Every school day, millions of parents across the United Kingdom perform a small ritual of trust. They pack lunchboxes or hand over dinner money, and they hope that the food their children eat at school is healthy, safe, and appropriate. That trust is precious, and it is easily shaken. So when news began to circulate that the Education Authority (EA) in Northern Ireland had been serving halal chicken in school canteens without explicitly telling parents, the reaction was immediate and intense. The BBC has reported on the controversy, and the picture that emerges is not one of secrecy or malice,…

For Imran Ahmed, the news came not as a dramatic courtroom scene, but as a quiet truncation of his future. A British anti-disinformation researcher who has spent years exposing viral hate and deception online, Ahmed found himself standing in a federal courthouse in New York, not as an observer of the information age but as the subject of a government’s extraordinary power over a non-citizen. A federal judge, Loretta Preska, dismissed his lawsuit against the Trump administration, which had sought to challenge a government effort to detain and deport him. She ruled only that the American courts do not have…