Intro
Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 22 through June 26. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player.
Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.
Measuring Iran, UK PM goes down, the pedestrian’s enemy, The Supreme Court closes doors, more drones than ever hit Russia, Vance says Watergate Shmatergate, Clive Davis could say more in three minutes than Alan Greenspan in a weekend and when this guy yells you’d better cover your ears.
Let’s take it day by day.
Monday June 22
Hammering out a deal after the bombs.
Was the war in Iran worth it? As the U.S. and Iran work on a deal to end the war, each item in that deal should be seen in the light of that question.
JD Vance departed Switzerland on Monday after talks that stretched past 1 a.m. He said Iran had agreed to let international nuclear inspectors back into the country. Iran’s foreign minister said inspections would “continue as usual.” In the word choices lies a key distinction. Iran has had inspectors in the country, on and off, for decades, including before the war.
The question – as it has been going back to the Obama era agreement– is which sites the inspectors can visit, and on what terms.
Under the 2015 nuclear deal — the one Trump called “one of the worst deals ever” and cancelled in 2018 — Iran agreed to give inspectors access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain, including uranium mines, centrifuge production facilities, and access to undeclared or military sites within 24 hours at declared facilities.
Critics at the time — Trump-ally Senator Tom Cotton chief among them — said the inspections schedule wasn’t enough. Inspectors had to be allowed in anytime anywhere.
After Trump cancelled the deal in 2018, Iran reduced the access it had given. Since last June, Iran has barred inspectors entirely from sites bombed by the U.S. and Israel — which include the facilities where Iran had been producing and storing highly-enriched uranium.
What Vance announced Monday then, was a return to something like the 2015 baseline — the arrangement that wasn’t good enough for the hawks who cheered Trump’s decision to blow up the Obama-era deal.
Iran’s president said his country’s frozen assets– $100 billion held in unpaid oil bills and decades-old military contracts.-- would be unfrozen and returned. Vance said Iran could use it only to buy American agricultural products — soy, corn, wheat– and only if Iran cooperated in negotiations.
The Strait of Hormuz remains open to shipping, Vance said, though the main central route is still mined. Iran’s military said Saturday it had closed the strait in response to continued fighting in Lebanon; U.S. Central Command disputed that. By Monday, Vance said the strait was open. Before the war, 100 to 130 vessels passed through the strait each day. Over the weekend, there were 71 confirmed transits.
Keir Starmer to exit
Britain is now on its seventh prime minister in a decade. The position is the Spinal Tap drummer of global leadership. Keir Starmer announced his resignation Monday morning, two years and roughly two months into a term that began with Labour’s largest parliamentary majority this century.
The majority was the misleading part. Labour won 34 percent of the vote in July 2024 because the conservative opposition was fractured, not because voters were enthusiastic. In fact, it was a record low for a party forming a government.
Analysts called Starmer’s victory a “loveless landslide.” And the love did not arrive after the marriage. Starmer left office as the least popular prime minister in polling records.
There’s been so much turnover in the office of the prime minister that Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group said, in the future, everyone will be prime minister of Great Britain for fifteen minutes.
Starmer did not launch a failed war, mismanage a pandemic, or crash the economy. His missteps were more mundane. He cut the winter fuel payment — an annual heating subsidy worth £200 to £300, paid to nearly all British pensioners since 1997 — restricting it to only those on the lowest means-tested benefits. That took the payment away from roughly 10 million people. The stated rationale was filling a £22 billion hole in the public finances left by the Conservatives. He reversed course which the left called it callous, and financial markets called it indecisive.
Starmer then proposed cutting the benefit that helps millions cover the extra daily costs of living with a long-term disability, such as help getting dressed, getting around, or managing medication. Over 100 Labour MPs threatened to vote it down. He backed off that too.
The problem for Starmer and any British prime minister is structural. More than half of Britain’s annual government spending — roughly 600 billion pounds — goes to three line items: the National Health Service, the welfare state (disability payments, housing support, and pension benefits) and debt repayment. All three are growing.
America faces the same trap. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the national debt together consume more than half of all federal spending, and every one of those lines is growing. Touch any of them and you lose the next election. Touch other popular items to fix the problem and people revolt.
There were non-policy problems as well. Under Starmer’s predecessors, Conservative lawmakers had thrown parties in Downing Street during the Covid lockdowns they themselves had imposed on the country. So when the labor party’s P.M. accepted tickets to Taylor Swift and Arsenal matches while he was calling for austerity measures, he was open to charges that he’d dropped his posture as an antidote to the Conservatives’ culture of entitlement.
He also appointed Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington despite Mandelson’s well-documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer fired Mandelson in September once those ties became clearer. The question that followed him — what he knew, and when, about whether security officials had cleared Mandelson — was made sharper by the fact that the British royal family had already forced Prince Andrew out over his Epstein ties. The institution least associated with accountability had managed to show some. The prime minister hadn’t.
You can see how he might have miscalculated though. The country he was sending Mandelson to, after all, was one whose president had been photographed with Epstein dozens of times, whose cabinet included officials who had maintained ties with Epstein after his conviction for sex trafficking. If Washington had set the bar that low, an ambassador with a special Epstein relationship might help with the special relationship, the term sometimes used to describe U.S./U.K. ties.
Federal judges blocking
President Trump has engaged in a multi-pronged effort to change American voting. In legislation, by executive order and rhetorically. His specific target – non-citizen voting– which is already illegal and fraud which is rare and has never been shown to remotely affect a national election.
In the executive branch, the Trump administration took a database the government uses to check immigration status — a tool called SAVE that was built to cover the roughly 26.5 million noncitizens and naturalized citizens who had passed through the federal immigration system — and expanded it to cover nearly every American with a Social Security number, folding in citizenship data and biometric records. This allowed states to run their voter rolls through the tool to flag supposed noncitizens. Several Republican-led states used the system and removed people it had identified as noncitizens — some of whom were, in fact, U.S. citizens.
Monday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the use of the overhauled SAVE tool. Her 75-page ruling found that federal agencies had been “scrambling to comply” with an executive order mandating its use in the creation of eligible voter lists for each state which caused sloppy results. She ruled the system violated three federal laws meant to protect private information: the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The administration’s argument — that only a small number of records were inaccurate — she called a red herring. Disseminating false citizenship data, she wrote, is defamatory, because it implies the flagged voter committed a federal crime.
The larger fight is about who controls elections. The Constitution assigns that authority to states, not the president — a deliberate choice by founders who explicitly sought to dilute concentrated federal power. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington D.C. to force them to hand over voter rolls — and is 0 for 9 so far in court.
