Welcome to Stack the Week for July 7th. It’s still not Friday. We here at Stack the Whatever We’re Calling It have a grasp of the totally obvious, if nothing else.
But we are pushing our Soap Box Derby car out of the shed and seeing how far it will go before the wheels come off and roll into the abandoned lot with the tires and discarded refrigerator.
Thank you to Laura Doan for helping sous chef all of this into a format available to all humans.
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Today the world’s most important waterway caught fire again, a militant group gave up a government it held for nineteen years (maybe!), the Atlantic alliance renegotiated its founding bargain, and the Democratic Party spent the day trying to talk its own Senate nominee off the ballot in Maine. Also: a man who fought beside American soldiers in Afghanistan died in American custody, and almost nobody noticed. And in New York, engineers noticed a sagging skyscraper just in time.
The Strait of Hormuz is hot again
Before dawn, a mayday. A Qatari tanker carrying liquefied natural gas was struck by a drone. Its engine room caught fire. Reuters has the audio recording — the captain calling out his ship’s name, reporting the hit on the port side.
Simultaneously, a Saudi supertanker was struck by a missile. By afternoon, the British military reported a third tanker hit by a drone; it remains damaged but sailing.
All three used the southern route along Oman’s coast — the route Iran told the world last Thursday not to use. They are out there because the main northern lanes are heavily mined.
No casualties reported on any of the three. Qatar’s foreign ministry called the strike a grave violation of international law.
Brent crude rose on the news — climbing about two and a half percent to just under seventy-four dollars a barrel. A five-month high for global oil.
In response, the U.S. revoked a license that had authorized the sale of Iranian oil. This ended economic life support granted Tehran just last month, effectively killing the interim ceasefire.
Now, either the administration allows global energy prices to spiral by choking off Iranian crude, or it is forced to back up its economic penalties with direct military strikes to keep the strait open.
The ten-year Treasury yield ticked up, one of those numbers you hear on the news but rarely understand. It means investors lending money to the government now want a bigger return. One reason is that they expect higher oil prices to push up inflation. When it costs more to move oil, it usually costs more to move almost everything else.
I started this item with a little bit of theatricality because I was trying to locate the story in flesh and blood—the captains who must traverse the Strait and hope that nothing hits their vessel from above or below. With every strike, fewer captains are going to want to make the run, and fewer insurance companies will be willing to risk their cargo. When ships stop sailing, prices go up. That’s how all of this makes life more expensive for you.
There is a theory that President Trump agreed to the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran because he wanted everything to cool down before November’s elections, planning to push Iran into greater concessions afterward. Today’s events expose the weakness in that theory. The Iranians push a couple of buttons, and the transmission line between those explosions and your wallet is short. They can keep doing it until November, making it impossible to guarantee the calm that agreement was supposed to buy.
President Trump said Monday that Iran must make a deal or the United States would finish the job. Iran’s foreign minister answered this morning: no more talks while the threats continue.
The death of an ally
This story hasn’t gotten much pickup, but by our framework, a loss of life outranks a political scandal.
Official medical examiner findings and death certificates released Tuesday reveal that Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, died of acute anaphylaxis and severe asthma less than twenty-four hours after entering federal custody this March. Paktiawal was a combat ally who spent more than a decade fighting alongside U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan before being evacuated to America in 2021.
Paktiawal’s family alleges that arresting agents confiscated and withheld his necessary medical inhaler during the booking process.
For more than ten years, this man bet his life on America’s word, walking patrols with Special Forces in a country where helping Americans was a death sentence. We flew him out in 2021 because we owed him. He survived a decade of the Taliban. He did not survive his first day in ICE custody.
Fifty-two people have died in ICE custody since January of last year, according to Human Rights Watch. Thirty-three died in 2025—the most in more than two decades—and this year is on pace to break that record. The death rate in detention has more than doubled, rising faster than the detained population.
Platner back on the farm
This is the story you might have expected to be the lead story today. Nearly every American front page leads with it. Is that news judgment or rubbernecking?
The campaign of the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner is in jeopardy. By the time you hear this, that campaign may be referred to in the past tense. But at noon Tuesday, the story was a credible Politico report featuring an on-the-record sexual assault allegation by a former partner, Jenny Racicot, which Platner denied. By 1:25 p.m., Senator Bernie Sanders publicly cut ties and told him to withdraw immediately. An elevator full of other prominent Democrats did too.
