A former deputy chief of staff in the New York governor's office was arrested on Tuesday and charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.
Why it matters: The FBI and Department of Justice have been warning for years about covert Chinese efforts to influence American politics. These charges are a particularly stark example.
1. Honduras is reeling from two political scandals, including President Xiomara Castro's announcement last week that she was ending the country's century-old criminal extradition agreement with the United States.
The announcement came after the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Laura Dogu, criticized a meeting of José Manuel Zelaya, who was then the Honduran minister of defense, with Venezuelan defense officials.
A few days after the announcement, Zelaya's father, Carlos, (who is Castro's brother-in-law) resigned from his post in Congress after admitting to having unwittingly met with drug traffickers in 2013.
California is home to six bellwether U.S. House races that analysts say could help determine which party controls Congress in 2025.
Why it matters: Latinos make up roughly one in four California voters this year — and hold an even larger share in some of the most competitive districts, meaning they're expected to play a crucial role in the six key races.
Policymakers are preparing for two very different outcomes if former President Donald Trump wins a second term: A world where he overhauls the U.S. approach to defending against nation-state hacks — and another where he leaves everything exactly as it is.
Why it matters: The Republican presidential candidate has yet to present a detailed plan for how he'd approach key cyber issues like securing utilities or combatting Russian ransomware.
A Chinese influence operation of inauthentic social media accounts to spread anti-Western sentiment is using fake accounts posing as American citizens ahead of the 2024 election, a report released Tuesday found.
The big picture: Americans have been inundated by media manipulated by China, Russia and Iran in recent yearsattempting to deepen stateside divisions as the election approaches.
Russian President Putin arrived in Mongolia Monday evening without incident — despite the host country being legally obligated to arrest him on an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant.
Why it matters: This is Putin's first visit to an ICC member nation since the court issued a warrant for his arrest last year for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
Brazil's Supreme Court on Monday upheld a decision to ban Elon Musk's X nationwide, after the platform formerly known as Twitter refused to comply with orders by the country's top judge.
Why it matters: The unanimous ruling by the five justices comes as Musk accuses Brazil's top judge of acting as a "dictator" for suspending X in Latin America's largest nation over misinformation concerns and for failing to appoint a legal representative for the social media platform in the country.
U.S. troops and allies captured an ISIS leader who helped members of the militant group's fighters escape from a detention center in Syria, the United States Central Command announced Monday.
The big picture: American troops and the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led coalition, captured ISIS facilitator Khaled Ahmed al-Dandal on Sunday — days after "five ISIS Foreign Terrorist Fighter detainees (Two Russians, two Afghans, and one Libyan) escaped from the Raqqah Detention Facility," per a CENTCOM statement.