Minnesota mean
A grand jury subpoena is one of the most powerful tools in federal law enforcement — a demand by prosecutors for testimony or evidence that is almost impossible to refuse and almost never blocked by a judge. On Monday, a judge blocked one. Or six of them, in fact, all aimed at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other state and local officials.
The subpoenas arrived on January 20th, the same day Trump posted on social media promising a “Day of Reckoning & Retribution” for Minnesota’s leaders — one day before the Justice Department leaked word of a federal investigation into Walz. The DOJ’s stated justification was that Walz had obstructed federal immigration agents during Operation Metro Surge, an immigration sweep that left two Americans dead and resulted in roughly 4,000 arrests.
Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz — a George W. Bush appointee — found that explanation “risible.” The connections between the information sought and any actual criminal violation– the standard required for the subpoena to be valid– ranged from, in his words, “extremely weak to nonexistent.”
What the subpoenas were actually doing, Schiltz found, was using the grand jury process to punish officials for refusing to direct state resources toward federal immigration enforcement. States have no constitutional obligation to do that. The federal government cannot compel them. So the administration reached for the next available lever: the threat of criminal exposure. Schiltz called it “a blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process” and threw the subpoenas out.
Ebola growing
Confirmed Ebola cases in eastern Congo have reached 1,003, with 254 deaths. This outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain has now produced more than seven times the total case count of both previous outbreaks of that strain combined, making it the largest Bundibugyo outbreak ever and the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record, behind only the 2014-2016 West African epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people. There is no approved vaccine or treatment for this strain.
The WHO declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on May 17 — its highest-level designation, used previously for Covid-19, the 2014 Ebola epidemic, and mpox.
Contact tracing — the process of tracking down everyone who came into contact with an infected person before symptoms appeared — has reached only 55 percent of known contacts. Public health officials believe the target threshold required to successfully contain a highly infectious disease outbreak is greater than 90% of identified contact persons traced.
The United Nations refugee agency said at least two million displaced people, including more than 320,000 refugees, live in areas at risk. Access is complicated by ongoing attacks from the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamic State-affiliated rebel group active in Ituri.
Donors have pledged $910 million for the response. Less than $90 million has reached the affected countries. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced Monday it would release $107 million in emergency funding. The CDC has also rerouted flights arriving from Congo and Uganda to four U.S. airports — Dulles, Atlanta, Houston, and JFK — for enhanced screening. Its current assessment is that the risk of the outbreak spreading to the United States is low.
How alarmed should Americans be? More than most are, less than the worst-case framing suggests. The outbreak is out of control by the CDC’s own metrics — contact tracing is failing, the true case count is unknown, and the virus is spreading in a city of more than a million people. It has no vaccine and no treatment.
But Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, not through the air, which limits its pandemic potential in countries with functional health infrastructure. The danger is concentrated where it already is: in one of the poorest, most conflict-affected regions on earth, where the response is underfunded and the disease has a head start.
Keep on truckin’
In November 2022, researchers from the Transportation Department’s Volpe Center met with senior officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and told them that America’s most popular vehicles were killing hundreds of pedestrians who would not have died if the vehicles had stayed the size they were in 2002.
A senior NHTSA official disputed the data and said new pedestrian-sensing technology was already improving safety. The meeting ended without a plan.
That was three and a half years ago. On Sunday, the New York Times published the study those researchers had been working from, along with new analysis matching federal crash records to vehicle dimension data. The finding: the shift toward larger SUVs and pickup trucks caused an estimated 3,000 pedestrian deaths between 2016 and 2024. That’s between 200 and 400 people a year who would be alive if vehicles had remained roughly the same size as a generation ago.
Why? Hood height. The average vehicle hood today stands about three feet high. Anyone shorter than five-foot-six — roughly half of American adults — would be knocked to the pavement by most vehicles on the road. A pedestrian struck at the center of gravity goes down and under the vehicle. A pedestrian struck lower goes up and over, which is survivable. The second explanation: blind zones. Using a three-dimensional scanner, the Times compared sightlines in four of the most popular pickup trucks today against their counterparts from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Silverado’s blind zones have nearly doubled. The Sierra’s and Tacoma’s grew by about 60 percent.
The auto industry’s response is that pedestrian-sensing technology will solve the problem. The Times found that many such systems fail in common conditions: bad weather, shadows, uneven road surfaces, or when a pedestrian is running, pushing a stroller, or is the size of a small child.
The full-size pickup truck now averages a sticker price of $70,000 — double that of a sedan — and is the source of virtually all of the U.S. auto industry’s profits.
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan died Monday at his home in Washington at 100. His wife of 29 years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, confirmed the cause as complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Greenspan led the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 — eighteen years, which included the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. The second-longest tenure in the Fed’s history, he was appointed by Ronald Reagan and reappointed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. No other Fed chairman has been reappointed by presidents of both parties in succession.
During his time as chief of the Fed, he transformed the perception of the role itself - creating the conditions where the chairman of the Federal Reserve was seen as a sort of Superman controlling vast swaths of the American economy. His mere use of the expression “irrational exuberance,” in which he asked whether asset prices had become too high shocked the markets. This encouraged him to change his public statements and say very little but at great length.
He arrived in office 69 days before Black Monday — October 19, 1987 — when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points, 22.6 percent, the largest single-day drop in history at the time. Every stock trade involves a two-day gap between when you agree to buy or sell and when the money and shares actually change hands. Firms had promised to pay customers Monday’s prices. By the end of Monday, those shares were worth 22 percent less — but the firms still owed what they had promised. Multiplied across millions of trades, the gap between what was owed and what the stocks in their hands were worth was too large. They turned to banks for loans but the banks refused.
It looked like the machinery that processes every buy and sell order in America was about to stop.Greenspan said the Fed would provide. He called the heads of the major New York banks himself and told them to keep lending. The Fed made $17 billion available to the banks in a single day. The idea was to cover the chaos, diminish panic for long enough for prices to recover and the Fed to get its $17 billion back. The economy suffered no lasting harm. The episode established him.
His predecessor Paul Volcker had spent eight years solving high inflation. Greenspan showed the Fed could also be fast and generous in a crisis. The assumption that the Fed would always step in to cushion a crash still shapes how Wall Street takes risks today.
Critics blamed his low-rate policy of the early 2000s for inflating the housing bubble that collapsed in 2007 and 2008. By keeping interest rates low, Fed made money cheap which encouraged banks and borrowers to take risks. Greenspan, who knew banks were issuing mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, chose to trust the market to police itself rather than use the Fed’s regulatory authority to stop it. In 2008 congressional testimony, he said his belief that markets were guided by rational actors — that banks and investors would restrain themselves out of self-interest — had turned out to be wrong.
