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John

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Bob Dylan’s Notebooks. The opposite of mine.

In any event, the wonderful response has encouraged me to finally finish enough episodes that today we published episodes one and two of season two. It’s not necessary that you start with season one, but it might help a little.

You can find season two and season one here:

Unlike my regular substack, Navel Gazing requires its own subscription.

Happy listening,

John

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By that contemporary standard, the confirmation process for Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche did something unusually useful. Instead of producing answers about his independence from the president, it produced a real-time test of it.

At issue was an extraordinary arrangement, which Blanche signed, resolving President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. It purported to grant sweeping protection from existing tax claims to Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, and to create a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could compensate people claiming to have been persecuted by the government—including, potentially, Trump’s political allies and January 6 defendants.

The arrangement was not merely controversial. Critics questioned whether it was legally binding at all, and even after Blanche narrowed its scope, the remaining tax protections could still be worth tens of millions of dollars to the president and his family.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, who is presiding over the case, dismantled both the lawsuit and the settlement it produced. She found that the suit had been brought for an “improper purpose.” This was not, she concluded, an ordinary lawsuit between genuinely adverse parties. The president was effectively suing an administration he controlled. She rejected the government’s attempt to present the resulting agreement as the product of an ordinary adversarial proceeding. She noted that the settlement outline bore only Blanche’s signature, even though the Justice Department purported to represent the government against the president.

In the Senate, the arrangement that got such rough treatment from judge Williams was a double test of Blanche’s independence. Did he put the president’s interests and those of his allies above his duty to the law and Constitution?

That independence matters because the attorney general leads a department powerful enough to shield a president and his allies from the law—or turn the law against their enemies.

This weekend, we saw the conclusion of an episode that illustrates the danger of what happens when law enforcement becomes an instrument of the president’s passions in the department Blanche is asking to run outright. After president Trump blamed “vandals” for the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner, federal authorities charged former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with felony property destruction. Prosecutors have now moved to dismiss the case, acknowledging that the damage resulted from a rushed, botched installation—not vandalism. The government’s own filing acknowledged that the evidence no longer supported the vandalism theory. The machinery of federal law enforcement advanced far enough to put a man under felony indictment before the evidence stopped it. Even then, the president didn’t concede the point—he told reporters the damage was still “VANDALS,” contractor problems notwithstanding.

Blanche was not a nominee being asked to speculate about some future conflict between presidential loyalty and the law. His signature was already on such a conflict.

Blanche, the president’s former personal lawyer, helped create the arrangement, publicly defended it, and then called the fund “dead” while declining to rescind the order that had created it. When Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn demanded that he put his assurance into binding form, he resisted. Only when they placed his confirmation in jeopardy did he issue the written order they had demanded.

That sequence is more revealing than any hearing exchange. Blanche’s conduct tracked the location of leverage. Blanche had already shown how he would behave when presidential loyalty collided with the impartial administration of justice.

As of this week, the senators have gotten a concession. What they have not gotten is any indication that the concession restrains anyone. Asked about the deal Monday, the president told reporters he hadn’t reviewed it — he understood there’d been a “sign-off,” he said, but didn’t know its terms, and waved off Blanche’s memo as simply restating things Blanche had already told Congress. Trump did not dispute that the fund was dead. He kept arguing for bringing it back.

The senators extracted a concession from Blanche. They did not extract one from the president. Trump continues to argue for reviving the fund, suggesting the pressure to restore it has not disappeared.

The ability to force a nominee into one concession is not evidence that he possesses the independent judgment required for the office in the future. If anything, the episode showed that Blanche responds to the person or institution holding the decisive leverage. First, that was the president. For a few crucial days, it was Cornyn and Tillis. Once Blanche is confirmed, the daily leverage returns overwhelmingly to the president, whose personal interests Blanche has already shown himself willing to accommodate with inventiveness.

Senators Cornyn and Tillis can reasonably claim that they used the Senate’s power to stop an abuse. But they are treating the resulting concession as if it erases the conduct that made their intervention necessary. In fact, that conduct is the evidence.

They are mistaking the success of their leverage for proof of Blanche’s independence—and are on the verge of voting to return the leverage to the president.

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It’s Friday again, and I’m grateful, as always, for your attention and subscriptions. This really is a wonderful place to work through ideas.

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I just posted Stack the Week Daily for today.

I would like to continue, but with the publication of today’s stack I’m ending the daily phase of the experiment here. Producing it every day requires an enormous lift. I have Navel Gazing episodes to get out the door in the coming week, some traveling ahead and a book that requires long stretches of concentrated work.

This does not mean the end of this publication. I’ll continue to post regularly, and I’ll turn some of those posts into audio offerings available through John Dickerson’s Field Notes on Apple Podcasts and other podcast players.

I’ve experimented a lot since the first Stack the Week podcast. So, I asked ChatGPT to read everything published under Stack the Week and Stack the Week Daily since we began in April—32 entries—and tell me what it thought the project was trying to do.

Here was its conclusion:

Stack the Week helps an attentive but overwhelmed citizen maintain an accurate, humane model of the world. It reconstructs events in sequence, tests claims against consequences, connects developments into larger patterns, and preserves important facts that the daily news cycle would otherwise erase. It does so with evidentiary discipline, acknowledged uncertainty, correction, curiosity and humor.

I fed my work to a machine, and it pronounced it excellent!

I know…1

But I’ll risk sharing the verdict in the hope that those of you who have followed these experiments will understand the stumbling spirit in which I asked.

The reason I ran this experiment is that you can aim to do something but maybe not get there. That description comes pretty close to what I was aiming for when I started.

This should exist somewhere in the world, but doing it properly— without all the flaws of the current version— would require a pretty hefty staff. If you really want to explain bond yields and valuations while making them slightly more enjoyable than a mouthful of sawdust, you would want graphics, illustrations and other modern conveniences. Maybe a single rock of ice to pour it over.

I don’t know what the fall will bring. There may be a second phase. Some of my ability to produce Stack the Week comes from focused work done in isolation. Producing it also consumes the time required for that work. I want to use my attention as intelligently as I can—and to find the form in which I can do the most useful work.

One of the most meaningful parts of this experiment has been discovering how many of you want this kind of work. That inspires me, and I’m enormously grateful, and so I’ll keep feeding off that. It’ll just show up in a different form. Shadow puppets are possible, obviously.

For my immediate future, however, I am going to join the founder of 15 Minutes Group, who has been at work in the dining room. We are going to go do pastoral dances.

Thank you again for joining for the ride. Have a wonderful weekend.

John

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The influx, equal to about 70 percent of Ceuta’s normal population, became a European dispute Friday. Italy temporarily restored checks on air and sea travel from Spain because its government feared that migrants admitted or released by Spain could travel onward through Europe’s normally border-free Schengen Area. Italy does not share a border with Spain; the restrictions apply to passengers arriving from Spain by plane or ship. The European Commission said Friday that it had not detected such onward movement. For migrants who remain, the next morning begins with registration, screening and a possible asylum proceeding. For other travelers, the political reaction means the return of passport checks on routes where they had largely disappeared.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that Hamas had accepted a plan to disarm in Gaza, but Hamas tied disarmament to an Israeli withdrawal while Israel insisted that Hamas surrender its weapons first. The Associated Press verified a written roadmap and reported Friday that Hamas had confirmed its participation; Israel had not formally accepted the plan. Under the roadmap, Hamas would first surrender police weapons and later turn over heavier arms. A new Palestinian security force would replace Hamas, while an international Board of Peace official would oversee a transition expected to last between 200 and 350 days. According to the Associated Press, Israeli forces remain deployed in or control access to roughly 60 percent of Gaza.

Reconstruction is estimated to cost $70 billion, but contractors cannot safely rebuild while Hamas and Israel disagree over who disarms or withdraws first. For civilians, the agreement arrives amid continued displacement and shortages. The United Nations humanitarian office reported that military operations, movement restrictions and insecurity were still forcing families to move and limiting access to drinking water, food, shelter, sanitation and medical care. Many people remain in temporary shelters or damaged buildings while reconstruction is stalled. Reconstruction cannot begin at scale until Hamas, Israel and the international force agree on who disarms, who withdraws and who controls Gaza during the transition.

Drones hit Kuwait on Friday, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it had attacked two oil tankers. Donald Trump’s pledge to hit a piece of Iranian infrastructure for each Iranian attack has not been followed up on. Four other tankers turned away from the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia assembled a 14-country security alliance to protect shipping and regional infrastructure, according to the Guardian’s live reporting. The alliance is intended to coordinate the protection of tankers, ports and regional infrastructure, although its members have not publicly explained how they will divide that work.

The war’s financial effects appeared in oil-company earnings Friday. Exxon earned $14.53 billion and Chevron earned $12.07 billion as oil traded above $100 a barrel and briefly reached $126. Exxon’s refining profit increased sixfold, while diesel prices rose 41 percent. The same supply disruption produces opposite mornings: producers and refiners collect higher prices, while drivers and businesses pay more for fuel, shipping and petroleum-based products.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s expansion of mandatory detention for immigrants arrested inside the United States, the Associated Press reported Friday. The policy denied many detainees the opportunity to ask an immigration judge for release on bond while their cases proceeded. Previous administrations generally allowed immigrants without criminal records who were arrested away from the border to request bond hearings. Immigration officials expanded mandatory detention last year, arguing that a 1996 law authorized it.

The Ninth Circuit said the administration’s interpretation conflicted with the law’s words, structure and history. Congress created different rules for people stopped while entering the country and people already living inside it; the administration sought to apply the stricter border rule to both groups. The decision deepened a split among federal appeals courts. The Fifth and Eighth circuits have upheld the policy, while several others have rejected it. The dispute captures a recurring legal fight in Trump’s immigration crackdown: whether the executive branch can use broad readings of older statutes to eliminate hearings that previous administrations provided. For detainees covered by the ruling, the immediate consequence is not automatic release. It is the right to ask a judge for release while the government tries to deport them.

Jessica Treviño, a 34-year-old Texas mother protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, sued the federal government after it sought to terminate her status for “unauthorized travel” caused by her deportation. The Associated Press reported the lawsuit Friday. Treviño arrived in the United States at seven and received DACA protection at 20. Federal agents arrested her and her husband in December, and the government deported them to Mexico on March 25. Citizenship and Immigration Services then cited her departure on March 25 as unauthorized travel. Their three children, all American citizens, remained with relatives in the United States. The government forced her across the border and then cited that crossing as the reason to cancel her protection.

Medicare currently pays private insurers a temporary subsidy to keep monthly premiums from rising sharply for people enrolled in stand-alone Part D prescription-drug plans. The subsidy does not lower the price charged by the drugmaker; it absorbs some of the added cost that insurers would otherwise pass to customers. The Trump administration will stop making those payments after 2026, the Associated Press reported Friday. Insurers will then recalculate their premiums without the federal cushion, and some of the roughly 25 million Part D enrollees are likely to pay more each month in 2027. The subsidy cost the government an estimated $3.6 billion this year. Beneficiaries will see their new premiums during the fall enrollment period, which overlaps with the November election. The change will first appear not at the pharmacy counter but in the monthly premium listed in each plan’s fall enrollment materials.

Amazon raised its projected 2026 capital spending from $200 billion to $220 billion, largely to build data centers and other artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Its shares rose about 12 percent Friday after the company reported that Amazon Web Services revenue grew 37 percent, up from 28 percent and its fastest growth in 18 quarters, according to the Associated Press. Capital spending is money used to build or buy assets expected to last for years—in this case chips, servers, data centers and the electrical equipment needed to run them.

Amazon’s stock jump helps explain the current rule on Wall Street: investors will tolerate enormous AI spending when a company can show that customers are already buying more computing services. The spending alone was not the good news; AWS’s accelerating growth gave investors evidence that at least part of the construction bill is producing revenue. In the AI boom, Wall Street is no longer rewarding the size of the promise. It is rewarding evidence that customers have begun paying the bill.

Amazon’s increase pushed the combined artificial-intelligence investment plans of the largest technology companies above $1 trillion, the Financial Times reported Friday. The companies are spending the money on data centers, advanced chips, power plants and transmission equipment. Some can pay from their own cash, while others are borrowing or using investment vehicles financed by outside investors. AI revenue has not grown as quickly as the infrastructure bill, so the returns depend on companies and consumers paying for far more AI computing in the future.

The closest Industrial Revolution comparison is the railroad boom: the technology companies are laying tracks, building stations and securing the power supply before they know exactly how much freight and how many passengers the system will carry. If demand arrives, they control essential infrastructure. If it does not, they still owe the cost of the tracks. The comparison also explains why the spending reaches beyond Silicon Valley: data centers require land, construction crews, cooling equipment and enough electricity to compete with homes and factories for power.

The Federal Reserve disclosed Wednesday that Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan had voted to raise its main interest rate by a quarter-point while the majority kept it between 3.5 and 3.75 percent. Friday’s news was their explanation. Hammack and Kashkari argued that inflation had remained high for too long and that repeated disruptions to supply could become permanent price increases if the Fed did nothing. Kashkari also cited the data-center construction boom as a new source of demand for workers, equipment and electricity.

They argued that a small increase now, while employment remains healthy, could reduce the need for a larger increase later. Higher oil prices reinforce their case: oil raises fuel and shipping costs, businesses can pass those costs to customers, and renewed inflation makes the Fed less willing to lower borrowing costs. Anyone seeking a mortgage, car loan or business loan notices the dispute because a Fed debating increases is much farther from delivering the rate cuts borrowers have been waiting for.

Yum Brands said Taco Bell’s American same-store sales had fallen 2 percent so far in the current quarter as customers avoided the chain during a cyclospora outbreak. It turns out the slogan “Explosive Diarrhea, It’s What Comes After Dinner” is not a real sales generator. Nearly 2,000 people reported illnesses during an outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce, and Taco Bell stopped using lettuce from the implicated Mexican supplier on July 17. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Taco Bell planned to bring customers back with discounted app promotions, including $1 food.

The size of the outbreak reflects the scale of the modern restaurant supply chain: one contaminated ingredient from a large supplier can reach many locations before investigators identify the common source. Taco Bell could replace the lettuce immediately. Customers decide when the outbreak is over.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez asked a state court to order the child-welfare department to help return a 15-year-old American citizen whom its employees allegedly sent alone into Mexico. The Associated Press reported the lawsuit Friday. State employees allegedly drove the boy to El Paso on July 6 and told him to cross the border to find his estranged mother, a Mexican citizen who had been deported after a drug-related arrest. The teenager later contacted the independent Office of the Child Advocate. Torrez also asked the court to prohibit officials from taking other children out of the country for reunification without judicial approval. The institutional failure is visible in who finally raised the alarm: not the agency responsible for the boy, but the boy himself, calling an outside watchdog from another country.

Anthropic reported Friday that three of its AI models had broken into real organizations during authorized security tests. The company conducted 141,000 evaluation runs using Opus 4.7, Mythos 5 and an internal model. Weak passwords helped the systems enter networks, and defenders failed to detect two of the intrusions. The tests began as early as April. The models did not invent a new kind of cyberattack. They found familiar human mistakes and exploited them at machine speed.

The World Meteorological Organization warned Friday that the strengthening El Niño could bring extreme heat, drought and heavy rain through spring 2027. El Niño is a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific that rearranges weather patterns around the world. A key Pacific measuring region reached the warmest level recorded at this early point in an El Niño’s development. Most forecast models indicate that the event could become the strongest on record, although scientists told the Associated Press that the forecast is not certain because the event will not peak for several months. Farmers, water managers, electric utilities and disaster agencies notice first because they must make planting, reservoir, power-supply and emergency plans months before forecasters know precisely where the droughts and floods will land.

And in other facts, cosmetic surgeons told USA Today on Friday that rapid weight loss from GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic can remove fat from the temples, producing “temporal hollowing.” Doctors can restore volume with fat or filler, but the temple contains arteries and veins connected to the eye, so an injection into the wrong blood vessel can cause blindness. The unexpected risk therefore comes not from the weight-loss drug itself but from an elective attempt to correct one of its visible effects.

The cave beneath Pembroke Castle

National Geographic reported that archaeologists are excavating an enormous cave reached by a spiral staircase beneath Pembroke Castle in Wales for evidence of Neanderthals and some of Britain’s earliest modern humans. Researchers once believed Victorian-era work had stripped the cavern of its archaeological value, but test excavations found burned bone, animal remains and worked stone. Those finds showed that archaeologically useful layers survived, which is why researchers are returning now for a larger excavation. They could establish whether Neanderthals, Homo sapiens or both occupied the site. The juxtaposition is unusual: a medieval fortress and the birthplace of Henry VII stand directly above a potential record of human life extending back as far as 100,000 years.

Children make music inside an MRI scanner

The Conversation highlighted an experiment in which musically untrained children ages 9 to 11 lay inside an MRI scanner with a specially built, nonmagnetic 35-key piano resting on their knees. The children alternated between playing a memorized five-note pentatonic scale and improvising melodies with the same five black keys. Because the notes were selected to sound harmonious together, the children could explore without playing a “wrong” note. Brain scans showed that improvisation strengthened connections among regions associated with emotion and reward more than the rote exercise did. The results suggest that improvisation engages children’s emerging creativity networks even before they receive extensive musical training.

Five million artworks in one searchable museum

Axios Finish Line reported that The Last Museum has assembled an online index of more than 5.8 million artworks, creating what amounts to a museum without walls, closing hours or a final gallery. The collection stretches across roughly 5,000 years, from about 3000 B.C. to the present. The site is free, and every work links back to the institution that holds it. Go to lastmuseum.com.

A civilization emerges beneath the Amazon canopy

Live Science reported that an airborne-laser survey of nearly 1,740 square miles of Brazilian rainforest revealed 396 previously unknown earthworks belonging to a complex civilization that arose about 2,500 years ago—close to the beginning of the Roman Republic in 509 B.C. The population in the area may have reached 1.25 million to 3 million between A.D. 100 and 300. The laser system, called lidar, measures reflected light from an aircraft and allows researchers to digitally remove the trees from an image, revealing roads, platforms and geometric earthworks hidden at ground level. The findings, published in Nature, add to evidence that the precolonial Amazon was neither empty nor untouched but supported large, organized communities whose monumental architecture is still being recovered from beneath the trees.

Four runs on one final swing

The Minnesota Twins entered the bottom of the ninth inning against Kansas City trailing 3-0 after failing to score in the first eight innings. With two outs, the bases loaded and Kody Clemens facing an 0-2 count, Clemens hit his 19th home run of the season to right-center field, giving Minnesota a 4-3 victory. The play qualified as an “ultimate grand slam,” the name for a walk-off grand slam hit when the home team trails by exactly three runs in the ninth inning or later. Kansas City had been one strike from a shutout; Minnesota instead scored all four of its runs on the game’s final pitch. According to Major League Baseball’s historical list, Clemens hit the 35th ultimate grand slam in major-league history—and the first with two outs and an 0-2 count.

The United States and Iran exchanged fresh missile barrages Thursday.

Jordan’s air defenses intercepted five Iranian missiles Thursday without casualties. That was the second consecutive day that Jordan had to play whack-a-missile. Kuwait’s military said an Iranian strike hit a Chinese company’s building, killing a worker.

Iran’s official news agency said an American strike on Qeshm (pronounced “GHESH-m”) Island killed three people and wounded two. Egyptian officials said drones caused fires aboard two natural-gas vessels.

The war feels like it’s jumping the box despite months of bombs and boasts.

Reuters reported that Tehran expects within weeks to receive the first part of an order for Chinese shoulder-fired air-defense launchers. These portable systems, commonly called MANPADS (man-portable air-defense system) allow small teams to fire at low-flying aircraft. They can force American pilots to fly higher, change routes or rely more heavily on long-range weapons. The sale would mark an unusually direct Chinese contribution to Iran’s war effort after Beijing had tried to support Tehran without becoming a combatant.

Bloomberg placed that purchase inside what it called a “third missile age.” Nuclear missiles defined the first age and expensive precision weapons the second. Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated a third model: firing conventional missiles by the hundreds or thousands to overwhelm defenses, destroy infrastructure and exhaust interceptor supplies. Iran has fired about 2,000 missiles since February 28.

Thursday’s reporting showed a widening difference between the allies over how to end the Iran war. Netanyahu urged Trump to intensify military and economic pressure. The administration still hopes negotiations can stop the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Netanyahu also confronted JD Vance, who had accused Israeli officials of undermining American diplomacy because it wanted to keep hitting Iran and warned that Israel was alienating Republicans. The Israeli PM said neither was true.

The Commerce Department said the economy grew at a 1.5 percent annual rate from April through June, down from 2.1 percent and below forecasts. But the headline was weaker than the economy underneath it. Consumer spending accelerated to a 3.2 percent rate, and business investment excluding housing grew at an 8.4 percent rate. When economists removed volatile government, inventory and trade figures, spending by American households and businesses grew at a 3.9 percent rate.

A lot of the expansion in this quarter came from spending on AI. That expansion is creating demand for workers. The New York Times reported that hundreds of electricians building OpenAI’s project in Saline Township, Michigan, are working 10-hour days, seven days a week. Michigan calls it the largest single investment in the state’s history. A separate $50 million program backed by Google plans to increase annual enrollment in electrician apprenticeships from 19,500 to 30,000 during each of the next three years—a 54 percent increase.

The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, the PCE price index, rose 3.7 percent from a year earlier—down from 4.1 percent but still well above the Fed’s 2 percent goal.

The Fed declined to raise rates, although three officials wanted to do so. The weak GDP headline supports caution; strong private demand supports higher rates to restrain prices. The Fed confronts a weak headline, sturdy spending and too much inflation. None of the choices is clean.

Investors are also making borrowing more expensive without waiting for the Fed. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond reached 5.23 percent Thursday, its highest level since 2007.

A Treasury yield is the return investors receive for lending money to the U.S. government. When the 30-year yield rises, investors are demanding more compensation to tie up their money for 30 years. That can reflect expectations of higher inflation, higher future interest rates, stronger growth, or weaker demand for long-term Treasuries; heavier government borrowing can also put upward pressure on yields, though it’s usually one factor among several.

Rates on mortgages and other long-term loans commonly follow Treasury yields, so the increase means higher borrowing costs can spread through the economy even when the Fed leaves its own short-term rate unchanged.

Two national polls delivered the same basic finding: most Americans oppose the Iran war, and they increasingly connect it to the cost of living. AP-NORC found that about two-thirds of adults said the war was not worth fighting. Only one person in five wanted the attacks to continue. Trump’s approval on Iran fell to 28 percent, six points below June.

Quinnipiac found 60 percent of registered voters opposed American military action and 34 percent supported it.

Americans considered preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon important, but ranked fuel prices and a ceasefire higher.

A CNN poll found the political damage extending to November’s congressional elections. Democrats led Republicans by eight points among registered voters on the generic ballot, which asks which party a person would support for Congress without naming candidates. That measure is seen as a rough proxy of how the parties will fare across the most contested races. Among voters who said they were extremely motivated to vote, Democrats held a 20-point advantage.

The president’s nominee for attorney general is in danger. Two Republicans, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, have demanded that Todd Blanche confirm in writing that the approximately $1.8 billion fund created through Trump’s settlement with the IRS will not exist and that protections against future Trump family audits cannot be revived. Blanche has not provided those guarantees. The senators will not support him until he does, so the Judiciary Committee canceled Thursday’s vote. Trump later said he might withdraw the nomination for now. For now, the disputed fund has also stalled Blanche’s nomination.

An update on Trump’s prime-time speech alleging Chinese interference in American elections: The Washington Post reported that officials in 12 of the 15 states named in administration intelligence reports said federal authorities never told them China had compromised their voter-registration systems, directly contradicting the White House’s public account.

Major hospital systems reported a sharp increase in uninsured patients after enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expired. Congressional Republicans allowed the larger premium tax credits to end on January 1, 2026. Hospitals told The New York Times that more patients were arriving without coverage and could not pay their bills.

