John Dickerson Field Notes

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

Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you sand down that one drawer that never closes, deadhead the roses or re-caulk the tub.

So here we go:

The Strait Stayed Closed

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

Ten weeks later, there is an answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian Trade Tariff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Billion-Dollar Medicaid Hold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The General After the Minister

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

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

On Tuesday, Zelensky fired Syrskyi too.

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

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

The Food Stamp Time Tax

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Childhood Behind an Age Gate

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

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

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

But enforcing the law creates another challenge.

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

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

The Recall After the Retraction

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

What would that mean?

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

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

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

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

The New Jersey Voter Roll Error

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

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

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

Updates and Short Stack

Public Charge Update

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

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

Russia’s Auction Failed

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

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

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

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

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

The Switch Buried in the Dashboard

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

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

The Biden Tapes

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

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

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

Burnham’s First Bill

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

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

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

Chopping Down Records

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

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

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

Four at Once

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

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

Climate Left a Record in Birds’ Bones

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Stack the Week for Monday, July 20

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

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

So here we go, with what mattered today:

Seventeen, and Twenty Ships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukraine and Russia Attack

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

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

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

Record Student-loan defaults

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burnham Takes Over

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

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

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

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

Congo Ebola: Still Bad

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

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

Head Start Restrictions

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

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

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

Paramount-Warner Pause

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

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

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

NYC ICE Fire

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

Cyclospora Trail

The cyclospora story was already messy enough.

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

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

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

The Spain Way

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

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

Five Cups of Coffee Please

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

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

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

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

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

The Museum of Endangered Sounds

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Stack the Week for Friday, July 17

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

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

For paid readers, I’ve gone back in and put some thoughts about why I made some of the choices I did.

Okay, let’s start.

Iran Infrastructure Week

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

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

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

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

I was unsatisfied about this Syrian bit. On the one hand, expanding the war and the downsides of that are kind of obvious, but I felt like there was something more to be said about an attack in Syria, but I just couldn’t figure out what that was by the time we got to publication hour.

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

ICE Pressure

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

I came across this interview while I was looking for how to pronounce David Brouillette’s name and came across this interview with his ex-wife. “How do you keep getting into these jobs when you’re around guns all the time.” It’s an extraordinary interview.

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

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

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

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

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

The Burnham Age Begins

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

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

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

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

This preceding paragraph is essentially the kind that I’d like to have in every item in the stack. What happened, why it happened and then this: why it matters beyond the narrow confines of the story.

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

Gaza Funeral Strike

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

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

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

Xi’s AI pitch

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

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

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

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

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

Lettuce not go to Taco Bell

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

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

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

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

Smoke Gets into Your Continent

Fire has become the atmosphere.

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

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

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

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

If It’s New to You

I didn’t want to go on at such length on this, as you could tell from the previous day’s item, but I couldn’t make it any shorter by publishing time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LHS 1140 b

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Stack the Week for Thursday, July 16

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

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

Okay, let’s start.

Iran Expansion

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Than 500 Rohingya Feared Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stops ICE Brings Back Vehicle Stops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wildfire Smoke Spreads Across the East

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

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

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

Ebola Outbreak

Ebola is moving in opposite directions across central Africa.

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

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

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

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

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

Ukraine Fires the Minister Who Wanted to Modernize the War

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Those Epstein Victims

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China Pulls Ahead

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

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

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

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

Consumers Have Not Stopped Spending

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

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

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

Pentagon Testosterone Screening

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

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

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

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

The President’s Election Speech

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

Perseverance Runs a Marathon

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

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

T Rex Crime Scene

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

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

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

Welcome to Stack the Week for Wednesday, July 15

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

Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you mow the lawn, debone a filet, or wipe down the whiteboard on which you’ve been trying to sync the movement of the planets with your Google calendar.

Okay, let’s start.

Iran 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICE Deaths

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

The other two:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank

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

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

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

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

Todd Blanche Confirmation Hearings

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

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

The whole hearing lived inside that correction.

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

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

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

Blanche asked to respond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blanche raised his voice.

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

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

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

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

Cornyn emerged unconvinced.

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

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

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

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

Floods and Fire

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

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

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

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

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

Let Us Now Avoid Lettuce

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

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

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

Law Firms and Administration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IBM

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

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

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

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

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

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

France and Assisted Suicide

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

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

Elon Musk and Wisconsin

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

Sak Tahn Waax

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

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

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

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

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

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

His name translates to white-chested fox.

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 14th, Tuesday.

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

If you’re reading this text on a screen instead of listening to the audio, remember that this is also designed as a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re commuting, folding laundry, or simply reclining into the posture that allows you to be delivered from the uncertainties and cares and illusions that beset the people of the world.

Okay, let’s start.

Drop the Toll Keep the Blockade

Clap on. Clap off. The Clapper!

If you are a certain age, you may remember that advertisement for a device that allowed you to turn on the light by simply clapping. You clapped it on and clapped it off. The Iran war is the Clapper war.

Mostly it’s been clap on. The U.S. military says it hit dozens of Iranian targets Monday, then struck six coastal cities and islands early Tuesday. Iran fired back at Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait and hit three tankers, killing two mariners and wounding 14, according to the International Maritime Organization. Before the war, 147 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz in a day. Last week the count was 22, according to Kpler, a firm that tracks global shipping.

Then came the clap off: the president’s Monday idea of charging a 20 percent toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump announced he would replace the fee with trade and investment deals from Gulf states, saying kings and emirs had called him. “I don’t think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the strait,” said the man who proposed the fee the day before.

Yesterday, when I presented the president’s plan for a 20 percent fee, I mused out loud about how such a thing might be calculated. A basic question. Nothing fancy about it. The president didn’t quite get there. Neither did his administration. The Wall Street Journal reports that hours after Trump announced the toll, aides rushed to figure out who would collect it — some officials assumed the Treasury Department, others argued for the Energy Department, since the cargo in question is oil. Officials were planning meetings on how to carry out the policy when the president abandoned it. Semafor, citing a White House official, reported that Trump ordered up the toll over the objections of advisers who had talked him out of the idea before. Axios reported that Gulf governments, whom the plan was supposedly built around, learned of it by surprise and called the White House asking what it meant. The toll also contradicted the president’s own secretary of state, who said weeks ago that international law forbids any country from charging tolls on an international waterway.

And then clap on again. Even as the toll vanished, the United States resumed a naval blockade of Iranian ports Tuesday afternoon, attempting to choke off Iran’s trade by other means.

I would recommend Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which outlines in detail the way Donald Trump makes decisions. The scramble on the 20 percent is the daily operating procedure in the White House: decisions made on a whim which everyone else has to scramble after. The authors report that a half-dozen people around Trump make decisions so fast that the Pentagon and State Department often learn what’s going on after the fact.

These are decisions about a war of choice whose consequences now extend well beyond the battlefield—to global shipping, energy markets and the movement of commerce through one of the world’s most important waterways. .

Inflation: A Bit of Good News—For Now

Inflation has two clocks. One asks, “What happened this month?” The other asks, “How much more expensive is life than it was a year ago?”

This month’s clock showed something unusual: prices, on average, fell 0.4% from May to June—the biggest monthly decline in four years. Imagine walking into the grocery store on June 1 and buying a cart full of groceries. Then imagine buying that same cart on July 1 and finding it cost a few dollars less. That’s unusual. Prices don’t normally move down across the whole economy. They usually keep creeping upward, just faster or slower than before.

But the yearly clock still showed prices were 3.5% higher than they were a year ago. That’s what economists mean when they say “annual inflation” was 3.5%: the average basket of things Americans buy still costs 3.5% more than it did last June, even though prices eased during the most recent month.