Greenspan’s last public act: joining all other living former Fed chairs and former Treasury secretaries in signing a statement opposing the Trump administration’s criminal investigation of current Fed chair Jerome Powell.
Clive Davis
Clive Davis died Monday at his home in Manhattan at 94.
Davis was the chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment and the former president of Columbia Records, founder of Arista Records, and founder of J Records. He signed or developed Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Carlos Santana, Aerosmith, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys, and Jennifer Hudson, among dozens of others.
He had no background in music when he started in Columbia’s legal department in 1960 at 28. His education came from studying the Billboard charts and analyzing what made a hit. The epiphany that remade his career arrived at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where he saw Janis Joplin perform. He signed her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, shortly after.
He was fired from Columbia in 1973, accused of using $94,000 in company funds — roughly $700,000 today — for personal expenses including his son’s bar mitzvah. He denied it. He pleaded guilty in 1975 to one count of failing to pay taxes .
Houston’s 1985 debut album, prepared over two years spent searching for the right songs and producers, produced three number-one singles and sold more than 25 million copies. His Grammy parties — hosted annually since 1976 — were among the music industry’s fixed institutions.
When Davis signed Springsteen he told him he was too static onstage, that he just stood there. Springsteen appeared to absorb nothing. Two years later Davis caught him at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village and Springsteen was jumping off the stage, onto tables, into the crowd. Afterward backstage he looked at Davis and said: “Did I move around enough for you?”
Mozart pairs up
In May 1778, Wolfgang Mozart was giving composition lessons in Paris to the teenage daughter of a duke, a talented harpist who could not, in Mozart’s assessment, compose. “She has no ideas, nothing comes of it,” he wrote to his father.
On February 2 of this year, François-Pierre Goy, a conservator at the French National Library who has managed manuscripts predating 1800 since 1995, was working through a stack of anonymous documents before his retirement when he opened a 44-page notebook. He recognized two distinct handwriting styles — a student’s and a teacher’s — and the teacher’s handwriting matched what he knew of Mozart’s: the rounded treble clefs leaning forward, the particular way of drawing braces, the double final bars.
The notebook contains seven previously unknown works for flute and harp. In the most substantial piece, a fast movement lasting about five minutes, curators estimate Mozart wrote roughly 75 to 80 percent of the music himself, correcting and completing his student’s work so thoroughly that it became his own.
Tuesday June 23
Tech stocks
Traders sold a lot of AI stocks Tuesday. One reason was a predictable blip in the hype cycle– that flicker when a critical mass of investors consider that their exuberance might be non-rational. Maybe AI isn’t going to be as revolutionary as we thought, at least not as fast as we thought. Also, the Fed might raise rates on inflation concerns. Higher borrowing costs make the math on AI infrastructure spending — billions going out the door, revenue still mostly theoretical — harder to justify.
The S&P fell 2 percent. SpaceX, which soared in its first days of public trading, has given back a fifth of its value in three sessions.
War powers after the war
The Iran fight Tuesday was over uranium no one can find — and whether a deal will ever require Iran to give it up.
The U.S. wants Iran to render its most dangerous nuclear material unusable and to allow inspectors to verify it’s happening before any money moves. Iran wants the money first, and its president said that Iran would never surrender its right to enrich uranium in the first place.
Satellite analysis suggests Iran moved its stockpile underground before the U.S. bombs fell — meaning the facilities the administration said it destroyed may have been empty. The international nuclear watchdog has since said it doesn’t know where the material is.
The Senate voted Tuesday to direct the removal of U.S. forces from the conflict. Four Republicans joined Democrats to pass it. The administration considers the underlying law constitutionally optional, so the vote is better understood as a message than a leash. The troops aren’t going anywhere — the U.S. military presence in the region will remain through at least the implementation of any agreement, which could take months.
The U.S. military presence required to hold this deal in place is substantial: roughly 50,000 personnel in the Middle East, more than 20 warships including two aircraft carriers, and hundreds of military aircraft.
A rare agreement under one roof
Tuesday the House passed a major bipartisan housing bill after Monday’s 85 to 5 Senate passage. The first significant piece of federal housing legislation since 1990, it passed 358 to 32 on its way to the president’s signature.
Republicans hope to use the legislation to show they’re addressing people’s concerns about affordability ahead of the midterms which are likely to turn on that issue. Democrats hope to do the same as well as show their base they have addressed the liberal desire to cap private equity home ownership.
The bill’s headline provision caps the number of single-family homes an institutional investor can own at 350. The idea — backed by both Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott, an unlikely pairing that helped drive the legislation — is that large investment firms have been bulk-buying single-family homes, converting them to rentals, and pricing families out of the market for existing homes in the process. A Harvard poll in May found 71 percent of registered voters support the restriction.
Housing economists say that provision will do little. Institutional investors own roughly 3 percent of single-family rentals and less than half a percent of the total single-family housing stock, according to the Urban Institute. However, there are many urban places where they control more and particularly starter homes. As Annie Lowery pointed out in the Atlantic, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions published a report showing that corporations now own one in 11 residential real-estate parcels in the 500 urban counties with data robust enough to analyze. In some communities, they control more than 20 percent of properties.
But the larger problem isn’t that the homes that exist are being hoarded by Wall Street landlords — it’s that there aren’t enough homes. The Urban Institute estimates the shortage at 4.7 million units. Some impediments to creating more housing include, local restrictions limit building, rates are high and there’s a shortage of construction workers.
The provisions in the legislation housing experts say actually matter are less visible. The bill eliminates a federal rule requiring manufactured homes to be built on a steel chassis with wheels and an axle — a holdover from when regulators assumed such homes would be moved. Most never are. Dropping the requirement could lower the cost of building a new manufactured unit by up to $10,000, according to the Niskanen Center.
The bill aims to make it easier to get a mortgage for properties below $100,000, which could particularly help rural Americans seeking smaller loans that tend to be unpopular for lenders who don’t earn much from them. It launches pilot programs to test different regulations to incentivize banks to issue more of these loans.
The bill also ties federal Community Development Block Grant money — flexible federal funds that cities currently use for a range of development projects, from road repairs to affordable housing construction — to increasing housing supply, meaning cities that approve more new homes get more federal money, and cities that don’t, get less.
The average American home sold for $150,000 in 1990. It sells for just over $500,000 today. Adjusted for general inflation, that 1990 home would cost about $360,000 now — meaning prices have risen roughly 40 percent beyond what CPI inflation alone explains.
