John Dickerson Field Notes

Today the Wall Street Journal printed a detailed account of the decision-making in the run-up to the Iran war. It shows, as the New York Times and others have, President Trump receiving explicit warnings about many of the dangers that have since materialized. He went ahead anyway.

The great American national-security blunders have taken different forms: the groupthink behind the Bay of Pigs, Lyndon Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam, the failure to connect the dots before 9/11, and the false assumptions, faulty intelligence and wishful planning that produced the Iraq War.

These four are the canon of blundering. In each, the president was one part of an institutional failure — advisers who missed signals, agencies that got the intelligence wrong, a process that broke down around him. Trump’s may be a new kind — not a failure of process, but a failure housed more centrally in the president himself, who actively rejected the process. The intelligence was right. The failure is his alone. That’s worth remembering next time a candidate boasts that he alone can fix something. It’s a warning.

The warnings were specific. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely produce “a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons.” She warned that Tehran would “rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market,” and attack American forces and partners in the region. Military leaders warned of casualties, depleted weapons stockpiles and readiness problems for an already overstretched force.

All of it happened. The war Trump promised would end within six weeks has reached the six-month mark without a clear end.

“This was all predictable and predicted,” Eric Brewer, a former national-security official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Journal.

I want to make a larger point but first, to show that I have metabolized the scale of the harm of this decision: we are watching the consequences spool out in real time as the administration lunges toward something it can call success. Consider the new economic sanctions announced Monday. Enforcing them against the Chinese institutions that sustain Iran could provoke a confrontation with Beijing. Declining to enforce them could expose another American threat as hollow. Longer term, the U.S. has burned through roughly two-thirds of its Patriot interceptor stockpile and close to half its THAAD inventory in under six months of fighting — inventories that take years, not months, to rebuild. And there are other years-long consequences: bruised alliances, and nations making choices based on a new — and perhaps warped — understanding of American strategic confusion.

So put this on the to-do list: catalog the consequences of this decision and reward those who come up with the most creative and realistic solutions for containing those consequences and addressing the fallout. This is one way to combat the despair people feel when faced with the president’s combination of bluster and incompetence. Look for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers used to say. Seek out and lift up the people who can scope the problem, name the challenges and identify realistic ways of limiting the damage and beginning the repair.

This brings us (if you’re still with me; I feel like I should pack a juice box to give us all a little energy at this point) to my little corner of obsession: presidential campaigns.

Everything about Donald Trump’s decision-making is bad enough, but it gets worse when you measure his performance against his boasts about how he would perform as president. Donald Trump ran on the promise that he had a special quality in just these moments. In the South Carolina primary debate in 2016, he offered his opposition to the Iraq War as evidence of his superior judgment. He also stood by his earlier claim that George W. Bush had lied the country into war.

“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump said. “We shoulda never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” When the debate moderator (hi Mom!) reminded him that he had said Bush should have been impeached, Trump replied: “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

Earlier in the debate, I had asked Trump to imagine his first day in the Situation Room and name the first three questions he would ask his national-security experts. Robert Gates had complained that the candidates were offering solutions “so simplistic and so at odds with the way the world really works.” Trump’s answer: “What we wanna do, when we wanna do it, and how hard do we wanna hit.”

Oof.

In that same debate, Jeb Bush, who was derided as insufficient for the task of being president, nevertheless outlined a vision of the office.

“The next president’s gonna be confronted with an unforeseen challenge,” Bush said in his closing statement, sounding like the son and brother of presidents who understood one of the defining characteristics of the job. “It could be a pandemic, a major natural disaster or an attack on our country.” The question for voters, he said, was “who do you wanna have sittin’ behind the big desk in the Oval Office?”

Next presidential campaign, listen to Jeb.

Wait, every presidential candidate boasts. Trump is hardly new. Yes, they boast, and they shouldn’t, unless they have the goods. Matching promises with performance is, after all, essentially the job description. More important, we shouldn’t let candidates get away with boasts they can’t back up.

One more point (hit the juice box!): Donald Trump’s boasts were special. He dismissed — and won escalating applause for dismissing — the very idea of planning, expertise and knowledge. He argued that every challenge could be made to disappear by the force of his personality.

No.

The Iran case provides an unusually clean test of his claim: The experts identified the risks, the president trusted his instincts, and the risks became reality.

Every presidential national-security decision comes down to one person. The question was never whether a president acts alone against expert advice — sometimes that’s the job. Barack Obama learned this: he ordered the Bin Laden raid over the explicit objection of Robert Gates, who had more national-security experience than anyone else in the room. The question is how a president makes a lonely decision. Obama had a room of mixed opinion and picked the more confident read. Trump had a room in agreement and picked the opposite of what it told him.

Experts, historians and wise people of good faith could help place this decision among other presidential failures — and determine, based on the reporting, just how badly President Trump shanked it. (Those with expertise will know how to sort post-hoc ass covering now that things have not gone according to plan).