One month doesn’t erase years of inflation. The cost of living is still high compared with what most people remember paying. But it does suggest businesses, on average, weren’t raising prices in June the way they had been.

Economists were also looking for signs that higher energy costs from the Iran war had spread into everything else—restaurant meals, clothing, rent, airline tickets and thousands of other prices. They largely hadn’t. Core inflation, which strips out the more volatile food and energy categories, was flat. As economist Michael Metcalfe put it, “Yes, gas prices went up, but nothing else did, more or less.”

That’s why this report surprised economists. Many expected both higher oil prices and President Trump’s tariffs to push inflation more broadly through the economy. June’s numbers suggested that hadn’t happened—at least not yet. Some economists think businesses have absorbed part of the higher tariff costs instead of passing them on to consumers. Others think the effects simply haven’t worked their way through the economy yet. The prediction has not yet come true, and economists don’t yet agree why.

Investors liked what they saw. The nation’s biggest banks also reported stronger-than-expected earnings. Banks make money when consumers keep spending, businesses borrow to expand, companies sell stock and bonds, and investors continue making deals. Strong bank profits don’t mean every American is thriving, but they do suggest that much of the economy is still moving. Together, the inflation report and the bank earnings lowered expectations that the Federal Reserve would need to raise interest rates to keep inflation from accelerating, which would increase the cost of economic activity.

Maine ICE Shooting

Suppose I told you that a young Latino immigrant had been shot and killed by federal immigration agents. He wasn’t the person they were looking for. He was in a vehicle. Agents said they were forced to shoot. There is no body-camera footage.

Which case am I describing?

You can’t know, because those details now describe two fatal ICE shootings in the last week.

That is an extraordinary sentence to be able to write.

The latest happened Monday in Biddeford, Maine. Twenty-six-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero (pronounced yo-HAHN seh-bas-tee-AHN doo-RAHN geh-REH-roh), a Colombian immigrant who lived with his wife and young daughter, was killed after ICE agents attempted to stop his vehicle during surveillance of another man with a final deportation order. Authorities now acknowledge Durán Guerrero was not the target of the operation.

The Department of Homeland Security says an officer fired because he feared for public safety after Durán Guerrero attempted to flee in his vehicle. And by flee in his vehicle, I mean leave a place in the same manner you would to go to the store.

One witness heard the wounded driver say, “I tried to stop.” Security camera footage shows officers pulling his body from the vehicle afterward, but not the shooting itself. The agents were not wearing body cameras, leaving investigators to reconstruct the encounter from witness testimony and the officers’ own accounts.

The Houston shooting last week ran along the same lines: a bystander, not the target, dead in a vehicle, no footage.

These shootings come as ICE has dramatically accelerated enforcement. The agency arrested more than 10,000 people in five days at the end of June—roughly 2,000 arrests a day—as the administration pushed agents to sharply increase arrests.

In response, ICE has ordered agents to suspend most vehicle stops while it reviews the incidents and provides additional training.

Ebola Is Moving Faster Than Public Health

The World Health Organization issued one of its starkest warnings yet Tuesday: eastern Congo’s Ebola outbreak continues to outpace efforts to stop it.

Nearly 2,000 people have been infected and more than 700 have died. The outbreak, caused by a rare strain with no approved vaccine or treatment, has become the fastest-growing Ebola epidemic ever recorded in Africa.

If you’ve been following this story with us, that may sound familiar—and in one sense it is. We’ve told you about the conflict, the attacks on health workers, the lack of a vaccine and the invisible spread. Today’s development is different. The WHO is no longer describing obstacles. It is saying, plainly, that those obstacles are now winning.

Four out of five new infections are coming from people who were never on any contact-tracing list. In other words, health workers are no longer interrupting chains of transmission—they’re discovering many of them only after they’ve already spread.

That’s an important threshold in any epidemic. Public health works by getting ahead of a virus. Once doctors, laboratories and contact tracers are mostly discovering infections after they happen instead of preventing the next ones, the outbreak begins dictating the pace of the response instead of the other way around.

That’s why today’s WHO statement matters. It isn’t simply another update on Ebola’s growth. It’s the moment the world’s leading public-health agency publicly acknowledged that, despite expanding treatment centers and laboratories, it is losing the race.

Justices Ask Congress for Protection

“I had to explain to my 12-year-old why I was wearing a bulletproof vest.”

That’s how Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained the Supreme Court’s growing security needs as she and Justice Elena Kagan appeared before Congress Tuesday to request a larger budget.

One measure of political polarization is what institutions have to buy. As the Supreme Court has become more politically consequential, the cost of protecting the people who serve on it has grown with it.

The Court says threats against the justices are expected to rise another 38% this year. It is asking for six additional security agents for each justice, a new residential security office, expanded cybersecurity and stronger threat-assessment capabilities. Those requests come after the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, the swatting of Justice Barrett’s home this spring and a wave of threats invoking Daniel Anderl — the 20-year-old son of federal Judge Esther Salas, shot dead in 2020 by a man who came to their home to kill her. His name has since become a kind of grim shorthand among those who threaten judges: a reminder that the danger is real and has already killed.

The Supreme Court isn’t alone. Congress has expanded the Capitol Police. Election officials around the country now receive security once reserved for far more prominent public officials. Polarization has a price tag. You can decide which political movements have produced more violence. You can also ask whether the Court’s increasingly consequential decisions—and the way it sometimes hands them down—intensify the sense that national policy is being imposed from above.

But Congress belongs in the picture too. When lawmakers fail to settle immigration, voting, climate, war powers and other major questions through durable legislation, presidents act on their own and opponents turn to the courts. Nine justices then become the place where the country’s unresolved political fights are decided. The Court has sometimes enlarged that role through its own decisions, but Congress’s paralysis helps explain why so much power, attention and anger now collect there.

Economists AI Warning

More than 200 economists and artificial intelligence researchers have signed an open letter warning that governments and institutions need to prepare now for AI’s economic disruption. The group includes 16 Nobel Prize winners, as well as employees of Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. The letter compares AI to the Industrial Revolution, as many have before, but argues that this transformation could happen over years rather than generations. That could bring enormous gains in productivity and living standards—but also large-scale job displacement.

You’ve heard this warning before. What’s different is who’s making it. Economists usually argue that technological revolutions destroy some jobs but ultimately create even better ones. Technology companies usually emphasize the opportunities AI will unlock. Here, leaders from both groups are acknowledging that market forces alone may not distribute those gains fairly. If that language sounds familiar, it echoes the moral argument Pope Leo has made about AI: markets create wealth, but they cannot by themselves decide how that wealth should be shared.

Economists have spent two centuries arguing that labor markets eventually adapt to technological change. This letter suggests many of them are beginning to question whether AI may move faster than workers can.

The letter itself offers few specifics. It calls for new incentives, guardrails and institutions but leaves the details to governments. Ideas already circulating include helping workers retrain, temporarily replacing part of the wages lost when someone takes a lower-paying job after being displaced, making benefits like health insurance and retirement savings easier to carry from one employer to another, and changing tax incentives so companies have stronger reasons to use AI to augment workers rather than simply replace them. (Portability of health insurance was what the Affordable Care Act was supposed to address. As STW listeners know, the ACA is under considerable strain right now).

At the heart of the debate are three questions: How quickly do jobs disappear? How quickly do new ones appear? Who carries the cost in between? The optimistic camp says technological revolutions destroy some jobs but create even better ones. The pessimistic camp says that may be true—but the long run can be a very long time if you’re the person who just lost your job.

