Welcome to Stack the Week for Thursday, July 23
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The Other Exit Is Closing
Brent crude, the international benchmark price for oil, crossed $100 a barrel Thursday for the first time since May. It had traded near $71 earlier in July, when investors still hoped a temporary understanding between the United States and Iran might hold.
Part of the spike reflects Houthi attacks on Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, threatening the route Saudi Arabia has relied on to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
Saudi Arabia built its East-West Pipeline during the Iran-Iraq War for exactly this danger. The pipeline does not replace Hormuz, but it gives the kingdom a way to preserve millions of barrels of exports when the eastern route becomes unusable.
Once that oil reaches reaches the end of the pipe, much of it still has to pass through the 18 miles between Yemen and the Horn of Africa at the southern entrance to the Red Sea.
If that passage becomes too dangerous because of Houthi attacks or threats of same, tankers must sail the long way around Africa. That detour can add several weeks to a voyage and ties up the same tanker for longer, reducing the number of ships available to carry everyone else’s oil.
The Houthi attacks also complicate President Trump’s announced formula for retaliation. He has said the United States will destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant whenever Iran attacks a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. But the Houthis attacked from Yemen, not Iran. They receive weapons and support from Tehran, but that does not establish that Iranian officials selected these particular tankers or ordered these particular launches. So do the Iranian people get punished anyway?
The war now threatens both doors through which Gulf oil reaches the world. The Strait of Hormuz was the front entrance. The Red Sea was the fire exit.
The fire exit is now under fire, too.
Also of note on the Iran front: The New York Times has a fact check. The administration has claimed that the Iranian missile capability is caput. But the Times found visible damage at nine American military and intelligence sites across the region from recent Iranian attacks, suggesting Iran retains a more capable missile force than some public statements have implied. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal reports the United States is moving additional forces, medical units and weapons into the region after a twelfth consecutive night of strikes to give president Trump more options if he wants to escalate.
They Died Where They Were Sent to Recover
On March 16, Pakistani aircraft bombed a sprawling compound in Kabul known as the Omid Rehabilitation and Treatment Centre during Pakistan’s campaign against militants it says operate from Afghanistan.
The Taliban has made drug addiction a national priority. Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest rates of opioid addiction, fueled in part by decades as the world’s largest producer of opium. Taliban authorities have repeatedly rounded up people addicted to drugs and sent many of them into compulsory rehabilitation centers like Omid.
The strike killed at least 269 civilians and wounded at least 122, according to figures independently verified by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
Amnesty International has now called for the bombing to be investigated as a possible war crime.
Pakistan said the compound contained technical-support facilities, weapons and ammunition used by militants attacking Pakistan.
Amnesty reviewed dozens of photos and videos, satellite images, interviews with witnesses and workers, and bomb fragments from the site.
Weapons experts concluded that at least one munition was a Pakistani-made Takbir precision-guided bomb, evidence that the facility had been deliberately selected rather than struck accidentally.
Under the rules of war, armies may attack military objectives, but must distinguish them from civilians, homes, hospitals and other civilian facilities. Medical facilities receive special protection.
Even if Pakistan possessed reliable evidence that militants had stored weapons somewhere in the compound—something Amnesty says it found no evidence to support—commanders still had to consider the people living around those weapons. The principle of proportionality prohibits an attack when the expected civilian harm would be excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated. The principle of precaution requires commanders to do everything feasible to verify the target, select weapons and timing that reduce civilian deaths, and warn people when circumstances permit.
Amnesty cannot prosecute; its report is evidence, not a verdict. A war-crimes case would require an independent investigation, something Pakistan rejects. Still, the report preserves evidence while witnesses and documents remain, which matters because such cases often begin years later.
23 Million Frozen in Place
Health insurance is trapping nearly one in four U.S. workers in jobs they want to leave. New West Health–Gallup research estimates that 24 percent—about 23 million adults—remain because they fear losing employer-sponsored coverage, up eight percentage points since 2021. The burden is especially acute among women, workers with chronic conditions and people facing medical debt. The consequences of this “job lock” extend beyond unhappy jobs. Workers pass up promotions, delay starting businesses, postpone retirement or stay in positions they no longer want because a gap in health coverage could expose them or their families to catastrophic medical bills. Across the economy, that reduces job mobility, slows new business formation and makes wages less responsive to competition.
A Fine That Cannot Be Paid
The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is using another tool to pressure undocumented immigrants to leave the country: enormous daily civil fines.
The Department of Homeland Security has sent more than 100,000 people letters saying they owe the federal government $998 for every day they remained in the United States after an immigration judge issued a final order requiring them to leave.
One week costs $6,986. Thirty days cost $29,940. One year produces a bill of $364,270.