This would help us understand the Trump presidency. It would also help us, in advance of another presidential campaign, develop a vocabulary for the most important aspect of the job. Debate answers of the kind Donald Trump gave repeatedly about Iraq were popular, entertaining and politically successful. They also mischaracterized his own position on that war. No public record supports his claim that he opposed the invasion before it began; when Howard Stern asked him in 2002 whether he favored invading, Trump answered, “Yeah, I guess so.” Most dangerously, those answers turned the

presidency into a cartoon of easy choices effortlessly dispatched by a cartoon image of leadership.

Clearing these cartoons from the stage will help us figure out what a president should be like so that we can ask our candidates if they’re up to the task. Embedded in this failure and every failure of the norm-breaking Trump administration is the raw material for forensic accountability. Not a verdict on one man. A standard the next one has to clear before we hand over the codes.

Confirmation hearings in the modern era are largely exercises in evasion. Senators deliver speeches disguised as questions. Nominees repeat rehearsed assurances. Everyone leaves carrying the opinion they brought into the room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish troops and police deployed in Ceuta on Friday after roughly 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish territory. The Associated Press reported that at least 57 people died. Because Ceuta belongs to Spain, the crossing placed the migrants inside the European Union’s asylum system even though Ceuta sits in North Africa. That does not make the migrants EU citizens or give them an automatic right to travel across Europe. It does allow them to request asylum from Spain, which must register and evaluate those claims under Spanish and EU law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cave beneath Pembroke Castle

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

Children make music inside an MRI scanner

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

Five million artworks in one searchable museum

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

A civilization emerges beneath the Amazon canopy

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

Four runs on one final swing

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

The United States and Iran exchanged fresh missile barrages Thursday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Stack Stories Daily for the 29th of July. We’re trying a little bit something different here today, so hang with us. You can read it or listen to it as a podcast. Let’s get to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Netanyahu visits presses his advantage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Wildfire update: France expands evacuations as heat returns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. China landslide: Thirty more victims identified

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

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

7. Red Cross declares a national blood-supply crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Libya: Protesters briefly threaten the national power grid

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

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

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

Short Stack

Lindsey Graham’s funeral becomes an informal wartime summit

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

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

Fauci’s diary records the pandemic behind closed doors

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

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

Kentucky’s governor tells McConnell: Speak publicly or resign

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

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

Claude’s public sharing links became searchable

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

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

Grandma wins happy hour for retirement homes

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

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

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

Colonel Sanders’ estate goes on the auction block

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

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

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

South Koreans consult tarot cards for their pets

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

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

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

A 300-strong gathering of humpback whales

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Stack the Week for Monday July 27th.

Thank you to our paying subscribers and our Apple podcast reviewers. Food for the larder and the soul. This is also a podcast, so you can listen to it while you read along or while you slowly tap your summer bag of wine.

Let’s start.

1. IRAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not so.

The government’s own analysts reached the opposite conclusion.

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

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

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

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

3. Wildfires Drive Mass Evacuations in France and Spain

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

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

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

4. Haitians Face Roundups as TPS Ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Changing Casualty Ledger

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

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

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

6. Two Wars Collide

This story was reported by the Associated Press.

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

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

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

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

7. Senate Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short Stack:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The strange work of coming home

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

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

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

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

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

The bell with tentacles

This story was reported by Popular Science on Monday.

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

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

Twenty-two hours in seat 34A

This story comes from CNN’s travel desk.

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Stack the Week for Friday, July 23

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More Is Creating More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some final questions:

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

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

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

Battling Production Lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, Did We do That?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tariffs, now more than ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MEASLES UPDATE

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

Smoke detector Removed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Missing Hands in Elder Care

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

Those hands are becoming harder to find.

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

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

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

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

DOJ Drops Subpoena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CYCLOSPORA UPDATE

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

Neanderthals are no Neanderthals

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Stack the Week for Thursday, July 23

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, notes and Apple podcast reviews which spread the word about how this product can also be listened to as you negotiate a durable peace, update your look for fall or simply look for a way to free and extend your emotional life.

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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.”

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 22, 2026.

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And the Apple podcast reviews help keep us from hiding under a bushel. (They introduce us to a wider audience.)

Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you sail through Copenhagen, reorder your holy cards or plan your ascent, vaulting on the bones of your enemies.

So here we go:

1. One Bridge at a Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The cost of France’s heat wave.

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

It can also be deadly.

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

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

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

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

3. Saudi Arabia Gets What Iran Can’t Have

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. ICE Kept Filling Unsafe Rooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The Models Left the Sandbox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. The Tariff on the Medicine Cabinet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Measles Reaches a 35-Year High

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

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

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

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

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

8. Individualized Treatment Reduces Rare Epilepsy

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

9. EEOC Moves to End Workforce Demographic Reports

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

10. The Wreck That Changed the Safety Briefing

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

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

The wreckage of that airplane has just been found.

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

Survivors told investigators that everyone survived the landing.

Then the airplane began to sink.

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

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

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