Tylenol lawsuits revived

More than 500 lawsuits alleging that taking Tylenol during pregnancy contributed to autism or ADHD can move forward after a federal appeals court revived the cases Tuesday.

The ruling does not say Tylenol causes autism. It does not resolve the underlying science. Instead, the appeals court ruled that a lower-court judge dismissed the cases too early by excluding the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses before a jury had a chance to hear the disputed evidence.

That’s an important distinction. Courts decide what evidence juries are allowed to consider. Scientists decide whether a hypothesis withstands scrutiny. Those are different questions.

For now, the scientific picture remains unsettled. Large reviews have not established a causal relationship between acetaminophen and autism or ADHD, and physicians continue to note that untreated fever and severe pain during pregnancy also carry risks. Tuesday’s decision changes the legal fight, not the scientific consensus.

Trump backs down on child care funding freeze

The Trump administration has backed away from a plan to freeze roughly $10 billion in child-care and social-service funding for five Democratic-led states after suffering repeated defeats in federal court.

The administration said it was trying to prevent fraud and stop federal money from benefiting undocumented immigrants. The states argued the White House lacked the authority to withhold money Congress had already appropriated, and federal judges repeatedly agreed.

Critics also saw the freeze as an effort to pressure Democratic-led states that have opposed the administration’s immigration agenda by withholding billions of dollars in federal aid. Those five states account for roughly a third of the nation’s population, meaning millions of families could have been affected if the freeze had remained in place.

For the families affected, though, the constitutional argument isn’t the first thing they notice. A child-care subsidy isn’t really about child care. It’s about whether a parent can keep showing up for work. Lose that support, and the dominoes can fall quickly: missed shifts, lost wages, even the loss of a job.

The larger question is one we’ve returned to repeatedly. Once Congress appropriates money, how much discretion does a president have to decide not to spend it? Federal courts have continued to answer: not nearly as much as this administration has claimed.

Four organs. Thirty-six hours. One second chance.

A 28-year-old Chicago woman with cystic fibrosis underwent a 36-hour operation to receive both lungs, a liver and a kidney in what doctors say was the first procedure of its kind in Illinois and only the sixth in American history.

Her name is Jasmine Jones. She thanked the anonymous donor with a sentence that captures what organ transplantation really is: “You gave your life to give a life.”

Manhattanhenge belongs to everyone now

Back in 2002, Neil deGrasse Tyson began telling New Yorkers about the evenings each year when the setting sun lines up perfectly with Manhattan’s street grid. He borrowed the name “Manhattanhenge” from Stonehenge and even recommended the best viewing spot: the Tudor City overpass, where you can look straight down 42nd Street without standing in traffic.

The New York Times Metropolitan Diary reports that one evening he was there explaining the phenomenon to curious onlookers when someone behind him yelled, “Down in front, sonny!”

His first thought was, Without me, you wouldn’t even know this was happening.

What he actually did was apologize and sit down. We have the right to work but not the fruits of that work.

Update: E. Jean Carroll Gets a Check Finally Receives the Money

Now for a few updates on some previous stories we’ve presented you.

A federal court has released the $5,625,005.48 Donald Trump owed E. Jean Carroll after his efforts to block the payment failed. The money represents the original $5 million judgment—plus interest—from the 2023 civil trial in which a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her after she publicly accused him of the assault. The money had been sitting in a court-controlled escrow account while Trump’s appeals worked their way through the legal system.

Carroll marked the moment with a celebratory post on her Substack titled “The Eagle Has Landed.” She thanked her legal team and, with evident sarcasm, one of Trump’s former attorneys, Alina Habba: “I could not have done it without you.”

Update: Air Force One and the Public Interest

A brief update on yesterday’s story. The New York Times is now arguing that its reporting wasn’t simply about a classified aircraft. It was about whether Air Force One’s defenses against missile attacks had kept pace with modern threats. The paper says that information belongs in the public interest because Air Force One carries not only the president but hundreds of government officials, members of Congress, military personnel, journalists and others.

Sparkle: Sky Mirror

And finally, In Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Eärendil sails to the forbidden West to beg the gods for light in a dark age — and they set him in the heavens with a burning jewel on his brow, where he becomes the Evening Star. That was how you got light from the sky in the old stories: you pleaded, and heaven decided. The FCC is the one that decided now, giving a California startup clearance to shoot Eärendil-1 into the sky. It carries a square mirror 18 meters on a side that unfolds once in orbit and tilts to bounce sunlight back down after dark — a 5-kilometer circle of full-moon glow, steered across the ground for minutes at a time. The company plans to sell the beam to solar farms that want to generate past sunset, to rescue crews, to farms now burning diesel for light. You could imagine other uses: Say you’re on the lam. Deep in the national forest, dogs a ridge back, darkness your last remaining friend — when a circle of light five kilometers wide slides over the treetops and finds you, lighting you up like the noonday sun, Dr. Kimble. One mirror delivers only moonlight. To approach daylight, the company ultimately hopes to place as many as 50,000 mirrors in orbit. Nearly 1,900 people and institutions filed objections — more than SpaceX drew for a proposed million satellites. They warned that nocturnal animals need darkness to hunt, migrate, and breed; that light at night disrupts human sleep; that a stray flash could temporarily blind pilots and drivers; and — as the FCC itself acknowledged — that if the company loses control of the satellite at the end of its mission, the mirror could tumble and sweep random flashes across the Earth for up to a year. Astronomers calculate Eärendil-1 could shine brighter than Venus — the very star the first Eärendil became.

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 13th, Monday.

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

If you’re reading this text on a screen instead of listening to the audio, remember that this is also designed as a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re commuting, folding laundry, or pondering what you’re going to do with all that World Cup knowledge you accumulated after next week.

A brief note about Laura Doan and Annie Cohen. They have both increased the labor participation rate by finding employment in corporations larger than Dickerson Enterprises and Picayune. Congratulations to them both!

Okay, let’s start.

Man Made Deaths

How do you count the people who die because someone dismantled the system that would have kept them alive? That’s the question Atul Gawande raises in the latest New Yorker, borrowing a concept from historian Richard Rhodes called “public man-made death.”Examples include: the child whose malnutrition treatment never comes, the woman who dies in childbirth after her clinic closes, the tuberculosis patient whose medicine disappears. Gawande cites research from Boston University and The Lancet estimating that the dismantling of USAID has already contributed to roughly 700,000 deaths, with millions more possible if the cuts persist. Those figures remain projections and are disputed by the Trump administration and Elon Musk who ran the operation that dismantled USAID. But Gawande’s larger point survives the debate over the exact number: policy decisions can kill people just as surely as wars do.

Why did we lead with this? Because our sorting criteria at the moment weighs human death– no matter what nationality of human– as a key priority. Human death as a consequence of human choices also pushes it higher.

Iran is Back On

Imagine you’re the captain of a 1,000-foot supertanker—longer than three football fields—or a container ship stacked 20 stories high, entering one of the most dangerous waterways on Earth. You’ve switched off your AIS transponder—the electronic beacon that normally tells nearby ships, insurers, and satellites who you are and where you’re headed. That makes you harder to target, but harder for everyone else to avoid. Collision risk rises. Rescue becomes more difficult. Insurers lose the ability to monitor your voyage in real time. Oh, and you might hit a mine or be hit by a drone.

That’s why only six ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, the lowest daily total in five weeks. Before the war, roughly 3,000 ships crossed every month, carrying about one-fifth of the world’s oil.

