orbit, disrupting satellite operations and creating persistent hazards for decades. The reflections from millions of debris shards would collectively increase light pollution worldwide, making astronomical observations more challenging even in the most remote locations on the planet. But even if Kessler Syndrome never materializes, light reflected from space debris is projected to increase night sky brightness by as much as 20 percent more than its natural level within the next decade. What once sounded theoretical has become reality as satellite launches have become more frequent. Governments and private companies are deploying thousands of satellites into orbit while cleanup standards remain weak and largely voluntary.

David M. Klein is an entrepreneur and a former business professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Britt Lundgren is a physics and astronomy professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

The question I hear from CFOs everywhere is simple: how do we get more value from our AI spend? For years, the market measured the success of software through adoption: seats purchased, users active, licenses renewed. Understanding the value of AI demands a more powerful measure: work accomplished. The basic economic question facing CFOs and other business leaders is whether the value of the work AI completes grows faster than the cost of producing it. Answering that question requires looking more deeply than a metric such as cost per token. A lower-cost model may have cheaper tokens, but getting great results may require more attempts, more time, or more human review. A more capable model may have more expensive tokens, but complete the same task in one pass. What matters is the full cost of producing a successful outcome, measured against the value that outcome creates. The ultimate scorecard for the age of AI could be looked at as “Useful Intelligence per Dollar.” This metric answers four key questions:

1. Is AI completing work that matters?
2. What does each successful task cost?
3. Can people depend on the result?
4. Does each AI dollar produce more value as usage grows?

The technolibertarian dream of a borderless internet may soon get its biggest reality check in years. Meta’s Oversight Board—a governance body launched in 2020 that continues to independently make binding content moderation decisions and policy recommendations—released a report suggesting that large language models could be “stifling political speech.” A study of 10 commercial LLMs found that the models may be essentially censoring themselves based on the speech laws of countries around the world. What the board seems to find more concerning, however, is that the AI chatbots appear at times to be applying one country’s more repressive speech restrictions globally. For instance, multiple chatbots refused to create flyers critical of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or China’s President Xi Jinping. Yet they would do so for U.S. President Donald Trump and U.K. King Charles III.

Public debate over artificial intelligence ranges between visions of mass labor displacement to the technology being overhyped—from substance to spectacle. Using Wave 119 of the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, I document a large spread between how workers assess AI’s impact on others and on themselves: nearly three-in-four workers are concerned about workers generally but only one-in-three translate that worry into personal concern, less than half. Yet, heavy AI users translate societal concern into personal concern markedly more than light users, with no change in the level of social concern. The workers best placed to dismiss AI as spectacle instead judge its substance for themselves, suggesting the comfortable gap between social and personal exposure most workers keep today is a lagging indicator, held in place by inexperience rather than by any durable fact about their exposure.

Using nationally representative Quality of Life Survey microdata for 2020–2022, this paper examines who worked from home in Colombia and how WFH is associated with wages, job satisfaction, and weekly hours. A Digital Divide Index for Colombia's employed population has been developed. The results show that WFH is strongly associated with educational attainment, gender, age, firm size, and economic sector. Controlling for regions and economic sectors reveals a positive association between WFH, wages, and job satisfaction, whereas the relationship with weekly hours worked is negative. The heterogeneous analysis suggests that the relationship between WFH and the labor market outcomes varies significantly across different population groups; however, these results should be interpreted with caution. In general terms, the results show that remote work is unevenly distributed across population groups, and pre-existing digital divides, sectoral capabilities, and the structure of the labor market shape its benefits.