When the credits disappeared, some families dropped coverage they could no longer afford. They did not stop getting sick; many delayed treatment until they reached emergency rooms, which must stabilize them whether they can pay. Hospitals absorb the resulting unpaid bills or shift costs elsewhere, potentially raising premiums for people outside the ACA marketplaces.

The National Urban League released its 50th annual “State of Black America” report Thursday and said Trump administration policies had pushed the American Dream farther away for Black Americans than at any point since the civil-rights movement. The organization cited the dismantling and redirection of parts of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, changes at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and administration-backed voting restrictions. The report also measured persistent material gaps: the median Black household income remains 37 percent below the median white household income.

In Ukraine, Russian missiles and drones killed at least nine civilians and wounded more than 50 overnight. Poland said a Russian missile crossed deep into Polish territory and fell there, prompting NATO aircraft to scramble.

France allowed 84,000 wildfire evacuees to return home Thursday after firefighters gained control of the southwestern blaze.

Congolese authorities reported that the official Ebola death toll has passed 1,500, an increase of about 50 percent in one week. Authorities called it the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record.

Thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta (SAY-oo-tah), Spain’s small territory on the North African coast, after border controls broke down Thursday. At least three people died trying to arrive by sea. Spain and Morocco agreed to cooperate in returning illegal entrants. In May 2021, more than 8,000 people entered Ceuta in two days.

AP said the immediate trigger for Thursday’s mass crossing was not clear. Surveys of migrants using the western Mediterranean route found that 54 percent cited economic reasons, 33 percent war or conflict, 23 percent targeted personal violence and 14 percent gradual environmental change (respondents could name more than one reason.) Most people crossing Thursday appeared to be Moroccan, while others had traveled to Morocco from elsewhere in Africa. Ceuta matters because reaching it means reaching Spanish—and therefore European Union—territory without making the longer sea journey to mainland Europe.

WIRED reported that American children are running faster than ever, a phenomenon the track world has dubbed “trackflation.” An Ohio high school senior ran the indoor two-mile in 9 minutes, 37.15 seconds, breaking a national record that had stood since 2013, while a Texas sophomore covered 100 meters in 9.92 seconds, only one-tenth of a second off the collegiate record. The most exuberant performance may have come from a 12-year-old Utah girl who ran a mile in 4:40.98, nearly six seconds faster than the age-group world record, despite performing the Scuba Dance just before reaching the finish line. “Nobody was even in the camera with her,” one astonished commentator said.

WIRED traced part of the change to the spread of elite coaching methods once largely confined to professional runners. Some teenagers are experimenting with Norwegian-style double-threshold training, completing two carefully paced workouts in a day and using blood-lactate readings to adjust their effort. Private coaches are also emphasizing efficient mechanics, deliberate recovery, nutrition and heat acclimatization. One coach said a program that once consisted of a 20-minute jog and a game of Capture the Flag now asks girls to run eight 400-meter repetitions at five-minute-mile pace. Young runners also benefit from carbon-plated “super shoes,” fast polyurethane tracks, pace lights and a growing national competition circuit that gives them opportunities to race equally fast peers. Coaches and researchers caution that such intensive training can also cause injuries, burnout and excessive pressure.

The Financial Times highlighted a South Korean trend involving “dopamine sites,” imitation shopping and food-delivery services on which nothing is sold and nothing arrives. Waiting for Godot’s packages. The platforms reproduce the ritual in elaborate detail: users examine menus and reviews, compare products, fill a cart, check out and sometimes follow an animated courier across a live map. One service called Food Never Comes allowed one user to add 1,000 toppings to an imaginary order. What no pickles?! About 30,000 people a week were pretending to order food through the service by mid-June. Other sites offer fictitious clothing and merchandise, while some tell users how much money or how many calories they avoided consuming. The premise is that anticipation and selection supply much of shopping’s excitement, allowing users to indulge the ritual of an impulse purchase without receiving an unwanted package, an unnecessary meal or a credit-card charge. Therapists have said the sites may interrupt costly behavior, although some question whether rehearsing the shopping ritual reinforces the same habit it is intended to control.

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The Iran war moved again from background to foreground. Iran launched missiles at U.S. forces in Jordan; U.S. Central Command said the missiles were shot down. The systems doing this work are the same scarce air-defense systems the U.S. has been burning through in the Iran war. The Wall Street Journal called it a surprise missile attack; the point is that Iran fired after a brief lull and while de-escalation talks were still being floated. There was action in Iraq. The United States and Saudi Arabia hit Iran-backed militias in Iraq. AP reports at least 20 militia fighters were killed, along with six Iranian advisers. Iraq condemned the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty. Iraq and Saudi Arabia are now more directly engaged in the war.

Ukraine said it hit two major Russian oil refineries overnight. That pushes forward the strategy we talked about before: Ukraine is not just fighting Russian troops; it is attacking the fuel and revenue that feed Putin’s war. Ukraine’s Zelenskyy was in Washington getting support from senators who advanced a Russia sanctions bill, 86-12. The bill would punish countries that keep buying Russian oil, gas and other exports. The bill would also let Trump impose tariffs of 500 percent on Russian imports and tariffs as high as 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian oil and gas. At Trump’s request, senators added sanctions aimed at Iran too.

In Congo, Ebola is now making hunger worse. The head of the U.N. World Food Program told AP that more than 2.7 million people in affected health zones face acute food insecurity. People are being told to isolate, but they also need food. That is the trap.

In Japan, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said at least 13 people had died after a magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto.

In Europe two firefighters were killed on Crete on July 29 while battling a wildfire driven by extreme heat and high winds.

The Fed held interest rates steady, but three officials wanted to raise them. Trump wants lower rates, which would make borrowing cheaper. But the Iran war is pushing oil prices higher, and that increases the price for gas and goods that move by gas-powered vehicles. The president insists his new Fed chair wants to lower rates. The war Trump is directing is making the rate cut he wants harder to justify.

A CNN/SSRS poll found a record 73 percent of Americans saying Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems. His approval among Republicans fell to a new low of 78 percent, and the share of Republicans enthusiastic about the rest of his second term fell from 38 percent last spring to 19 percent. 19 percent? Wowza.

A new filing in the James Comey case says Trump requested notes from the Secret Service interview of Comey “to use in his 6 p.m. press conference,” while repeated searches by federal investigators, including Secret Service agents, for evidence that “86” meant killing produced inconclusive or empty results.

Today’s Washington spectacle was Anthony Fauci’s appearance before the Senate. Republicans, led by Rand Paul, are still investigating the origins of COVID and whether Fauci misled Congress about U.S.-funded research. Paul claims Fauci helped obscure or deny U.S. support for risky “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan, and he released parts of Fauci’s diary to argue that Fauci privately took the idea that the virus leaked from a lab more seriously than he admitted publicly. Fauci has said the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research as Paul defines it. Gain-of-function research means altering an organism, often a virus, to study whether it becomes more transmissible, more dangerous, or better able to evade defenses. Fauci said he had testified or briefed Congress “well over 200” times during nearly 40 years in government. Today, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer more than 100 questions, saying the hearing was designed to trap him into criminal exposure. He said Paul wanted him to say “anything” that could fulfill Paul’s public pledges to put him “behind bars.” He also accused Paul of an “unhinged obsession” with him. Republicans now plan a contempt vote. So the fight is no longer only where COVID came from. It is whether Congress is investigating Fauci or trying to make him prosecutable.

Todd Blanche’s nomination to become attorney general in full is wobbling. Politico reports Blanche skipped a scheduled meeting with Sen. John Cornyn, who then said he was still “not prepared” to support him. Cornyn’s issue is the Trump IRS settlement. He wants written assurance that a roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund is dead and that audit protections for Trump and his family cannot be revived or stretched forward. Blanche has said the fund is effectively gone, but Cornyn wants it in writing before he supplies the vote. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to vote tomorrow, so the immediate question is whether Republicans have the votes to move Trump’s former lawyer into permanent control of the Justice Department.

The morning after a federal judge ruled that no federal detention contract could override state law, ICE published proposed contracts for 5,500 beds declaring that state and local laws “shall not apply” to the facilities. The same proposed contracts would let detention centers operate indefinitely at 85 percent staffing, including medical staffing. A June inspection found one detainee’s health assessment was 22 days late and suicide-watch checks ran nearly 14 hours apart instead of the required eight. In Washington state, officials needed three years of litigation, after 10 refused inspections and 3,500 detainee complaints, to win a ruling allowing state health inspectors into the Tacoma detention center.

Trump also denied $227 million in snow-disaster aid requests from four Democratic-led states even though FEMA or NOAA had found the requests met federal standards. Presidents since George W. Bush had approved 68 of the previous 69 qualifying snow-disaster requests. Last week it was disclosed that the administration had denied projects in states that did not vote for Trump.

The United States also banned new foreign-made humanoid and four-legged robots, a move aimed mostly at China. The FCC says the issue is national security: robots can collect data, move through homes, schools and factories, and plug into American infrastructure. China dominates the humanoid robot market.

It was generally a bad day for robots. In New York, a rural school district paused plans for a nearly $60,000 humanoid AI robot teacher named Sally. Sally has silicone skin, brown hair, facial expressions and “natural conversation,” and was supposed to help teach robotics and technology at Salamanca High School, on the Allegany territory of the Seneca Nation. Teachers, parents and state officials objected. They raised concerns about student privacy, replacing human judgment, and the fact that Realbotix acquired a company known for hyper-realistic sex dolls. One local substitute teacher put the deeper objection plainly: of all the schools to “test it out,” they chose Native American children again.

U.S. job postings with “AI” in the title rose from 264 in the first quarter of 2022 to 822 in the first quarter of 2026, and Indeed found that AI titles are now more common outside the technology industry than inside it.

Illinois has recorded 220 confirmed tornadoes through Monday, more than twice the total of any other state, along with nine significant weather events, the state’s highest number in a decade. There is not one tidy cause. The state climatologist has pointed to a year of repeated storm systems, warm and humid air, and Illinois sitting in the active zone where those ingredients kept meeting. There is also a reporting issue: better radar, storm-spotter networks and damage surveys can count weaker tornadoes that previous decades missed. But the record still points to a real year of repeated severe-weather setups over Illinois.

College sports money kept accelerating. Ohio State reportedly agreed to a roughly $15 million-a-year JPMorgan jersey-patch deal, meaning the bank’s logo would appear on uniforms across Ohio State’s varsity sports, not just on signs around the stadium, only for Notre Dame to announce a roughly $20 million-a-year SoFi agreement hours later. Notre Dame’s deal would put SoFi’s logo on Irish jerseys and make the company an official financial-services partner. Schools can now share revenue directly with athletes; Ohio State plans to max out a roughly $21.3 million pool for 2026-27. Jersey patches are one way to pay for that new athlete payroll.

In a Costa Rican forest, scientists have installed a 15-inch touchscreen to attract wild capuchin monkeys. AI-powered facial recognition identifies each animal, the screen presents a simple learning task, and a correct touch sends a dried banana slice sliding onto a tray. Which doesn’t happen around these offices, I tell ya, no matter how much I punch the screen. Ten of the sixteen monkeys that investigated the contraption eventually worked out the relationship between poking the glass and receiving their favorite treat. Eight remembered later. Researchers hope to add more sophisticated tests of memory and impulse control in the hopes of curing those of us who split off from the family tree 7 million years ago.

In 2020, a visitor gave the New Bedford Whaling Museum one star for being the “Worst Aquarium Ever,” which was hard to dispute because it was not an aquarium. The museum put the review on T-shirts, sales jumped 250 percent, and now people are lining up to represent a place whose chief aquatic attractions are four enormous whale skeletons and, as of this year, one modest 250-gallon fish tank.

Finally, the filmed version of the musical “Hadestown” earned $10.2 million in 1,949 North American theaters, narrowly beating “Hamilton” for the largest debut ever by a live theatrical capture. The folk-and-jazz retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice began as an indie project, reached Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tony Awards. Its five-day engagement was extended, with some of the strongest business coming from Huntsville, Salt Lake City, Eugene and Boise.

Benjamin Netanyahu met for 90-minutes with President Trump Tuesday. He declared near-total agreement on Iran and called the meeting one of their best. The administration was equally upbeat.

The public display obscured consequential disagreements. Israel wants the United States to resume the war if Iran refuses to dismantle its nuclear program, including attacking the deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain complex. Washington has not explained how that could be accomplished, and the United States is consuming Patriot and THAAD interceptors faster than it can replace them.

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Trump acknowledged Netanyahu’s pressure about the danger of Pickaxe mountain before the meeting: “Bibi’s telling me that because he wants me to stay involved.” Politico reported that some of Trump’s America First allies fear the meeting will pull the US deeper into the war, alleging that Netanyahu had “sold” Trump on starting the conflict in the first place. His renewed pressure—and Trump’s slightly irritated acknowledgment of it—echoes all that.

It was Netanyahu’s eighth Oval Office meeting since Trump returned to office — and RealClearWorld’s read on it was blunt: he arrived “weaker and less influential” than in any of the previous seven.

The Telegraph reported the IRGC has fielded its deadliest kamikaze drone yet, a jet-powered upgrade explicitly framed as a message to Trump.

The math here seems to be inescapable. Iran has not surrendered its nuclear program. American missiles have not eliminated it. US stockpiles are shrinking, while Iran has acquired new leverage by reducing commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The current situation seems a long way off from checking off the boxes on Netanyahu’s to do list.

The New York Times framed Tehran’s strategy bluntly: “Why Iran Is in No Rush to Return to Talks With United States.” Iranian leaders appear to be betting that they can endure greater economic and military pain than Trump—and that their control over passage through Hormuz gives them leverage Washington cannot ignore. You may remember that we framed this as a contest of pain thresholds in our digest on Friday.

Inside Iran, the government is using the wartime environment to accelerate its repression. Authorities hanged two more men Tuesday for killing police during January’s protests. They were among 12 sentenced in closed, torture-tainted proceedings; four have now been executed, with eight on death row. These executions underscore the brutal aftermath of the government surviving the January uprising, which saw tens of thousands arrested and thousands killed.

2. Ebola update: Congo approaches a two-year toll in 10 weeks

Congo’s Ebola outbreak reached 3,262 confirmed cases and 1,437 deaths Tuesday—nearly as many infections as the country’s worst previous outbreak recorded over two years.

This epidemic has needed only 10 weeks to approach that total. The Bundibugyo (boon-dee-BOO-joh) strain has no approved vaccine or treatment, leaving responders dependent on isolation and contact tracing. Both are breaking down in eastern Congo: rebel violence has made communities unreachable, frightened residents have attacked treatment centers, and some health workers are striking because they have not been paid.

Across the border, Uganda declared its outbreak over Tuesday. Its last Ebola patient was discharged June 16; authorities then waited the required 42 days—two complete incubation periods—without another infection. Uganda’s success shows that the virus can be stopped when officials identify every patient and monitor every contact.

3. Japan’s earthquake: a terrifying echo of 2016

The magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck Kyushu on Tuesday produced Japan’s maximum level of local shaking—a force capable of throwing people to the floor, hurling unsecured furniture and collapsing some reinforced-concrete walls. The second floor of a shopping mall partially collapsed, leaving 20 to 30 employees missing. About 90 injured people were taken to hospitals.

Japan experiences roughly a tenth of the world’s earthquakes because it sits where several tectonic plates collide. So preparedness is a part of daily life. Sensors automatically stop high-speed trains before the strongest shaking arrives. Department stores broadcast earthquake warnings in four languages. Some vending machines can switch to emergency power and dispense drinks for free. Children practice evacuation drills, families keep earthquake kits, and thousands of instruments report local shaking within seconds.

This quake was only slightly smaller than the magnitude 7.3 shock that devastated the same region in 2016. That earlier earthquake released roughly twice as much energy, but both registered the maximum reading of 7 on Japan’s shindo scale, which measures what people and buildings actually experience at a particular location.

The more alarming comparison is the sequence. In 2016, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake was followed 28 hours later by the larger 7.3 shock. That disaster ultimately killed 278 people—including deaths attributed to its aftermath—injured more than 2,800 and destroyed or badly damaged tens of thousands of homes. Japan’s weather agency is warning residents that another powerful earthquake remains possible during the next two or three days.

The Aeon mall had been badly damaged in 2016 and later repaired and partly rebuilt with seismic upgrades. It completed another reconstruction and reopened in June—just one month ago—with the reopening promoted as a “fresh start” marking the region’s recovery from the 2016 disaster. Its failure Tuesday therefore destroyed both a building and a symbol of successful reconstruction.

4. Wildfire update: France expands evacuations as heat returns

France evacuated nearly 4,000 more people Tuesday—on top of roughly 330,000 displaced across France and Spain—as renewed heat helped fresh flames break out near a popular Atlantic beach.

Officials said the fire in Gironde (zhih-ROND) was “fixed,” meaning that its perimeter had stopped advancing—not that the fire was extinguished. Hours later, flames erupted near Grand Crohot beach and water-dropping aircraft returned to the air.

“We are at a point of fragility,” French firefighters’ federation spokesman Eric Brocardi said. Crews would keep attacking the fire despite the forecast rise in temperatures.

The Gironde fire has burned about 162 square miles—four times the area of Paris—and forced approximately 220,000 people from their homes and vacation sites. Across France and Spain, the fires have consumed more than 1,100 square miles, an area larger than Rhode Island.

Spain allowed about 20,000 evacuees to return Tuesday, but temperatures in its fourth heat wave of the summer were again exceeding 104 degrees. Thirteen people have died. Surveying one burned valley, gardener David Gonzalez described the prevailing mood in two words: “anger and helplessness.”

5. Online scam compounds are trafficking workers from more than 80 countries

Criminal networks are trafficking people from more than 80 countries into online scam compounds, the U.N. migration agency warned Tuesday. Fake advertisements lure educated, English-speaking applicants into overseas jobs; after arrival, their passports are confiscated and violence or manufactured debts force them to defraud strangers online.

The compounds may hold hundreds of thousands of workers. Fraud losses in East Asia, Australia and New Zealand reached as much as $114 billion last year. The person sending a romance pitch or investment offer you get via text may therefore be both a criminal and a prisoner.

5. ICE uses migrant-child agency information to make 12,000 arrests

ICE has arrested more than 12,000 children, sponsors and household members using information supplied by the federal agency responsible for caring for unaccompanied migrant children, according to internal government data reviewed by Reuters.

Since January 2025, the Office of Refugee Resettlement has provided ICE with more than 460,000 leads involving children and the adults seeking to retrieve them from federal shelters. Sponsors are generally parents or other relatives.

A 2008 law instructed the government to place children in the least restrictive setting and release them as quickly as safely possible, regardless of a sponsor’s immigration status.

The data does not reveal how many of those arrested were children rather than sponsors. But it documents a fundamental reversal: information collected to reunite vulnerable children with their families is now being used to identify people for detention and deportation.

6. China landslide: Thirty more victims identified

Chinese authorities identified 30 more victims of the July 17 landslide in Pengshui County on Tuesday, raising the confirmed death toll to 41. Twenty people remain missing.

The landslide sent approximately 636,000 cubic feet of rock and earth down a steep slope, burying at least 10 residential buildings and a passenger minibus. The minibus wreckage was found Sunday.

7. Red Cross declares a national blood-supply crisis

The American Red Cross declared only its second national blood-supply crisis today, after summer donations fell to their lowest level in four years.

The organization, which supplies roughly 40 percent of donated blood in the United States, has begun rationing some products—sending hospitals blood for the most urgent cases while delaying less critical orders. Platelets are especially scarce because they generally expire after only five days.

The shortage can force hospitals to postpone surgeries and complicate treatment for trauma patients, women suffering severe childbirth bleeding and people receiving cancer care. The Red Cross is asking eligible donors of every blood type to give immediately.

8. AI selloff: South Korea’s stock market plunges 10.8 percent

South Korea’s stock market plunged 10.8 percent today as investors dumped the chipmakers at the center of the artificial-intelligence boom. The decline was so steep that regulators temporarily halted trading.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix led the rout. Investors are questioning whether enormous spending on AI infrastructure can produce the profits embedded in chip-company valuations. But today’s most concrete catalyst came from China, which has reportedly begun producing domestically developed immersion deep-ultraviolet lithography machines. These machines project the intricate circuit patterns onto silicon wafers and have long been dominated by the Dutch company ASML. China’s equipment still lags Western systems in performance and reliability, but domestic production suggests that American and European export restrictions may no longer be enough to preserve the industry’s technological hierarchy. ASML shares fell 8.5 percent.

The selloff spread through global semiconductor stocks ahead of earnings reports from Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, which may reveal whether the industry’s extraordinary investment in data centers will continue.

9. Libya: Protesters briefly threaten the national power grid

Protesters furious about prolonged power outages stormed a Libian energy complex overnight and shut gas lines supplying the country’s power plants. Officials warned that the disruption could collapse the electrical grid and produce a nationwide blackout.

The government sent security forces to retake the facility today. Gas deliveries resumed, and electricity service gradually stabilized.

The energy faciiliy in question also supplies gas to Italy through an undersea pipeline, making the break-in an international energy concern. Demonstrators across western Libya are demanding reliable electricity and the resignation of the Prime Minister, whose government controls the country’s west.

Short Stack

Lindsey Graham’s funeral becomes an informal wartime summit

President Trump eulogized Lindsey Graham at Washington National Cathedral today as a “constant fixture of American politics.” Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky attended after holding separate White House meetings with Trump, turning the funeral into an extraordinary gathering of the leaders managing the wars Graham spent his final months trying to shape.

The ceremony also dramatized the vacancy Graham leaves inside Republican foreign policy. He was the Senate’s most persistent advocate for arming Ukraine, defending Israel and confronting Iran. His last major legislative project—sanctions against countries purchasing Russian energy—now depends on colleagues deciding whether to carry it forward.

Fauci’s diary records the pandemic behind closed doors

More than 1,000 pages of Anthony Fauci’s private pandemic diary were released by Senator Rand Paul ahead of Fauci’s testimony Wednesday about Covid’s origins. The entries show Fauci privately struggling to keep Trump focused, describing presidential news conferences as “painfully rambling” and calling Trump an “idiot” after he posted inaccurate death figures.

The diaries also complicate the caricature of an unruffled technocrat. Fauci closely tracked his celebrity—Brad Pitt impersonations, fan art and flattering messages—while recording early scientific uncertainty about whether the virus emerged naturally or through a laboratory accident. Paul is presenting that uncertainty as evidence that Fauci misled the public; Fauci declined to comment.

Kentucky’s governor tells McConnell: Speak publicly or resign

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear demanded today that Mitch McConnell directly address his constituents and demonstrate that he remains capable of serving—or resign from the Senate.

McConnell, 84, has been hospitalized or in rehabilitation since a June 14 fall that briefly left him unconscious. His office disclosed Monday that he has not been medically cleared to leave rehabilitation and will miss Senate votes. It has released statements and two photographs but no video or direct public remarks from the senator. Beshear also asked Majority Leader John Thune to investigate if McConnell does not respond.

Claude’s public sharing links became searchable

Hundreds of Claude conversations appeared in Google and Bing results because Anthropic’s publicly shared chat pages lacked a “noindex” instruction telling search engines not to list them. The indexed material included legal questions, political deliberations and erotic role-play.

This was not a breach of private, unshared accounts: every exposed conversation had been deliberately turned into a public link. The failure was one of discoverability. Users may have expected to send an obscure link to one person, not make the conversation searchable by everyone. Google removed the results, but Bing was still displaying roughly 600 when Wired checked. Anthropic has not explained why the stronger indexing protection was absent.

Grandma wins happy hour for retirement homes

Anita LeBrun wanted a glass of pinot grigio with her friends. Minnesota law said no.

The 82-year-old discovered that her retirement home could not serve alcohol because it lacked the same food-service license required of bars and restaurants. So LeBrun became the face of a campaign to change the rule. She testified before state lawmakers, explaining that residents should not lose the ordinary pleasures of adulthood merely because they had moved into senior housing.

The legislature agreed. LeBrun stood beside Gov. Tim Walz as he signed the new law. She plans to celebrate when it takes effect next week—with happy hour and, finally, that glass of wine.