One of them was hit anyway. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked a Cyprus-flagged container ship because it used what Iran called an unauthorized route, crippling the vessel and leaving one civilian crew member missing. Open access to the Strait of Hormuz was part of June’s ceasefire agreement. By declaring which routes are “authorized,” Iran is rewriting that agreement by force.

The United States answered with a third round of strikes in a week, reportedly hitting about 140 Iranian military targets.

Before February, Iran had almost no say over what moved through Hormuz. Today, it fires warning shots, dictates shipping lanes, inspects commercial traffic, and proposes charging tolls.

Monday President Donald Trump declared the United States would become the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait,” said it would charge ships a 20 percent fee for safe passage, and suggested America would effectively take responsibility for keeping the waterway open. That will take more time, money, military effort and risk, just the kind of mission-creep candidate Trump often argued had drawn previous presidents into costly, open-ended conflicts.

The Financial Times reports that Dubai is planning a new port designed to reduce dependence on Hormuz altogether. They no longer see it as a passing military episode.

The Washington Post reports that Israel shared intelligence with Washington, indicating that elements of Iran’s hard-line leadership want President Donald Trump dead. U.S. officials stress the intelligence reflects the views of ultra-hardliners rather than an approved assassination plot. Some officials also caution that Israel may have emphasized intelligence because it knows how President Donald Trump makes decisions: present him as the target, and he may become more receptive to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument that military pressure on Iran should continue.

Trump dismissed the warning. “Israel came up with nothing,” he told the New York Post, while adding that he has been Iran’s “number one” target for years.

Security officials worry less about an official assassination order than about a lone actor inspired by the rhetoric. A government doesn’t have to authorize an attack if one supporter decides to carry it out.

A New York Times report. It says Mossad secretly recruited former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—the man who once called for Israel’s destruction—met him in Budapest, paid his expenses, hid him inside Iran after the war began, and hoped he might someday lead the country.

Another ICE Death

A federal immigration agent shot and killed a man during an ICE enforcement operation Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, after authorities say he drove his vehicle toward an officer while attempting to flee. The shooting brings to at least nine the number of people who have died during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign. State and local officials from both parties, including Governor Janet Mills, Senator Susan Collins and Mayor Liam LaFountain, called for a full, transparent investigation. The agents were not wearing body cameras, leaving investigators without video evidence of the encounter. The shooting also comes as Minnesota prosecutors announced they have finally obtained evidence the Trump administration withheld for more than six months in two earlier fatal ICE-related shootings, while prosecutors in Houston say federal officials are still refusing to provide key evidence in another fatal ICE shooting last week.

Lindsey Graham Fallout

Just one day before he died, Senator Lindsey Graham was on the phone from Kyiv with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, celebrating what he believed was a breakthrough. After months of lobbying President Donald Trump, he had finally won White House backing for his bipartisan Russia sanctions bill. Twenty-four hours later, he was dead.

He had suffered an acute aortic dissection—a tear in the inner wall of the aorta, the body’s largest artery. Blood had forced its way between the layers of the artery wall, causing them to separate. It is one of the deadliest cardiovascular emergencies in medicine. Roughly half of patients die before reaching a hospital. Doctors describe the pain as feeling “like a knife to the heart.”

Graham had just returned from his tenth trip to Ukraine. His bipartisan sanctions bill would impose severe secondary sanctions and tariffs on countries—including China and India—that continue buying Russian oil.

In the short term, Republicans effectively lose one vote. Until South Carolina appoints a successor and Senator Mitch McConnell returns from medical leave, Republicans have only a 51-47 majority on paper.

Graham’s death also creates one more Senate race Democrats will at least examine. South Carolina remains a deeply Republican state. Donald Trump carried it by roughly 18 percentage points in 2024, Republicans hold every statewide elected office, and Republican Governor Henry McMaster has appointed Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, as her late brother’s temporary replacement . That makes a Democratic pickup unlikely.

Even so, an open seat is almost always more competitive than one held by a well-known incumbent. Republicans may have to spend money defending South Carolina.

To win the Senate, Democrats must gain four Republican-held seats while holding every Democratic seat they currently control. The key Republican targets remain North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, Alaska, Iowa and Texas, while Democrats must also defend the open seat in Michigan.

The overall judgment from six pollsters and political analysts surveyed by The New York Times was consistent: Democrats remain favored to win the House, but the Senate map still tilts toward Republicans. North Carolina appears to be Democrats’ strongest pickup opportunity. Beyond that, they would likely have to win several states Donald Trump carried comfortably.

McConnell Speaks

After four weeks of speculation, McConnell explained his absence: a fall at his Washington home on June 14 left him briefly unconscious and hospitalized, followed by a mild case of pneumonia. The 84-year-old, who survived childhood polio and has fallen repeatedly this year, said his doctors found no fractures, no stroke, no heart attack, no tumor. He’s moved to a rehabilitation center and isn’t cleared to return to the floor. His statement came with a photo — smiling beside his wife Elaine Chao, holding Sunday’s Washington Post sports section, a tacit answer to online rumors that he’d died.

He addressed the long silence directly: “You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.” It took Kentucky’s Democratic governor publicly asking him to update the public to break it. McConnell is retiring in January, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history.

Times Subpoenas

When does a leak investigation become an attack on the press? That’s the question raised Friday when federal agents showed up at the homes of four New York Times reporters with subpoenas ordering them to testify before a Manhattan grand jury this Wednesday. Their reporting had revealed that President Donald Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One lacked some of the defensive systems installed on the older presidential aircraft, prompting the Secret Service to switch the President back to the older plane for part of his trip home from the NATO summit.

Before publication, the FBI urged the newspaper not to publish the story, arguing it would damage national security, and demanded the identities of the reporters’ confidential sources. The Times refused. The Justice Department insists the reporters are not the targets. The targets, it says, are government officials who illegally disclosed classified information.

The dispute reaches beyond whether one story should have run. News organizations argue that compelling reporters to identify confidential sources weakens one of the few independent checks on government power. Much of what the public knows about how wars are fought, intelligence agencies operate, presidents make decisions and taxpayer money is spent comes from officials willing to speak only if their identities remain protected.

For decades, subpoenaing reporters was treated as an extraordinary measure reserved for the rarest circumstances. The Trump administration has revived the tactic. Earlier this year it subpoenaed reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal before withdrawing those demands after court challenges.

The larger question isn’t whether governments should investigate leaks. Every administration does. The question is where the line sits between protecting national secrets and protecting the independent reporting citizens rely on to understand what their government is doing. That question carries particular weight during a war, when governments naturally seek greater secrecy, and in an administration that has made aggressive use of executive power while providing relatively little visibility into its internal decision-making. If courts allow prosecutors to routinely compel journalists to reveal their sources, the consequence will reach far beyond this one airplane. It will shape what government officials are willing to reveal—and what the rest of us are able to know.

Blanche Has Rough Times Ahead

Who does the Attorney General work for? A federal judge offered a sharp answer Monday in a 56-page ruling rejecting one of the Trump administration’s most controversial legal agreements.

The case began when President Donald Trump sued the IRS over the disclosure of his tax returns. The Justice Department later announced a settlement that did far more than end that lawsuit. It granted President Trump, his family and their businesses broad protection from future IRS investigations and proposed creating a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who claimed they had been victims of government “weaponization.” The administration later claimed to have abandoned the fund after bipartisan criticism but said the tax protections would remain.

Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that the agreement was not a legitimate settlement but “an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy” to a deal conferring extraordinary protections on the President and those affiliated with him. The suit, she wrote, “was not brought to vindicate rights” but to “manipulate the judicial process” — an attempt to use the court “to provide some legitimacy” to a deal conferring immunity and earmarking taxpayer billions for grievances the law does not define. A lawsuit needs two opposing sides, and this one had a president suing an agency he runs. “It is risible,” she wrote, “to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.” Someone should do a count on the use of the word risible in responses to Trump administration lawsuits.

