Happy Friday! Britain’s Silverstone Festival is hosting its iconic car auctions this weekend, and TMD’s British petrolhead editor is delighted to see some of his country’s quirkiest vehicles heading to the block. Highlights include a Racing Green Engineering replica of 1949 Bentley Le Mans ‘Speed 8,’ a powder-blue MG XPower SV, a V8-swapped Bowler Bulldog, and the one-of-one TVR T440R. If you’re an American car enthusiast who’s heard of any of these cars before, TMD salutes you.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- In a joint statement released on Thursday, the European Union and the United States revealed the terms of the trade deal agreed upon last month, with the 27.5 percent tariff on cars made in Europe remaining in place until the 27 member states of the European Union lower their duties on U.S. agricultural and industrial goods. Most other European goods will be subject to a 15 percent tax upon entering the country.
- Federal Judge Matthew Brann ruled Thursday that Alina Habba, the acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey, lacks legal authority to serve in the role. Unconfirmed by the U.S. Senate, Habba had been acting as an interim U.S. attorney on a 120-day term until last month, when a panel of federal judges appointed a career prosecutor instead of extending her tenure. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi fired the new appointee and renamed Habba as acting U.S. attorney, which was immediately challenged in court. Brann—a former Federalist Society member and Republican—wrote that Habba “is not currently qualified to exercise the functions and duties of the office in an acting capacity,” but paused enforcement of his ruling to give the government the opportunity to appeal.
- Bloomberg reported Thursday that officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog—will meet with U.S. officials in Washington, D.C., next week to discuss recent Iranian refusals to allow the IAEA to inspect Iranian uranium stockpiles. IAEA officials were expelled from Iran in June as Israel struck targets across the country, and Iran’s government claims that sites bombed by the U.S. and Israel remain too hazardous to visit, meaning that the amount of near-bomb-grade material still in Iranian possession remains unknown. “We have not reached the point of cutting off cooperation with the agency, but future cooperation will certainly not resemble the past,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Wednesday, according to Iranian state media.
- In the latest corruption news surrounding New York City Mayor Eric Adams, prosecutors charged Ingrid Lewis-Martin—the mayor’s former chief of staff—with bribery on Thursday. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg claims she traded political favors for money, home renovations, and a role on a TV show. Lewis-Martin resigned from government in December 2024, after she and her son were accused of taking bribes to expedite the approval of construction projects, but has continued to volunteer on Adams’ reelection campaign.
- Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will speak today at the Fed’s annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in his final appearance there as head of the central bank. Powell will discuss the nation’s economic outlook and the Fed’s dual mission of combating inflation and unemployment, less than a month out from the Fed’s next rate-setting meeting in September. The speech comes amid immense pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, who on Wednesday called for Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook to resign based on accusations of mortgage fraud. On Thursday, Justice Department official Ed Martin encouraged Powell to remove Cook from her position despite the Fed chair lacking the legal authority to do so.
- A New York appeals court on Thursday threw out a $355 million penalty imposed on Trump by a lower court in a civil fraud case. A majority of the five-judge panel found that the fine—which had risen to $515 million with interest and penalties on other members of the Trump organization—was excessive, but did not conclude whether New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the case, had proven that Trump engaged in fraud by padding financial statements to lenders and insurers. The case remains open for prosecutors to appeal to the New York Court of Appeals. Trump claimed “total victory” on social media Thursday.
- Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced Thursday that it had collaborated with the U.S. government’s National Nuclear Security Administration to develop a tool that could block conversations about building nuclear reactors or weapons within its chat interface. In the announcement, Anthropic wrote that “As AI models become more capable, we need to keep a close eye on whether they can provide users with dangerous technical knowledge in ways that could threaten national security.”
- Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, announced Thursday that he would run for state attorney general to replace incumbent Ken Paxton, who is currently running against Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP Senate primary. Roy is the policy chair of the fiscally hawkish House Freedom Caucus and has a reputation for opposing federal spending bills. “Texas is under assault—from open-border politicians, radical leftists and faceless foreign corporations that threaten our sovereignty, safety and our way of life,” Roy said in a statement posted to social media announcing his decision. “It’s time to draw a line in the sand.”