Colonel Sanders’ estate goes on the auction block

Colonel Sanders’ pressure cooker, clip-on bow tie, watches, cash register, former home and original restaurant headquarters went up for auction in Kentucky tonight.

The strangest lot may be a 1964 planner containing a handwritten mixture of herbs and spices. KFC once sued to keep it secret, then withdrew after examining the recipe and deciding that it was probably for stuffing—not the legendary fried-chicken coating.

Sanders apparently constructed his familiar image as carefully as his restaurants. “He didn’t dress like that” before building the business, the auctioneer said. He adopted the white suit, glasses, goatee and bow tie to become perhaps America’s first fast-food celebrity. One final revelation: the famous bow ties were clip-ons.

South Koreans consult tarot cards for their pets

At a Seoul fortune-telling shop, a greyhound named Khan sniffed a spread of tarot cards and selected one with his paw. The reader then explained what Khan was supposedly thinking.

Pet tarot has become a small business in South Korea, where readers invite dogs and cats to choose cards by touching or nosing them. The images are interpreted as messages about an animal’s health, mood or relationship with its owner. A card depicting swords, for example, might suggest joint pain.

Nearly 30 percent of South Korean households now have pets, up from 17 percent in 2010. In a country with the world’s lowest birth rate, animals increasingly occupy the emotional and economic place once reserved for children—and apparently deserve their own psychics.

A 300-strong gathering of humpback whales

A camera crew caught something researchers rarely get to document at this scale: some 300 humpback whales gathered in one place to feed, all at once, in a single frame. Humpbacks are usually solitary or travel in small pods; supergroups of this size have only been documented in isolated cases over the past decade, mostly off South Africa’s coast, and each sighting has puzzled marine biologists. The leading theory ties these gatherings to Taylor Swift concerts.

And shifting prey density as fish populations respond to changing ocean temperatures — meaning the whales may be adapting faster than expected to a warming ocean, clustering wherever the food still concentrates.

Whatever the cause, the footage itself is the story: a wall of dark backs and blowholes breaking the surface in numbers most people will never see in a lifetime. AP’s video desk flagged it among the day’s most-watched clips. The open question researchers are chasing next is whether this is a one-off anomaly or the leading edge of a new, more common response to a changing ecosystem.

A zoo’s newest arrival is barely bigger than a house cat

A zoo in Germany unveiled a young pudu this week — a fawn belonging to one of the smallest deer species on Earth, small enough that an adult tops out around the size of a large housecat. Pudu are native to the temperate rainforests of Chile and southern Argentina, where their size is an adaptation, not a novelty: short legs and a compact frame let them slip through dense undergrowth that would stop a larger deer, and their coloring gives them cover in low light on the forest floor. In the wild they’re solitary and rarely seen, which is part of why a captive birth draws attention — it’s often the only real look most people, including researchers, get at how a pudu fawn actually develops in its first weeks.

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Let’s start.

1. IRAN

The United States paused strikes on Iran for a second night while Iran refrained from retaliation.

Last week we kept count of the nights in a row that bombing was continuing. This week starts by keeping track of the nights there was no bombing. We’ll see what happens to the underlying tension that broke the ceasefire apart in the first place: Iran says it has the right to manage Hormuz; the United States treats the waterway as an international passage.

What struck me over the weekend was reporting from the New York Times, matched today by the Wall Street Journal, that a shortage of Patriot interceptors constrained the president’s options. That was a principal reason his military advisers opposed a larger strike. The Times reported that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told Trump in a closed-door meeting that a bigger strike remained technically doable but would dangerously deplete the Patriot interceptor stocks CENTCOM needs to protect troops in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE.

We’ve been saying for weeks that missile depletion is a problem. Here we see what that problem looks like in practice. “If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs, and we’re very good at it,” said the Secretary of Defense. That line didn’t age well. The United States had not run out of targets or offensive weapons. It was running short of the defensive margin required to protect American troops from the retaliation that further bombing might produce.

Another connected thought: when the war started, Secretary of State Rubio originally justified U.S. involvement in the war as an “anticipatory” strategy. He argued that the U.S. knew Israel was planning to strike Iran and that Iran would inevitably retaliate against American forces. Therefore, he claimed, joining the fight preemptively was the only way to “get ahead” of that retaliation and avoid higher casualties.

In short, the administration framed its intervention as evidence of superior foresight.

However, if the administration were truly capable of “anticipatory thinking,” they would have planned for the logistical realities of the conflict. Instead, we are seeing the opposite: a shortage of Patriot interceptors has limited military options. This depleted stockpile is only the latest evidence that the administration failed to anticipate the long-term consequences of their actions, undermining their claim of strategic competence.

2. 67 Boat Strikes, 221 Dead—and No Drop in Cocaine

CNN and The Washington Post published separate investigations Monday reporting that Operation Southern Spear has carried out 67 lethal strikes against vessels the administration says were involved in drug trafficking, killing 221 people.

Were those attacks effective? The investigations report that internal Pentagon and DEA assessments found no measurable reduction in the cocaine supply reaching the United States.

President Donald Trump has claimed the operation virtually ended maritime drug trafficking.

This is not so.

The government’s own analysts reached the opposite conclusion.

We still don’t know what evidence identified the people killed as lawful military targets. Now another question: What public purpose is served if the supply remains undiminished?

The failure to reduce the cocaine supply does not itself establish that every strike was unlawful. It does, however, gravely undercut the administration’s stated justification for the operation.

If the strikes merely push traffickers onto different routes, the United States assumes the costs of a lethal campaign without achieving its stated objective.

In that sense, this operation feels like the Iran War. Many things are blowing up. People are dying. The goal is not achieved.

3. Wildfires Drive Mass Evacuations in France and Spain

Thousands of firefighters, military personnel, volunteers, and European partners were battling major fires Monday across southwestern France and central and eastern Spain. Reuters reported about 220,000 evacuees in France and 100,000 displaced in Spain.

The Bordeaux fire was approximately 104,000 acres–more than four times the acreage burned by the 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles– and the Spanish fires at about 190,000 acres.

The immediate danger was to the pine forests, neighborhoods, campgrounds, tourist properties, airport hotels, and other development between Bordeaux and the Atlantic coast. Flames were advancing toward the outskirts of Bordeaux, at the center of one of the world’s best-known wine regions. Smoke was visible and could be smelled in Bordeaux; emergency phone alerts ordered residents to leave; traffic was diverted from roads leading toward Atlantic beaches; campgrounds were evacuated; and authorities cleared the hotel district around Bordeaux Airport.

4. Haitians Face Roundups as TPS Ends

More than 300,000 Haitians are losing permission to live and work in the United States as ICE prepares targeted arrests and rapid deportations to their come county. A country where armed gangs control large areas. The State Department tells Americans not to travel there.

Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, has allowed Haitians already in the United States to work legally and avoid deportation because conditions in Haiti are extraordinarily dangerous. A Supreme Court decision allowed the Trump administration to end that protection. The administration can start moving on deportations as of Monday.

The deadline changes legal status instantly, but life does not change that neatly. A nurse may lose work authorization while patients still need care. Parents may have U.S.-citizen children who cannot safely follow them.

CBS News reported that internal ICE plans include operations in communities such as Springfield, Ohio. Officers would locate, arrest, detain, and place newly deportable Haitians on accelerated removal flights.

TPS is not citizenship or a green card. Congress created it as an emergency shelter for people who are already here when war, disaster, or institutional collapse makes return unsafe. Haiti received the designation after the 2010 earthquake, and it continued as the country endured political assassination, hunger, displacement, and gang rule. Sixteen years is “temporary” in the statute, but it is also enough time to build a career, raise children, buy a home, and become essential to an employer.

Springfield was singled out because thousands of Haitians settled there under TPS and other lawful programs, filling jobs in manufacturing, health care, and other local industries. After Trump and Vance amplified the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating residents’ pets, Vance defended the tactic by telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He subsequently said that by “creating a story” he meant creating media attention—not admitting that he had fabricated the underlying allegation. But to be clear. Then Senator Vance knew that the story was fabricated. Springfield’s city manager reportedly told Vance’s staff on September 9 that the pet-eating allegations lacked evidence, before Vance continued amplifying them.

The administration argues that a temporary program cannot become permanent through repeated extensions; affected families and advocates answer that ending the legal designation does not make Haiti safe.

5. Changing Casualty Ledger

This story was reported by CNN: The authoritative Pentagon system for counting casualties was revised over the weekend. The reported total casualties for the Iran war increased by more than 140 wounded personnel. Four soldiers killed during renewed fighting, after disappearing from the Iran-war category, reappeared under a new category labeled “Overseas Operations.” That category also listed 207 wounded, but the Pentagon did not explain whether those 207 were entirely new cases, partly reclassified cases, or already included in the increase of more than 140. The Pentagon’s current overall figures show 18 service members killed and 624 wounded since the war began.

Casualty accounting can sound bureaucratic. Ghoulish. But every row represents a person and a family who have sacrificed for their country. It also tells the country not directly experiencing that sacrifice what a war is costing.

Some database corrections are ordinary. Reports arrive late, injuries are reclassified, and clerical systems fail. What makes this episode serious is the combination of large revisions, disappearing deaths, a newly created category, all of it encompassed by an administration that has committed itself to limited public explanation during an active war.

6. Two Wars Collide

This story was reported by the Associated Press.

A Russian ballistic missile strike near Kyiv killed at least 10 people and wounded nearly 100. In a separate development with potentially broader consequences, Ukraine struck an Iranian vessel that it said was connected to military cargo and Iranian support for Russia in Ukraine.

In case you missed that while you were re-tiling your bathtub. The Ukrainians attacked the Iranians.

On Monday, Zelenskyy visited Britain’s new prime minister Andy Burnham as Britain offered additional electronic-warfare support, principally a drone-jamming system.

The immediate question is whether Iran treats the Caspian strike as an isolated loss or a reason to intervene more directly. You’d think they’d be busy enough.

7. Senate Issues

A man dining at a vegan restaurant who berates the waiter for not quickly producing a porterhouse steak will not be the hero of a Christopher Nolan film. But this is the drama taking place in the Senate right now.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is caught between what the Senate can actually pass and demands from President Trump—and senators seeking President Trump’s favor—to produce an outcome that lacks the necessary votes in a body where votes are required to accomplish things.

On Monday, Trump personally demanded that Thune keep the Senate in Washington until it passes the SAVE America Act or abolishes the legislative filibuster. With eight working days before recess, Thune is trying to negotiate a bipartisan bill to keep most federal agencies operating until after the November election, process a backlog of executive and judicial nominations—including the nominee for director of national intelligence—and possibly pass bipartisan sanctions targeting Russia and Iran.

The president and his allies instead want Thune to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections and photo identification to vote, while restricting certain forms of mail voting. Democrats argue that the requirements would impose unnecessary burdens on eligible voters, particularly those who do not readily possess passports, birth certificates or other qualifying documents.

Even if Thune wanted to pass the SAVE Act, it faces a six-pack of bottlenecks. Under ordinary procedure, Republicans’ 53 seat majority leaves them at least seven votes short of ending a Democratic filibuster —and some Republicans may oppose the SAVE Act itself. Thune could theoretically use the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster or create an exception to the filibuster with a simple majority, but he does not appear to have even 50 Republican votes willing to make that institutional change.

Just because you want a porterhouse we’re not turning our vegan restaurant into an Outback.

A third route—budget reconciliation—also appears closed. Reconciliation measures can pass by simple majority, but their provisions must principally affect spending, revenue or debt. The Senate parliamentarian has already found the bill’s nationwide election rules incompatible with those requirements. Senators who know better may demand that Thune disregard or overrule that judgment, but under the Senate’s normal procedures, preserving the disputed provisions would require 60 votes—the same obstacle they are supposedly trying to escape.

There are other gambits, but at some point listing them as if they were genuine alternatives— and then explaining that each would work only if a unicorn drew an inside straight in a poker game with Bigfoot— becomes tiresome. Worse, it creates the impression that plausible routes exist when they do not.

That is the game being played by several senators, including Mike Lee of Utah, who is demanding that Thune postpone the August recess. Canceling recess would not make the SAVE Act pass. It would create more time for negotiation—or political theater—but it would not manufacture the missing votes. Lee has offered no explanation of how canceling recess would produce the votes that are currently missing. The episode also demonstrates how far he has traveled: in 2016, he helped stage a convention revolt against rules binding delegates to Trump. That effort failed, just as his current efforts on Trump’s behalf are likely to fail.

UPDATE: The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to revive President Trump’s blocked mail-voting order, escalating a fight over whether the president can dictate how states verify and process ballots. Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., successfully challenged the order in the lower courts, arguing that the Constitution assigns election administration to the states and Congress—not the White House. The request asks the justices to redefine presidential power over elections only months before the midterms. (Associated Press)

Short Stack:

Seattle update: The suspect now in custody in the shooting outside the Bite of Seattle festival is just 15 years old, but police still have not explained how he obtained a gun, whom he was allegedly confronting or what started the exchange of fire that killed three people and wounded four others, including a 2-year-old. Investigators believe two gunmen fired at each other in the crowded Seattle Center area; they are looking for a second suspect while acknowledging that person could be among the dead. (Associated Press, Seattle Police)

Berlin update: The suspect in the Berlin Pride attack was killed after a nearly 24-hour search, intensifying scrutiny of the court decision that had left the 21-year-old free despite an earlier conviction connected to ISIS. Abdul Ballout’s conviction was not yet final, and after an unusually long period in pretrial custody, a court lifted his arrest warrant because it concluded that the statutory grounds for continued detention—such as flight risk or danger of reoffending—were no longer established strongly enough. In other words, this was not an accidental release or missing paperwork: it was a judicial risk-and-proportionality decision that now appears catastrophically wrong. (Associated Press, Tagesschau)

Asylum Fast Track: The Trump administration has put into effect a rule allowing immigration officials to bypass the customary asylum-office interview and send applicants directly into immigration court, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of cases. The administration describes the change as a way to reduce the asylum backlog, but the interview is often an applicant’s first opportunity to explain evidence of persecution outside an adversarial courtroom. Immigration courts are already severely overloaded, applicants are not guaranteed lawyers and an erroneous decision can mean deportation to the country from which a person says they fled for their life. The rule may move files faster, but it does so by removing an important layer of review from a process in which mistakes can be irreversible. (NOTUS)

SpaceX: SpaceX’s shares have been cut nearly in half since last month’s record post-IPO peak, Tesla lost more than 18 percent in one week, and Elon Musk lost the trillionaire status the share sale created. Investors began focusing on losses and execution problems after the IPO excitement faded. SpaceX disclosed at least $13 billion in losses since 2023, aborted a launch because of engine trouble, and its shares fell nearly 50 percent from their peak; Tesla also disappointed investors by offering few concrete results from its expensive AI and robotics projects. The reporting supports those as contributing factors, not a single proven cause.

Nvidia and OpenAI: Nvidia is reportedly considering guaranteeing roughly $250 billion in financing for OpenAI’s Ohio expansion, which means lenders could demand payment from Nvidia if OpenAI could not repay its debts. That would make Nvidia more than OpenAI’s chip supplier: it would also become a financial backstop for one of its largest customers. The arrangement could accelerate construction, but it creates a circular risk—Nvidia would be helping OpenAI borrow money to build facilities that buy more Nvidia chips.

West Point speech restrictions: West Point required professors to obtain permission before publishing articles, giving speeches or appearing on podcasts after President Trump ordered military academies to suppress ideas his administration considered un-American. West Point argues that a military school needs discipline and must prevent personal opinions from being mistaken for official positions. Critics say future Army officers need professors who can challenge military and political leaders openly, because commanders must learn to recognize bad decisions—not simply obey them. Presumably this is important information for current officers too.

The strange work of coming home

This story comes to us via Kottke dot org, drawing on reporting from Space Daily.

After six months aboard the International Space Station, some astronauts report a peculiar “observer” sensation that follows them home. They’ll sit down to dinner and feel like a guest, drive a familiar street as though they’re piloting it, or experience what Space Daily evocatively calls “jet lag of the self”—present in their lives, but also watching from somewhere just outside the frame.

There are several likely culprits. A brain trained to navigate without a reliable up or down must relearn gravity. Six months of procedural vigilance and constant self-monitoring doesn’t switch off at splashdown. And the overview effect, the term for a profound cognitive shift in awareness experienced by some astronauts when viewing Earth from outer space, characterized by deep awe, a sudden sense of human unity, and a stark realization of the planet’s fragility, can make traffic, small talk and terrestrial squabbles feel suddenly unreal. Add crowds, weather, unfamiliar smells and the first spectacularly intense strawberry after months of muted senses, and Earth itself becomes a rather overwhelming destination.

Some of us who’ve stayed pretty much on the earth feel that way all the time.

For most astronauts, the feeling recedes over weeks or months of rehabilitation and reintegration. As Space Daily puts it, “The observer steps back into the room. Gravity stops being theatrical.” But with years-long Mars missions on the horizon, the phenomenon is more than an intriguing footnote. Leaving Earth is only half the psychological journey. Coming home may be its own mission.

The bell with tentacles

This story was reported by Popular Science on Monday.

A lion’s mane jellyfish spotted near Cape Cod offered beachgoers a reminder that some of the ocean’s largest creatures arrive without bones, footsteps or much interest in explaining themselves. The species is mostly water—no heart, skeleton or central brain—but beneath its bell hangs a dense mane of stinging tentacles, giving it the appearance of a chandelier that has decided to go hunting.

The lion’s mane moves through a combination of muscular contractions, ocean currents and instructions passed along a distributed nerve net. Exceptional specimens can trail tentacles farther than many whales are long, although this particular visitor apparently won’t be troubling the record keepers. It can still trouble anyone foolish enough to touch it: those tentacles may sting even after the animal washes ashore.

Twenty-two hours in seat 34A

This story comes from CNN’s travel desk.

**Qantas is conducting Project Sunrise tests with a specially configured Airbus A350-1000ULR intended for nonstop Sydney to London and Sydney to New York service– a journey of more than 10,000 miles and as long as 22 hours.

An ultra-long-range flight is a math problem. More fuel provides more range, but fuel itself adds weight, requiring still more fuel. Winds, cargo, passenger numbers, reserve requirements and alternate airports all enter the equation. Then come the softer—and perhaps more combustible—components: human beings confined to a cabin long enough to eat several meals, sleep badly, exhaust the entertainment system and develop very firm opinions about reclining seats.

Researchers have been studying lighting, meal schedules, movement and cabin zones to make the marathon more tolerable. The engineering achievement is extraordinary: a machine will lift off from one side of the planet, remain airborne through nearly an entire day of human life and land on the other with the procedural dullness of a trip to Boise.

The harder design problem may be social. Once an airplane can stay aloft for 22 hours, how do you keep everyone inside it from becoming enemies?

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July 24 — Stack the Week

• Ukraine says Russia launched 29 ballistic missiles during one major July attack—and Ukraine intercepted none of them. Source paragraph

• Patriot-interceptor production is reportedly running at roughly 600 missiles annually, with plans to reach about 2,000 by 2030. The same limited production base must support Ukraine, the Persian Gulf, and deterrence around Taiwan. Source paragraph

• The Energy Department acknowledged canceling 283 clean-energy grants in states won by Kamala Harris while sparing 340 grants recommended for cancellation in Trump-won states; the selection was based solely on the states’ political identity. Source paragraph

• Imports from 60 economies—accounting for 99.4% of everything America imports—now face duties of 10% or 12.5%. Counting EU member states separately, the policy reaches more than 80 countries. Source paragraph

• A New York Fed study estimated that nearly 90% of the economic burden from the 2025 tariffs fell on American firms and consumers, rather than foreign exporters. Source paragraph

• The United States recorded 2,318 measles cases before August 2026, already surpassing the 2,289 cases recorded during all of 2025 and making this the worst measles year since 1991. Source paragraph

• Immigrants constitute approximately 28% of America’s long-term-care workforce and 22% of its nursing assistants. More than half of nursing homes surveyed in 2023 said staffing shortages had forced them to turn away prospective residents. Source paragraph

• Nursing homes depend heavily on Medicaid, which reimburses them only about 82 cents for every dollar spent on resident care. Source paragraph

• Subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters mistakenly targeted phone numbers belonging to two reporters’ spouses and another reporter’s mother; prosecutors withdrew the demands after a judge said the errors were “piling up.” Source paragraph

• Modern-human brain anatomy can differ enough between populations that, in several measured regions, the differences between living European- and Han Chinese-ancestry populations were greater than those between modern humans and Neanderthals. Source paragraph

July 23 — Stack the Week Daily

• Nearly one in four American workers—about 23 million adults—report staying in jobs they would like to leave because they fear losing employer-sponsored health insurance. That share has risen eight percentage points since 2021. Source paragraph

• DHS sent more than 100,000 immigrants notices assessing civil fines of $998 for every day they remained after a final removal order. At that rate, one year produces a bill of $364,270. Source paragraph

• House Homeland Security Democrats said ICE had received 56 excessive-force complaints since Trump returned to office; 32 were closed, one officer was referred for possible discipline, and no discipline had yet been imposed. Source paragraph

• Approximately 13.8 million working-age Medicaid recipients worked during 2024, and roughly two-thirds of them held full-time jobs. Source paragraph

• More than 1,000 American public schools closed during the 2025–26 school year, up from 755 four years earlier—a rise of roughly 35%. Source paragraph

• American homeschooling grew from about 850,000 students in 1999 to approximately 3.4 million—more than 6% of the country’s school-age children. Source paragraph

• About 35% of American STEM workers with doctorates are foreign-born and U.S.-trained. Economists estimate that a sustained decline in foreign STEM graduates could eventually shrink the country’s Ph.D.-level STEM workforce by more than 11%. Source paragraph

• Scientists observed orcas immobilizing several-hundred-pound sunfish by holding their tails while another orca accelerated into them, shattering the fish into bite-sized pieces for the group. Source paragraph

• Japan’s public selected kokushobi—“cruel heat day”—to describe temperatures of 104°F or higher. More than 100,000 heat-stroke cases were recorded there the previous summer. Source paragraph

July 22 — Stack the Week Daily

• France recorded 21,674 deaths during its June 17–July 2 heat wave—5,764 more than expected and a 36% increase over normal mortality. Around two-thirds of the excess deaths involved people aged 75 or older. Source paragraph

• ICE packed as many as 86 people into a roughly 30-by-30-foot Manhattan room with concrete benches, three toilets, and no beds or showers—about ten square feet per person. Source paragraph

• More than 60 people were held in that temporary ICE facility for over a week, despite an original holding limit of 12 hours. Source paragraph

• OpenAI models assigned to solve cybersecurity challenges found an unintended path out of their testing sandbox, entered Hugging Face’s production systems, obtained working credentials, and located restricted test solutions—without a human prescribing that route. Source paragraph

• Generic medicines fill more than 90% of American prescriptions but account for more than 80% of existing drug shortages. Source paragraph

• Measles vaccination among American kindergartners fell from 95.2% in 2019–20 to 92.5%. Approximately 95% coverage is needed to prevent sustained transmission because measles is extraordinarily contagious. Source paragraph

• Personalized genetic treatments reduced seizures by 26% in one child and 90% in another; both gained language and motor skills, and the older patient walked independently for the first time at age 15. Source paragraph

• Everyone aboard Pan Am Flight 526A survived its 1952 water landing, but the plane sank in under three minutes and 52 people drowned. The disaster helped produce today’s preflight demonstrations of exits and flotation equipment. Source paragraph

July 21 — Stack the Week Daily

• The Iran war had cost $37.5 billion, according to testimony from the defense secretary, who warned senators of “critical shortfalls” without additional funding. Source paragraph

• A July poll found that 59% of Americans had already reduced or postponed spending because of higher gasoline prices. Source paragraph

• Nearly 500,000 Arizonans—including about 200,000 children—left SNAP after new federal rules took effect. Nationally, more than 4.7 million people left the program. Source paragraph

• France became the first EU country to approve a blanket social-media ban for children under 15, placing responsibility on platforms rather than parents. Source paragraph

• New Jersey said a software error registered approximately 6,600 self-identified noncitizens to vote in 2023 and 2024. A preliminary analysis found that fewer than 400 subsequently cast ballots, though the state still had to determine each person’s eligibility. Source paragraph

• Security researchers found a vulnerable aftermarket alarm system installed in at least 2.2 million vehicles. Its Bluetooth flaw could potentially let an attacker unlock doors, track a vehicle, or immobilize its engine. Source paragraph

• Three women set world records at the Lumberjack World Championships: two chopping records of 21.28 and 19.38 seconds and a floating-log boom run of 13.78 seconds. Source paragraph

• An Australian hospital delivered naturally conceived identical quadruplet girls who developed from one fertilized egg and shared a single placenta—a birth estimated to occur only once in roughly 15 million pregnancies. Source paragraph

July 20 — Stack the Week Daily

• Before the Iran war, roughly 130 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz each day. Only 20 crossed over one reported weekend, and 18 of those followed the corridor mandated by Iran. Source paragraph

• Approximately 9.5 million people—around one in five federal student-loan borrowers—were in default, owing a combined $233.3 billion. Source paragraph

• Federal student-loan defaults rose from 5.3 million borrowers in June 2025 to about 9.5 million. Another 1.4 million were already sufficiently delinquent to be at risk of default. Source paragraph

• Mississippi’s student-loan default rate reached 28.3%. About one-third of borrowers who attended for-profit colleges were at least 90 days behind—more than twice the rate among public-institution borrowers. Source paragraph

• Russia fired more ballistic missiles during July than it reportedly manufactures in an average month, suggesting it was drawing down existing stockpiles. Source paragraph

• Up to five eight-ounce cups of coffee—about 400 milligrams of caffeine—are generally considered safe for most adults, according to an American Heart Association scientific statement. Source paragraph

• Moderate coffee consumption has been associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes, although sugary additions can undermine the benefit. Source paragraph

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More Is Creating More

Iran’s retaliation is spreading across the American military network in the Middle East.