Antifa conviction
On the Fourth of July last year, a group of protesters gathered outside the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas to demonstrate against immigration detention. One of them, a former Marine reservist named Benjamin Song, yelled “get to the rifles” and opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle, striking a police officer in the shoulder and neck. The bullet narrowly missed the officer’s spine.
On Tuesday, Song was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Seven others received sentences ranging from 30 to 70 years.
The case is the first the Justice Department has brought to sentencing under Trump’s executive order designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. A jury convicted all but one of the eight on terrorism charges in March. The sentencing judge called what happened “an assault on democracy” and said “the need to deter this type of conduct is high.” Neither the jury nor the judge pushed back on the antifa framing. The sentences are remarkable partly because of their length — and partly because of what prosecutors used to justify them. Bringing firearms, first aid kits, and wearing body armor were presented as evidence of terrorist intent.
Defense attorneys said their clients came legally armed, for their own protection, to what was planned as a late-night noise demonstration with fireworks. Song said he fired because he believed the officer was about to shoot a protester. Several defendants said they had no role in the shooting or the planning. One was sentenced to 30 years for moving a box of his own belongings — artwork, poetry, journals — after the event. Nothing in the box was illegal.
The fight over the word “antifa” runs through the entire case. Antifa is not an organization. It is a political identity — short for anti-fascist — shared by loosely affiliated individuals who oppose far-right extremism. There is no membership, no leadership, no hierarchy. Trump designated it a domestic terrorist organization anyway, even though no legal mechanism exists to designate a domestic group the way the State Department designates foreign ones. Prosecutors defined the “North Texas Antifa Cell” in court filings as a “militant enterprise” that “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government.”
The Justice Department filed new charges against 15 people in Minnesota last week on similar grounds.
Speedy deportations
When immigration agents arrest someone in the country without authorization, that person normally has the right to appear before an immigration judge — a hearing where they can explain why they should be allowed to stay, claim asylum, or simply establish that the government has the right person. Expedited removal skips all of that. No judge. No hearing. Agents arrest, process, and deport, sometimes within days.
For decades, expedited removal applied only to migrants caught near the border shortly after crossing. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order extending it to anyone in the country illegally who cannot prove they’ve lived here continuously for at least two years — which means, in practice, nearly the entire undocumented population. A federal district judge blocked that expansion in August, finding the administration hadn’t built adequate safeguards against deporting the wrong person. The ruling cited documented cases of people who had lived in the country far longer than two years but were removed anyway.
On Tuesday, a divided appeals court reversed that block. Two Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit ruled the expansion of expedited removal can proceed. The Obama-appointed judge dissented. The majority acknowledged the error cases but said they resulted from individual officers breaking the rules, not from a flaw in the rules themselves — a distinction the ACLU called a way of insulating the policy from its own consequences.
The legal question underneath this is who bears the burden of proof. Under the expanded policy, migrants must establish they’ve been here two years or more to avoid expedited removal, but the administration is not required to tell them that. The majority said the Constitution requires only notice of the action being taken and a chance to respond — not, in Judge Walker’s words, “what amounts to legal advice.” The dissent and the ACLU say that standard makes due process theoretical for people who don’t know it exists.
Brexit regret
Tuesday was the tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote — June 23, 2016, when 52 percent of Britons chose to leave the European Union and triggered the resignation of David Cameron, the first of those seven prime ministers that have moved so fast through the office its more like an extended stay Air B and B.
The central promise of those advocating leaving was that money Britain sent to Brussels to pay EU bureaucrats could be spent on the National Health Service at home instead.
Economists now estimate Brexit has made the British economy between four and eight percent smaller than it would otherwise be — the result of lost trade with Britain’s largest trading partner; five years of suppressed business investment while companies waited to find out what the new relationship with Europe would actually look like; and a labor shortage in health and social care, where hospitals and nursing homes had relied on workers who could move freely from EU countries.
A YouGov survey this month found that 57 percent of Britons now believe leaving was the wrong choice — up from 36 percent who thought so when the vote was held. Just over half of Britons said they would support rejoining the EU.
Mon Dieu its hot
Summarizing the stint by UK PM Keir Starmer, the Economist wrote, “Sir Keir was simply unable to marshal power or say why he wanted it. His government wilted like a houseplant in a heatwave.” Perhaps a true assessment but for our purposes a sign of just how hot things are in the UK.
It has been historically hot in the UK this week, with the country smashing its all-time June temperature records two days in a row amid a dangerous “heat dome” and a rare red extreme heat warning.
France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday — measured as a national average across thirty weather stations. The previous record was set in August 2003, when an estimated 15,000 people died, most of them elderly, most of them in apartments without air conditioning.
The Eiffel Tower closed early. The Louvre said it would close two hours ahead of schedule through Saturday. France has recorded forty drowning deaths in the past week as people seek to cool off in the water. Most of the dead are young.
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures rising twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s. Of France’s fifty-two official heat waves since 1947, half have occurred in the past sixteen years.
One in four French homes has air conditioning. In the United States, the figure is nine in ten.
In 2024, Europe recorded more than 60,000 heat-related deaths during a heatwave; this year’s will be even hotter.
X-Ray letter opener
Somewhere in a museum, there is a clay envelope that has never been opened. Inside it, there is a letter that’s pressed into clay — roughly the size of a smartphone, written four thousand years ago, The outer layer of clay carries a name. The inner layer carries the message. To read one, you used to have to break the other.
Researchers in Germany have built a portable X-ray scanner that gets inside without breaking anything. The innovation matters because the machines capable of this work typically weigh several tons — they don’t travel, and neither do the tablets, which museums won’t ship. So the letters have sat unread not from neglect but from physics. The new device disassembles into eight pieces, flies to the collection, and reconstructs the interior in three dimensions.
The team has now read more than a hundred of these unopened letters. A merchant confirming a textile delivery. A woman trying to settle a debt while her husband was away. A digest of the week’s news called Stack the Clay.
The empty spot on Messi’s trophy shelf
Lionel Messi has won everything. Eight individual player of the year awards. Four Champions League titles. The World Cup, finally, in 2022 at age 35. The one thing missing from a career longer than most novels is the Golden Boot — the award for the tournament’s leading scorer, which he has never won in five World Cups.
He’s leading it now, with at least four games left to play. He is 38.
Kylian Mbappé of France and Erling Haaland of Norway are one goal behind him and are scheduled to play each other Friday. After Norway beat Senegal on Tuesday, Haaland was asked about his next opponent. “They’re probably going to win against us,” he said. “They’re probably going to win the whole tournament.”
France is as hot as the weather in the country the team represents. The country’s team has scored freely, which is a departure — two years ago at the European Championship they reached the semifinals without a single goal from open play, winning only on penalties and own goals. Whatever was stuck is now unstuck.