She barred the parties from describing the arrangement as a “settlement,” sanctioned Trump attorney Daniel Epstein and prohibited him from practicing in the Southern District of Florida for one year. She also said she would forward her opinion to New York disciplinary authorities already investigating Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Those penalties make the decision more than an angry judicial rebuke: the judge formally concluded that the lawyers had misused the legal process.

The Justice Department occupies a peculiar place in American government. The Attorney General is appointed by the President but is expected to represent the interests of the United States—not the personal legal interests of the President who appointed him.

That principle and this case now sits at the center of Blanche’s confirmation hearing this week. Senators aren’t simply deciding whether to promote a nominee. They’re deciding whether the nation’s chief law enforcement officer should be someone a federal judge concluded tried to use the courts to legitimize extraordinary legal protections for the President and his family.

The Family Business

The war in Iran has driven billions of dollars toward defense technology. At the same time, President Donald Trump’s sons have been investing in companies positioned to receive that money.

A Washington Post analysis found Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump tied, mainly through two investment firms, to more than a dozen defense technology and artificial intelligence companies. Since President Trump’s election, those companies have received at least $3.2 billion in federal contracts, with another $3.1 billion available through contract options. Some are also eligible to compete for much larger pools of future Pentagon work.

Some of the companies held federal contracts before the Trump sons invested. The companies say they won the work on merit, Pentagon officials say political relationships played no role, and the White House calls the reporting “the same, tired narrative.” Which, we should note, is a response not an answer.

No evidence shows that Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump broke the law or personally steered a contract.

The conflict lies elsewhere: the President is expanding military spending while members of his family hold financial interests in companies that can benefit from it.

Private institutions often run on relationships or even just vibes. Government is supposed to impose a higher standard though because the money belongs to the public. Competitive bidding, career contracting officers, inspectors general, financial disclosures, congressional oversight and the press are meant to ensure that contracts follow merit rather than access.

But influence does not always leave evidence of a phone call or an order. Companies know who has access. Investors anticipate where government money will move. Officials know which relationships carry political weight. Proximity can acquire value without anyone explicitly trading a favor.

That is why this is not merely a story about nepotism. It is a conflict-of-interest story about a wartime spending boom, a presidential family investing inside it, and whether the safeguards separating public decisions from private gain remain strong enough to earn public trust. Or, maybe it may just be an election story. While the majority of Americans say the country’s economy isn’t working for them, this is another story where things work out well for those in power.

Bangkok Fire

Twenty-seven people died in a Bangkok music bar Monday, and at least 25 more remain in critical condition after a fire trapped patrons inside. Investigators believe the blaze began with an electrical fault, but they’re focusing on something more familiar: whether blocked exits, flammable interior materials and poor emergency planning turned a survivable fire into a mass-casualty event. Survivors said thick smoke drove people toward the back of the building, where many became trapped in bathrooms because they couldn’t find a way out.

Thailand has seen this story before. A nightclub fire in Bangkok in 2009 killed 67 people and led to promises of tougher enforcement. Yet investigators are again asking whether safety rules existed on paper but not in practice. Entertainment venues rarely become death traps because a fire starts. They become death traps when a series of small safety failures—locked doors, blocked exits, combustible decorations, poor signage—leave people with nowhere to go once it does.

Ukraine Builds a Missile Shield

Ukraine and nine European countries announced a new ballistic-missile-defense coalition in Paris on Monday, a concrete attempt to build the protection Ukraine needs against Russia’s expanding missile campaign. The coalition will coordinate weapons, sensors, training and financing—another sign that European governments increasingly expect the war, and the need to defend against it, to continue.

President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, promised Monday to answer Ukraine’s latest attacks with strikes “several times more powerful,” signaling that he intends to escalate rather than negotiate. As we’ve discussed over the past week, Ukraine has deliberately expanded the battlefield beyond the front lines, striking oil refineries, ports and other infrastructure deep inside Russia in an effort to make the war impossible for ordinary Russians to ignore.

There are signs Ukraine’s strategy is beginning to bite. The Economist reports growing frustration inside Russia over fuel shortages, internet outages and military draft raids. Gallup found a record 60 percent of Russians say their local economy is worsening—the highest level since 2006. Even with higher oil prices from the Iran war, Moscow has cut its own 2026 growth forecast from 1.3 percent to 0.4 percent, while oil and gas revenues fell 45 percent in the first quarter. One produce seller in Rostov summed up the mood: “We used to live just fine. Now all you do is scramble from one problem to the next.”

Paramount Blockage

The fight over Paramount is no longer just about one company. It’s becoming a test of who gets to police media consolidation when Washington won’t. A bipartisan coalition of twelve state attorneys general sued Monday to block Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing the deal would reduce competition, eliminate jobs and leave Americans with fewer choices and higher prices for entertainment. The Justice Department has already approved the merger. The Associated Press values the transaction at $81 billion; the Financial Times and others put its enterprise value, including debt, at roughly $110 billion.

The combined company would place CBS and CNN, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, HBO Max, Warner Bros., DC Studios and two of Hollywood’s major theatrical operations under one corporate roof. Supporters say only companies of that scale can compete with streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube. Opponents argue fewer media companies mean fewer competitors for talent, fewer places to pitch ideas and fewer independent editorial institutions reporting on the government, politics and public life.

Japan Spies.

Donald Trump has long argued that America’s allies should rely less on Washington and do more for themselves. Japan just took him up on it. For the first time since World War II, Japan is creating a centralized intelligence agency to counter threats from China, Russia and accommodate an unpredictable U.S. partner. For a country whose 1947 constitution renounced war and whose wartime secret police left a lasting distrust of domestic surveillance, that represents a remarkable reversal.

Sugar in Space

The universe just got a little sweeter.

Astronomers announced Monday that they’ve found another sugar drifting through the vast clouds of gas and dust between the stars. It’s called erythrulose. On Earth, it’s found in raspberries and even some self-tanners. In space, it floats through the raw material from which new stars and planets eventually form. The discovery didn’t come from a photograph. Using radio telescopes, scientists detected the molecule’s unique pattern of radio frequencies—its chemical fingerprint—and matched it to measurements made in laboratories on Earth.

Scientists aren’t excited because they found dessert in the Milky Way. They’re excited because sugars are among the building blocks of life. DNA itself depends on sugars. Every new one discovered in space strengthens the possibility that the chemistry needed for life isn’t unique to Earth but scattered throughout the galaxy, waiting for the right conditions to assemble itself.

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 10th, Friday.

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts.

If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or trying to lessen the cognitive load at the end of the week because frankly you’re a blob of jelly and just forming words is a challenge.

Here at Stack the Whatever We Call it, we have the words.

Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me bolt all of this together.

Iran Again off Again

The repetitive rhythm of this war—attack, retaliation, ceasefire, collapse—invites a danger. Every day feels like yesterday, so we stop asking key questions.

Wake me when the war’s over.

This hands over our critical faculties to the people who try to confuse us. So I’m going to give you the news and then try to knock us all out of our presentism.

First, the news: The U.S. hit more than 170 targets in Iran over two days. Iran answered the recent U.S. attacks with missiles and drones at bases in four countries—Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan—including Qatar, the mediator of the talks it’s still supposedly conducting.

The US attack included a railway bridge —civilian infrastructure, not just military hardware. Central Command says the bridge moved weapons toward the Strait; Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s former top Middle East official, told The New York Times the strike was a message that Iran’s bridges and railways are now targets.