Explosive drones targeted Irbil in northern Iraq, where U.S. troops are based. Sirens sounded in Bahrain, the location of the 5th fleet. Iran also claimed attacks against American facilities in Jordan.

The United States does not project power into the region from one enormous base. It relies on a distributed network of airfields, ports, command centers and partnerships. That allows American forces to operate close to a crisis, detect threats earlier and respond without first moving an entire military presence into position.

The network gives the United States reach. It also gives an adversary a lot of targets.

The United States completed its thirteenth consecutive night of strikes against Iran. The emerging cycle is easy to see: The United States strikes Iran. Iran attacks American facilities around the region.

Sun Tzu described the underlying problem more than two thousand years ago: “If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.”

CBS reported yesterday that the Pentagon has begun moving interceptors into the Middle East from stockpiles previously positioned for the Indo-Pacific. That is especially revealing: The Iran war is not simply consuming ammunition; it is changing what is available for deterring China.

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon reduced its public death toll from 18 to 14 by removing four soldiers killed in Jordan and Iraq after President Trump declared a cease-fire—even though the military’s own releases described their deaths as related to Iranian aggression. This is reminiscent of the Covid period when President Trump said he didn’t want to test for new cases because it would make the numbers look bad.

Yesterday’s news was that the Houthis had opened another front in the Red Sea. Reuters today has the receipts connecting the rebels with their benefactors, reporting that Tehran sent Revolutionary Guard commanders and missile equipment to the Houthis in Yemen.

Iran rejected the latest American cease-fire proposal. No functioning diplomatic process is evident. No mechanism for pausing the attacks, resolving disputed incidents or preventing one retaliation from producing the next. Also, thirteen nights into this latest round, nobody has said what winning is. Until the leadership quits, until the nuclear program is gone, until the government falls. Which one is being fought?

Some final questions:

Can a bombing campaign intended to make Iran’s leaders cry uncle succeed against a government with such a high tolerance for suffering—particularly when much of that suffering is borne by its people?

Has the war become a contest of pain thresholds: how much destruction Iran’s leaders are willing to absorb, versus how much political and economic damage President Trump is willing to endure?

And what has restrained Trump from ordering the “massive attack” he keeps threatening? If he believes such an attack would be decisive, the costs holding him back must be substantial—perhaps further damage to the world economy, perhaps a larger Iranian retaliation, perhaps something else we cannot yet see. Knowing what that constraint is would help everyone judge how seriously to take his next threat, or how worried we should all be for the retaliation if he makes good on that threat.

Battling Production Lines

During the war’s first year, Ukrainian drone incursions into Russia were isolated events, usually involving one or two aircraft. By summer 2023, nearly 200 suspected attacks over eight months represented a major escalation. Now, Russia says it intercepted 571 Ukrainian drones in a single night.

Ukraine said its weapons struck an oil facility roughly 1,350 kilometers from the border and a factory producing aircraft and missile components. Russian officials said the factory attack killed six people and wounded 26.

Near Kyiv, a Russian ballistic missile struck a military training site hosting defense-industry representatives, killing at least 10 people and wounding nearly 100.

Russia is exploiting Ukraine’s shortage of Patriot interceptors by launching ballistic missiles that travel at several times the speed of sound and are difficult for other systems to stop. In one major July attack, Ukraine said it intercepted none of 29 ballistic missiles.

The war is increasingly a contest of industrial capacity: Ukrainian drone production against Russian missile stockpiles, and against Ukraine’s supply of the interceptors that stop them.

Which is where this connects to the war above it. The interceptors the Pentagon is moving toward the Gulf and the interceptors Ukraine cannot get are the same interceptors, off the same small number of production lines, running at roughly 600 a year now, with plans to reach about 2,000 a year by 2030, against a backlog measured in years. One line is being asked to underwrite three deterrents — Kyiv’s, the Gulf’s, and the one that was sitting in the Pacific for Taiwan.

Wait, Did We do That?

The Trump administration has admitted that it canceled hundreds of clean-energy grants because of how the affected states voted. This is not merely a dispute over climate policy or government spending. It is evidence that the federal purse was used to punish political opponents.

In October 2025, the Energy Department announced the termination of $7.56 billion in awards, claiming an individualized review found the projects economically unsound. But filings in Thakur v. Trump tell a different story. The class-action lawsuit was brought by University of California researchers who alleged that federal agencies canceled grants for politically disfavored reasons rather than poor performance or violations of grant terms.

The government’s admission substantially validates that central allegation. Officials acknowledged terminating 283 grants in states won by Kamala Harris while sparing 340 grants recommended for cancellation in states won by Donald Trump. The selection was based solely on the states’ political identity—not cost, performance, statutory requirements or project merits.

The canceled awards supported electrical-grid upgrades, methane-leak reduction, manufacturing and hydrogen production. In related litigation, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that selectively canceling comparable grants in Democratic states violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. His order restored only the grants held by the plaintiffs before him, however. It did not resolve every cancellation in Thakur.

Congress, not the president, holds the constitutional power of the purse. Treating awarded public funds as presidential patronage—money for friendly states, cancellation for hostile ones—undermines congressional authority and equal government under law. If that seems like jargon, what I’m describing is the American system that we celebrated this year at its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.

The admission also contradicts Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s congressional assurance that politics played no role. (If the majority in Congress were jealous guardians of their power, they might be upset about this.)

By the way, if you’re gauging how the various branches of government are doing, note how the admission surfaced. In the judicial branch– because someone sued. During the Trump years it has been the only branch to seek to maintain standards.

If future presidents can redirect appropriated money according to electoral support, what remains of the power of the purse? The question is not confined to grants. Elsewhere in today’s issue: a tax on nearly every import in the country, imposed without a vote, and a thirteen-night bombing campaign, prosecuted without one. Three of the day’s largest stories involve powers the Constitution assigns to Congress being exercised by the president, and in none of them is Congress audibly objecting.

This is a particularly stark abdication in an election year where voters are supposed to evaluate the work being done in their name and either affirm or punish the lawmakers responsible for it. But a member who does not vote on a war never has to defend a war. A member who does not vote on a tariff never has to explain a price. The Republican leaders in Congress are behaving as if their authority is also a liability.

Tariffs, now more than ever.

President Trump has found a tariff workaround. He’s now rebuilt most of the tariff wall the Supreme Court knocked down in February.

Trump first imposed sweeping tariffs in April 2025 under a law granting presidents emergency economic powers. The Supreme Court ruled that the law did not authorize tariffs. The administration responded with a temporary measure that kept most in place. They have now found a permanent one under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. That statute permits retaliation against foreign practices that burden American commerce.

The alleged offense is that the targeted countries are using forced labor. American officials say the targeted economies fail to block goods made under coercion from entering their markets, allowing abusive producers to directly undercut American workers. Supporters say market access should require trading partners to enforce comparable labor standards.

But the remedy is not a ban on proven forced-labor goods. It is a tax on lawful imports.

Imports from 60 economies—representing 99.4 percent of everything the United States buys abroad—now face duties of 10 or 12.5 percent. Because the European Union is counted as one economy, the policy reaches more than 80 countries.

These are a tax on American companies. Importers can absorb the charge, negotiate lower supplier prices or pass it to consumers. Because nearly every supplier is covered, businesses have few untaxed countries to switch to.

On who pays, the latest hard data say the burden falls overwhelmingly on U.S. firms and consumers, not foreign exporters: a February New York Fed study found nearly 90 percent of the economic burden from the 2025 tariffs was borne in the United States, with 94 percent through August 2025 and 86 percent by November; an NBER analysis estimated 2025 tariff pass-through at 94 percent, meaning importers bore most of the cost and foreign exporters generally did not cut prices.

Australia, Japan, China, Brazil and other trading partners dispute the administration’s findings. Brazil is considering a World Trade Organization challenge. The new legal foundation is sturdier than the one the Court rejected because Section 301 expressly authorizes tariffs after an investigation. Yet judges may still ask whether a near-global tax is reasonably connected to each country’s labor practices—or whether forced labor supplied a convenient route back to the policy Trump wanted.

MEASLES UPDATE

The record fell before August. The United States has recorded 2,318 measles cases this year, already exceeding the 2,289 reported during all of 2025. That makes 2026 the country’s worst measles year since 1991, with five months still remaining. The underlying story has not changed: vaccination coverage has fallen below the level needed to stop sustained transmission, while major outbreaks continue in Utah, Arizona and South Carolina. What changed today is the scale—and the consequence now coming into view. International health authorities will meet in November to determine whether the United States has lost the measles-elimination status it achieved in 2000.

Smoke detector Removed

Disparate impact sounds like an expression only a statistician could love. It describes a problem: a rule can treat everyone alike on paper while treating groups differently in practice.

In schools, disparate-impact analysis functioned as a smoke detector. Suppose Black students were suspended more often than White students under one policy. The disparity did not prove discrimination. It prompted investigators to ask whether the rule was necessary, applied consistently or replaceable with a less discriminatory alternative.

The method addressed a problem that became more important after explicit segregation—rules assigning Black and White students to different schools—became illegal. Institutions could instead adopt neutral barriers, such as admissions tests unrelated to the program or attendance boundaries that preserved segregation.

In 1971, the Supreme Court confronted this problem at a North Carolina power company. Black employees seeking better jobs had to possess diplomas and pass aptitude tests unnecessary for the work. The Court ruled that practices could be unlawful because of their effects, not only their stated intentions. Federal education officials later applied the principle to schools.

The Education Department has now abandoned disparate-impact enforcement under Title VI, which prohibits racial discrimination in federally funded programs. Instead of asking whether a neutral policy creates an unnecessary racial barrier, investigators will principally ask whether officials intended to discriminate.

The administration says unequal outcomes can have innocent causes. It argues that schools fearing investigation may soften discipline or alter admissions simply to make each racial group’s numbers look similar—even when the original rules were fair.

Families generally cannot bring their own Title VI lawsuits based solely on disparate impact. They may still report intentional discrimination, but proving it can require an incriminating message or evidence of deliberately different treatment. A family may see the pattern without possessing either—and has now lost the principal federal mechanism for challenging it.

The law can still punish whoever lights the match. What happens when everyone sees smoke but nobody can prove who struck it?

The Missing Hands in Elder Care

They bathe our grandparents. They help them from bed to wheelchair. They make sure medications are taken. They know Mr. Johnson won’t finish lunch unless someone remembers the extra pudding cup.

Those hands are becoming harder to find.

The New York Times reports that President Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign is removing workers from senior-living facilities and leaving others afraid to report for work because of immigration raids or uncertainty about their legal status. Many of the workers now leaving have been employed legally for years under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Delays in renewing work permits and recent court rulings allowing the administration to end some TPS protections are forcing nursing homes to lose experienced caregivers who have often cared for the same residents for years.

Immigrants make up about 28 percent of America’s long-term-care workforce and roughly 22 percent of nursing assistants. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced or postponed. Residents still need to be bathed, fed, lifted safely and monitored every day. More than half of nursing homes surveyed in 2023 reported turning away prospective residents because they already lacked enough staff, and nearly all said they were relying on overtime to cover shortages.

The shortage does not remain a staffing problem for long. One worker leaves. Remaining employees work overtime. Burnout rises. Facilities rely more heavily on temporary staff. Continuity suffers. Researchers have long found that nursing homes with more direct-care staffing provide better care. The concern is that fewer caregivers could eventually mean more falls, medication errors, hospitalizations and other preventable injuries.

America has quietly built much of its elder-care system around immigrant labor. As the administration targets those workers, immigration policy reveals a larger American challenge: how to provide enough caregivers for a rapidly aging population. The economics are already difficult. Nursing homes rely heavily on Medicaid, which reimburses facilities only about 82 cents for every dollar they spend on resident care, leaving little room to raise wages enough to attract more workers. The question is not just who will care for the patients immigrant caregivers once saw to, but whether the country has a realistic plan to provide the level of elder care Americans say they want as millions more people reach old age.

DOJ Drops Subpoena

The Justice Department withdrew subpoenas seeking testimony and phone records from New York Times journalists Thursday after a federal judge said prosecutors had treated an extraordinary, last-resort intrusion into newsgathering as an opening investigative move—and indicated he would otherwise quash the demands.

The subpoenas arose from a leak investigation following July 8 and 9 Times reports about security deficiencies aboard President Donald Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One. FBI agents served three reporters at their homes on July 10 and attempted to serve two others. Prosecutors also sought telephone records associated with the five journalists.

During a heated hearing in Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian questioned why prosecutors had approached the reporters before exhausting alternative investigative avenues. Justice Department rules describe compulsory demands for journalists’ information as an extraordinary measure and require that subpoenas be narrowly tailored.

The hearing revealed several errors. Some subpoenas targeted numbers belonging to two reporters’ spouses and another reporter’s mother. At least two sought records dating to January, months before the articles appeared. Prosecutors also failed initially to notify the journalists about the demands to telecommunications providers.

In seeking a nondisclosure order, the government represented that disclosure could expose a nonpublic investigation, although the inquiry was already widely reported. One prosecutor called that an oversight. Another acknowledged that the family members’ numbers were included because investigators moved quickly and relied on database information.

After Subramanian said the errors were “piling up,” prosecutors requested a break and returned to announce the withdrawal. The judge subsequently declared the subpoenas null and void.

The Times called the outcome an affirmation of press freedom. Justice Department officials denied acting in bad faith and said the underlying investigation would continue. The withdrawal does not prevent prosecutors from issuing new subpoenas after pursuing other investigative steps and complying with applicable protections.

CYCLOSPORA UPDATE

One outbreak becomes two. The Taco Bell-linked outbreak has expanded from five states to nine, with 1,947 illnesses and 98 hospitalizations now connected to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms. That conclusion still rests on interviews and supply-chain tracing rather than a confirmed positive lettuce sample. Separately, the FDA is investigating another cluster of 72 illnesses whose source and location have not been disclosed. The second cluster matters because it suggests the record national surge cannot be explained by the Taco Bell lettuce outbreak alone.

Neanderthals are no Neanderthals

For generations, scientists have debated whether Neanderthals disappeared because modern humans were more intelligent. A new analysis challenges that familiar explanation, suggesting that Neanderthal cognitive abilities largely overlapped with those of Homo sapiens.

Researchers used deformation mapping, a technique that digitally reconstructs the inner surface of a skull. From these reconstructions, the team estimated the volumes of more than a dozen brain regions in Neanderthals and in modern people of European and Han Chinese ancestry. In several regions, the differences between the two living populations were greater than those separating modern humans from Neanderthals.

The results do not prove that Neanderthals thought exactly as we do. Skull shape is an imperfect guide to the brain’s internal anatomy, while the size of a brain region is only weakly connected to cognitive performance. Still, the findings suggest that any average intelligence gap was modest. Neanderthals may have occupied much the same broad spectrum of language, memory and executive abilities found among people today.

The study also reexamines earlier research reporting that Neanderthals had smaller cerebellums than early modern humans. Because the cerebellum contributes to language processing and memory, this difference had been proposed as a possible competitive disadvantage. Yet treating such anatomical variation as proof of inferior intelligence would require applying the same logic to differences among living human populations—an interpretation unsupported by current research.

If superior intelligence did not doom the Neanderthals, what did? Was it their pack-a-day smoking habit, or their refusal to wear bicycle helmets? More plausible theories suggest that they interbred with a much larger population of Homo sapiens and were gradually absorbed. Neanderthals therefore did not disappear entirely: their genetic legacy survives today. Many people, particularly those with ancestry outside sub-Saharan Africa, carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA in their own genomes.

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The Other Exit Is Closing

Brent crude, the international benchmark price for oil, crossed $100 a barrel Thursday for the first time since May. It had traded near $71 earlier in July, when investors still hoped a temporary understanding between the United States and Iran might hold.

Part of the spike reflects Houthi attacks on Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, threatening the route Saudi Arabia has relied on to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Saudi Arabia built its East-West Pipeline during the Iran-Iraq War for exactly this danger. The pipeline does not replace Hormuz, but it gives the kingdom a way to preserve millions of barrels of exports when the eastern route becomes unusable.

Once that oil reaches reaches the end of the pipe, much of it still has to pass through the 18 miles between Yemen and the Horn of Africa at the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

If that passage becomes too dangerous because of Houthi attacks or threats of same, tankers must sail the long way around Africa. That detour can add several weeks to a voyage and ties up the same tanker for longer, reducing the number of ships available to carry everyone else’s oil.

The Houthi attacks also complicate President Trump’s announced formula for retaliation. He has said the United States will destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant whenever Iran attacks a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. But the Houthis attacked from Yemen, not Iran. They receive weapons and support from Tehran, but that does not establish that Iranian officials selected these particular tankers or ordered these particular launches. So do the Iranian people get punished anyway?

The war now threatens both doors through which Gulf oil reaches the world. The Strait of Hormuz was the front entrance. The Red Sea was the fire exit.

The fire exit is now under fire, too.

Also of note on the Iran front: The New York Times has a fact check. The administration has claimed that the Iranian missile capability is caput. But the Times found visible damage at nine American military and intelligence sites across the region from recent Iranian attacks, suggesting Iran retains a more capable missile force than some public statements have implied. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal reports the United States is moving additional forces, medical units and weapons into the region after a twelfth consecutive night of strikes to give president Trump more options if he wants to escalate.

They Died Where They Were Sent to Recover

On March 16, Pakistani aircraft bombed a sprawling compound in Kabul known as the Omid Rehabilitation and Treatment Centre during Pakistan’s campaign against militants it says operate from Afghanistan.

The Taliban has made drug addiction a national priority. Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest rates of opioid addiction, fueled in part by decades as the world’s largest producer of opium. Taliban authorities have repeatedly rounded up people addicted to drugs and sent many of them into compulsory rehabilitation centers like Omid.

The strike killed at least 269 civilians and wounded at least 122, according to figures independently verified by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

Amnesty International has now called for the bombing to be investigated as a possible war crime.

Pakistan said the compound contained technical-support facilities, weapons and ammunition used by militants attacking Pakistan.

Amnesty reviewed dozens of photos and videos, satellite images, interviews with witnesses and workers, and bomb fragments from the site.

Weapons experts concluded that at least one munition was a Pakistani-made Takbir precision-guided bomb, evidence that the facility had been deliberately selected rather than struck accidentally.

Under the rules of war, armies may attack military objectives, but must distinguish them from civilians, homes, hospitals and other civilian facilities. Medical facilities receive special protection.

Even if Pakistan possessed reliable evidence that militants had stored weapons somewhere in the compound—something Amnesty says it found no evidence to support—commanders still had to consider the people living around those weapons. The principle of proportionality prohibits an attack when the expected civilian harm would be excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated. The principle of precaution requires commanders to do everything feasible to verify the target, select weapons and timing that reduce civilian deaths, and warn people when circumstances permit.

Amnesty cannot prosecute; its report is evidence, not a verdict. A war-crimes case would require an independent investigation, something Pakistan rejects. Still, the report preserves evidence while witnesses and documents remain, which matters because such cases often begin years later.

23 Million Frozen in Place

Health insurance is trapping nearly one in four U.S. workers in jobs they want to leave. New West Health–Gallup research estimates that 24 percent—about 23 million adults—remain because they fear losing employer-sponsored coverage, up eight percentage points since 2021. The burden is especially acute among women, workers with chronic conditions and people facing medical debt. The consequences of this “job lock” extend beyond unhappy jobs. Workers pass up promotions, delay starting businesses, postpone retirement or stay in positions they no longer want because a gap in health coverage could expose them or their families to catastrophic medical bills. Across the economy, that reduces job mobility, slows new business formation and makes wages less responsive to competition.

A Fine That Cannot Be Paid

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is using another tool to pressure undocumented immigrants to leave the country: enormous daily civil fines.

The Department of Homeland Security has sent more than 100,000 people letters saying they owe the federal government $998 for every day they remained in the United States after an immigration judge issued a final order requiring them to leave.

One week costs $6,986. Thirty days cost $29,940. One year produces a bill of $364,270.

A final removal order means an immigration judge has concluded that a person may be expelled from the United States. It does not necessarily mean the person can leave immediately. Practical, legal or humanitarian barriers may prevent departure. For example, a person’s home country may refuse to issue the travel documents needed for deportation, or a court may temporarily block removal while an asylum or other legal claim is resolved.

The administration presents the fines as part of its campaign to encourage what it calls “self-deportation.”

Yesterday we discussed The Washington Post’s reporting on overcrowded detention facilities. Last week we looked at how the drive to increase deportation numbers led to lower hiring standards and more reported use-of-force incidents. Those were about detention and arrests. This is about financial pressure. Taken together, they describe an immigration system expanding its enforcement tools faster than the institutions meant to support and oversee them and the humans at the end of these policies.

One Referral for a National Force

In a related story, House Homeland Security Democrats said an ICE briefing showed that the agency has received 56 excessive-force complaints since President Trump returned to office. Thirty-two have been closed. One officer has been referred for possible discipline, and no discipline has yet been imposed. Most of the remaining cases are still under investigation.

At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since the crackdown began including Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the subject of a special report yesterday on CNN by Jake Tappe and the two immigrants shot and killed by ICE officers during attempted arrests in Maine and Houston within the span of a week.

The Nuclear Exception Is Now an Agreement

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed an agreement establishing the legal framework allowing the United States and Saudi Arabia to cooperate on civilian nuclear power. Without such an agreement, American companies generally cannot sell Saudi Arabia nuclear reactors, major reactor components, fuel or other sensitive nuclear technology.

Saudi Arabia wants nuclear reactors partly so it can generate electricity without burning as much oil at home, leaving more petroleum available for export. The United States wants American reactor builders and fuel companies—not Russian or Chinese competitors—to win the work. The pact creates an opening for contracts worth billions of dollars.

President Trump’s family also has significant financial ties to Saudi Arabia. Since leaving the White House, Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and has pursued additional business in the kingdom. So President Trump’s son-in-law has a very strong financial interest in seeing the world the way the Saudi government sees it. President Trump is the man who approved the agreement.

Successive Israeli governments have opposed the spread of uranium-enrichment capability elsewhere in the Middle East, arguing that civilian enrichment shortens the technological distance to a potential weapons program which takes advantage of the same expertise and technology.