It’s not you it’s me
A Bank of America survey of Americans aged 18 to 29 found that 51 percent spent nothing on dates in the past month. Twenty-three percent said they are delaying moving relationships forward because of their financial situation. Only 11 percent described themselves as actively dating.
The average all-in cost of a date — including grooming and gas — reached $189 earlier this year, up 12.5 percent from the prior year, according to a Bank of Montreal survey. One 26-year-old in Los Angeles told Bloomberg he estimates a dinner date costs him $250, up from $120 a few years ago. Gas in California runs just under $6 a gallon. He matches only with people who live within a 20-minute drive.
Forty-two percent of the Bank of America respondents said they were living paycheck to paycheck, including 29 percent of those earning over $100,000 a year.
Wednesday, June 24
The socialists are coming.
Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for six months. By Wednesday morning, he was the most consequential figure in the Democratic Party’s internal argument about what it wants to be.
His three endorsed candidates swept competitive congressional primaries in New York City, ousting two sitting members of Congress. Big deal. In 2024, the incumbency reelection rate was near 98 percent. All three winners ran on the same platform: abolish ICE, tax the rich, end U.S. support for what they call a genocide in Gaza.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader and a Brooklyn native, backed candidates who lost. He now faces the prospect of a caucus that includes four democratic socialists — up from two — none of whom have committed to supporting him as speaker if Democrats win back the House in November.
All three winning candidates attacked their opponents for accepting donations from the Israeli lobbying group AIPAC or refusing to use the word genocide. Jews make up an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the city’s electorate, which has traditionally meant candidates felt compelled to support the Israeli government. But the party is changing nationally. A Gallup poll from February found that 65 percent of Democrats now express sympathy for Palestinians, compared to 17 percent for Israelis. Eighty percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view Israel unfavorably—a metric that has climbed steadily from 69% and 56% in recent years.
What does this mean outside New York? A Manhattan Institute survey of registered Democrats and Harris voters found that 47 percent of the coalition identifies as moderate, 37 percent as progressive liberal, and only a small fraction as socialist — and a plurality across every demographic group, including Black and Hispanic voters, wants the party to move toward the ideological center, not further left.
The Pew Research Center recently released a typology of American politics. Leftward Progressives — Mamdani’s ideological base — make up 7 percent of U.S. adults and 14 percent of Democrat-leaning voters. They are by far the youngest typology group, with 79 percent under 50, and 61 percent say they are online almost constantly. They are also among the most politically engaged, which means their energy gets amplified in low-turnout primaries. A small, intense, digitally active faction shapes the party’s public face in ways that don’t reflect the full coalition.
Mamdani is popular in New York — Marist found 55 percent of city residents view him favorably — but his coalition is concentrated in places he already won. Every race he entered Tuesday was in a district he carried comfortably last year. The theory of his movement has not yet been tested anywhere that doesn’t already agree with it.
Republicans understand this. They will try to convince voters in battleground districts and states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that liberal views popular in ideological enclaves define the entire Democratic party.
The new left is powerful, energetic and successful. But the late, long-serving Congressman Barney Frank, in a May interview with the Times, warned that this includes a tension. The left’s problem, he said, is not the positions themselves but the insistence on making every position a litmus test before building public support for it. The gay rights movement won, he argued, by starting with the most popular fights — gays in the military, employment — and leaving marriage for last. The new left wants everything at once. “If you insist on the most controversial parts all at once, you make it harder.”
Trump holds housing bill hostage
Wednesday morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the housing legislation that had just passed through Congress “one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history,” and James Blair, the recently departed White House deputy chief of staff now running Trump’s midterm operation, dubbed it “a signature commitment that President Trump laid out in the State of the Union.”
But something got tangled in the Hormuz. An hour and a half before the president was due to sign the bill at the Capitol at noon, the president posted online minimizing the bill as one “of minor importance,” calling it “The Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill.” Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was one of the main authors of the bill in the Senate. He caught lawmakers and his staff by surprise, declaring on social media that a news conference and signing ceremony was “hereby cancelled until such a time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”
The news conference that was not cancelled was the one ongoing when that social media post arrived. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other House GOP leaders were touting the housing bill at a news conference, the stage set for the president in the National Statuary Hall — including a table and chair to sign the legislation.
The Save America Act is Trump’s proposed law requiring proof of citizenship to vote and effectively ending mail-in voting. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said repeatedly that it does not have the votes to pass. The 53-47 Senate can’t get to 60 without Democrats, and Democrats are uniformly opposed because the requirement would fall hardest on the voters they represent — lower-income Americans, minorities, and the elderly — many of whom are eligible citizens without ready access to the documents the bill demands. Democrats also note that federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting, which makes the bill, in their telling, a cure for a problem that doesn’t exist
Trump knows this. He has known it for months. What he did Wednesday was use a bill that would have helped Republican candidates in November as leverage for a bill that cannot pass — a hostage taken for a ransom no one can pay.
A D.C. court blocked his expansion of the SAVE database Monday. A Boston judge permanently barred his citizenship verification executive order Wednesday. And on Thursday, a federal judge blocked the proof-of-citizenship requirement from his first elections executive order. Three courts in a week. The Senate doesn’t have the votes. The crusade is running into the same wall from every direction.
The housing bill can still become law without Trump’s signature. If Congress sends it to the White House and he neither signs nor vetoes it within ten days, it becomes law automatically, on the condition that Congress stays contiguously in session for those ten days. But House leadership hasn’t sent it yet — that clock hasn’t started — and Speaker Johnson said Wednesday he expects Trump to sign it within the ten-day window once he does.
Trump shouts at Senators
Trump blew off the signing ceremony but kept his lunch date with Republican Senators where he blew off steam.
Inside the lunch, Trump spent most of an hour not on the housing bill or the elections legislation he says is his top priority, but on Iran — specifically on the four Republican senators who had voted the day before to rebuke his handling of the war. He called them losers. He accused them of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Senator John Kennedy said Trump arrived “mad as a murder hornet.”
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana stood up and told the president that the war was not going as well as senators were being told. “It was supposed to last four weeks,” Cassidy said afterward. “It’s lasted four months.” Trump responded by bringing up Cassidy’s recent primary loss — the one Trump caused by endorsing his opponent. Cassidy called it an attempt to bully him out of asking a question the American people deserved answered.
Majority Leader Thune, sources said, did not speak.
Trump is powerless.