Problem: attacks on civilian infrastructure could constitute war crimes. The administration is trying to write around that by saying the civilian infrastructure is dual use. On the other hand, who will take the U.S. to court?

In last month’s memorandum of understanding the U.S. gave Iran sanctions relief in return for its assurance that it would allow free use of the Strati of Hormuz.

Iran cheated, taking the relief while trying to keep control of the Strait by forcing shippers onto an Iran-approved route and when tankers didn’t take that route Iran attacked, as it did with three commercial ships earlier this week.

That’s the news. Here’s the 30,000-foot view:

One of the world’s worst regimes—one that murders and suppresses its own people, funds terrorists abroad, and seeks to build the means to do both more effectively with missiles and nukes—has been significantly degraded.

The costs of the degradation are:

Death.

A thirst for revenge implanted in an entirely new Iranian generation.

Destabilization of the world economy.

Further deterioration of the American public’s faith that their leaders will tell them the truth about the highest-stakes actions taken in their name.

Missile stockpiles—both the interceptors that defend and the weapons that attack—have dwindled, weakening the United States and its allies against every other threat.

Russian oil allowed to flow, propping up a regime that kills Ukrainians.

Hardliners are in power in Tehran. Nobody in Washington can say who they’ll be negotiating with in five years.

The U.S. has publicly claimed the right to hit bridges and power plants under a dual-use theory, a precedent Russia and China can now cite back at us.

Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan absorbed attacks on their own soil for hosting American forces, a bill that will come due.

Congress never voted—four months of war, 170 targets in two days, and the constitutional question has simply been steamrolled.

The war has also consumed something harder to measure but just as finite: American attention. Attention is finite. Every hour, intelligence asset, diplomat, or Patriot battery devoted to Iran isn’t available for China, Ukraine, or the next crisis.

Was it worth it? And was it worth it the way it has been done? Could it have been done no other way? The only way to come up with an honest answer is to keep the question right at the end of our nose.

Making a final calculation also depends on what finally comes of diplomatic negotiations (let’s not call them peace talks or a ceasefire—those words have lost the snap in the waistband).

Finally, and I know I mentioned it earlier in the week, but as the war heats up, I return to the spin from the administration and its allies: that when Donald Trump signed the June Memorandum of Understanding, it was a savvy move to quiet the war’s impact in advance of the November elections. That spin was folly at the time and today’s news reminds us why. It’s a double folly really: the happy talk of 18 dimensional electoral chess strategy echoes the original criticism of the war—that it was built on happy talk, fantastical outcomes and incapable of hard thinking about long-term and unintended consequences.

Houston Shooting Update

We told you Tuesday about the Houston construction worker who was fatally shot by an ICE agent during a traffic stop. The Department of Homeland Security initially said the driver had tried to run over an officer with his van, forcing the agent to fire in self-defense.

The update: in reporting by The Washington Post and the Associated Press, the three men who were in the van have now given detailed, consistent accounts disputing that version, saying the van never drove toward an officer and that agents opened fire from the side of the vehicle. There is still no body-camera footage. ICE says the agents involved had not yet been issued body cameras, even though the agency has adopted a policy requiring their use where they have been deployed. ICE has not released other evidence supporting its account.

Body cameras matter here because they reduce the space where competing official and eyewitness narratives can survive indefinitely. In ordinary policing, video increasingly settles factual disputes within days. Immigration enforcement still operates in many places without that evidentiary backstop, leaving the public to judge credibility instead of evidence.

Several other fatal encounters involving ICE agents are also in dispute, with similar claims that victims acted aggressively toward officers. In the case of two incidents in Minneapolis, reporting later showed that video evidence contradicted key parts of ICE’s initial account.

Election Assistance Commission

Donald Trump fired the remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Friday. If your reaction was, “The what?”, you’re not alone.

Congress created the commission after the disputed 2000 Bush-Gore election, not to run elections—despite the repeated efforts by president Trump that remains the responsibility of the states—but to make elections run better. The EAC tests and certifies voting machines, distributes election-security grants, maintains the national voter registration form, shares best practices with thousands of local election officials, and coordinates efforts to protect election systems from cyberattacks.

The immediate practical effect may be limited. States will still run this November’s elections, and the commission has operated without a full slate of commissioners before. The larger story is what this says about the long-running fight over who gets to shape American elections. President Trump has repeatedly argued that elections need stronger safeguards against illegal voting, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register.

Those in touch with the data and facts respond that documented cases of noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud are exceedingly rare. Democrats say requirements of the kind Trump is advocating risk making it harder for eligible citizens to vote. Federal courts have already blocked parts of the administration’s effort to impose document requirements through executive order, saying the Constitution largely leaves the conduct of elections to Congress and the states.

This is one of the first major tests of the Supreme Court’s recent expansion of presidential authority to remove leaders of independent federal agencies. We know that Donald Trump has a history of repeated claims that elections were rigged when there is no evidence. Removing experts who could fact-check him allows his evidence-free claims to flourish in an environment where being loud and wrong is more powerful than facts or reason.

Trump and Housing Bill

If the Election Assistance Commission isn’t really about elections anymore, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the housing bill isn’t really about housing anymore either.

Hours after firing the commissioners, Donald Trump refused to sign Congress’s bipartisan housing bill—not because he objected to anything in it, but because the Senate had failed to pass his SAVE America Act, which he says would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.

The housing bill will become law anyway at midnight because Trump chose neither to sign nor veto it, foregoing a chance to boast about an issue close to people’s election year concerns.

So what does that mean for housing costs? Probably not much this year. The bill tries to increase housing supply over time by making it easier and cheaper to build homes, easing federal regulations, encouraging local governments to permit more construction, and limiting some large institutional purchases of single-family homes. Economists generally see it as a useful, incremental supply bill—not one that will noticeably lower your rent or mortgage in the near future.

The larger point is the one we’ve been talking about all week. Increasingly, legislation isn’t judged on its own merits. It becomes leverage in a fight about something else. In this case, one of the largest bipartisan housing bills in decades has been turned by the president into something else. The thing that might help people with the necessity they care about most is overshadowed by a phantom problem that gains them nothing.

Ebola

In the United States or Europe, an Ebola case sets off a rapid, almost choreographed response: teams fan out, contacts are traced within hours, names logged on clipboards, temperatures checked, patients isolated before the virus can move. In eastern Congo, clinics in the conflict zone are attacked. Roads are unsafe. Contact lists are incomplete or nonexistent. House-to-house searches begin late and proceed slowly. Four out of five new patients were never on any tracing list at all, meaning the virus is spreading unseen. The World Health Organization now estimates the outbreak could already be two to four times larger than the official numbers. The latest news: Suspected cases have now appeared in provinces where the virus hadn’t been seen before, and one of those cases has no obvious connection to the known outbreak.

That doesn’t mean Ebola is about to become a global pandemic. Ebola remains difficult to spread; it requires close contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, unlike an airborne virus such as COVID. But outbreaks like this remind us that conflict doesn’t just kill people directly. It also dismantles the ordinary machinery—clinics, surveillance, trust, transportation, and paid health workers—that keeps dangerous diseases from becoming much larger ones.

White House UFC Attack Plot

Last month, with spectators crowding the White House lawn and surrounding a ring where fighters were beating each other bloody, another group had a very different spectacle in mind: explosive-laden drones flying into the crowd, followed by sniper fire aimed at panicked people trying to escape. Their alleged target list included President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk, and other senior officials.

Fortunately, they never got anywhere close. According to an indictment unsealed Friday, investigators uncovered the plot four days before the event, arrested the alleged participants across multiple states, and have now charged eight men in a single conspiracy case.