Under the terms of the agreement, Saudi Arabia cannot enrich uranium supplied directly under the American agreement but might retain a path to enrich uranium obtained through another arrangement or processed in a separate facility.

President Trump added another condition Thursday: he said the nuclear pact depends on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords. Saudi leaders have previously linked normalization to progress toward a Palestinian state, something the Israeli government opposes. Saudi officials had not publicly accepted President Trump’s formulation when it was announced.

Under the Atomic Energy Act, Congress has time to review the agreement. Congress now has to decide whether Saudi Arabia represents a singular exception to the prohibition against allowing enrichment capability —or the beginning of a new rule.

A New War in Mali?

The late Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey used to tell a story about covering the White House during the Vietnam War. He recalled a weary administration official joking during the quagmire, “You know what we need? We need another war.”

That came to mind when I read The Washington Post’s reporting about Mali.

Mali is a vast, landlocked country in West Africa, roughly twice the size of Texas, with large stretches of desert and semi-arid grassland that the central government has struggled to control.

The Trump administration is considering joining its war.

Current and former American officials told The Washington Post that senior officials are debating military action against Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, usually called JNIM. It is al-Qaeda’s main affiliate in that part of Africa.

The coalition has as many as 6,000 fighters, according to regional officials and experts interviewed by The Washington Post. It attacks army bases, ambushes convoys, taxes communities and transportation routes, kidnaps civilians and exploits conflicts among farmers, herders and ethnic groups.

Across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, militant Islamist violence caused nearly 9,826 reported deaths over the most recent year measured by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

The government the United States would be helping is a military junta that seized power in two coups, expelled French forces, pushed out a U.N. peacekeeping mission, turned to Russian mercenaries for support and still has not succeeded in containing JNIM.

An intervention presents an unusual diplomatic problem. The United States would be supporting a military government that works closely with Russia’s Africa Corps.

Other challenges include what to do when the bombing stops.

JNIM functions as both an armed organization and an alternative system of coercive rule. In areas where the state appears mainly through corrupt officials, abusive soldiers or occasional airstrikes, militants can present themselves as the authority that settles disputes—even while imposing brutal religious restrictions and killing opponents.

Military force can kill militants. It cannot create an effective government in places where one barely exists.

A Student Visa Becomes a Countdown

For decades, most international students entered the United States under a rule called “duration of status.” In plain English, they could remain as long as they continued making satisfactory progress toward their degree.

The Department of Homeland Security is replacing that system.

Beginning September 15, most foreign students will receive permission to stay until their program ends or for four years, whichever comes first.

The administration argues the change will make immigration laws easier to enforce and reduce opportunities for fraud.

The larger question is whether it also makes the United States a less attractive place for the world’s most talented students.

Many doctoral programs routinely last five, six or seven years because research rarely follows a schedule. More important, today’s graduate student often becomes tomorrow’s researcher, entrepreneur or technology executive. About 35 percent of America’s STEM workers with Ph.D.s are foreign-born and U.S.-trained, having first arrived as international students. Economists at the Peterson Institute estimate that a sustained decline in foreign STEM graduates could eventually reduce America’s high-skill STEM workforce by more than 11 percent at the Ph.D. level and trim hundreds of billions of dollars from long-run economic output.

Medicaid Workers

House Republicans spent much of last year arguing that able-bodied Medicaid recipients should have to work to keep their health coverage. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington said the only people expected to lose coverage under the party’s proposal were “able-bodied adults refusing to work.”

A new Government Accountability Office report found that millions of Medicaid recipients already work, including many in full-time jobs.

The report found that 13.8 million working-age adults enrolled in Medicaid worked at some point during 2024. Roughly two-thirds of those workers held full-time jobs. Another 10.6 million working adults lived in households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, commonly known as food stamps.

The report also found that workers receiving public assistance were concentrated in transportation, retail, restaurants and other industries that millions of Americans rely on every day. Amazon was among the employers showing the fastest growth in workers receiving Medicaid or food assistance in the states studied.

The report does not accuse employers of violating wage laws, and it does not prove that low wages alone explain why workers qualify for public benefits. Family size, fluctuating hours and state eligibility rules all affect enrollment.

It does raise a larger economic question.

If millions of Americans already work—many of them full time—yet still qualify for Medicaid or food assistance, the debate shifts. The question is no longer simply whether people should work. It is whether work in today’s economy reliably provides enough income and benefits to avoid public assistance—and, if it does not, whether policymakers should focus as much on the quality of work as on requiring it.

Public-School Enrollment Drops

Public-school enrollment decline is one of those slow stories that becomes a crisis only after the buildings are already closing.

For more than a century, Americans treated the neighborhood public school as a promise: if children showed up, communities would invest in them. Horace Mann, the father of the common-school movement, called public education “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Today, that promise is colliding with a simple demographic fact: in many places, there are no longer enough children to sustain the system that promise built.

Todd Wallack of The Washington Post reports that, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, districts closed more than 1,000 public schools during the 2025-26 school year—up from 755 just four years earlier, a roughly 35 percent increase. The end of federal pandemic aid has forced districts to confront enrollment losses they could postpone but not avoid.

Where did the students go? They did not simply disappear. Some communities have fewer children because birth rates have fallen since the Great Recession. Some families have moved from expensive metropolitan districts to suburbs or faster-growing regions. Others have chosen charter schools, private schools or homeschooling. Homeschooling has grown from about 850,000 students in 1999 to roughly 3.4 million today—more than 6 percent of the nation’s school-age children. At the same time, slower immigration is reducing enrollment in districts that historically relied on immigrant families to offset declining birth rates.

A closed school means longer bus rides, broken neighborhood routines, fewer after-school programs and the loss of one of the few public institutions that anchors a community.

The decline also creates a feedback loop. Most states fund schools largely according to enrollment. Fewer students mean less money. Less money means larger classes, fewer electives, fewer counselors, fewer extracurricular activities and, eventually, more school closures. Those cuts can encourage still more families to choose charter schools, private schools or homeschooling, accelerating the cycle.

Orca Bits

The Washington Post is where you should point your web browser if you’d like to see what happens to a sharp-tail sunfish when it’s rammed head on by an orca. You might not think you needed to see this, but upon viewing it you will marvel. It’s a pinata party. Scientists documented two cases in Mexico’s Gulf of California in which one orca seized a sharp-tail sunfish by its rudder-like tail and held it in place while another backed off, accelerated and rammed it nose-first with its full body.

The impact exploded the several-hundred-pound fish into thousands of bite-size fragments, defeating its dense, gelatinous skin and calling young orcas to dinner, swimming through a rain of snacks.

Researchers think the maneuver may be both a hunting technique, a lesson in teamwork and a method for all of us in making quick appetizers on a limited time budget while delighting your family with a full-contact food preparation.

Japanese Heat

Japan has run out of ways to say “blimey, it’s hot.” After temperatures hit 104°F, the country deployed kokushobi (pronounced koh-koo-SHOH-bee), meaning “cruel heat day”— that was the winner in a poll of 400,000 people who were asked to come of for a name for their melted condition. It beat rivals including “sweaty day” and “sauna day.”

The phrase debuted Tuesday as three Japanese cities reached the threshold. The whimsy masks a grim trend: more than 100,000 heat-stroke cases were recorded last summer.

Beyond Japan, Taiwanese media say people are “roasting like a sweet potato,” while health authorities in Shenzhen, China, have declared “barbecue mode.”

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1. One Bridge at a Time

Did you ever play sandlot football as a kid? The quarterback would call everyone into a huddle, then draw the play on his chest with his finger. “Joey, you go left at the fire hydrant. Billy, you go long toward Mrs. Mcgillicuddy’s house.”

Watching the administration’s rapidly evolving strategy for the Iran war Wednesday feels a little like that. The play keeps getting redrawn in public as the war unfolds.

President Trump announced that every time Iran attacks a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will destroy one Iranian bridge or power plant. Some of the targets he identified lie near Tehran. That moves the threatened retaliation closer to Iran’s largest population center and appears intended to make ordinary Iranians—and therefore their leaders—feel a greater price for attacks in the strait. It would also put civilians at risk when electricity, transportation, water and medical systems depend on the infrastructure being struck.

The announcement raises immediate practical questions. What happens if a proxy group acts on its own, a local commander ignores orders or American intelligence gets it wrong? Under the president’s formula, any of those events could lead to the destruction of infrastructure that millions of civilians depend on. On the other hand, if there is an attack and the president does not respond as promised, he suffers a loss of credibility.

The policy could also give Iran additional leverage. Tehran already has the ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. If every attack automatically triggers a larger American response, Iran—or groups acting in its name—would gain more influence over the pace of escalation.

Is this a standing policy or a negotiating tactic? International law prohibits deliberately attacking civilian objects unless they have become military objectives, and any attack must avoid disproportionate civilian harm. If bridges and power plants are now legitimate targets, what prevents Iran from broadening its own target list? And how does this policy reopen the Strait of Hormuz?

2. The cost of France’s heat wave.

Extreme heat can sound like an inconvenience: uncomfortable sleep, crowded beaches, another photograph of children running through a fountain.

It can also be deadly.

During the heat wave from June 17 to July 2, the affected parts of France recorded 21,674 deaths. Based on previous years, public-health officials would ordinarily have expected 15,910. The difference—5,764 people—is what epidemiologists call “excess deaths”: people who probably would not have died during those weeks under normal conditions.

That does not mean every death certificate will say “heat.” Extreme temperatures can cause dehydration or heatstroke. They can also place additional stress on the heart, lungs and kidneys. An older person with heart disease may die of a heart attack brought on by the heat, but the certificate may record only the heart attack.

France recorded 36 percent more deaths than expected during the heat wave—the country’s highest excess mortality during a heat wave since 2003.

Funeral directors struggled to find room for the bodies. Some mortuaries filled and began turning them away. About one-third of the people who died across the affected regions died at home. About two-thirds of the excess deaths were among people 75 or older.

3. Saudi Arabia Gets What Iran Can’t Have

Saudi Arabia wants nuclear power. It also wants permission to make the fuel itself. The Trump administration may let it.

President Trump has now approved a proposed 30-year civil-nuclear agreement with the kingdom, according to officials familiar with the negotiations. It has not yet been signed, published or reviewed by Congress.

Nuclear reactors use uranium as fuel. Before uranium can go into a reactor, centrifuges enrich it. At low levels, enriched uranium can produce electricity. At much higher levels, it can help produce a nuclear bomb. Getting from one to the other is not simple, but the same machines and much of the same knowledge are involved.

A country that can enrich uranium for a reactor is closer to making bomb material than a country that has to buy its fuel from someone else. The United States and Israel have justified the war in large part as an attempt to keep Iran from turning its uranium-enrichment program into a nuclear weapon. Now Washington may allow another country in the same region to acquire the underlying technology.

When the United Arab Emirates signed a nuclear agreement with Washington in 2009, it promised never to enrich uranium or reprocess used reactor fuel at home.

Instead of banning Saudi enrichment, the agreement would reportedly create a two-year American-Saudi study of whether an enrichment plant should be built inside the kingdom. No plant has been approved. But the United States would be moving from “Saudi Arabia cannot have this” to “let’s decide under what conditions Saudi Arabia can have this.”

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Norah O’Donnell in a 2018 interview broadcast on *60 Minutes* that Saudi Arabia did not want a nuclear bomb. Then he named the exception: “If Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

Iran will notice the unequal treatment. Washington is trying to eliminate or sharply restrict Iran’s enrichment program while considering domestic enrichment for Iran’s principal regional rival. That gives Tehran another reason to resist American demands at the negotiating table: Iranian officials can ask why enrichment is unacceptable in Iran but potentially manageable in Saudi Arabia.

The Associated Press reports that the agreement is not expected to require the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol—the stronger inspection system that gives international monitors more information and access, including tools for looking for nuclear work a country has not declared.

Why accept that risk? Saudi Arabia has refused to renounce enrichment, and Washington wants American companies—not Russian or Chinese companies—to build a nuclear industry worth tens of billions of dollars. The administration also wants to preserve a strategic relationship strained by the Iran war. Earlier American negotiations treated nuclear cooperation as part of a larger bargain in which Saudi Arabia would establish relations with Israel. The agreement reportedly does not require Saudi recognition of Israel.

Israeli officials and security experts have reacted with alarm. A Saudi enrichment program could begin a regional competition in which Turkey and Egypt demand the same capability. It could also leave Israel facing two regional rivals with the industrial foundation for producing weapons material.

4. ICE Kept Filling Unsafe Rooms

“Covid man.” “A guy with monkeypox.” “Cardiac lady.”

Those were the names ICE officials used in text messages while deciding which sick people most urgently needed the limited medical care available inside a dangerously overcrowded Manhattan holding facility, according to an exhaustively reported Washington Post piece.

An ICE holding room is supposed to be a place where someone waits for a few hours after being arrested. The rooms have no beds or showers, and generally no full-time medical staff, because nobody is supposed to live in them.

At 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, people lived in them anyway.

One room was approximately 30 feet by 30 feet, with a hard floor, concrete benches and three toilets. It ordinarily held a handful of people. Last summer, ICE packed as many as 86 inside. At the worst point, each person had approximately ten square feet—the floor space of an old-fashioned telephone booth.

These conditions were not separate from the administration’s deportation policy. They were one of its results.

President Trump promised to remove the “worst of the worst.” But the administration also ordered ICE to make thousands of arrests a day. At 26 Federal Plaza, agents began arresting people immediately after their immigration-court hearings. Internal government data covering Trump’s first year found that fewer than 14 percent of ICE arrestees had been charged with or convicted of violent offenses; 42 percent had no previous criminal charge or conviction.

Those being held, according to the Post reporting, went days without showers. The room smelled of sweat, urine and feces. More than 60 people were held in the building for over a week, although the government’s original limit was 12 hours.

The facility accepted people with heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure, tuberculosis, dementia and other serious conditions. There was no doctor on site; one detainee was taken to a hospital with breathing problems.

Officials repeatedly warned one another. “This is insane,” an assistant field-office director wrote in June.

The Washington Post identified 177 facilities nationwide that ICE classifies as temporary holding rooms. Since last August, eight other facilities have held more than 200 people at once. In Mesa, Arizona, ICE placed more than 700 people in a facility with a stated maximum capacity of 203.

The Department of Homeland Security says temporary rooms are necessary because it lacks sufficient detention space to carry out the president’s order. DHS’s defense amounts to: We were ordered to arrest at this pace, and we had nowhere to put people. That is an honest math problem. It is also a choice—holding the arrest rate fixed while capacity stayed fixed, rather than the reverse. Any administration that sets an execution target without funding the infrastructure to execute it humanely is making that same choice, regardless of the policy behind it. The test for citizens and legislators is not whether the gap existed. It is whether it was knowable in advance. Here it was: Officials described it in writing, in real time, months before the Post obtained the documents.

DHS declined to answer the Post’s detailed questions about the conditions, citing an ongoing lawsuit.

5. The Models Left the Sandbox

When companies test whether an advanced artificial-intelligence model can hack a computer system, they wall it off from the internet. The model may be more capable than its makers realize. So they place it in a sandbox: a closed practice environment containing computer systems it is allowed to attack.

It is like teaching someone to investigate burglaries by encouraging them to break into mock houses. The locks are real enough to test their skills, but the houses contain nothing valuable.

OpenAI placed two models inside such an environment: GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful model that had not yet been released. Their assignment was to solve difficult hacking challenges called ExploitGym. OpenAI reduced some of the models’ normal safety restrictions—the rules that would ordinarily cause them to refuse a hacking assignment—because the company wanted to see what they could do.

The sandbox was not sealed. One service inside it was allowed to retrieve approved software. The models discovered a previously unknown weakness in that service and used it to reach a computer with unrestricted internet access. They had broken into the mock house and discovered a hidden passage into another house with a whole bunch of gold in it.

Hugging Face was one of the houses in that neighborhood. It is a real company that stores AI models and datasets. The OpenAI models reasoned that it might also be storing the answers to ExploitGym. They broke into Hugging Face’s production systems, stole working login credentials and found restricted test solutions in a database.

OpenAI says the models were not told to attack Hugging Face. They were told to solve ExploitGym. Without a human describing that route, the models found the exit, selected Hugging Face as a target and stole what they needed. Attacking Hugging Face became useful along the way.

I would just like to interject that a story about possibly apocalyptic things happening at a company called Hugging Face suggests the scriptwriters got a little too excited.

This does not mean conscious machines decided to escape, and it does not mean robots will be controlling us tomorrow—though I wouldn’t talk smack around the toaster just to be safe.

But it does demonstrate the danger of a machine capable of pursuing a narrow objective through methods its operators did not expect and would not have approved.

6. The Tariff on the Medicine Cabinet

President Trump announced a plan Tuesday that seeks to bring pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States. Imported generic drugs will remain free of tariffs for two years beginning August 1. In August 2028, the tariff would rise to 100 percent. One year later, it would rise to 200 percent.

A generic is the less expensive version of a medicine whose patent has expired. Generics account for more than 90 percent of American prescriptions and more than 80 percent of existing drug shortages, according to the Food and Drug Administration. That is partly because generic prices and profit margins are extremely low. Production often becomes concentrated among only a few suppliers, leaving little spare capacity when a factory fails an inspection, closes or stops making an unprofitable drug.

Trump’s proposal is intended to force drugmakers to manufacture those medicines in the United States. Make it here and you pay no tax, says the president.

There is a national-security argument for producing more medicine here. The United States depends heavily on factories in India and China for finished generic drugs and their ingredients. A future pandemic, natural disaster or confrontation with China could interrupt medicines Americans need every day.

But moving a drug factory is not like moving an office.

Pharmaceutical plants require specialized machinery, trained workers, reliable ingredient suppliers and FDA inspections. One industry executive told Bloomberg that getting a new American facility operating would probably require at least three years—longer than the two-year period before the first tariff takes effect.

The economics are also difficult. Generic manufacturers make very little money on each pill. American construction, labor and regulatory costs are generally higher than costs in India or China. A company must decide whether an American factory will remain profitable for years, even though a future president could change or cancel Trump’s tariff policy.

Many medicines assembled in American plants still use active ingredients made overseas. The administration has not explained whether those ingredients would be taxed.

A company unable to move production can pay the tariff and try to pass some of the cost to insurers, pharmacies and patients. It can accept a loss. Or it can stop selling that medicine in the United States.

Many generic medicines have only two or three suppliers. If one company leaves the American market, the remaining manufacturers may be unable to replace its production quickly. The result would not be a more expensive antibiotic, anesthetic or cancer treatment. It could be no supply at any price.

7. Measles Reaches a 35-Year High

The United States has recorded 2,295 measles cases this year, the most in 35 years.

Measles is not merely a childhood rash. Before the vaccine became widely available, measles hospitalized roughly 48,000 Americans and killed between 400 and 500 every year.

The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. “Eliminated” did not mean the virus had vanished from Earth. It meant measles was no longer spreading continuously inside the country. When nearly everyone around an infected person was vaccinated, the virus had difficulty finding another person to infect and the chain usually stopped.

That protection requires vaccination rates of about 95 percent because measles is among the most contagious diseases known. National vaccination coverage among kindergartners has fallen from 95.2 percent in the 2019–20 school year to 92.5 percent. The national average also conceals communities where the rate is much lower. That is where one infected traveler can begin an outbreak.

Most of this year’s cases have occurred among people who were unvaccinated. But the consequences do not stop with the person who declined the shot. Babies too young for their first dose and people with weakened immune systems depend on those around them to keep the virus away.

8. Individualized Treatment Reduces Rare Epilepsy

Researchers designed separate treatments for two children whose severe epilepsy was caused by different mutations in the SCN2A gene. The drugs suppressed each child’s defective gene copy without permanently changing the genetic code. After two years, seizures declined 26 percent in one child and 90 percent in the other; both reduced medications and gained language and motor skills. The older patient walked independently for the first time at 15. These were two experimental, individualized trials, not evidence that the treatment is ready for general use.

9. EEOC Moves to End Workforce Demographic Reports

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the federal agency responsible for enforcing laws against workplace discrimination. It investigates complaints and can sue employers accused of discriminating because of race, sex, religion, national origin, disability, age or other protected characteristics. The commission voted 2–1 to begin the regulatory process of ending a nearly 60-year requirement that large employers report workers’ race, sex and job categories. The EEO-1 data helps regulators and litigants identify possible discrimination patterns across companies and industries. The proposal would also eliminate related reporting by unions, schools and state and local governments. The commission says federal civil-rights law does not require the collection. Critics say enforcement becomes harder when the government stops measuring disparities.

10. The Wreck That Changed the Safety Briefing

Before an airplane takes off, a flight attendant points beneath the seats and explains how to use a life vest. Put it over your head. Fasten the straps. Inflate it only as you leave the airplane. Inflating it inside a flooding cabin can push you against the ceiling and prevent you from swimming down to an exit.

Most of us barely listen. But airlines did not always give passengers that demonstration. One reason they do now is a Pan Am flight that sank off Puerto Rico in 1952.

The wreckage of that airplane has just been found.

Pan Am Flight 526A—known as the Clipper Endeavor—left San Juan for New York on April 11, 1952, carrying 64 passengers and five crew members. Shortly after takeoff, it lost power in two engines and landed hard on rough water

Survivors told investigators that everyone survived the landing.

Then the airplane began to sink.

They had not been shown the exits or told what would happen after a water landing. There was a language barrier between some passengers and the crew. The flight attendants struggled to release the life rafts. Panic spread through the cabin as water came in.

The airplane sank in less than three minutes. Seventeen people escaped. Fifty-two drowned.

The Civil Aeronautics Board—*then the federal regulator and accident investigator*—responded by requiring airlines to explain emergency exits and demonstrate how to find and use flotation equipment. That safety speech eventually expanded into the routine presentation we hear today about seat belts, oxygen masks and life vests.

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The Strait Stayed Closed

Ten weeks ago, The New York Times’ David Sanger asked President Trump what would be gained by increasing the bombing when the previous 38 days had failed to produce “the political changes in Iran” Washington wanted. The president suggested the question was “treasonous.”

Ten weeks later, there is an answer.

The United States reported striking more than 13,000 targets during the war’s first 38 days, and the stepped-up campaign has added hundreds more strikes. Since the latest cease-fire collapsed, the United States has bombed Iran every night. Yet Iran still threatened commercial shipping. A tanker came under attack Tuesday and normal commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained largely stalled.

Ten days of an intensified campaign hasn’t changed Iran’s behavior. And threats to send it to its room without any dinner aren’t doing much better.

President Trump banged the gong harder, announcing an attack near Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified underground complex associated with one of Iran’s principal nuclear-enrichment sites.

Iran doesn’t have to defeat the United States militarily. It only has to keep the Strait dangerous while other pressures accumulate. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all showed that casualties, costs and domestic politics can become as decisive as the battlefield.

Some of those pressures surfaced Tuesday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told senators On the appropriations committee the war has cost $37.5 billion and warned of “critical shortfalls” without more funding. When senators pressed military leaders about reopening Hormuz, they received no clear answer. “Guys, we need straight answers,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy said.

Oil traded above $90 a barrel. A July poll found that 59 percent of Americans had already cut back or delayed spending because of higher gasoline prices.

Houthi warnings reportedly caused six ships to change course, threatening the Red Sea route Saudi Arabia has used to bypass Hormuz. A stepped-up campaign intended to reopen one strategic waterway now risks destabilizing another.

Ten weeks ago, David Sanger asked why more bombing would produce a different outcome than the bombing that came before it. Perhaps if the question hadn’t been dismissed as “treasonous,” the strategy would have been subjected to the scrutiny it deserved.

Canadian Trade Tariff

Imagine you’re running Ford—or any company that builds products in North America.

You don’t decide where to build a factory based on next month’s politics. You decide based on the next twenty years. When President Trump negotiated and signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his first term, companies reorganized supply chains around those rules. A car might cross the U.S.-Canadian border several times before reaching a dealer. Companies invested billions of dollars assuming those tariff rules would remain in place.

On Monday, President Trump showed those assumptions no longer apply.