The Senate runs through Maine. Democrats’ most plausible path to a majority requires beating Susan Collins, and their nominee’s collapse makes that path substantially harder.
The story also matters because it sits inside a recurring national argument: what we owe accusers, what we owe the accused, and how a movement responds when one of its stars is accused of wrongdoing. That’s not gossip. It’s how parties demonstrate their values—and a model for how the rest of the culture handles abuse in the workplace and at home.
Under Maine’s election statute, a nominee who withdraws by 5 p.m. on the second Monday in July—this coming Monday, July 13—can be replaced on the November ballot. The party then has until July 27 to name someone. Miss the deadline and Platner’s name stays, disowned by nearly everyone who put it there.
Yesterday, we noted that Platner’s rise reflected what can happen when a political movement prizes raw, unvetted “authenticity” above all else. But as our community rightly noted—and I should have said—authenticity doesn’t inherently breed misconduct, nor are establishment candidates immune.
NATO, renegotiated
The postwar Atlantic bargain—America underwrites European security, Europe follows America’s lead—is being renegotiated in real time.
The summit was convened in Turkey rather than Brussels, the de facto headquarters of NATO and the European Union. Alliance meetings are typically held there to signal unity and institutional continuity. Instead, leaders gathered in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s palace compound, and Trump said that if Erdoğan weren’t hosting, he might not have come. Trump likes Erdoğan—a strongman who deals leader to leader, flatters generously, and skips the lectures Trump gets from Western Europe.
The strategic reason is that the war in Iran has made Turkey’s geography indispensable. It fields NATO’s second-largest army, controls the straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, hosts pipelines carrying Caspian and Iraqi oil west, and remains the one NATO capital on speaking terms with Moscow, Kyiv, and Tehran at once.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it the most consequential gathering in the alliance’s history, and he meant it as a boast. In the administration’s telling, this is the summit where NATO rebuilds on American terms: Europe paying more, Europe supplying the troops and ships America pulls out.
The Americans who distrust NATO and the Europeans who run it now agree on the basic facts: after this week, America does less and Europe does more. They only disagree about what to call it. The White House calls it fixing a bad deal. Much of Europe calls it being left on their own by the country that helped write the rules of the modern global order.
Trump renewed his demand that the United States acquire Greenland—territory of Denmark, a NATO ally—and suggested that if Europe keeps resisting, the U.S. could pull every service member off the continent.
The alliance came to Ankara carrying billions in new arms deals—much of it buying American—assembled less as strategy than as appeasement. Europe is arming to make itself less dependent on a partner it no longer fully trusts, while paying that partner in the meantime. The Thank you, sir, may I have another strategy.
Sitting beside Erdoğan, Trump announced he’ll lift the sanctions imposed in 2020 after Turkey bought Russia’s S-400 air defense system—”We don’t want to sanction friends,” he said—and that he’ll consider selling Turkey the F-35, the stealth fighter Turkey was expelled from in 2019 for that same Russian purchase. Congress wrote the expulsion into law; Trump did not explain how he’d get around that law. Erdoğan says he’s been promised five jets. Israel’s prime minister spent Monday morning on television claiming the sale was a threat to its security and urging Washington not to do it. The original objection—that operating F-35s alongside Russian radar could teach Moscow how to detect those aircraft—got a one-sentence answer from Trump: “No concerns at all.”
Asylum files
A sweeping push for mass deportations drove federal officials to cut a deal with an enemy state, according to a lawsuit highlighted by The Washington Post.
The lawsuit, filed by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and Public Citizen, alleges that in March 2025 immigration officials wanted to deport hundreds of Iranians in federal custody. But under international law, you cannot simply dump people at a foreign border. The receiving country has to agree to take them. According to the complaint, the administration offered Tehran access to confidential asylum files to help make that happen.
To apply for asylum in America, you have to write down a detailed map of exactly why your home country wants to kill or imprison you—whether you participated in pro-democracy protests, converted to Christianity, or are LGBTQ. The lawsuit alleges that U.S. officials hand-delivered or mailed that exact information to the Iranian Interests Section at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.
This is the equivalent of giving your executioner the pin drop to your house.