Also on Wednesday, a federal judge in Boston permanently barred Trump from implementing the proof-of-citizenship requirement from his first elections executive order. The Constitution, Judge Denise Casper wrote, “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
Camp Mystic bankruptcy
Camp Mystic, the all-girls Christian camp in central Texas where catastrophic flooding killed 28 people last July — 25 campers, two counselors, and the camp’s longtime executive director — filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday. The operators listed debts exceeding $10 million against assets of between $1 and $10 million.
Chapter 11 allows a company to reorganize rather than liquidate, but it also freezes most civil lawsuits against the debtor — which matters here, because the families of the dead are almost certainly plaintiffs. State investigators found earlier this month that the camp had failed to provide adequate emergency plans and that nearby adults had been unprepared to act when the floodwaters came.
Gen Z wants to help
A Gallup survey out Wednesday found that nearly 80 percent of Gen Zers (those between 14 and 29) want jobs that help other people. Those who feel they’re making a positive impact in others’ lives are dramatically more likely to find their own lives meaningful. But the economy isn’t meeting them where they are. Almost half said care-focused jobs don’t pay enough, and half said what they actually want most from a career is a job that makes enough money without being too stressful. At which point someone’s father says “that’s why they call it work.”
When researchers removed the financial constraint and asked what they’d do on a comfortable salary, most said they’d take the meaningful job. The motivation is there, which means those who pay care workers should increase salaries to tap the meaning-focused generation. And if that doesn’t happen we’ll have another case where there’s agap between what a generation says it values and what the economy makes possible.
Thursday, June 25
Venezuelan double quake
Two earthquakes struck Venezuela’s northern coast Wednesday evening, 39 seconds apart — a 7.2 and then a 7.5. The second was the strongest to hit Venezuela since 1900. By Thursday morning, at least 164 people were dead and nearly 1,000 injured. By Friday that number had risen to over 500, with thousands still missing. The United States Geological Survey estimated a 41 percent probability that the final death toll could exceed 10,000.
La Guaira sits just north of Caracas and contains the country’s main airport, which sustained heavy damage and was closed. The buildings that fell were mostly unreinforced brick and concrete — structures that, in a large earthquake, fail floor by floor, one pancaking onto the next.
Residents were wandering the streets, shouting names of the missing. Since there were no machines, neighbors were the ones who started digging.
The country’s coffers are largely empty. Trump posted that Venezuela’s people were his “new and great friends” since he seized Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro, in a military raid. The president instructed all federal agencies to move quickly. Rubio called it “a setback” to stabilization efforts. He said the response would be “big, fast, and effective” — then noted the airport closure was complicating logistics.
State TV showed some international emergency responders started to arrive Friday to help dig through the aftermath in search of thousands of missing people. A website compiling reports of people still missing had 50,000 names listed as of Friday morning, according to Reuters.
Previously, the record for the deadliest quake in Venezuela’s modern history was a 1967 earthquake that killed 240 people.
Not so EZ pass.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard issued a warning Thursday to any vessel using the alternative shipping route through Omani waters — the route organized by the International Maritime Organization to move hundreds of ships stranded in the Persian Gulf since the war began. The Guard called the route “unacceptable and completely dangerous.” “Violators will be dealt with,” it said, without elaborating. Hours later, a cargo ship on that route was struck by an unknown projectile. The UK Maritime Trade Operations center confirmed the vessel sustained damage to its bridge. No casualties. No confirmation yet of who fired.
Before the war, 130 or more ships passed through the strait each day. Wednesday had 78 transits — the most since the war began, but still well short of normal.
The underlying dispute is not just about routes. It is about who controls the strait permanently, and on what terms, after the 60-day window in the memorandum of understanding expires. The MOU says Iran will allow toll-free passage “for 60 days only” — after which Iran and Oman will negotiate “the future administration and maritime services” of the waterway. Iran has already set up a Persian Gulf Strait Authority to regulate and collect fees. Rubio said Thursday that Iran will never be permitted to charge tolls under any final deal: “International waterways do not belong to any nation state.” Iran has not agreed to that. The MOU does not resolve it. It schedules a conversation about it — one that, based on Thursday, is not going well.
This was not an issue before the war. If what’s won in the end is less than the status quo before the bombing started — or before Trump tore up the JCPOA — then a lot was spent for a weaker result.
Just one in four Americans believes President Donald Trump’s war with Iran was worth its costs and a majority worry that a truce with Tehran is unlikely to last, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Inflation still here
The Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the PCE — is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge because, unlike the better-known Consumer Price Index, it tracks how Americans actually adjust their spending as prices change, capturing the full economy rather than a fixed basket of goods. The Fed’s target is 2 percent annual PCE inflation. In May, it came in at 4.1 percent — the fastest annual rate in more than three years. The main driver was oil prices, pushed up by the war.
But the so-called core measure, which strips out food and energy, rose 3.4 percent — a sign the question going forward is not just whether war-driven fuel prices will fall. It is whether inflation from tariffs, and from the broader stress the war placed on supply chains, has now embedded itself in the wider economy. If it has, the oil-price relief from the ceasefire may not be enough. About half of Fed officials now expect to raise interest rates by year’s end. The Fed’s new chairman, Kevin Warsh, is under pressure from the president to cut them instead.
SCOTUS TPS
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday to allow the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians. TPS is the program Congress created in 1990 to give people from countries struck by war or natural disaster temporary legal status and work permits in the United States. It does not provide a path to citizenship.
Among the 350,000 Haitians facing deportation: 15,000 agricultural workers, 13,000 nursing assistants, and 8,000 caregivers, according to the National TPS Alliance. Many have American-born children. Panic rippled through communities from Florida to Ohio within hours of the ruling. TPS recipients from Haiti concentrated in nursing homes, factories, and elder care facilities because they were among the few sectors that actively recruited them: health care for its chronic labor shortage, manufacturing for its tolerance of workers without college credentials. Miami Jewish Health had already cut 120 nursing home beds in part due to pending TPS cancellations. At a Boston rehabilitation center, managers began preparing to lose the dietary aides and certified nursing assistants caring for 115 elderly residents.
Immigrants began making plans to sell homes and resolve custody arrangements. The State Department currently warns Americans not to travel to Haiti in its strongest terms, citing gang violence, kidnapping, and limited health care. Four Haitian women deported in February were found beheaded and dumped in a river several months later, according to court documents filed by immigration lawyers.
The administration moved to end TPS for people from 13 of the 17 countries that had it when Biden left office. Lower courts had blocked the terminations, finding that the administration had not followed the process Congress required — including a genuine consultation with the State Department about country conditions — and that the Haiti decision was likely motivated by racial animus in violation of the Fifth Amendment. Thursday’s ruling clears the path to deportation. Stephen Miller told reporters Thursday that Haitians and others who lose TPS should be detained and deported immediately.