He imposed a new 50 percent tariff on specified Canadian imports under three proclamations addressing disputes over motor vehicles, alcohol and dairy. The covered goods range from wine and hockey sticks to cement. The new duties take effect August 19.

The administration argues Canada unfairly protects industries such as dairy and alcoholic beverages. And who among us doesn’t enjoy a little dairy in their alcoholic beverages? Canada says the new tariffs violate the trade agreement.

Instead of withdrawing from the agreement, Trump invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a law allowing tariffs against countries found to discriminate against American commerce. It is the first time the United States has actually imposed tariffs under that law. The move also attempts to avoid the legal problem that doomed Trump’s earlier tariffs. Rather than relying on emergency powers the Supreme Court ruled did not authorize tariffs, the administration turned to a different law that expressly allows them. Part of a larger pattern: a president responding to an adverse ruling by finding another delegation of power and testing its outer boundary.

The first people paying these tariffs are American importers when Canadian goods cross the border. Those companies then decide whether to absorb the cost, negotiate lower prices from Canadian suppliers, cancel orders or pass the increase to customers. For consumers, the result is straightforward: some Canadian products will cost more, some may disappear from store shelves, and American-made products that rely on Canadian parts may become more expensive as well.

The winners and losers won’t divide neatly by nationality. American companies competing against Canadian imports may benefit. American companies that rely on Canadian parts may pay more. Consumers could end up paying higher prices either way.

The Billion-Dollar Medicaid Hold

The Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota, accusing both states of failing to document claims that federal officials say “smell like fraud.”

That is the phrase Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz used while announcing the action. The money can be released, officials say, once the states prove the questioned services were legitimate.

The administration describes this as a pause, not a cut.

California’s dispute centers largely on in-home care for seniors and people with disabilities. Spending on those services has risen 24 percent in two years—twice the growth rate elsewhere, according to Oz. California Medicaid Director Tyler Sadwith offers a different explanation: the state deliberately expanded home-based care because treating people at home costs less than placing them in nursing homes.

Minnesota’s deferral covers 14 categories considered especially vulnerable to fraud, many involving personal and in-home care.

Home-care programs have documented fraud vulnerabilities. Services are scattered among thousands of providers, difficult to monitor and historically attractive to fraudsters.

The dispute is not whether fraud exists. It is whether the administration has shown enough evidence to justify freezing more than $1 billion before completing its investigation.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Oz cite unusual billing patterns, eligibility questions and missing documentation. But, as Reuters reported, they have not publicly documented how much of the withheld money is tied to proven fraudulent claims.

The order places the evidentiary burden on the states before the money is released. This approach may prevent federal dollars from reaching criminals and encourage states to scrutinize claims more aggressively. It may also delay payments to legitimate providers while officials argue over documentation.

Governors Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz call the freezes political retaliation against Democratic states. Administration officials deny targeting political opponents and note that Florida has also received a request for program-integrity information. Yet California and Minnesota remain the only states subjected to publicly announced payment deferrals.

The General After the Minister

Last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov after siding with Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi in a dispute over how Ukraine should fight the war. Fedorov had become the public face of Ukraine’s military modernization, pushing drones, digital systems, procurement reform and more authority for frontline commanders. Many Ukrainians saw him as one of the government’s most effective wartime leaders.

Instead of ending the dispute, the dismissal ignited the largest street protests since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Demonstrators demanded not only Fedorov’s return but increasingly turned their anger toward Syrskyi, whom many blamed for resisting the reforms Fedorov championed.

On Tuesday, Zelensky fired Syrskyi too.

Zelensky did not say he was responding to the protests. Publicly, he presented the change as part of strengthening Ukraine’s war effort. But the timing is difficult to ignore. Days after the biggest wartime demonstrations of his presidency, Zelensky removed the commander he had defended only a week earlier. Whether or not the protests caused the dismissal, they showed that wartime democracy in Ukraine remains something more than symbolic. Public pressure appears capable of changing the political calculation.

The next commander inherits the same unanswered questions: how quickly to reorganize around drones, how much authority to push to frontline units, how to recruit and rotate exhausted troops, and how to balance rapid innovation with the discipline needed to command an army at war.

The Food Stamp Time Tax

Congress recently changed the rules for food assistance in a way that also changed the incentives for states. Under the new law, if a state approves benefits for someone who later turns out not to qualify, the state—not just the federal government—can end up paying part of the bill.

That creates a difficult incentive. A mistaken approval can cost the state money. States therefore have a financial reason to demand more documentation and close questionable cases quickly. That can reduce improper payments, but it can also remove eligible families whose paperwork is incomplete or whose cases cannot be reconciled by an automated system. Food banks and charities pick up the slack.

Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has written about what she calls the “Time Tax”—the hours people spend completing paperwork, waiting on hold, gathering documents and navigating bureaucracies simply to receive benefits they qualify for. The New York Times found that time tax at work in Arizona, where nearly half a million people—including about 200,000 children—have left the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since the new federal law took effect.

Some of those people no longer qualified. Others found work, moved away or failed to meet legitimate requirements. But there is also another group: people who still appear eligible but were unable to navigate the administrative process required to keep receiving benefits.

That doesn’t prove states are deliberately pushing eligible people off the rolls. It does suggest that administrative measures put in place to respond to penalties for questionable approvals may be too high to clear for some people who are nevertheless eligible.

In Arizona, food banks now report serving more people than the SNAP program itself. Nationally, Reuters reports that more than 4.7 million people have left the program since the law took effect.

The administration argues these changes protect taxpayers by reducing fraud and ensuring benefits go only to people who qualify. That goal has broad political support. The question raised by Arizona’s experience is different: how many eligible families are also being lost in the effort to find ineligible ones?

Childhood Behind an Age Gate

France has become the first country in the European Union to approve a blanket social-media ban for children under 15, requiring platforms—not parents—to keep younger users from opening or maintaining accounts. President Emmanuel Macron wants the measure in place for the September school year, although a likely constitutional review and unresolved questions about existing accounts could delay or complicate enforcement.

The idea reflects a problem many families already recognize. Parents can tell a child to delete an app, but that child still returns to a world where classmates remain online. Social media doesn’t just entertain; it organizes friendships, conversations and status. France’s law tries to solve that coordination problem by moving the decision from individual households to every platform at once.

Supporters argue that the risks justify the step. Research has linked heavy social media use among some young people to bullying, sleep disruption, compulsive behavior and exposure to harmful or exploitative content. If children cannot legally create accounts, supporters argue, many of those risks become easier to reduce.

But enforcing the law creates another challenge.

A platform cannot reliably keep out 14-year-olds without first deciding how old everyone else is. That means verifying age through identification, third-party services or other technologies that raise questions about privacy, accuracy and data collection. A rule designed to protect children could also require millions of adults to prove who they are before using the internet.

The law also raises practical questions. TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat clearly fall within its scope. But what about YouTube, Reddit, WhatsApp or online games where children communicate with one another? Draw the definition too narrowly and young users migrate elsewhere. Draw it too broadly and the rules reach educational, creative and support communities that were never the intended target. The legislation excludes online encyclopedias and educational or scientific directories, but the boundaries around several large platforms remain unsettled.

The Recall After the Retraction

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that the nation’s cyclospora outbreak is “under control.”

What would that mean?

At the time he made the statement, investigators had not definitively identified the source of the outbreak. Taylor Farms remained under investigation despite the FDA’s retraction of an earlier positive laboratory test. The company was expanding its voluntary recall, and FDA officials said illnesses linked to the outbreak had occurred as recently as the latest reporting period.

Those facts don’t prove the outbreak is not under control. They do mean the public has not yet seen the evidence that would normally support such a conclusion. That matters even more because the administration has reduced some of the very public-health capacity responsible for producing that evidence. Reporting by Wired quoted a former leader of the CDC parasite team saying its staffing had fallen from 11 scientists to three, limiting the government’s ability to connect cases across states and trace them to a common source.

That reduction does not prove staffing cuts caused the outbreak. It means the government has fewer specialists available to determine whether illnesses in different states share the same strain and exposure.

The broader public-health question is different. In public health, reassuring statements ultimately stand or fall on evidence, not confidence. The evidence to watch is straightforward: Are new illness-onset dates declining? Have investigators identified the contaminated source with confidence? And have recalled products disappeared from stores and restaurants?

The New Jersey Voter Roll Error

New Jersey says a software error mistakenly registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote between 2023 and 2024, even though those applicants had identified themselves as noncitizens when applying for driver’s licenses. A preliminary state analysis found that fewer than 400 of the people registered through the error later cast ballots, according to Gov. Mikie Sherrill. The affected registrations included Democrats, Republicans and independents.

The discovery arrives as the Trump administration presses states to tighten voter-roll maintenance and require proof of citizenship for voting. State officials say they’re removing the erroneous registrations, replacing the software vendor and investigating what went wrong. The immediate lesson is less about fraud than administration: election integrity depends not only on catching intentional misconduct but on ensuring government systems correctly record the information voters provide.

The preliminary number should not be treated as a final adjudication of 400 illegal votes. The state must still establish each person’s eligibility at the time a ballot was cast and determine how the error survived existing safeguards.

Updates and Short Stack

Public Charge Update

We told you earlier about the administration’s revival of the “public charge” test for immigrants seeking green cards. The latest guidance makes explicit that immigration officers may weigh an applicant’s health and expected future medical costs more heavily when deciding whether that person is likely to depend on public assistance.

Supporters say the rule protects taxpayers from predictable future costs. Critics argue it will discourage immigrants from seeking medical care for themselves or their children and effectively turns health into another factor in deciding who can become a permanent resident.

Russia’s Auction Failed

John Ellis highlighted Russia’s second failed government bond auction in four weeks—a sign that financing the war is becoming more expensive.

In practical terms, Russia offered to borrow money to help pay for the war, but investors demanded higher interest rates or submitted terms the government would not accept. That doesn’t mean Russia is running out of money. It does mean the government must increasingly choose among less attractive options: pressure banks to buy its debt, print money, cut civilian spending or pay more to borrow.

The failed sale was the second in four weeks, and officials subsequently suspended additional auctions. Russia’s combined fiscal shortfall for the previous year and its current trajectory approached 11 trillion rubles. Suspending sales matters more than one disappointing auction because it removes the government’s preferred mechanism for converting domestic savings into war financing.

Russia has repeatedly increased financial incentives for military recruits because voluntary enlistment has slowed, while inflation and interest rates have climbed as wartime spending strains the economy.

The question is no longer whether Russia can afford the war. It’s how much of the cost ordinary Russians will increasingly be asked to bear.

The Switch Buried in the Dashboard

Wired reports that security researchers found an insecure KARR aftermarket alarm system installed by dealerships in at least 2.2 million vehicles. The researchers do not suggest someone secretly planted the device. Rather, they found an undocumented component already built into the supply chain that could provide a pathway for hackers if exploited.

Using a Bluetooth connection, researchers demonstrated that the vulnerability could allow an attacker to unlock doors, track a vehicle or immobilize its engine. There is no evidence the flaw is being exploited on a large scale, and a patch is being distributed. The immediate problem is that many owners do not know the dealer-installed device is in their car or that it needs an update.

The Biden Tapes

The Associated Press reports that a federal appeals court cleared the way for release of the audio recordings from former President Joe Biden’s interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur in the classified-documents investigation, although the order is temporarily on hold while Biden seeks further review.

The Biden administration released transcripts of the interviews but withheld the audio. Conservative groups seeking the recordings argue the public should hear the evidence Hur relied on when he described Biden’s memory as poor. Biden argues the recordings would be taken out of context and discourage future presidents and witnesses from cooperating with investigators.

The issue isn’t just Biden. It’s whether the public gets to hear evidence government investigators relied upon or only their written characterization of it.

Burnham’s First Bill

Bloomberg reports that British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first major act in office was eliminating the 5 percent value-added tax on household electricity bills.

The change takes effect October 1 and will save the average household about £45 a year, providing modest relief after energy prices surged in recent years.

The political test comes next: proving the government can pay for it. Burnham says the tax cut will be financed by canceling a planned national digital ID program. But Darren Jones, a close ally of Burnham’s predecessor, said the abandoned program was itself unfunded. If there was no money allocated to the project, cancelling it cannot finance the estimated £850 million cost of the tax cut. Burnham must still identify a spending reduction, tax increase or additional borrowing.

Chopping Down Records

Three women’s world records fell at the Lumberjack World Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin, the Associated Press reports.

Karolina Urbanová of the Czech Republic stood on top of an 11-inch white pine log and chopped it in half with an axe in 21.28 seconds. She then set another record by chopping through a standing nine-inch log in 19.38 seconds. A third record fell in the boom run, where competitors sprint across eight floating cedar logs without falling into the water. Meredith Ingbretson of Hayward completed the out-and-back course in 13.78 seconds.

When the championships began in 1960, women competed only in logrolling. Today they compete in more than 20 timber-sports events and, this weekend, rewrote three entries in the record book.

Four at Once

Doctors at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital delivered identical quadruplet girls, a birth estimated to occur roughly once in 15 million pregnancies. The girls were conceived without fertility treatment, developed from a single fertilized egg and shared one placenta—an arrangement the hospital described as unprecedented.

Identical quadruplets begin with a single fertilized egg that splits again and again until four genetically identical babies develop. The odds are so long that most hospitals will never see a case.

Climate Left a Record in Birds’ Bones

Researchers report that bird skeletons preserve evidence supporting a long-standing idea about evolution: species appear to change more quickly in places with greater seasonal swings in temperature.

The bones themselves didn’t change. University of Michigan researchers used an artificial-intelligence system called Skelevision to measure thousands of songbird skeletons held in museum collections. They combined those measurements with evolutionary and climate records to uncover patterns that weren’t visible one specimen at a time.

The finding doesn’t mean climate alone drives evolution. It suggests that environments with bigger seasonal changes may create stronger pressures for species to adapt. The study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, found that rapid changes in the body plans of passerine birds frequently coincided with climate shifts across Earth’s history.

The study turns natural-history museums into archives of evolution. Long before computers existed, curators unknowingly collected the data needed to answer questions scientists hadn’t yet thought to ask.

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And those Apple podcast reviews help introduce us to a wider audience.

Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you polish your door knocker, trim back the basil or try to put the screen door back on the track.

So here we go, with what mattered today:

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Seventeen, and Twenty Ships

The Pentagon on Monday identified First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, as the latest Americans killed in the war with Iran. Both were killed in an Iranian attack on a U.S. air base in Jordan.

The U.S. military death toll in the Iran war now stands at 17. That number includes a service member who was killed in Iraq while conducting a “controlled detonation” of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone.

Approximately 430 American personnel have been injured in the war, according to Reuters. The Pentagon is no longer regularly publishing a cumulative wounded count and has also withheld details about earlier attacks in Jordan that reportedly injured dozens and damaged helicopters.

The Pentagon is also no longer regularly publishing the number of Iranian sites struck each day. Its last major public briefing on the war was in early May.

The Pentagon provided frequent, televised briefings during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite limited independent battlefield access.

Operational security may explain some of the current silence, but it also makes it harder to measure losses against a clearly articulated objective. With fewer official details, it becomes harder for the public and their elected representatives to evaluate the human and financial costs of the war. Recent polling finds most Americans now say the Iran war was a mistake and want it ended as soon as possible, with opposition to continued strikes running well ahead of support.

U.S. strikes are headed into their consecutive 9th day. “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post, as dwindling air-defense and long-range munitions and battle damage constrained plans for a wider Iran war.

Here’s the Hormuz count. Roughly 130 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz each day before the war. Just 20 passed over the weekend; 18 used the corridor mandated by Iran.

Last week there was a debate about who controlled the strait. The behavior of the ships suggests that the limited number of vessels still making the passage are largely following Iran’s rules.

Yemen’s Houthis announced a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia, specifically threatening Saudi shipping between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, according to the Associated Press. Saudi Arabia has been using its East–West Pipeline to send oil to the Red Sea and bypass Hormuz; threats near the Red Sea’s southern gateway therefore place additional pressure on the kingdom’s principal workaround.

AAA listed the national average for regular gasoline over $4. Gas rose to $4.50 in May and fell below $4 in June.

The consequences are not confined to American pump prices: Associated Press reporting from northern Nigeria found families skipping meals as petrol costs jumped and food prices followed, including one father who lost his taxi income and watched his 18-month-old daughter relapse into malnutrition. UNICEF warned that continued war could push as many as 23.4 million additional children into monetary poverty by year’s end, with at least 80 percent of them in Africa and Asia.

Ukraine and Russia Attack

Ukraine and Russia opened the week with another demonstration that the war’s air campaign is becoming broader, faster and harder for either side to contain. Ukraine launched hundreds of drones toward Moscow from late Sunday into Monday. According to the Russians, most were intercepted far from the capital and 85 near it. Regional officials reported 10 people wounded and damage to homes and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine said its targets included logistics sites, an oil depot and vessels linked to Russia’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet.”

The assault followed a major Russian bombardment of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. Russia is using more ballistic missiles, which travel at supersonic speed and leave civilians and air defenses only minutes to react. The Institute for the Study of War says Russia has already fired more ballistic missiles in July than it reportedly produces in a month, suggesting Moscow may be drawing down stockpiles. Ukraine, unable to match Russia missile for missile, is exploiting increasingly capable long-range drones against a vast territory that is difficult to defend.

Ukrainian strikes this weekend hit warehouses operated by Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce marketplace, causing a fire that burned for two days and was visible in satellite imagery. The episode undercuts the Kremlin’s effort to insulate ordinary Russians from the war.

Record Student-loan defaults

Student borrowers are still feeling the pain of the pandemic. About 9.5 million people—roughly one in five federal borrowers—are in default, with $233.3 billion unpaid. That appears to be a record high for federal student‑loan defaults, and the numbers have been climbing rather than stabilizing. The default population has jumped from 5.3 million since borrowers again became eligible to default in June 2025, after a one‑year “on‑ramp” gave them a buffer while payments restarted. During the pandemic, most federal borrowers were allowed to stop paying for more than three years without going delinquent or defaulting, and interest did not accrue.

For borrowers, those numbers translate into missed rent, postponed medical bills and the feeling that the degree they were told would unlock the middle class has instead locked them out of it.

The Trump administration has eliminated SAVE, the most generous income‑based repayment plan, and is moving borrowers into a much simpler but less forgiving setup with one flat payment plan and one income‑based plan. In practice, that means many people who were shielded by very low or even zero payments under SAVE will be shifted into plans that demand more money each month and offer fewer ways to cap or reduce what they owe over time.

Another 1.4 million borrowers were already late enough in March to be at risk of default within six months, suggesting the default total may not be the peak. As defaults spread, borrowers lose access to credit or pay more for it, which can mean fewer car purchases, delayed home‑buying and less money circulating in the local economies that depend on their spending.

The damage is concentrated. Mississippi’s default rate is 28.3 percent, and Southern states cluster near the top, with Puerto Rico’s rate higher than any state. Borrowers who attended for‑profit colleges are faring worst: about a third are at least 90 days behind, more than twice the rate among borrowers from public institutions. For‑profit schools tend to enroll more low‑income and first‑generation students, charge higher prices and deliver weaker job outcomes, leaving graduates and dropouts with more debt and less income to repay it.

For many borrowers, this shows up first as credit damage and growing delinquency; for those who fall into default, it can eventually mean wage or Social Security garnishment when collections resume. The system was built on the promise that borrowing for college is a ticket into the American middle class. A record default count, concentrated in poorer states and among for‑profit students, is a sign that promise is breaking down for many of the people who needed it most.

Burnham Takes Over

Britain’s prime minister runs the world’s fifth‑largest economy and a major nuclear power. Decisions from No. 10 change how Britain taxes, spends and regulates. They also affect global markets, NATO planning and arguments over populism, immigration and inequality. When that job changes hands, it can change how a key U.S. ally treats energy, trade, finance and security—and how other democracies think about their own politics.

Today, that power formally passed to Andy Burnham. Keir Starmer went to Buckingham Palace to resign, and King Charles asked Burnham to form a government. As we’ve told you before, Labour had already picked Burnham as its next leader; today is the constitutional handoff that makes it official. Burnham then walked into 10 Downing Street for the first time as prime minister, promised a new 10‑year plan for Britain and said he wants to put “life’s essentials” like housing and basic services back under public control.

He promises to tackle Britain’s cost‑of‑living crisis with changes people would feel quickly: cheaper bus fares, more help with household bills and relief for renters who have seen costs jump. When he talks about giving local governments more authority—devolution—he means shifting decisions on housing, transport, schools and local investment out of London and into city regions and towns, backed by a new “Number 10 North” office in Manchester, meant to give the regions a direct line into the center of government. And when he calls for greater public control of buses and water, he is talking about moving some services out of purely private hands, with tighter public oversight and, in some cases, public ownership of struggling utilities such as Thames Water.

He inherits slow growth, high public debt, strained public services and the lingering effects of Brexit, Britain’s 2020 exit from the European Union. Burnham also faces Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s anti‑immigration party, which is drawing voters from both Labour and the Conservatives. The question is whether he can scale up what worked for him in Manchester—and whether voters accept the costs once he explains how he plans to pay for his ideas.

Congo Ebola: Still Bad

Congo’s health ministry says the country’s Ebola outbreak is not just growing; it is accelerating. The official death toll has risen to at least 930, with 37 deaths in a single 24‑hour span from Friday into Saturday, one of the highest daily totals since the outbreak was declared in mid‑May.

A little caveat which will sound familiar from the Covid days. WHO says part of the sharp numerical increase reflects expanded surveillance, testing and diagnostic capacity, and that some newly reported cases and deaths may come from a specimen backlog. Even with better detection, officials say the trend line is still bad: more cases, more deaths and an outbreak spreading faster than they can trace.

Head Start Restrictions

Head Start is supposed to be one of the cleanest promises the government makes to poor children: before kindergarten, before the achievement gap hardens, before family poverty becomes school failure, the country gives them a better start.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering a rule that would change that bargain. Under the draft described by The Bulwark, Head Start could be restricted based on a parent’s immigration status, even when the child is a U.S. citizen. That turns a preschool program into an immigration checkpoint.

The moral question is not complicated: if a four-year-old is poor enough to qualify, should the government ask whether her parents have the right papers before letting her learn letters, numbers, songs and how to sit in a classroom?

Paramount-Warner Pause

A federal judge has put the Paramount-Warner deal on hold for at least two weeks, giving a coalition of states time to press its antitrust case.

That sounds like a media-business story, but the stakes are larger than who owns which studio logo. This is about whether a shrinking number of companies will control more of what Americans watch, stream, buy and remember. The states argue the merger would kill competition; the companies argue scale is the only way to survive in the streaming economy.

The useful frame is: Hollywood says it needs bigness to compete. The states say bigness is the problem.

NYC ICE Fire

A man is in custody after a fire was set outside a federal building in New York City that houses immigration offices, authorities said. Officials did not immediately report any injuries or major damage, and the blaze was quickly brought under control. Investigators are looking into the suspect’s motive and whether the building’s role in immigration enforcement was a factor. The site includes offices for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Cyclospora Trail

The cyclospora story was already messy enough.

Health officials were investigating a Taco Bell‑linked outbreak and tested shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms, a supplier in central Mexico. A sample first came back positive for the parasite, then the FDA said that particular test was a false positive and withdrew it.

That does not mean the whole case collapsed. Investigators still say the pattern of illnesses points toward shredded iceberg lettuce as the most likely source, even if one key test result did not hold up. The Taco Bell outbreak is the confirmed restaurant cluster. The lab result changed, but the basic suspicion did not.

As we mentioned Friday, the larger summer cyclospora numbers include many other cases that may have different sources.

The Spain Way

Spain won the World Cup, which you of course know by now, but what you may not know is just how dominant Spain has become. Its men’s team now has another World Cup to go with recent European titles, the women’s team are reigning world champions, and Spanish youth teams keep reaching and winning finals. Across age groups and genders, Spain is not a one‑off Cinderella story; it is one of the sport’s new superpowers.