You may remember that the United States recently bombed Iran because, among other reasons, the regime kills so many of its own people. The very kinds of people whose identities and stories are at the center of this case.
By September 2025, Tehran signed an agreement to take back up to 400 nationals. Roughly 115 Iranians have since been deported on three flights. The lawsuit relies on testimony from a whistleblower inside the embassy and from deportees who say that when they were summoned for ICE interviews, senior Iranian consular officials were sitting across from them, already holding their confidential U.S. asylum files. According to the complaint, the information-sharing continued even after the war began.
The Department of Homeland Security flatly denies the allegations, saying that ICE only facilitates standard consular access to help detainees get passports. If the court ultimately finds the administration traded confidential asylum files to hit its deportation metrics, it would mean the government violated its own asylum protections to hand dissidents over to the state it now says threatens international security.
Blanche AG Nomination Revolt:
An institutional revolt has sprung up against the president’s choice for Attorney General ahead of his confirmation hearing on July 15. More than twelve hundred former federal prosecutors, judges, and FBI veterans have signed a joint public letter sent directly to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing the nomination.
The 59-page letter warns that confirming acting Attorney General Todd Blanche could transform the Department of Justice from an independent arbiter of law into an arm of presidential power because, the signatories argue, he has treated the department as the president’s private defense firm.
They point to several developments: over sixteen thousand career employees—nearly a quarter of the department’s workforce—have left during his tenure, many, they argue, because they refused what they considered unlawful or unethical directives. They also accuse Blanche of purging the teams that handled the January 6th and Special Counsel investigations, installing political loyalists to pursue cases against the administration’s opponents, and telling all 93 U.S. Attorneys that their chief client is not the American public, but the occupant of the Oval Office.
According to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in Regime Change, Trump has long wanted an attorney general who would serve as his personal Roy Cohn—a fierce legal fixer whose loyalty to the president outweighed loyalty to the institution. To the letter’s authors, Blanche represents the fulfillment of that search.
✔️Small Businesses small coverage
More than a quarter of American workers earn their paycheck at a small business—a firm with fewer than fifty employees. A new report from STAT shows those businesses are giving up on offering health insurance because it’s simply too expensive. Three in ten small firms now offer coverage, down from nearly half in 2000. Their average premium has risen 182 percent over that stretch—more than double general inflation. STAT calls it the lowest offer rate ever recorded, part of a longer slide in which job-based coverage among working-age adults has fallen from 67 percent in 1998 to about 60 percent today.
As we reported yesterday, the federal exchanges, where workers go when the workplace plan disappears, are fraying at the same time. Fresh federal data shows Obamacare enrollment down about 13 percent nationwide—roughly 3 million people—with the deepest losses concentrated in Ohio, Oklahoma, Arizona, South Carolina, and Minnesota following the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits. Ohio and Oklahoma each lost nearly a third of their enrollment.
When we talk about the American dream, these numbers should be top of mind. For decades, the social compact was built on the private employer. You worked hard, built a business—or found a job at one—and that effort earned your family basic health security. When that pillar snaps, economic self-reliance goes with it.
Our inflation debate often misses the prices that matter most. A two percent drop in core inflation looks great on a government chart, but it means little to a parent whose monthly health premium just became a second mortgage. The hidden tax isn’t just higher prices. It’s the loss of predictability. When health insurance slips out of reach, families stop planning for the future and start managing the next bill.
Farage Resigns
In our somewhat recurring series, “British Politicians: They’re Nothing Like Ours,” populist right-wing leader and staunch Trump ally Nigel Farage announced Tuesday that he is resigning his seat in the British Parliament—only to immediately turn around and run for it again.
Farage is forcing a flash by-election, betting his voters will send him right back to Westminster. The move temporarily pauses the parliamentary investigation into his conduct.
The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner is investigating Farage over a five-million-pound gift from a cryptocurrency billionaire ahead of his 2024 campaign. A watchdog is also considering a second inquiry into housing, staff, and private security allegedly financed by a close friend later jailed in the United States for wire fraud.
British law requires MPs to declare any benefits worth more than three hundred pounds in the year before their election if they relate to their political activity. Farage says these were purely personal, “unconditional” gifts and calls the scrutiny an establishment witch-hunt.