Writing for the majority, Justice Alito said the statute bars courts from second-guessing the Homeland Security secretary’s designation decisions. On the racial animus argument, Alito did not say the claims were false. He said the statements cited — including Trump calling Haiti a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country and amplifying false claims that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — were not “overtly racial” and insufficient to prove race was a motivating factor.
Justice Kagan’s dissent rested on two grounds. The first is procedural: she argued courts can review whether the secretary followed the required process, even if they cannot override the final decision. The second is constitutional: she argued the Constitution’s guarantee that the government cannot act out of racial animus applies here, and that the evidence was plain. “The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike,” she wrote, that race entered into the decision. Kagan noted that Trump’s comments were “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.” The practical effect is that the constitutional claim goes back to lower courts — but the injunction keeping people in legal status while that litigation proceeded is now lifted.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, called the decision “a mistake” and said it is too dangerous to deport people to Haiti. New York Governor Kathy Hochul vowed to fight the ruling: “It’s going to cripple our health care system. Who’s going to show up tomorrow to take care of grandma?”
SCOTUS Asylum
Imagine you are fleeing gang violence in Honduras. You make it to the US border. You walk up to an official crossing and tell the officer you are afraid to go home. For decades, federal law has been understood to guarantee you the right to be heard — to have someone evaluate whether your fear is credible before anything else happens. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ended that guarantee.
The court ruled 6-3 that the administration can turn people away before they set foot on American soil. The majority’s reasoning: federal law gives asylum rights to anyone who “arrives in the United States,” and a person standing in Mexico, stopped at the border, has not arrived. Justice Alito: “A guest does not arrive in a house when he knocks on the front door.”
The ruling leaves asylum seekers with two options. They can present themselves at an official crossing and be turned away without any evaluation of their claim. Or they can cross between ports of entry — which is illegal under US law. The 1951 Refugee Convention, which the United States ratified unanimously in 1968, says refugees should not be penalized for illegal entry when fleeing persecution. But that protection only applies once you’re on US soil — which you can no longer reach legally without the administration’s permission.
The same treaty prohibits returning anyone to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened. The United Nations’ position is that turning people away at the border without evaluating their claim violates that obligation. The court’s majority held that domestic law governs what happens at the border. The treaty has no enforcement mechanism. There is no court that can make the United States comply.
Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench — an unusual act of public protest — saying the ruling “extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.” The policy is not currently in use, but the ruling makes it available whenever the administration wants it. White House aide Stephen Miller reacted to the ruling by declaring that “America’s doors are closed to asylum seekers.”
SCOTUS Roundup
For about 20 years, John Durnell was the “spray guy” for his neighborhood association in St. Louis — killing weeds at local parks without protective equipment. He developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells, and attributed it to his exposure to Roundup beginning in 1996. A jury awarded him $1.25 million. Thursday’s ruling erases that verdict and closes the courthouse to the more than 100,000 people who filed similar claims.
A 7-2 court held that Bayer cannot be sued in state courts for failing to warn consumers about cancer risk because the EPA has determined no such warning is required. The World Health Organization classified Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015. The EPA has said it is unlikely to cause cancer when used as directed.
The principle the ruling establishes goes beyond Roundup: once a federal agency approves a product’s label, state courts cannot second-guess that approval — even if the underlying science is contested, even if internal documents suggest the company knew more than the label disclosed. The agency’s word is final. Medical devices, cosmetics, other pesticides — anything governed by a federal labeling requirement could now be shielded from state failure-to-warn claims by the same logic.
That makes the ruling politically awkward in a specific way. Trump sided with Bayer. Robert F. Kennedy built the MAHA movement — the movement that helped elect Trump — on the argument that federal agencies like the EPA have been captured by the industries they regulate, approving products not because they’re safe but because corporations shaped the process. Thursday’s ruling holds that once the EPA speaks, the courthouse door closes. That is precisely the outcome MAHA activists believe enabled decades of harm. Kennedy has not reconciled that position with the administration’s.
UKs next PM
On Thursday, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Keir Starmer’s government — the equivalent of the Treasury Secretary in American terms — threw her support for the next prime minister behind Andy Burnham.
Burnham is the 56-year-old former mayor of Manchester and currently the sole declared candidate for Labour leader. Under his nine years in that job, he took the city’s bus network back into public control, capped fares when they were rising nationally, and became the most popular politician in the Labour Party — including among voters in areas the party has been losing to Reform.
To become party leader, Labour rules require a seat in Parliament. Burnham didn’t have one, so a sitting MP resigned his position to trigger a by-election — the first time since 1965 that had been done solely to clear a path for someone outside Parliament. Burnham won last week, routing the Reform UK candidate — the nationalist party that wants to halt immigration, scrap climate targets, and push the NHS toward private providers. If he faces no challenger when nominations close July 16, he could be prime minister by July 17.
The Greens blink
France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday. Only 25 percent of French households have air conditioning, compared to 50 percent in Spain and Italy and 90 percent in the United States. Thousands of schools have closed this week. Medical workers say conditions in hospitals are becoming intolerable. Richard Salmon, director of the Air Conditioning Company in the UK, said residential inquiries have more than tripled in five years. “People just can’t function when they’re boiling at 3 a.m.,” he said.
Marine Le Pen, of the nationalist National Rally party , has called for a national plan to equip all schools and hospitals with air conditioning, backed by €20 billion in government loans. The head of the Ecologists party broke with her movement’s longstanding argument — that air conditioning treats the symptom while worsening the disease, consuming electricity, expelling heat onto city streets, and raising urban temperatures by two to three degrees — and said air conditioning in schools and hospitals is now unavoidable.
They are not wrong. They are also losing the argument.
World’s loudest person
And in totally unrelated air conditioning news, an Australian air conditioning repairman and honorary town crier named Joseph McGrail-Bateup has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s loudest person. He yelled the word “now” at 122.4 decibels — the range of a jet taking off — breaking a record set in 1994 by a Northern Ireland schoolteacher who had yelled “quiet.”
If you heard him up close you would exceed the physical pain threshold for most humans. Just below a jackhammer or air raid siren which cause immediate physical pain.
McGrail-Bateup said there was no way to train for the attempt. It took him seven tries. His voice, he said, was shot for days afterward.
The previous record had stood for 31 years.