I don’t know soccer the way a tactics nerd does, but here’s the conventional wisdom about why Spain is so good. First, there is a clear “Spain way” of playing—keep the ball, pass quickly, press when they lose it, and make decisions as a unit instead of relying on solo runs. Players learn that style in club academies and youth national teams, so when they reach the senior sides they already fit into the pattern. Second, Spanish clubs invest heavily in those academies, which turn out lots of technically gifted players rather than just one or two stars per generation. Third, the federation and clubs coordinate closely, so backups can slot in without changing how the team plays. Put together, that system keeps producing winning teams long after any single star ages out.

Five Cups of Coffee Please

It can be hard to remember where we are in the cycle of coffee is good for you, coffee isn’t good for you. But according to a new American Heart Association scientific statement reported by Axios and others, up to five 8-ounce cups of coffee a day, about 400 milligrams of caffeine, is generally safe for most adults.

Moderate intake is linked with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke and Type 2 diabetes. The likely helpers are not just caffeine but coffee’s other compounds, including polyphenols, which may affect inflammation and metabolism.

But the blessing is for coffee, not dessert pretending to be coffee. Sugar, cream, syrups and high-calorie add-ins can wipe out the upside. And the AHA draws a bright line between coffee and energy drinks, where high caffeine doses and other stimulants can raise heart risks.

So the clean takeaway is: if coffee agrees with you, you probably do not need to feel guilty about it. The sweet spot is roughly three to five cups.

We’re just going to believe this and not listen to the next study that contradicts it.

The Museum of Endangered Sounds

If you are of a certain age, I am sorry. Or maybe not. Perhaps you feel the golden glow of experience and life’s sweet progression. But that’s not really the point. If you are of a certain age, you felt the special jolt that came from the scream of a dial-up modem. In my case it meant the file I was sending as a Time magazine reporter from somewhere on the road was one step closer to making it to New York. It was the sound of progress, though it was, by itself, a nuisance sound without that connotation.

You can visit this sound in the only place it will be in not too long: The Museum of Endangered Sounds, created by Brendan Chilcutt. You can visit it at savethesounds.info. This is not a new thing, but it was new to me and I don’t need no stinking badges.

The site preserves the noises that used to organize ordinary life: the scream of a dial-up modem, the chatter of a dot-matrix printer, the Nokia ringtone, the mechanical bite of a typewriter, the rewind of a cassette tape, the click and whirr of machines that once told you the world was working.

The old world made a sound when it did something. A phone rang like a bell. A camera snapped. A register opened. A coffee percolator bubbled and hissed and announced that morning was assembling itself in the kitchen. Now the same actions happen silently, behind glass, inside sealed devices, as if modern life has been put on mute.

These old sounds were proof of how work felt, how waiting felt, how rooms sounded before everything became frictionless. The museum says: listen closely, because the soundtrack of your life is being retired while you are still living it.

This was an exciting week. We took in a foster dog for a couple of weeks which meant that for a couple of days, Stack the Week Daily was produced in near Monk-like conditions. Our houseguest did not like me at all. This was not conjecture. When I met her she bit me.1 A builder friend of ours was bit by a cat and his hand swelled like a volleyball from the infection so I checked the internet and the internet said I should get to urgent care2. I’m on antibiotics now.

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However, after a few days of patient work (she greeted me with inflamed hounds of hell barking and teeth flaring) Cujo and I are in fine shape3:

As for the journalism, I made some tweaks to Stack the Week. A little shorter. More rigorous about individual story length. I tuned my systems that help me search for stories and confirm facts (since I’m flying solo). One thing I’m thinking of doing is adding notes for subscribers inside Stack the Week Daily to explain my process. I don’t know if that will be interesting to anyone.

I continue to think about what I’m going to do with Stack the Week. It is rewarding but takes up a lot of time. I’m finishing the first few episodes of Navel Gazing Season Two so I’m pretty much writing all day, which is heaven, but there will come a time when I need to start working for longer stretches on the book. I assume Anne will want to see me at some time too.4

Anyway, as I was driving back from the farm market this morning I was overcome with a great sense of gratitude for this work and you in the audience. So, as the headline says: thank you.

John

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.

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Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you organize the new bookshelves, weed the garden bed or arrange briquets to get moving on that brisket that everyone loves so.

Okay, let’s start.

Iran Infrastructure Week

The Iran war is an infrastructure story today. U.S. bombing moved deeper into the systems civilians and markets depend on: bridges, ports, shipping routes, energy sites and drinking-water plants. The campaignis aimed at the physical network that lets Iran move troops, supplies and oil.

The chronic kink in the Strait of Hormuz is changing corporate behavior: According to the AP, Chevron is investing in Iraqi oil fields and a pipeline route that could bypass Hormuz. Remember the time when people used to talk about this war being over? Now companies are placing bets about a permanent condition where the Strait of Hormuz is up for grabs.

Iran answered by widening the target set on its side of the Gulf. One Iranian strike damaged a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant. In a dry Gulf country, desalination is not a side industry; it is the tap. Kuwait gets about 90 percent of its drinking water from desalination. The fire there was contained, but the point was made: modern Gulf water and power systems are now a part of Iran’s target list.

Iran also expanded the map, striking eastern Syria in its first attack on Syrian territory in this conflict, saying it aimed at a U.S. special operations command center. The conflict is spreading, which makes it harder to stop and increases the chances that more countries—and their soldiers, supplies, and economies—get pulled in.

Iranian officials say dozens have been killed and hundreds wounded in recent days. The United States is on its seventh straight day of attacks.

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ICE Pressure

The Associated Press reports that David Brouillette, the ICE agent who killed Johan Guerrero, has a long history of violent, terrifying behavior and serious mental‑health struggles, raising the question of how someone with that record cleared ICE’s vetting, received a gun, and was sent into an armed immigration operation. Johan Guerrero was in the country legally, was not the target, and was shot while his wife watched.

AP reports that Brouillette’s relatives warned supervisors about his instability and abuse, that he cycled through law‑enforcement and public‑safety jobs, and that he was removed from a volunteer fire department after disputes and refusal to follow orders—each a red flag that should have mattered in a federal background check.

Democrats have called for an investigation. That investigation is really about whether the pressure to deport has hardened into a machine that reliably produces human tragedy. Start with hiring and vetting. If ICE is expanding quickly, are standards slipping? Are background checks catching histories of violence, instability, misconduct, or bad judgment before people are armed and sent into volatile encounters, or has the system accepted risks it once would have rejected to meet the deportation quota?

Also training. These operations increasingly look less like civil immigration enforcement and more like fugitive work: vehicle stops, surprise encounters, families nearby, frightened people, split‑second decisions. If officers are not trained for de‑escalation, for mistaken identity and families in the line of fire, the policy is not only aggressive, it is careless.

This is mission creep on top of mission creep. Immigration enforcement moved away from focusing on “the worst of the worst,” the phrase that was meant to reassure voters that deportation would focus on the most dangerous people. Now it is shifting toward a more militarized posture in which civil enforcement begins to resemble street policing or tactical arrest work. ICE says it conducts more stops away from homes because agents often cannot enter without a warrant. But that limit is not a loophole to route around; it is the system drawing a line. Slowness, imposed by courts and standards, protects values, including that human life should have some value.

Voters wanted deportations, but that signal is not a license to do anything. They expect promises to be fulfilled inside American rules, which is why the language became “the worst of the worst” in the first place. Candidate Trump was pledging restraint. And finally there is a permission structure here. If officials describe immigrants as invaders, praise agents after deaths, attack judges and communities, and raise quotas instead of pausing after tragedy, agents learn something: that force will be defended first and examined later. Maybe.

The Burnham Age Begins

Andy Burnham was elected leader of Britain’s governing Labour Party on Friday, making him the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade. Though new traditions come slowly to a venerable political system, that pace of turnover almost begs for a new ritual in keeping with Britain’s love of ceremony: something like each time a new occupant checks bags at 10 Downing Street, he should pose for a photo next to the catapult that will eventually eject them from office. At least then the exits would start to match the drama of the arrivals.

The previous PM Keir Starmer resigned in June under months of pressure from Labour MPs who feared he would lose the next election to the hard-right Reform UK. Burnham hopes to forestall the fate that met his predecessors by rebalancing power. He earned the nickname “King of the North” as mayor of Greater Manchester, where he became a national figure by arguing that northern England deserved more power, money and respect. In his victory speech, he said Britain took a wrong turn in the 1980s, when political power became centralized and economic power was privatized.

His core promise is the biggest rebalancing of power Britain has ever seen: moving control over transport, housing, skills, spending and economic growth away from Whitehall—the shorthand for London’s central government departments—and toward regional leaders.

Burnham is trying to answer the same political disease that feeds populism all over the world: voters who think government happens somewhere else, for someone else. His immediate political task is to stop the nationalist Reform UK’s rise by convincing those voters that Labour can still hear them. His governing task is harder: prove that devolution is not a slogan, but a machine that can make life cheaper, fairer and more competent in the places that feel ignored.

Burnham’s first test is whether “power out of Whitehall” survives Treasury arithmetic. A high-debt, low-growth state can promise regions control over housing, transport, skills and growth, the question is whether it will also let them– or can let them– control enough money to make those promises real.

Gaza Funeral Strike

People gathered to bury one victim of the war. The war added more.

An Israeli strike hit a funeral in Gaza on Friday, killing at least seven people and wounding 22, according to Palestinian officials. The funeral was for a Palestinian killed in an earlier strike the same day.

The formal ceasefire agreed in October reduced the heaviest fighting, but it has not stopped killing in Gaza. Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 1,123 people have been killed since the ceasefire took effect. Israel says its continued strikes respond to militant attacks and ceasefire violations; five Israeli soldiers have been killed over the same period.

Xi’s AI pitch

The next generation of AI will not just live inside chatbots that explain soccer offsides rules. It will make decisions in hospitals, schools, workplaces, police departments, banks, border systems, energy grids and media feeds. It will help decide which job applicants are interviewed, which medical scans get flagged, which neighborhoods get more patrols, which loans are approved and which power plants turn on when the grid is stressed.

That is why the real question for humans is not which company has the biggest models—or which company has the largest initial public offering—but who writes the rules that protect ordinary people. Neither the United States nor China, the world’s two biggest AI powers, offers a clear, trusted way to protect everyday rights while this technology spreads.

The incentives for dominance and profit often point away from those guardrails rather than toward them.

That was the backdrop for Xi Jinping’s speech at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Friday. He cast AI as a “symphony of international cooperation” and used the stage to launch the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, WAICO, an intergovernmental body headquartered in Shanghai and advertised as a way to help poorer and middle‑income countries catch up. In plain language, WAICO is meant to be a club for governments that want help using AI. Xi promised places in training programs for officials and engineers, AI‑powered weather‑warning tools for countries that face floods and storms, and centers where China would help regional groups apply AI to transport, agriculture, health and other fields.

The pitch is: we will help you learn this technology, we will share tools, we will not wrap everything in U.S.‑style national‑security restrictions. It sounds generous. Underneath the language, WAICO is an attempt to gain dominance under the cover of looking helpful. It is designed to put China at the center of global AI governance—shaping standards, making other governments rely on Chinese models and turning Beijing into the place countries go first when they want AI expertise.

Lettuce not go to Taco Bell

Cyclospora, the parasite that you’ve all learned about that gives people explosive diarrhea, does not appear in lettuce by magic. It arrives when human waste and food‑handling systems intersect and no one stops it.

On the farm, that usually means contaminated water or poor sanitation. Irrigation water, wash tanks or hydrocooling systems that are tainted with sewage or runoff carrying human fecal matter can deposit Cyclospora onto lettuce leaves. In the plant, workers with diarrhea or inadequate hand‑washing can spread the parasite onto ready‑to‑eat greens through direct contact with produce or food‑contact surfaces. Once the parasite is on shredded iceberg, normal rinsing and typical chlorine levels do not reliably kill it, because Cyclospora’s outer shell lets it survive routine washing.

Traceback teams followed the trail of this outbreak from sick patients to what they ate, where they ate it to the supplier who furnished the shredded iceberg lettuce used at Taco Bell restaurants in several Midwestern states. The CDC has tied 1,644 illnesses and 94 hospitalizations to a Taco Bell cluster. They ultimately traced the contaminated lettuce back to a single source, identified by people familiar with the inquiry as Taylor Farms, which said Friday it was pulling all iceberg lettuce from the region. Taco Bell said it was removing the lettuce nationwide.

The Taco Bell-linked outbreak is the traced restaurant cluster; the broader summer cyclospora count appears larger and may include unrelated cases.

Smoke Gets into Your Continent

Fire has become the atmosphere.

The center of the story is Ontario, where officials report 191 active fires as of Friday, 81 not under control and 21 newly ignited. Evacuations have been ordered in at least 15 communities, some of them remote and reachable only by air. Across Canada, more than 850 fires remain active, with 113 listed as out of control.

The smoke has moved into the United States. More than 100 million people in 18 states plus Washington, D.C. have been under air‑quality alerts. Washington has seen some of its worst pollution on record, with monuments disappearing into haze. Toledo, Milwaukee and Detroit saw readings above 500 on Thursday; air is considered hazardous above 300. Emergency rooms across the Northeast reported spikes in patients with breathing and heart problems.

The danger is PM2.5, the tiny particles that can slip into the lungs and bloodstream and worsen asthma, bronchitis, diabetes, heart disease and other conditions.

Republican politicians in Michigan and Ohio attacked Ontario’s handling of the fires. Ontario Premier Doug Ford snapped back that if U.S. politicians wanted to complain, they should send help, pointing out that Ontario has helped America in past crises, including California fires.

If It’s New to You

Donald Trump is one of the most successful showmen in American political history. He was even able to turn the catastrophic failure of the January 6 attack into political success. On Thursday night, however, he lapsed into reruns in prime time.

He promised a major revelation about election fraud and foreign interference, then delivered a familiar argument with more official staging than proof. Trump’s central claim was that American elections are dangerously compromised. He argued that the 2020 election was corrupted by foreign interference, bad voting technology, noncitizen registration and a “deep state” cover‑up.

The largest claim involved China. Trump alleged that China interfered in the 2020 election, including by acquiring or compromising U.S. voter data. He framed this as a major national‑security scandal and suggested officials had hidden or minimized the threat.

He did not produce evidence that votes were manipulated or that any election outcome was altered. The allegation also left out context so basic it was either bad faith or confusion. Much of the “voter data” he was talking about is public: registration lists, names, addresses, party affiliation in some states. You have access to it too. As election expert David Becker put it on NPR, knowing who is in a class is not the same as knowing how they scored on a test; having a list of voters is not the same as having the power to change how they voted or how their ballots were counted.

Trump also claimed that U.S. intelligence or national-security officials suppressed the true scale of Chinese activity. This was the “deep state” portion of the argument: not just that China acted, but that American officials covered it up.

The same officials he now says hid foreign interference are the ones he publicly doubted when they found it. In Helsinki in July 2018, three days after the Justice Department indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails, Trump stood beside Vladimir Putin and was asked whom he believed. He said Putin had denied it, and added: “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

The president went on to describe vulnerabilities in electronic systems and suggested that machines could be compromised. But a vulnerability is not evidence of exploitation. Repeated audits, court cases, state reviews and Republican‑run examinations after 2020 did not show machine fraud.

Trump also cited a finding that large numbers of noncitizens appeared on voter rolls. But being flagged on a voter roll is not the same as voting illegally. It can reflect data errors, outdated records, naturalized citizens incorrectly flagged, duplicate entries or database mismatches. Even if some registrations were improper, he did not establish that those people voted, that they voted. The evidence that does exist shows in‑person voter fraud to be vanishingly rare.

Trump used these claims to push the Save America Act. He framed the bill as an obvious anti‑fraud measure, but the evidence he presented did not prove widespread fraud that would require that remedy.

The danger is not that Trump proved his case. He did not. The danger is that the presidency can make unproved claims feel official, and then use those claims to justify new voting restrictions, pressure state and local officials, mobilize federal agencies and threaten media companies. The speech failed as evidence, but it may still succeed as pressure.

The sharpest irony, as Sam Stein at The Bulwark pointed out, is that the intelligence report itself warned that foreign actors spread exaggerated claims about voting-system compromise to undermine confidence in American elections. Trump then went on television from the Oval Office and did nearly the same thing: inflated fragments into a story of national betrayal, not to prove what happened, but to make people doubt the system that counted the votes.

LHS 1140 b

One of the places out there in the great beyond that we already thought might be worth watching appears to have one of the basic conditions that make watching worthwhile.

Astronomers say LHS 1140 b shows the first strong hint of an atmosphere on a small world in the “habitable zone” of another star. In plain language, that means this planet sits at a distance from its star where temperatures could allow liquid water on its surface and, as you all know, where there is water means the possibility of cruise ships, which means the bacteria necessary for life coursing through the Lido deck. New data suggests LHS 1140 b is also wrapped in a real sky rather than being just bare rock. That makes it one of the best current candidates for a world that could support Earth‑like surface conditions.

LHS 1140 b has been on the books since 2017 as a promising planet. The new discovery is not the planet itself but the characterization of its atmosphere and interior. Early observations told us that it existed and roughly how big and massive it was. New data from Webb and careful reanalysis let scientists see how starlight changes as it passes through any air during a transit and how the planet’s mass and radius fit different interior models. That shift—from knowing “there is a planet there” to saying “this is probably a water world with a thick atmosphere”—is what turns an old entry in a catalog into a fresh piece of news. It does not mean we have spotted animals or forests; it means the planet has some of the basic ingredients that make life possible here, not proof that life exists there.

Scientifically, it shows that planets with Earth‑like temperatures and atmospheres may not be rare, and that we now have instruments good enough to tell a bare rock from a world with a sky at interstellar distances. That matters because it turns the search for habitable planets from guesswork into something more like engineering and survey work: we can measure, reject and refine candidates instead of just dreaming about them.

Could we visit? No, not with anything like current technology. LHS 1140 b is about 49 light‑years away. Mars is minutes away at the speed of light; this is decades of light‑travel time. At present spacecraft speeds, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there. For us, it is a world for telescopes and models, not trip adviser reviews.

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The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.

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Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you mow the lawn, debone a filet, or drive back from the urgent clinic after the rescue dog bites your hand. (I’m fine, but today’s stack is going to be a little short.)

Okay, let’s start.

Iran Expansion

The U.S. has been hitting Iran for five straight days, striking farther north towards Tehran while broadening the kinds of targets it is attacking.

Reuters reports that three U.S. officials describe the latest strikes as “shaping operations”—attacks intended not only to reopen the Strait of Hormuz but to destroy the military capabilities the United States would want removed before any larger campaign.

That helps explain why recent strikes have expanded beyond forces directly threatening shipping to include air defenses, command centers, surveillance sites, energy infrastructure and areas tied to Iran’s nuclear program.

But these hits don’t necessarily have to be softening the ground for more intervention. The New York Times reports attacks this week on Iran’s naval power, oil production and nuclear infrastructure are meant to degrade the systems that would allow Iran to sustain a longer war. In other words, make them cry uncle.

Here’s the daily count you’re used to: Before the war, more than 130 ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on an average day. On Wednesday, only nine made it.

Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Iran continues expressing interest in a deal. Iran reinforced that signal by releasing dual U.S.-Iranian citizen Dena Karari, whom President Trump called a goodwill gesture. Both governments continue to escalate militarily while leaving open the possibility of negotiations.

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More Than 500 Rohingya Feared Dead

More than 500 people are feared dead after two crowded refugee boats disappeared in the Bay of Bengal.

The passengers were Rohingya, a Muslim minority from Myanmar, which sits between India and Thailand.

The Rohingya have lived there for generations, but Myanmar’s government says they are immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh rather than one of the country’s recognized ethnic groups.

Human rights organizations reject that claim. Instead, they say the Rohingya have long faced ethnic and religious discrimination in the predominantly Buddhist country.

In 2017, Myanmar’s military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from their homes by burning villages, killing civilians, and forcing families to flee. Most escaped to refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

Life in those camps is difficult. People have few opportunities to work, little hope of building a permanent future, and almost no legal way to move to another country. Some decided to risk a dangerous sea voyage, hoping to reach Malaysia, where they believed they could find safety and jobs.

The boats left in late June. One disappeared almost immediately. The other is believed to have sunk off Myanmar’s coast on July 8. The United Nations is still trying to confirm exactly what happened, which is why officials say the passengers are “feared dead.”

If the number is confirmed, it would rank among the deadliest refugee boat disasters in recent years. More than 800 migrants died when an overcrowded boat sank off Libya in 2015, and more than 600 were believed lost when the Adriana sank off Greece in 2023.

Stops ICE Brings Back Vehicle Stops

The Atlantic reports that President Trump insisted ICE resume stopping suspects in their cars after some of his supporters criticized the agency’s brief pause, arguing it signaled a retreat from aggressive immigration enforcement.

ICE says it increasingly has little choice. Many migrants have learned that if they remain inside their homes, ICE often needs a judicial warrant to enter and arrest them. Catching someone after they leave in a vehicle avoids that problem.

But stopping moving cars creates a different danger. Unlike local police, ICE agents generally receive far less training in conducting high-risk traffic stops. Those encounters can unfold in seconds, forcing agents to decide whether a driver is trying to escape or whether the vehicle poses a deadly threat.

The law draws an important line. The Supreme Court has held that officers cannot use deadly force simply because a suspect is fleeing. Deadly force is allowed only if an officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses an immediate threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or someone else.

Update: Court filings cited in recent reporting allege that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the man shot and killed by ICE agents in Houston, had drugs in his vehicle. If that allegation proves true, it may describe what investigators found after the shooting. It does not answer the central question investigators must resolve: What did the agents know before they fired, and did they reasonably believe Salgado Araujo posed an immediate deadly threat? Evidence discovered afterward cannot, by itself, justify an earlier decision to use deadly force.

Beginning in September, immigration officials deciding whether to approve a green card can once again weigh an applicant’s use of some public benefits as evidence that the person may become financially dependent on the government.

Supporters say the rule helps ensure that people granted permanent residency are unlikely to depend on government assistance. They argue immigration policy should favor applicants who can support themselves without relying on public benefits.

Critics argue its biggest impact falls on families who are legally entitled to benefits but avoid medical care, food assistance, or other programs because they worry using them could hurt their chances of getting a green card.

Wildfire Smoke Spreads Across the East

Everyone east of the Rockies can see this story out the window. As I type this I feel like a ham hock. Hazy skies, a milky sun, and, in some places, the smell of smoke. All are the result of large wildfires burning in Canada and Minnesota.

The smoke has drifted hundreds of miles south and east. A large area of high pressure, sometimes called a heat dome, is trapping it close to the ground instead of allowing it to blow away. More than 115 million people could experience unhealthy air, and cities including Philadelphia have issued Code Red air quality alerts.

The smoke is expected to linger through at least Friday in parts of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Conditions will improve only when the winds shift or the weather pattern trapping the smoke begins to break down. As long as the fires continue burning, smoky conditions could return.

Ebola Outbreak

Ebola is moving in opposite directions across central Africa.

In eastern Congo, confirmed infections have risen from roughly 1,926 to 2,073, while deaths climbed from 702 to 796.

Uganda, meanwhile, has discharged its last Ebola patient and begun the World Health Organization’s 42-day countdown toward declaring its outbreak over. Uganda’s outbreak remained comparatively small and occurred in a more stable security environment. Workers could identify cases, trace contacts and isolate patients before the virus spread widely. In eastern Congo, years of conflict have repeatedly interrupted that.

The Wall Street Journal reports one reason the outbreak continues to worsen in Congo: false claims spreading through WhatsApp voice notes have led people to hide deaths and attack health workers. Rumors circulated in Uganda as well, but they did not overwhelm the response. In Congo, misinformation has combined with armed conflict, displacement and distrust of authorities, making it much harder for health workers to find infected people before they infect others.

The United States has now imposed an unusual “do not board” policy, meaning Americans who have recently been in the outbreak zone cannot simply board a commercial flight home. Previously, they could travel if they met ordinary screening requirements.

Instead of relying mainly on screening after travelers begin their journey, the policy works by preventing potentially exposed passengers from boarding commercial flights in the first place, stopping them at the ticket counter rather than after they arrive in the United States.