Here is the punchline, and the proof that British politics operates on a different planet: Farage might win the by-election without anyone running against him. Within hours, Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats announced they would boycott the ballot, calling it a “pathetic, desperate stunt.”
But the strategy has a built-in expiration date. If Farage wins, the investigation resumes immediately. If the commissioner ultimately finds he broke the rules, Parliament must suspend him, triggering another by-election—this time on his opponents’ timetable, not his.
Hamas dissolves its government (Maybe)
Nineteen years of Hamas rule in Gaza may have just come to an end.
Monday, at a press conference in a hospital courtyard, an official announced that the militant group responsible for the October Seventh attacks has dissolved its government. As part of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal, Hamas says it is preparing to transfer power to a technical committee backed by the United Nations.
If this transition holds, it represents a fundamental rewiring of the entire region. Hamas describes the decision as evidence of its commitment to rebuilding Gaza after years of war. But according to the Associated Press, the group did not say whether it plans to take the most crucial step of all: disarming, or handing over security to an international force.
And that is where the deal hits a wall. Nine months after the ceasefire was signed, negotiations between Israel and Hamas remain largely deadlocked over this second phase. The Israeli Foreign Minister dismissed Monday’s move entirely, saying it was designed specifically to avoid disarmament. His statement was blunt: “As long as Hamas retains its weapons, any civilian government will, of course, operate as Hamas dictates.”
On the ground, the violence has not stopped. On Monday, Israeli strikes killed at least five people in Gaza—including three in Khan Younis and two in an apartment in Gaza City, according to health officials. The Israeli military says it was targeting a Hamas operative and a Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant. At the same time, militants have carried out shooting attacks against Israeli troops, and five Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ceasefire began nine months ago.
Cuba Blackout
By Tuesday morning, technicians in Cuba had slowly restored power to about thirty percent of the capital, mostly to hospitals and water pumps. Much of the rest of the country remained without electricity after an island-wide blackout Monday left nearly ten million people in the dark.
This is the third time the national grid has completely collapsed in the last six months. For years, Cubans survived on a creaking system of dilapidated, Soviet-era power plants. But the tipping point came in January, when the Trump administration launched a campaign to cut off Cuba’s oil supplies—cutting off fuel shipments from Venezuela, pressuring Mexico to halt its supply, and threatening steep tariffs on any foreign company delivering oil to the island.
The State Department has explicitly called the Cuban government a national security threat and says these sanctions are designed to strangle the economy and trigger social unrest that could lead to regime change.
The consequence on the ground is a humanitarian crisis. Cuba produces only forty percent of the fuel it needs to keep its lights on. Public transit has stopped. Tens of thousands of surgeries have been canceled. One thirty-six-year-old woman in Havana told the Associated Press she spent the night searching by flashlight for charcoal so she and her father could cook enough rice to eat.
Skyscraper opening :
When you take a 1961 office giant and try to carve 1,500 apartments out of it, you have to cut thousands of new holes through the concrete floors to run plumbing and cables for 1,500 kitchens and bathrooms. That is a lot of holes. At the same time, you are piling on massive amounts of new weight—all the drywall, tile, and appliances that go into a modern apartment building. This has, as we learned in high school, consequences.
Those consequences arrived just before eight o’clock Tuesday morning.
Up on the twenty-first floor, workers heard concrete cracking, windows buzzing under immense pressure, and heavy steel groaning. Two main structural steel box beams started to bend and deflect, buckling under a load they were never built to hold.
By the time the FDNY and emergency engineers arrived, the damage wasn’t just a localized crack. The building was actively moving. A six-floor section of the skyscraper—from the twenty-first floor to the twenty-sixth—was visibly sagging.
The city immediately established a collapse zone, shutting down a large section of Midtown from Fortieth to Forty-Fifth Streets. The threat was so severe that emergency crews evacuated eight surrounding high-rises and a nearby school, forcing four hundred children and hundreds of other people into the streets.
A union representative for the steamfitters on site put the blame squarely on a rushed job, pointing out that contractors were tearing out structural walls and boring holes without adding enough steel reinforcement to compensate.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters that engineers are tracking movement in the compromised columns minute by minute. The plan is to use drones to monitor the structure until it’s stable enough for emergency crews to install massive truss systems to keep the thirty-seven-story building from collapsing into the middle of Forty-Second Street.
