Today’s Big Story

Should the U.S. Lower Its Voting Age?

After Britain lowered the voting age, some American teens wondered: When will it be their turn?

As they say, the children are our future … so should more young people be granted the right to vote? Because there’s a lot of plugged in teens that would relish the opportunity. And it’s not just a pipe dream. The idea is gaining new attention since the British government announced its intention last month to allow 16- and 17- year-olds to start voting in the United Kingdom.

Britain’s Labour Party campaigned in part on lowering the voting age last year—in an election with just 59.7% turnout, the lowest since 2001. The U.K. will join a short list of countries where the voting age is 16, including Austria, Brazil and Ecuador. A handful of European Union nations, including Belgium, Germany and Malta, allow 16-year-olds to vote in elections to the European Parliament, but not their national legislatures.

While such a nationwide change seems unlikely in the United States, where any alteration to the voting age would require a constitutional amendment, more than a dozen cities have opened the door to young voters in some elections, with momentum seemingly growing.

According to the New York Times, voters in Albany, Calif., overwhelmingly passed a measure lowering the voting age to 16 for local and school district elections; two months later, lawmakers in Newark, N.J., passed legislation allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in school board elections. College Park, Md., approved younger voting in April. Some states also already allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries or caucuses if they will turn 18 by the general election in November.

The director of Vote16USA, an advocacy group that seeks to lower the voting age to 16, told the Times the movement is drawing wide support from those who are already tantalizingly close to casting their first ballots. “It is youth up and down this country, no matter the political party, that are pleading with adults to get these things right,” he said. “Because they are most significantly impacted by the decisions that are made today.” And one eager future voter made a good point: Many 16-year-olds are already working, paying taxes and volunteering with campaigns. So why not let them participate in the electoral process?

Is a Recession Coming?

All signs seem to point to “yes”, but it’s hard to say

After months of delay and backroom dealmaking, the Trump administration has imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly 100 countries, sending U.S. import duties soaring to their highest levels in nearly a century. A report on gross domestic product indicated a slowdown of growth over the first half of the year. Then there was the weak jobs report a few days ago, which raised alarm among some analysts that the U.S. economy may be slipping toward a recession.

More than half of industries are already shedding workers, a “telling sign that’s accompanied past recessions,” top economists tells Forbes. Analysts believe the economy could dip into a downturn but the outlook remains uncertain. They differed sharply on the likelihood of a recession, ranging from dire warnings to skepticism about whether the recent data suggests significant cause for concern.

The stock market, however, has hardly blinked. The tech-heavy Nasdaq has ticked up 0.4% since the end of trading last Tuesday, a day before the GDP report marked the first in a series of major developments. Over that same period, the S&P 500 has dropped 0.6%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen 1.4%. Analysts who spoke to ABC News attributed investor optimism to robust corporate profits, the prospect of interest rate cuts at the Federal Reserve and an abiding expectation that Trump will not return to the steep tariffs initially rolled out in April. For now, markets remain opportunistic about current gains, rather than wary of possible headwinds that may emerge in the coming weeks or months.

A Gaza Breaking Point

Consensus on Gaza is rapidly shifting as famine looms and Israel escalates

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came under pressure from all sides Sunday as his controversial plan for a new offensive in the Gaza Strip drew backlash at home and internationally. According to NBC News, the proposed military offensive, which the Israeli government announced Friday, has been widely condemned by critics who say it is likely to worsen the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and further endanger the hostages still being held by Hamas.

But over the past few weeks as starvation in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels—nearly 12,000 children under the age of five are suffering acute malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization—politicians have finally risked criticism of the regime responsible. Intelligencer reports that even stalwart defenders of Israel, such as New York representative Ritchie Torres, have begun to question the war’s aims. On July 28, Marjorie Taylor Greene—no ally of the Jewish state—became the first Republican to call Israel’s actions a “genocide.”

On July 30, 27 senators from the Democratic caucus voted for Bernie Sanders’s bill to halt firearms shipments to Israel, up from just 15 who voted for similar resolutions in April. Key holdouts remain—including Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand—but as a former Biden official told Politico, such a result was recently unimaginable. Globally, the condemnation has gotten louder. In the last days of July, 31 countries signed on to a joint statement calling for an immediate cease-fire. France, the U.K. and Canada warned they would formally recognize a Palestinian state as long as Hamas disarms.

NASA’s Planned Moon Base

And yes, it includes a nuclear reactor

The U.S. government has announced it’s accelerating plans to place a nuclear reactor on the moon to power a base for humans. If the first space race was about flags and footprints, 2025’s new race is all about building up there—and doing so hinges on power.

The reactor would launch to the moon by 2030, according to a directive by acting NASA Administrator (and former ‘Real World’ cast member) Sean Duffy that was sent to NASA officials in July and obtained by NPR. It's an ambitious target that has some in the scientific community concerned about high costs and a potentially unrealistic schedule. And while it might feel like a sudden sprint, this isn’t exactly breaking news. NASA and the Department of Energy have spent years quietly developing small nuclear power systems to fuel lunar bases, mining operations and long-term habitats. Because the moon rotates so slowly, the lunar surface experiences two weeks of darkness at a time. That means solar power won't be efficient to power a crewed outpost—most robotic lunar rovers can't even survive the lunar night.

So how would this work? Nuclear reactors on the moon work in much the same way as reactors on Earth, according to Bhavya Lal, a former associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy at NASA. A controlled nuclear reaction in uranium fuel is used to generate heat that in turn can be used to make electricity. That's very similar to how the 94 commercially operated nuclear reactors in the U.S. operate, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. A typical nuclear reactor in the U.S. generates at least 1 gigawatt of power, which is equivalent to 100 million LED light bulbs, according to the department.

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