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Louisiana Takes on Roblox
Roblox isn’t like most games. First released in 2006, it’s a blend of social media and game development platform—an online social space where millions of minors hang out with their friends and play the millions of games (or “experiences”) created on Roblox. Whether you want to play a first-person shooter, a pet simulator, a business management game, or a knock-off of Sega’s Sonic, there’s a version of it on Roblox, in its signature Lego-like aesthetic. Its fans—like Janzen Madsen, who grew a business from creating Roblox games—praise it as an easy on-ramp to development, and most of its more than 110 million daily active users—44 percent of whom are minors—experience it as a fun digital playground.
But for years, the company has been dogged by complaints about insufficient moderation—both of its in-game content and of its messaging system. “You don’t have to look very hard for it. It’s not like you have to kind of seek out the hidden corners of Roblox to find the secret sex dungeon,” said Damon De Ionno, the managing director of Revealing Reality, a market research group that has analyzed Roblox’s gameplay experience and safeguards. And incidents on the platform are raising broader concerns about child safety online.
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On July 29, the family of a 13-year-old girl filed a lawsuit against Roblox. According to the suit, the child “was introduced to an adult predator on Roblox unbeknownst to her parents, groomed, and then kidnapped from her grandmother’s West Des Moines, Iowa home on May 24, 2025, where she was subsequently trafficked across multiple states, and repeatedly sexually abused and raped.”
This isn’t an isolated story. According to Bloomberg, which ran a long feature on the “Roblox Predator Problem” last year, U.S. police had “arrested at least two dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met or groomed using Roblox.” And on August 14, Louisiana sued Roblox, arguing the company is “accountable for the facilitation and distribution of child sexual abuse material (‘CSAM’) and for the sexual exploitation of Louisiana’s minor children.”
Louisiana’s lawsuit comes at a time when lawmakers are grappling with how to make the internet safer for children. In May, Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee reintroduced her 2022 Kids Online Safety Act—co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal—which, if passed, would create a “duty of care” requirement for all online platforms, social media companies and video games alike. A total of 41 senators—24 Republicans and 17 Democrats—have signed on to cosponsor the legislation.
The same month, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. John James introduced the App Store Accountability Act to implement age-verification requirements for app stores, require that users under 18 years old receive parental consent to access the app store or download an app, and automatically link minors’ devices and app store activity to their parents or guardians’ account. Earlier, in February, Lee also introduced the SCREEN Act to require age verification for access to websites “that make available content that is harmful to minors,” such as pornography. The U.K. passed similar legislation in 2023 with the Online Safety Act, which requires platforms to “prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content,” as well as properly label such content for adult users. The penalty for violations is steep: “Companies can be fined up to £18 million or 10 percent of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater,” a U.K. government website on the law states. Since the law took effect in July, VPN downloads have topped the U.K. Apple App Store chart, and some users have used faces from video game characters to bypass age verification.
Jessica Melugin, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Technology and Innovation, explained that, while she believes these efforts are well-intentioned, she doubts they will prove to be effective and could do more harm than good. “This is a brilliant strategy to chill America’s free speech and a sincere effort, probably, to protect children,” she told TMD. “It’s kind of ridiculous to think that sites can catch 100 percent of bad actors, like, it’s a platform,” Melugin explained. “It’s not in business to catch criminals.” She added that “more resources for law enforcement would, I think, do a lot more good than proposals like age verification for everyone in the whole world to access everything.”
At an August 14 news conference, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill remarked, “We passed laws to keep sexual predators away from our kids, and daycares, and schools, and on playgrounds but there are companies who are facilitating and promoting virtual access that exposes your child, even when you think they’re safe, in you’re home or in their own room.” Her lawsuit accused Roblox of engaging in false and deceptive marketing practices by advertising its site as safe for children; demonstrating negligence by failing to maintain a “reasonable standard of care” for its product; and unjustly enriching itself by profiting, including through its in-game currency, “Robux,” which online users have used to extort child users for explicit content.