Stocks and Real Estate

Stocks now make up 34% of American household wealth — the highest share ever recorded. Real estate, which held American wealth for generations, has fallen to 26%. That 8-point gap is also a record. The figures come from Barclays’ Alexander Altmann on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, flagged by co-host Tracy Alloway in the show’s newsletter on Friday.

For most of modern American history, the family home held the family’s wealth. Now the stock market does. That changes what a crash means or even daily market fluctuations. When wealth lived in houses, a crash hurt people who owned stocks. Now it hurts almost everyone, because people spend based on how wealthy they feel — and when portfolios shrink, spending stops. Altmann says a 20% drop in the S&P 500 wipes out about $16 trillion, half of what the US economy produces in a year.

Politicians now have more reason than ever to keep stock prices from falling, because a crash punishes voters, not just investors. And stock prices are high right now largely because investors expect AI companies to make huge profits someday. Those profits haven’t arrived. If they never do, stock prices fall, families that hold their savings in stocks get poorer, and they cut their spending. That’s how disappointment about one technology could shrink the whole economy.

Man Sucked from Plane

“I love you so much I would grab your legs and refuse to let go if you were sucked through a plane window.” As a marriage vow, that would be highly specific and somewhat odd. And yet you’d want it pressed with a rose in your wedding album if you found yourself where a 61-year-old Serbian man found himself on Friday: five minutes with his head outside a Boeing 737 at altitude. He is alive because his wife grabbed his legs and refused to let go. The New York Times reported this, God love them.

The window next to his seat came apart shortly after the plane left Thessaloniki, Greece, bound for Memmingen, Germany. The escaping cabin air pulled his upper body through the opening. Other passengers helped his wife drag him back inside. The plane, a Ryanair subsidiary Malta Air flight, turned around and landed in Thessaloniki. The man is in a hospital with friction burns, conscious.

Ryanair confirmed the window “dislodged inflight” but did not address how a paying customer ended up partially outside the aircraft, a class of service that was not on his ticket and which you can’t really purchase at any price. Boeing says it’s in contact with the airline, so that’s comforting.

A plane at cruising altitude keeps its cabin pressurized to feel like it would at 6,000–8,000 feet while the air outside is far thinner. When a window fails, the high-pressure cabin air rushes out through the hole, and it takes anything nearby with it — papers, phones, a61 year old Serbian man. If you’re seated next to the breach when this happens, the pull is strongest in the first seconds, then weakens once cabin and outside pressure equalize.

The person stuck in the opening faces three problems at once: air roaring past at hundreds of miles an hour, thin air with too little oxygen, and cold that can hit 60 below. The immediate killer, when there is one, is usually blunt-force trauma — the body slamming against the fuselage. Upsides include: that windblown look, a strong narrative spine for dinner conversation and the grace of seeing the world through the fresh recollection that our time in it is fleeting.

How often does this happen? Almost never. In 2018 a Southwest passenger did die, but it was the first passenger fatality on a US airline in nine years. The most famous precedent is stranger still: in 1990, a British Airways windscreen blew out and the captain was sucked halfway out of the cockpit; a flight attendant held his ankles for 20 minutes until landing, and the captain survived and returned to flying. Commercial windows are built in multiple layers precisely so one crack doesn’t open a hole, which is why investigators will want to know what happened to this one.

Even though this is rare, we’d be letting you down if we didn’t arm you with some practical knowledge. The first thing to do is marry well. The man’s wife did what you’re supposed to do. As a general matter the instructions are this: If someone near you is being pulled toward a breach, do not maintain an ironic distance. Grab and hold! The initial suction fades within seconds as pressure equalizes, so surviving the first moments is most of the battle. Oh, and put your own oxygen mask on first; at cruising altitude you have perhaps 15–30 seconds of useful consciousness without it, and you can’t hold anyone’s legs while blacking out. Stay belted — the seatbelt is what keeps the hole from getting you in the first place. Then wait: pilots train for exactly this, and the plane will descend fast to thicker air where everyone can breathe.

That Air Force One News

In other plane news, you might have heard that President Trump flew home from the NATO summit on the old Air Force One instead of the new Boeing 747 donated by Qatar. Apparently, it lacks some of the sophisticated missile countermeasures found on the older presidential aircraft. This is just a temporary presidential aircraft. The permanent replacement planes, still under construction by Boeing, are expected to include the full suite of defensive systems.

Wait. How can another country give the president an airplane? Doesn’t the Constitution prohibit that?

The Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause bars federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign governments without Congress’s consent. The Trump administration argues the aircraft was accepted by the U.S. government—not by Donald Trump personally—and that it is being used as government property during his presidency before eventually being transferred to his presidential library after he leaves office. This feels a little like putting your hands over your eyes and thinking no one can see you. It’s a gift, called one thing while Trump is in office and then another when he keeps it upon leaving.

Farage Bin Challenge

On Monday we told you about Nigel Farage’s decision to resign his seat in Parliament and force a special election, arguing that voters—not Parliament’s ethics watchdog—should judge the questions surrounding the gifts and cash he received from interested parties.

Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats have refused to give in to his stunt and field candidates. So, one of Farage’s highest-profile opponents is now Count Binface, a candidate who campaigns dressed as a giant trash can (or bin as the Brits call it when they’re not saying alluminium). Binface describes himself as an intergalactic warrior from the planet Sigma IX. His platform includes moving a badly placed hand dryer in a local pub, capping the price of croissants, bringing back the old BBC teletext service, and, for reasons known only to Count Binface, nationalizing Adele.

Binface is in the tradition of UK novelty candidates—including Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party. In 2002, a man dressed as a monkey was elected mayor of Hartlepool.

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do... except, perhaps, my wife... and some of her friends. Oh, yes, and Captain Johnson. Come to think of it, most people like a good laugh more than I do, but that’s beside the point.

It falls upon me to remind you that the reason Farage has so many people up in arms is that his platform—and the platform of his Reform UK party—isn’t a joke. It calls for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, sharply reduce immigration, detain and deport people arriving illegally, abandon Net Zero policies, expand domestic oil and gas production, cut taxes, and take a harder line on crime.

The Bayeux Tapestry’s Secret Journey

Just before three o’clock Friday morning, a yellow truck backed through the gates of the British Museum under police escort. Inside the truck was a cage. Inside the cage was a crate. Inside the crate was another crate. Inside that was a metal shell containing a 950-year-old, 225-foot-long piece of embroidery, folded back and forth 28 times like the world’s most valuable accordion.

The Bayeux Tapestry had arrived in England, on loan while the museum housing it—which John Dickerson failed to visit while he was on a shoot and staying in Bayeux because he was just too tired and had a really long day ahead of him—undergoes a 2 year renovation.

The tapestry is one of the great survivors of Western civilization: an embroidered eyewitness account of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066—the Battle of Hastings, Halley’s Comet, warships crossing the English Channel, cavalry charges, and the death of King Harold. Think of it as Europe’s oldest graphic novel.

Moving it was an engineering project worthy of NASA, according to Chris Heath’s remarkable reporting in National Geographic. The tapestry was cushioned by giant vibration-dampening springs, monitored by sensors measuring every bump, and driven under police escort through the Channel Tunnel after multiple full-scale rehearsal trips.

All this for an object that, during the French Revolution, was nearly used to cover a wagon, was once almost cut into strips to decorate a parade float, survived Napoleon, and later survived Hitler.

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 9th, Thursday.

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or concluding that you really haven’t done enough to decide what your new look for summer is going to be.

Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me bolt all of this together.