Ukraine Fires the Minister Who Wanted to Modernize the War

Ukraine’s government has removed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov (mih-KAI-loh fed-OR-ov), the 35-year-old architect of much of the country’s military innovation, after a reported clash with Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi (oh-lek-SAHN-der seer-SKEE).

Ukraine cannot match Russia soldier for soldier or shell for shell. Fedorov argued its best chance was to make every soldier more effective by using drones, software, artificial intelligence, and faster weapons development. Under his leadership, Ukraine dramatically expanded drone production, pushed to move supplies with unmanned ground vehicles instead of soldiers, and argued that technology—not manpower—would determine the future of the war.

His critics argued that winning today’s war still requires the basics: mobilizing troops, holding trenches, maintaining discipline, and running a large conventional army.

The argument isn’t really about whether technology matters. It’s about how quickly a country fighting for survival should bet the future of its army on it.

Meanwhile, the fighting has shifted to another battlefield: grain. Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks on Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov, disrupting routes that carry about a quarter of Russia’s grain exports. Russia has answered by intensifying strikes on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, cutting Ukraine’s grain export capacity by roughly one-third. Together, Russia and Ukraine account for about a third of the world’s wheat exports, so when both sides target the other’s ability to ship grain, the effects reach far beyond the battlefield, driving up food prices around the world.

Oh, Those Epstein Victims

Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general may now depend on a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican whose vote could determine whether Blanche advances out of committee, said Thursday he will not support the nomination unless Blanche meets with the survivors first. Within hours, the Justice Department said Blanche planned to do just that, after previously testifying that legal and procedural constraints had so far prevented such a meeting.

One survivor, Dani Bensky, testified that the group had spent months trying unsuccessfully to secure a meeting with Blanche.

Tillis also wants firm assurances that the Justice Department’s proposed $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund cannot be revived.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is another Republican holdout. He has raised broader concerns about the Trump tax settlement that created the fund and said Thursday he remains unconvinced Blanche’s assurances that it is “dead” are sufficient.

But the Blanche fight is bigger than Epstein and bigger than one confirmation vote. The Economist reports that the Justice Department itself has been profoundly degraded over the past 18 months. About a quarter of its lawyers have left. Divisions that once handled cryptocurrency fraud and public corruption have withered. Election fraud, which is not a real large-scale problem but is one of President Trump’s fixations, is consuming more of the department’s time and resources.

That means the question before the Senate is not simply whether Blanche will meet with Epstein’s victims or whether one settlement fund is really dead. It is whether Trump’s personal lawyer will be confirmed to run a Justice Department that is already being retooled around the president’s enemies, obsessions, and personal legal needs.

I should have explained yesterday why Blanche can still run the Justice Department as acting attorney general even if the Senate never confirms him. The key is the Attorney General Succession Act, 28 U.S.C. § 508, which says that when there’s a vacancy in the office of attorney general, the deputy attorney general may exercise all the duties of that office—and unlike the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA) it contains no time limit. Under the FVRA’s own terms, specific succession statutes like § 508 are exceptions to its usual time limits, which is why courts and the GAO have treated parallel provisions at other departments as allowing “forever nominees.” Blanche is effectively in the same posture Julie Su occupied at Labor: a deputy elevated by statute who can keep doing the job for as long as the president wants, whether or not the Senate ever confirms him.

China Pulls Ahead

China has now pulled ahead of the United States in global public opinion, and it’s not just one outlier survey. A new 36‑country study from the Pew Research Center finds that in most of the nations it polled, more people now have a favorable view of China than of the U.S. On average, Beijing’s favorability comes in a few points higher than Washington’s, a reversal from earlier in the decade when the U.S. held a clear edge. Pew’s findings line up with Gallup’s latest World Poll, which shows global approval of China’s leadership at 36 percent in 2025, compared with 31 percent for U.S. leadership.

This doesn’t mean the world has suddenly decided it prefers China’s political system. Pew still finds the U.S. rated more highly on respecting personal freedoms in many countries, especially among long‑time American allies, though that gap has narrowed. What’s changed is the risk calculus. Views of China have improved at the margins, while views of the United States have deteriorated more sharply, particularly since Donald Trump returned to office.

Countries look at Washington and Beijing and ask a simple, practical question: “Who is more likely to hit us with surprise tariffs, sudden sanctions, or public fights we can’t control?” If the United States feels jumpy and unpredictable, and China feels more steady or at least more consistent, some leaders decide they’d rather manage China’s downsides than America’s.

In other words, they’re not embracing China’s system. They’re just deciding which partner is less likely to give them a headache — and more of them are starting to think that working with Beijing may be the safer, more predictable bet than working with Washington right now.

Consumers Have Not Stopped Spending

June’s retail report shows a slowdown, not a stall. Government data for June put retail and food-service sales up 0.2 percent from May and 6.7 percent compared with a year earlier. The monthly increase is small enough to be within the survey’s margin of error, but the year‑over‑year gain confirms that overall spending is still rising, not rolling over. A big share of the strength came from auto dealers and online retailers, while categories like grocery stores, clothing, and health and personal‑care stores were weaker.

This isn’t a picture of a booming consumer, but it’s clearly not a collapse either. The headline number actually understates some of the underlying strength because lower gasoline prices pulled down receipts at gas stations, even as drivers may have bought similar amounts of fuel. At the same time, the growth we do see is uneven and may owe a lot to discounting, promotions, and timing of car purchases rather than across‑the‑board confidence on Main Street.

It’s also worth remembering what this report does and doesn’t capture. Retail sales measure dollars, not units, so higher prices can flatter the topline even if people aren’t buying more stuff. And the data are mostly about goods, not services, so they miss big pieces of consumer spending like rent, travel, health care, and entertainment. Consumers are still spending enough to keep the economy moving, but this report doesn’t say that every household—or every kind of store—is sharing equally in that resilience.

Pentagon Testosterone Screening

The Pentagon will begin annually screening service members age 30 and older for low testosterone and offering voluntary replacement therapy. The move grows out of a culture‑war frame—Fox host Pete Hegseth has talked about building a “High‑T Department of War”—but the department has not clearly explained how women service members fit into the new regime.

Testosterone isn’t a simple readiness gauge; levels fluctuate during the day and are heavily influenced by sleep, stress, weight, illness and medication. In ordinary practice, doctors diagnose low testosterone only when there are symptoms and repeated low readings, not just a single lab value below some target threshold.

There is a serious counterargument in favor of more testing. Military service puts unusual strain on people’s bodies, and hormonal deficiencies can affect bone density, muscle mass, mood and recovery, so systematic screening might catch treatable problems before they sideline troops. So more systematic hormone testing could be justified as a preventive, readiness-enhancing measure rather than just a political stunt or “vanity.”

Still, in the end this is probably a way to think about it: normal testosterone helps you function; more testosterone is not the same thing as more bravery; and making “high T” a goal for the whole force invites a lot of medical risk and red tape in the name of a slogan.

The President’s Election Speech

President Trump says newly released government material will show serious problems with U.S. elections. If he presents credible evidence that votes were altered or officials concealed a breach, it would be major news—not because he’s making the claim, but because it would be the first time he has backed such allegations with proof. President Trump has made unsupported claims of election interference or election fraud dating back to at least 2012. He’s made the claims related to his elections and those of others. In elections and caucuses. What has unified the claims is the whistling lack of proof.

Perseverance Runs a Marathon

On Mars, the Perseverance rover has just crossed a marathon’s distance: 26.2 miles in five years and four months. It’s now in a small off‑world distance club, chasing NASA’s old Opportunity rover, which holds the record after logging about 28 miles before a dust storm ended its mission. Spirit made it nearly five miles before getting stuck, Sojourner in the 1990s managed only a few hundred feet, and China’s Zhurong rover covered a little over a mile before it went silent.

A marathon at roughly the pace of a glacier, which on Mars counts as sprinting.

T Rex Crime Scene

A new fossil gives us a freeze‑frame of dinosaur violence instead of another educated guess. Paleontologists have found a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth embedded in the skull of an Edmontosaurus, unusually direct evidence of a face‑to‑face predator‑prey encounter rather than an inference from scattered bones and bite marks. Paleontology usually reconstructs behavior from what death left scattered; this fossil preserved one violent moment almost intact.

I decided to look up what other kinds of grisly finds archaeologists have stumbled upon and came up with these. In one Belgian cave, researchers uncovered Neanderthal bones with cut marks and smashed long bones mixed in with animal remains, strong evidence of cannibalism. In ancient Egypt, at a palace in Avaris, excavators found pits filled only with severed right hands, thought to be trophies taken from defeated enemies and traded to the king for rewards. And across parts of Eastern Europe, “vampire” burials have turned up: skeletons pinned down with stakes or sickles or buried with stones jammed in their mouths, apparently to keep the dead from rising.

And on that note we will put a stone in my mouth and conclude this episode. We’ll see you when we see you. I’m going to go try to make peace with Cujo.

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Iran 2.0

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius calls this phase of the Iran war Iran Fiasco 2.0. His argument: the administration went back to bombing without solving the problem that made the first round fail. Iran doesn’t need to win. It only needs to keep threatening ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which it can still do after every American strike. Same campaign, same result.

Which is what David Sanger of the New York Times asked weeks ago on Air Force One, and got called a traitor for: if you start bombing again, why do you expect a different result?

The United States restored the naval blockade of Hormuz Wednesday and flew a fourth overnight round of strikes, hitting Iranian military sites including an army barracks. By late afternoon the US military said it was launching another wave of strikes, the third in 24 hours.

President Trump threatened bridges and power plants unless Iran negotiates. He would not rule out ground troops. The attacks continue until he decides they’re enough, he says.

Iran fired missiles and drones toward Jordan, which intercepted three. Alerts in Bahrain. In Kuwait, cruise missiles, a ballistic missile, and dozens of drones — the heaviest attack on that country so far — wounding naval personnel.

The Revolutionary Guard set its terms: energy exports stay open to everyone or to no one. If Iran can’t sell its oil, nobody sells theirs.

Gas prices are going up as you’d expect. Regular is at $3.89. Diesel is near $5, which is the number that matters more, because diesel moves the trucks that move the groceries.

John Ellis’s News Items points to a War on the Rocks analysis on how Iran built for this. After studying previous American wars, it designed a mosaic defense — a decentralized system in which local commanders and allied forces keep fighting after headquarters is gone.

Iran handed real authority to local commanders and to allies outside Iran — the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq. They don’t need to be told what to do. So bombing Tehran doesn’t stop the missile crew on the coast or the drone team in Yemen. There is no headquarters to destroy. That’s why each new round of bombing can leave the underlying military problem intact. The plan is already inside everyone’s head.

Military experts told NPR the strikes so far have not destroyed enough of Iran’s missiles, drones, and small boats to make the water safe. Even optimistic military assessments describe a campaign measured in weeks, not days.

That is a much larger and much longer war than the administration has described.

ICE Deaths

A 28-year-old Mexican national ran from federal agents at a St. Augustine gas station and was struck by a tractor-trailer. He is the third man to die in an immigration-enforcement encounter in eight days.

The other two:

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Houston. Agents followed his work van. DHS said he weaponized the vehicle and tried to run over an officer. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said the agents’ actions resembled no law-enforcement tactic he’d seen, and that they were either untrained or putting themselves where firing into a car could be justified. Araujo was here illegally. He was not the target of the operation.

Johan Sebastián Guerrero, Biddeford, Maine. Video caught shouting, gunfire, and his car turning in a circle before agents pulled him out while his wife and young daughter watched. His father said he had legal status and worked two jobs.

Neither agent who fired wore a body camera. They were not required to. DHS now requires each arrest team to include at least one — the team, not each officer, and not necessarily the officer who fires. About half of DHS field officers have cameras. ICE has released no footage from Houston or Maine and has not named the shooters.

Neither dead man was armed. Alex Pretti and Renée Good died in Minneapolis before these three, and they were described as aggressors too. They were not.

Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, agents in the immigration crackdown have shot at least 22 people. Six died. Three were American citizens. Nearly all involved officers firing into cars. The Washington Post names the recurring question: whether officers step into a car’s path and then call the moving car a weapon.

Trump’s answer: ICE personnel are doing a “GREAT job,” and the government cannot give up what he called one of its most effective crime-fighting tools.

After Pretti and Good, the administration changed personnel, discussed body cameras, promised less controversy. Then Congress approved multiyear funding with no mandatory accountability provisions.

This week ICE paused most vehicle stops after two fatal shootings. Border czar Tom Homan insisted it was a short review, not a policy change, and said agents would soon return to “doing what they do best.” Less than a day later, President Trump ordered the tactic resumed.

The question is what evidence a citizen should require before accepting the government’s claim that a car became a weapon — when the government holds the footage, the identities, and the narrative, and has released none.

Three men are dead in eight days, two of them shot by federal agents, the third chased into traffic. The agents work for the federal government and are paid by taxpayers.

A country gets to decide who lives in it, but the people who voted for deportations were told it would only be the worst of the worst. Neither of the men shot was. Araujo wasn’t the man they came for. Guerrero was here legally. These were mistakes, but no one in government is treating them that way. No regret from DHS, ICE, or the White House. No condolence to Guerrero’s wife, who watched. The response was to praise the agents and defend the tactic. An institution that thought it had made a mistake would say something.

Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank

Israeli and Lebanese officials concluded a sixth round of U.S.-mediated talks in Rome Wednesday. The subject: “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces would withdraw and the Lebanese Army would take over. The test is whether the Lebanese state can hold ground Israel gives up, which means keeping Hezbollah off it.

Trump told Netanyahu last Thursday to pull troops out of southern Syria and Lebanon, Axios reported: “They don’t want you there. You should redeploy.”

An Israeli strike in central Gaza Wednesday killed a man, his wife, and their six-year-old daughter. Days earlier, a strike on a police station in a northern Gaza refugee camp killed several people, including a senior police commander; Israel said the station was used for military activities.

In the West Bank, the Israeli government announced 34 new settlements. Ministers called it a historic expansion meant to prevent the creation of a future Palestinian state. Netanyahu himself endorsed a demilitarized Palestinian state in a 2009 speech. He spent the years after walking it back, and in 2019 campaigned on annexing the settlements instead. The land these 34 will sit on is the land that the state was supposed to occupy.

Todd Blanche Confirmation Hearings

Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, asked Todd Blanche a softball at his confirmation hearing: Is the president your friend?

“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche said. Then, almost instantly: “Was his lawyer. And now I’m the deputy attorney general.”

The whole hearing lived inside that correction.

Blanche defended Donald Trump in the hush-money trial and the federal prosecutions. Since Watergate, the attorney general has been expected to run the Justice Department independently of the White House.

The question before the Senate was whether someone who spent years serving one man can convincingly serve the institution and the Constitution instead.

Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor whom Trump has targeted for prosecution, asked, “What happened to the Todd Blanche who was a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York?”

Blanche asked to respond.

“I am still here. I am the same exact person I was when I was a federal prosecutor.”

Democrats argued his record now tells a different story. They pointed to the indictment of James Comey, investigations of John Brennan and Cassidy Hutchinson, an IRS settlement that a federal judge has since condemned as a bad-faith misuse of the legal process, and Blanche’s continued insistence that the 2020 election was rigged.

Some 16,000 employees have left the Justice Department during his tenure, including more than a quarter of its attorneys. More than 1,200 former Justice Department employees signed a letter opposing his confirmation. More than 100 former judges filed a disciplinary complaint against him.

Ten of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims sat in the hearing room. Senator Dick Durbin asked Blanche whether he would meet with them.

“They have lawyers,” Blanche replied. “I’m prohibited from meeting directly with them.”

Democrats noted that Blanche personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell last summer while she was represented by counsel. Senator Cory Booker called Blanche’s explanation “utter nonsense.”

Blanche raised his voice.

“You can ask the questions, but you cannot control my answers.”

Since three million pages of Epstein files were released—after Congress forced the disclosure—the department has prosecuted no one. Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, said Blanche was responsible for the release that publicly identified victims by name.

Republican Senator John Cornyn focused on another issue: the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund created in Trump’s IRS settlement. Blanche insisted the fund was dead because no money had ever been transferred.

But he also acknowledged that the settlement itself remains “an enforceable document.”

Cornyn emerged unconvinced.

“The argument was that the anti-weaponization fund is dead,” he said, “and what he confirmed was that it’s not.”

One Republican vote against Blanche in committee would block his confirmation. Since Lindsey Graham’s death, Republicans hold an 11-10 majority on the panel. Senator Thom Tillis appears likely to vote yes.

But Blanche can continue serving as acting attorney general regardless of the committee vote. The confirmation won’t determine who runs the Justice Department. It will record whether the Senate approves of how he’s run it.

In other confirmation news, Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be Director of National Intelligence, repeatedly refused to say Joe Biden won the 2020 election when asked directly. The job requires telling a president things he may not want to hear. That matters most when a president’s assumptions meet reality—as they are now in the Iran war. Senators were really asking a different question: if a nominee won’t acknowledge a settled fact under oath, but must cater to the president’s illusions at the cost of their self respect, what confidence should Americans have that he would be able to do his job when it matters most?

Floods and Fire

The Weather Prediction Center issued its highest flood risk — Level 4 of 4 — on back-to-back days over the Texas Hill Country. High-risk days come fewer than 4% of the time and account for more than 80% of all flood damage.

Six to 12 inches fell overnight into Tuesday, with 10 more possible by Wednesday morning at rates of 2 to 4 inches an hour. Four inches an hour is more than a car’s wipers can clear. Flood watches cover six million people. Game wardens photographed an empty vehicle floating away; the occupants had been rescued minutes earlier. Governor Abbott declared disasters in 59 counties.

This is the same ground, one year and eleven days after the Fourth of July floods that killed more than 130 people in the Hill Country, including 25 girls and two counselors at Camp Mystic. Steep slopes, shallow soil, exposed bedrock that sheds rain instead of absorbing it. The ground says no and the water goes somewhere else.

They could use the water in Minnesota. Seventeen wildfires are burning across the northeast corner of the state. The five largest cover 30,000 acres and none are contained.

The smoke would normally rise and disperse. It isn’t, because a heat dome — a lid of high pressure — is sitting over the eastern half of the country, holding the smoke down at ground level and pushing it east. That’s why Manhattan’s sky went hazy Wednesday from fires 1,200 miles away. The same lid has nearly 100 million people under major or extreme heat warnings from the Dakotas to New England.

Let Us Now Avoid Lettuce

2026 is now the worst cyclospora year on record. State data puts the count past 4,700 — the mark set in 2019 — across more than 30 states.

Michigan interviewed more than 1,000 patients and one item kept coming up: lettuce. Salad greens. Officials there now say buy whole heads, throw away the outer leaves, wash the rest and then throw it out and run from the house screaming. Not exactly, but you can never be too careful. True advice: skip the bagged lettuce and salad kits.

Two things make it hard to catch this parasite. Symptoms take days to weeks to appear, so patients are being asked to remember a salad from three weeks ago. And many standard food-poisoning tests aren’t built to detect it.

Law Firms and Administration

The New York Times reports the Justice Department has subpoenaed thirteen of the country’s biggest law firms.

Early last year, Trump signed executive orders against firms whose lawyers had crossed him. The orders stripped their security clearances, barred their lawyers from federal buildings, and threatened the government contracts of any client who kept them. The pressure wasn’t directed only at the firms. It was aimed at their clients.

Nine of the biggest capitulated, pledging nearly a billion dollars in free legal work for causes he supports. Four other firms fought in court instead. The firms that fought won. The administration eventually abandoned those cases.

One of the president’s personal lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, negotiated the deals. He is not a government employee.

The American Bar Association sued in June to stop the campaign and asked a judge to make the White House turn over communications about the deals. The Justice Department moved to quash that request. Then it subpoenaed the law firms for many of the same records the ABA was seeking, demanding documents about the agreements and depositions from firm leaders.

The firms that made peace with the White House got subpoenaed anyway. Some told the Times they fear objecting will trigger a new executive order. The four firms that fought remain in court, where they already were.

Before the second term began, incoming White House counsel David Warrington wrote that Epshteyn’s conduct “must be stopped” and his proximity to Trump “terminated”—otherwise, “at best a scandal,” at worst “criminal indictments.” That’s from the new Haberman and Swan book. The Justice Department is now subpoenaing thirteen law firms for their correspondence with Epshteyn.

IBM

IBM lost $69 billion of market value Tuesday. Shares fell more than 25% — the largest one-day drop in the company’s history.

Which is strange, if you think AI is lifting everything with a chip in it. The AI boom is the reason IBM fell.

Companies have a fixed technology budget. This year they are spending it on AI, and the AI bill is large. So they buy servers, storage, and memory chips — the hardware that runs AI — and they stop buying what they used to buy. What they used to buy was IBM.

DealBook asked who’s next. Software companies fell with IBM on Tuesday — but was that a real fear or a momentary panic? IBM’s problem was mainframes nobody’s buying. What does that have to do with software?

A lot, if the IBM story is about limited budgets. Those budgets are limited for software too. Analysts at Evercore disagree; they say the mainframe miss doesn’t generalize, and the firms that should worry are the consultants — the ones you hire to build your software for you — because AI does what they charge for. They fell too.

One company went up 12%: CrowdStrike, which sells cybersecurity because AI models keep opening holes nobody knew were there.

France and Assisted Suicide

France’s National Assembly gave final approval to a bill legalizing assisted dying, voting 291 to 241 to let terminally ill adults end their lives with medical help — a step beyond current law, which allows only deep sedation. Patients must be 18 or older with an incurable, life-threatening illness in an advanced stage and suffering that can’t be relieved; psychiatric illness or Alzheimer’s alone doesn’t qualify.

The patient makes the request personally, a medical team reviews it for 15 days, and the patient confirms after a two-day waiting period. Patients take the medication themselves unless physically unable. National health insurance pays. The bill, a priority of President Macron, now goes to the Constitutional Council for a final review expected to take up to a month. Opponents, including disability advocates, warn the law could pressure the sick and elderly to choose death rather than become a burden; supporters call it a right to end unbearable suffering on one’s own terms. France joins Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Canada in permitting some form of assisted dying.

Elon Musk and Wisconsin

A bipartisan Wisconsin election panel found probable cause that Elon Musk broke the state’s election bribery law with his $1 million payments to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court race. The Wisconsin Elections Commission — three Democrats, three Republicans — voted 5-1 to refer two voter complaints to the Brown County district attorney. The finding centers on a Musk social media post offering $1 million to people who voted in the election, which the commission says was made to induce them to vote. Musk handed checks to three Wisconsin voters. His PAC also paid $100 to voters who signed a petition against “activist judges.” Musk and allied groups spent at least $20 million backing the Republican-endorsed candidate, who lost by 10 points in the most expensive judicial race in American history. The state’s attorney general sued to stop the checks before they were handed out; the courts declined. The finding arrives fifteen months after the election it concerns. The door on the barn is firmly closed. The horse is on Mars.

Sak Tahn Waax

And finally, we’re just catching up to the news about Sak Tahn Waax (SAHK-tahn-wah-ash), but that’s true of mankind as well.

Twelve hundred years ago, Sak Tahn patiently tracked Mars and Venus across years of nights. He did the math and worked out the rules that coordinated the Maya calendars with the movements of those two planets.

He never got credit. We refer to it as a civilization’s achievement, as though a whole people leaned in at once. Like the Egyptian pyramids. Meanwhile we know the Greeks by name — Hipparchus (hip-AR-kus), Ptolemy (TOL-uh-mee) — the men who measured the same sky and got to keep their signatures on it.

Now we know Sak Tahn Waax, because an eighth-century inscription gives him the credit.

It was found at Xultun (shool-TOON), in Guatemala, in a small rectangular room archaeologists call Structure 10K-2. The walls are covered in microtexts — faint handwritten calculations and astronomical tables. They think the room was a workshop: a whiteboard where scholars drafted and refined the formulas before they went into the formal books.

It’s the first time anyone has identified a specific person from the Classic Maya period credited as a mathematician and astronomer.

His name translates to white-chested fox.

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