“We share the critically important goal of keeping kids safe online and any assertion otherwise is categorically untrue,” a Roblox spokesperson said in a statement shared with TMD. “Many games the lawsuit highlighted were long removed for violating our safety policies and we work constantly to remove violative content and bad actors. And we continue to innovate and add new safety features regularly in an effort to help keep kids safe. We share Attorney General Murrill’s urgency to help keep kids safe because safety has been our priority. We look forward to working with the Attorney General to help keep kids safe in Louisiana and across the country.”
Roblox made changes to improve child user safety on its platform in November 2024, including providing parents with an account to monitor and review their child’s gameplay on the platform, changing the default setting so that users under 13 cannot directly message other players (unless the user or user’s parent removes that limit), and restricting in-game “experiences”—mini-games within Roblox, some of which are created by other users—by allowing users under 9-years-old to only access areas rated “minimal,” “mild,” and, with parental consent, “moderate.” These changes came about one month after investment firm Hindenburg Research released a report calling Roblox a “X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.”
But loopholes remain. De Ionno pointed to Roblox’s censorship of vulgar and sexually explicit speech used in the game’s built-in chat system. While particular words and phrases are automatically blocked in that chat system, users have found ways to easily circumvent this, such as communicating through emojis or replacing letters with similar symbols. As such, De Ionno explained it’s not uncommon to read sexually charged discussions, vulgar language, and racism thrown around in Roblox’s online chatroom.
However, the most significant concern with this loophole is the potential for conversations between users to be moved off Roblox and onto third-party platforms. (For example, a user cannot ask for another player’s “Instagram” handle, but a request may go undetected if spelled “1nst@gram.”)
“That’s the bit that’s concerning,” De Ionno said, “where you’ve got adults potentially making contact with children and then going off onto platforms which are even less observed, and scrutinized, and moderated than Roblox, where basically anything can happen.” Not everything on Roblox is problematic and there are “lots of things on Roblox that are child-friendly,” De Ionno explained, but “it’s … where people can meet each other and then go off-platform.”
Roblox CEO David Baszucki has maintained that the gaming platform remains a safe environment for children and called on parents to learn more about Roblox and make their own determination. “My first message would be, if you’re not comfortable, don’t let your kids be on Roblox,” he told the BBC in March. Melugin reiterated this point: Few people are better positioned to monitor a child’s safety than their parents. “I mean, I’m a parent, and if I’m worried about a platform being unsafe, I’m not going to let my kids spend time on it,” she told TMD. “That’s just it.”
Today’s Must-Read
The White House’s Troubling Foray Onto TikTok
Toeing the Company Line
The Risks of Trump’s Turn Against mRNA Vaccines
Ted Cruz Knows Better
Has President Trump ‘Solved Six Wars in Six Months’?
Assessing President Trump’s Claims About Mail-In Ballots and Voting Machines
War and Peace | Roundtable
Worth Your Time
- Few figures have been gifted as much outsize power in the Trump administration as right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer (who first came to public attention during the first Trump term, when she interrupted Shakespeare in the Park). As such, multiple journalists have tried to understand her influence, including Michael Scherer in a deeply reported profile for The Atlantic. “I suggested at one point that her effort to get federal employees fired for supposed disloyalty to Trump recalled the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the private musings and personal associations of alleged communist sympathizers to end their careers. She loved that. ‘Joseph McCarthy was right,’ Loomer responded without missing a beat. ‘We need to make McCarthy great again.’” To learn more about Loomer, check out Thursday’s episode of The Daily, and Will Somner’s piece from earlier this month in The Bulwark, which goes through her deposition in a defamation lawsuit she has brought against Bill Maher.
Presented Without Comment
CBS News: Cracker Barrel Loses Almost $200 Million in Value as Stock Plunges After New Logo Release
Also Presented Without Comment
Forbes: Yeezy Money: Kanye West Yze Memecoin Hits $3 Billion Amid Trump-Fueled Crypto and Bitcoin Price Boom
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