A final removal order means an immigration judge has concluded that a person may be expelled from the United States. It does not necessarily mean the person can leave immediately. Practical, legal or humanitarian barriers may prevent departure. For example, a person’s home country may refuse to issue the travel documents needed for deportation, or a court may temporarily block removal while an asylum or other legal claim is resolved.
The administration presents the fines as part of its campaign to encourage what it calls “self-deportation.”
Yesterday we discussed The Washington Post’s reporting on overcrowded detention facilities. Last week we looked at how the drive to increase deportation numbers led to lower hiring standards and more reported use-of-force incidents. Those were about detention and arrests. This is about financial pressure. Taken together, they describe an immigration system expanding its enforcement tools faster than the institutions meant to support and oversee them and the humans at the end of these policies.
One Referral for a National Force
In a related story, House Homeland Security Democrats said an ICE briefing showed that the agency has received 56 excessive-force complaints since President Trump returned to office. Thirty-two have been closed. One officer has been referred for possible discipline, and no discipline has yet been imposed. Most of the remaining cases are still under investigation.
At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since the crackdown began including Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the subject of a special report yesterday on CNN by Jake Tappe and the two immigrants shot and killed by ICE officers during attempted arrests in Maine and Houston within the span of a week.
The Nuclear Exception Is Now an Agreement
Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed an agreement establishing the legal framework allowing the United States and Saudi Arabia to cooperate on civilian nuclear power. Without such an agreement, American companies generally cannot sell Saudi Arabia nuclear reactors, major reactor components, fuel or other sensitive nuclear technology.
Saudi Arabia wants nuclear reactors partly so it can generate electricity without burning as much oil at home, leaving more petroleum available for export. The United States wants American reactor builders and fuel companies—not Russian or Chinese competitors—to win the work. The pact creates an opening for contracts worth billions of dollars.
President Trump’s family also has significant financial ties to Saudi Arabia. Since leaving the White House, Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and has pursued additional business in the kingdom. So President Trump’s son-in-law has a very strong financial interest in seeing the world the way the Saudi government sees it. President Trump is the man who approved the agreement.
Successive Israeli governments have opposed the spread of uranium-enrichment capability elsewhere in the Middle East, arguing that civilian enrichment shortens the technological distance to a potential weapons program which takes advantage of the same expertise and technology.
Under the terms of the agreement, Saudi Arabia cannot enrich uranium supplied directly under the American agreement but might retain a path to enrich uranium obtained through another arrangement or processed in a separate facility.
President Trump added another condition Thursday: he said the nuclear pact depends on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords. Saudi leaders have previously linked normalization to progress toward a Palestinian state, something the Israeli government opposes. Saudi officials had not publicly accepted President Trump’s formulation when it was announced.
Under the Atomic Energy Act, Congress has time to review the agreement. Congress now has to decide whether Saudi Arabia represents a singular exception to the prohibition against allowing enrichment capability —or the beginning of a new rule.
A New War in Mali?
The late Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey used to tell a story about covering the White House during the Vietnam War. He recalled a weary administration official joking during the quagmire, “You know what we need? We need another war.”
That came to mind when I read The Washington Post’s reporting about Mali.
Mali is a vast, landlocked country in West Africa, roughly twice the size of Texas, with large stretches of desert and semi-arid grassland that the central government has struggled to control.
The Trump administration is considering joining its war.
Current and former American officials told The Washington Post that senior officials are debating military action against Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, usually called JNIM. It is al-Qaeda’s main affiliate in that part of Africa.
The coalition has as many as 6,000 fighters, according to regional officials and experts interviewed by The Washington Post. It attacks army bases, ambushes convoys, taxes communities and transportation routes, kidnaps civilians and exploits conflicts among farmers, herders and ethnic groups.
Across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, militant Islamist violence caused nearly 9,826 reported deaths over the most recent year measured by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
The government the United States would be helping is a military junta that seized power in two coups, expelled French forces, pushed out a U.N. peacekeeping mission, turned to Russian mercenaries for support and still has not succeeded in containing JNIM.
An intervention presents an unusual diplomatic problem. The United States would be supporting a military government that works closely with Russia’s Africa Corps.
Other challenges include what to do when the bombing stops.
JNIM functions as both an armed organization and an alternative system of coercive rule. In areas where the state appears mainly through corrupt officials, abusive soldiers or occasional airstrikes, militants can present themselves as the authority that settles disputes—even while imposing brutal religious restrictions and killing opponents.
Military force can kill militants. It cannot create an effective government in places where one barely exists.
A Student Visa Becomes a Countdown
For decades, most international students entered the United States under a rule called “duration of status.” In plain English, they could remain as long as they continued making satisfactory progress toward their degree.
The Department of Homeland Security is replacing that system.
Beginning September 15, most foreign students will receive permission to stay until their program ends or for four years, whichever comes first.
The administration argues the change will make immigration laws easier to enforce and reduce opportunities for fraud.