Friday
Foolish violation
President Trump called it “a foolish violation of what we agreed to” referring to the ceasefire with Iran. Iran is reported to have launched at least four drones at a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, and one struck the upper deck of the Ever Lovely while the U.S. military says it shot down the other three. The ship was damaged but continued its transit.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister said safe passage through the strait is “not guaranteed under vague arrangements, parallel routing systems, or decision‑making processes that exclude Iran as a coastal state.” The International Maritime Organization announced a temporary pause in its evacuation of hundreds of vessels stranded in the Persian Gulf since the war began. Ships on the U.S.-backed southern route, hugging the Omani coast, were ordered to turn back or hold position. Thursday’s transit count through the strait fell to about 54, from roughly 73 the day before. Before the war, say with me won’t you, around 130 or more ships passed through each day.
One week in, what has the agreement produced? The war has stopped, which has likely saved lives. Iran is selling oil again — about 3.8 million barrels exported in the first week after the naval blockade ended, with the ability to sell to anyone at market prices instead of offering China steep discounts. Frozen assets worth more than $100 billion remain in dispute. Nuclear inspections remain in dispute.
Lebanon
Four rounds of U.S.-mediated talks between Israel and Lebanon have failed to resolve the central questions: the scope and timing of any Israeli pullback from areas of southern Lebanon where its troops have operated since the latest phase of fighting began, and how Lebanese state forces will assume control on the ground. Hezbollah has urged Beirut not to separate its own diplomatic track from Iran’s, arguing that any Israeli withdrawal should be secured as part of Tehran’s negotiations with Washington.
After days of haggling in Washington, a fifth round produced a framework agreement. At a State Department ceremony, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a U.S.-brokered framework he described as “the beginning of the beginning” toward a cessation of hostilities and the reassertion of Lebanese sovereignty in the south. The text envisages Lebanese Armed Forces units taking exclusive control in designated “security zones” and a phased reduction of Israeli forces from certain areas, under conditions that include an end to Hezbollah fire. Israeli officials say the deal is meant to push Hezbollah and Iran out of the border equation and open a path toward more durable arrangements between Israel and the Lebanese state.
But the underlying gaps remain. Israel has resisted committing to a fixed timetable for full withdrawal, and its forces have continued to carry out airstrikes and drop evacuation leaflets in parts of southern Lebanon even as talks proceed. Hezbollah’s leadership has publicly rejected a framework negotiated without its participation and continues to demand an unconditional, fully scheduled Israeli exit from Lebanese territory.
Meanwhile, in the hills above Kfar Tebnit, Israeli troops have surrounded a large underground Hezbollah complex that Israeli and Western officials say was built over decades with Iranian assistance. Hezbollah fighters are believed to be entrenched inside as the standoff drags on, their situation shaped as much by battlefield pressure as by whatever diplomacy produces in Washington.
Ukraine drone strikes
Ukraine launched one of its largest drone strikes of the war overnight Thursday — 660 intercepted by Russian air defenses, surpassing the previous record of 556 set in May. Crimea declared a state of emergency. Gas stations there have run out of fuel. Summer camps canceled. Rolling blackouts. Bookings in Crimea for July and August down more than 30 percent. Zelenskyy announced a 40-day “influence operation” aimed at compelling Russia to end the war.
Bolton pleads guilty
John Bolton pleaded guilty Friday to a single felony count of illegally retaining classified information — notes he compiled for his memoir excoriating Donald Trump. He faces up to five years in prison and a $2.25 million fine, which could claw back much of what he earned from the book. Sentencing is in October.
The case began in the first Trump administration and gained momentum under Biden, after Bolton’s personal email — containing notes on national security matters he’d shared with his wife and daughter as though they were editors — was hacked by Iranian government operatives. A hacker taunted him: “Good luck Mr. Mustache.” His assistant reported it to the FBI. Investigators found the diary-like entries Bolton had been sending himself, essentially a running record of classified material from inside the Trump White House.
JD Vance has thoughts about Watergate
JD Vance said Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library that Watergate would have been “a 12-hour news story” today and that “the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” He compared the forces that removed Nixon to those that targeted Trump, called it the work of “the same institutions,” and noted the personal resonance: “Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”
Nixon resigned in disgrace after his administration orchestrated and covered up a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters and members of his own party told him he faced certain impeachment for obstruction of justice — paying hush money to the Watergate burglars and directing the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation — and abuse of power, including using the CIA, FBI, and IRS to harass political opponents.
If Nixon was undone by the deep state, then the deep state was his mouth — the most damning evidence being a recording made six days after the break-in of Nixon directing his chief of staff to have the CIA tell the FBI to halt its investigation on national security grounds.
Republican congressional leaders listened to the tape and told Nixon he had fewer than 15 votes in the Senate. He resigned the next day. For a vice president who has said it is necessary to make up stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets in order to get attention, who called Renee Good and Alex Pretti domestic terrorists after they were shot and killed by federal agents — with no evidence to support the designation and six federal prosecutors resigning in protest — it is not surprising that he might think the historical record can be rewritten. Still, it takes some nerve to wave away the literal origin of the phrase “smoking gun” — named for this case, because the evidence was irrefutable — as a 12-hour story.
Chat GPT needs government approval
OpenAI released its most powerful AI model Friday — GPT-5.6, called Sol — with a condition attached: the federal government decides who gets access. Only companies approved by the administration can use it. Individual users cannot.
OpenAI said the arrangement is temporary while a longer-term regulatory framework is worked out, and made clear it isn’t happy about it: “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.”
The administration that came to power promising to liberate AI from Biden-era restrictions has moved in the opposite direction. After Anthropic developed a model capable of finding vulnerabilities in critical software, the administration controlled which companies and nations could access it. Earlier this month it placed export controls on other Anthropic models after the company provided access to a South Korean firm suspected of ties to China. A former Trump AI adviser who is joining OpenAI next month: “In a matter of weeks, U.S. federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque.”
AI can read burnt scrolls
A papyrus scroll carbonized when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD has been fully read for the first time, without being opened. Researchers used CT scanning and AI-assisted ink detection to virtually unwrap PHerc. 1667, recovering nearly 1.5 meters of text across 20 columns — a philosophical discussion of ethics and human behavior reflecting Stoic thought, dated to as early as the third century BC, making it among the oldest in the collection. A second scroll yielded the title “Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8” — establishing for the first time that the work ran to at least eight books, when only one had been known. More than 600 scrolls remain unopened. The Vesuvius Challenge, which organized the effort, is offering $1 million to the first team to fully read any additional scroll, and is publishing all its data, models and code. The collection — the only large-scale library known to have survived from classical antiquity — was buried in a villa believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The lead papyrologist on the project was speaking at a conference in Naples, across the bay from Vesuvius — the volcano that destroyed the library visible through the window — when she announced: “Literally last night, in front of Mount Vesuvius, everything changed.”