The larger question is whether it also makes the United States a less attractive place for the world’s most talented students.
Many doctoral programs routinely last five, six or seven years because research rarely follows a schedule. More important, today’s graduate student often becomes tomorrow’s researcher, entrepreneur or technology executive. About 35 percent of America’s STEM workers with Ph.D.s are foreign-born and U.S.-trained, having first arrived as international students. Economists at the Peterson Institute estimate that a sustained decline in foreign STEM graduates could eventually reduce America’s high-skill STEM workforce by more than 11 percent at the Ph.D. level and trim hundreds of billions of dollars from long-run economic output.
Medicaid Workers
House Republicans spent much of last year arguing that able-bodied Medicaid recipients should have to work to keep their health coverage. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington said the only people expected to lose coverage under the party’s proposal were “able-bodied adults refusing to work.”
A new Government Accountability Office report found that millions of Medicaid recipients already work, including many in full-time jobs.
The report found that 13.8 million working-age adults enrolled in Medicaid worked at some point during 2024. Roughly two-thirds of those workers held full-time jobs. Another 10.6 million working adults lived in households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, commonly known as food stamps.
The report also found that workers receiving public assistance were concentrated in transportation, retail, restaurants and other industries that millions of Americans rely on every day. Amazon was among the employers showing the fastest growth in workers receiving Medicaid or food assistance in the states studied.
The report does not accuse employers of violating wage laws, and it does not prove that low wages alone explain why workers qualify for public benefits. Family size, fluctuating hours and state eligibility rules all affect enrollment.
It does raise a larger economic question.
If millions of Americans already work—many of them full time—yet still qualify for Medicaid or food assistance, the debate shifts. The question is no longer simply whether people should work. It is whether work in today’s economy reliably provides enough income and benefits to avoid public assistance—and, if it does not, whether policymakers should focus as much on the quality of work as on requiring it.
Public-School Enrollment Drops
Public-school enrollment decline is one of those slow stories that becomes a crisis only after the buildings are already closing.
For more than a century, Americans treated the neighborhood public school as a promise: if children showed up, communities would invest in them. Horace Mann, the father of the common-school movement, called public education “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Today, that promise is colliding with a simple demographic fact: in many places, there are no longer enough children to sustain the system that promise built.
Todd Wallack of The Washington Post reports that, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, districts closed more than 1,000 public schools during the 2025-26 school year—up from 755 just four years earlier, a roughly 35 percent increase. The end of federal pandemic aid has forced districts to confront enrollment losses they could postpone but not avoid.
Where did the students go? They did not simply disappear. Some communities have fewer children because birth rates have fallen since the Great Recession. Some families have moved from expensive metropolitan districts to suburbs or faster-growing regions. Others have chosen charter schools, private schools or homeschooling. Homeschooling has grown from about 850,000 students in 1999 to roughly 3.4 million today—more than 6 percent of the nation’s school-age children. At the same time, slower immigration is reducing enrollment in districts that historically relied on immigrant families to offset declining birth rates.
A closed school means longer bus rides, broken neighborhood routines, fewer after-school programs and the loss of one of the few public institutions that anchors a community.
The decline also creates a feedback loop. Most states fund schools largely according to enrollment. Fewer students mean less money. Less money means larger classes, fewer electives, fewer counselors, fewer extracurricular activities and, eventually, more school closures. Those cuts can encourage still more families to choose charter schools, private schools or homeschooling, accelerating the cycle.
Orca Bits
The Washington Post is where you should point your web browser if you’d like to see what happens to a sharp-tail sunfish when it’s rammed head on by an orca. You might not think you needed to see this, but upon viewing it you will marvel. It’s a pinata party. Scientists documented two cases in Mexico’s Gulf of California in which one orca seized a sharp-tail sunfish by its rudder-like tail and held it in place while another backed off, accelerated and rammed it nose-first with its full body.
The impact exploded the several-hundred-pound fish into thousands of bite-size fragments, defeating its dense, gelatinous skin and calling young orcas to dinner, swimming through a rain of snacks.
Researchers think the maneuver may be both a hunting technique, a lesson in teamwork and a method for all of us in making quick appetizers on a limited time budget while delighting your family with a full-contact food preparation.
Japanese Heat
Japan has run out of ways to say “blimey, it’s hot.” After temperatures hit 104°F, the country deployed kokushobi (pronounced koh-koo-SHOH-bee), meaning “cruel heat day”— that was the winner in a poll of 400,000 people who were asked to come of for a name for their melted condition. It beat rivals including “sweaty day” and “sauna day.”
The phrase debuted Tuesday as three Japanese cities reached the threshold. The whimsy masks a grim trend: more than 100,000 heat-stroke cases were recorded last summer.
Beyond Japan, Taiwanese media say people are “roasting like a sweet potato,” while health authorities in Shenzhen, China, have declared “barbecue mode.”