I usually start with a big thought connecting the day’s events that I can roll at you to say I am Lazarus, come from the dead. I’m not seeing it in the entrails today. I don’t want to force one and then have one, settling a pillow by her head, say, “That is not it, at all.”

So, get yourself a peach and follow along with what happened, sorted through our way.

Iran is a big mess again

The ceasefire stopped organizing the Iran war. Now we’re back to a more dangerous process of watching each side calculate which has more leverage and how to get more.

For the last few weeks, every new development was measured against the question: Would the ceasefire hold?

Now we are back to a familiar formula: Iran cannot match the United States bomb for bomb. It doesn’t have to. It has its hand around the throat of something the rest of the world cannot afford to lose: the Strait of Hormuz.

I won’t bore you with the shipping math. The world needs what moves through that narrow stretch of water. And Iran doesn’t have to close the strait to use it. It only has to make ship captains, insurers, energy traders, and presidents nervous.

That’s why the June memorandum of understanding–—the ceasefire that lifted the American naval blockade, and reopened the Strait— mattered more than it first appeared. It wasn’t simply an agreement. It was an acknowledgment that the Strait itself had become one of the central prizes in the conflict. And as acute listeners will know, it was not a prize before the conflict because it was not an issue of contention.

Even as the formal truce collapsed into open conflict, high-level mediators from Qatar, Pakistan, and Egypt kept lines of communication open around the clock. The war and the negotiations are no longer alternating; they are happening simultaneously.

The problem was not that Washington failed to imagine Iran’s leverage. The problem was that it acted as if American military superiority could make that leverage irrelevant. That’s a big mistake and a big one for Donald Trump who presents himself as having a killer instinct that understands all possibilities.

So now that President Trump has declared the ceasefire over, what are the choices now? The United States can try to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten shipping, do the slow, hard work of reopening the Strait, and rob Iran of its leverage. Or it can escalate the bombing in the hope of forcing the regime to yield. The Iranian regime can continue asking its people to absorb the pain while betting it can disrupt the Strait long enough for pressure from the world economy—and perhaps from the approaching November election—to produce better terms.

Ukraine’s Strategic Shift

The lesson of the Iran war—if we can’t beat your army, we’ll attack the system that keeps it fighting—is playing out in Ukraine too.

Ukraine is going after the machinery that lets Russia keep fighting: oil depots, refineries, fuel terminals, tankers, rail links, and the supply lines that keep Crimea and the front fed.

On Thursday, Ukrainian drones hit more Russian oil facilities and set two oil tankers ablaze in the Sea of Azov. Fires broke out at oil sites prompting evacuations, while one tanker continued burning after its crew fled.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls the campaign “long-range sanctions.” If sanctions are supposed to squeeze the revenue and supply lines that sustain war, Ukraine is now trying to do with drones what Western governments have tried to do with finance.

Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries and fuel infrastructure have helped trigger gasoline shortages, rationing, and long lines in multiple Russian regions. Foreign Policy reports that Ukraine has hit Russian oil refineries 194 times this year—11 times as often as during the same period last year—and that more than half of Russia’s regions have reported fuel shortages, rationing, or restrictions on civilian sales.

This is the change in the war. Ukraine is no longer only trying to stop Russian advances at the front. It is trying to make the front harder for Russia to supply. I don’t know what to do with this exactly, but for years, Ukraine’s allies worried that striking inside Russia would escalate the war. How worried should we be about escalation now?

The lesson isn’t being lost on the rest of NATO. On Thursday, at a NATO summit, Germany announced it will buy American Tomahawk cruise missiles, giving it—for the first time since the Cold War—a ground-based weapon capable of striking targets more than 1,000 miles away. Since NATO was created to counter the Russian threat, those 1,000 miles might be measured straight into Russia.

European allies also pledged billions of dollars to develop their own long-range strike systems. Europe is drawing the same lesson Ukraine has learned by necessity: in modern war, holding an enemy’s logistics, industry and infrastructure at risk may matter as much as defeating its armies at the front.

President Trump said Wednesday that the United States would give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air-defense systems. A license is not a shield over Kyiv: A top Ukrainian official warned that it could take a year or more to produce Patriot interceptor missiles.

Fire in the Land of Shoes

China’s shoe capital became the site of one of the country’s deadliest industrial accidents in years Thursday.

A fire tore through the Huiteng shoe factory in China’s Fujian Province, killing 28 people. More than 200 workers escaped or were rescued, but many were trapped as flames spread through the multi-story building. The fire broke out in Jinjiang, a city whose factories produced more than 1.2 billion pairs of shoes last year—roughly one out of every five pairs made anywhere in the world.

Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered what state media called an “all-out” rescue effort and demanded that those responsible be held accountable. Authorities arrested the factory owner and other managers, froze the company’s assets, and opened an investigation into what caused the fire.

Preliminary findings suggest the blaze started on the building’s ground floor. Officials said materials such as rubber soles, adhesives, and chemical solvents used in shoe production helped it spread rapidly, while firefighters told state television that large quantities of stored materials had been piled into stairwells, slowing both evacuations and rescue efforts.

The speed of the government’s response reflects a familiar pattern in China. Major industrial accidents often produce an immediate promise of accountability, arrests of local managers, and a national investigation. The harder question usually comes later: whether the findings lead to broader changes in workplace safety or simply identify people to blame.

Perhaps not the Time for a Fruit Habit

Food has become remarkably good at traveling across America. Unfortunately, so have the things that sometimes come with it.

Health officials are investigating one of the country’s largest cyclospora outbreaks in years after nearly 1,000 people in Michigan and hundreds more in neighboring Ohio became sick with a parasite that causes severe diarrhea. More than 40 people have been hospitalized, but no one has died. Officials still don’t know what food caused the outbreak.

Cyclospora exposes a weakness in the modern food system. By the time people become sick—sometimes two weeks after eating contaminated food—the lettuce, basil, cilantro, berries or other produce that carried the parasite has long since been harvested, shipped, sold and eaten. One contaminated ingredient may have passed through multiple distributors into grocery stores and restaurants across dozens of states before investigators even know an outbreak exists.

Tracing the source is unusually difficult. The parasite cannot be grown in a laboratory, many routine tests don’t look for it, and investigators often discover that the only thing hundreds of patients shared was a single ingredient hidden inside dozens of different meals. Sometimes they never find the source.

The defenses are modest: Wash produce, though washing may not remove this parasite. Peel what you can. Skip pre-cut produce during an outbreak. And if diarrhea lingers after a meal of fresh produce, tell your doctor what you ate. Sometimes the most important clue isn’t in a lab result—it’s in your last meal.

Participation Puzzler

The unemployment rate tells you how many people are looking for work and can’t find it.

The labor-force participation rate tells you something different: How many Americans are even in the game? It measures the share of adults who either have a job or are actively trying to get one. Stop looking, and you disappear from both the labor force and the unemployment rate. Your family, however, will still expect you at dinner.

That’s why economists watch it so closely. A falling unemployment rate usually signals a healthy economy. A falling participation rate can mean people aren’t finding work, can’t work, or no longer think work is worth pursuing.

USA Today highlighted just how dramatic that shift has become. In June, roughly 720,000 Americans left the labor force, pushing the participation rate down to 61.5 percent. Outside the pandemic, that’s the lowest level in nearly half a century.

Why are they leaving? No one agrees. Some are retiring as America ages. Some have left work to care for children or aging parents. Some are living with chronic illness or disability. Others have concluded that after paying for childcare, transportation, housing, and food, a full-time job simply doesn’t add up.

Whatever the reason, those Americans haven’t disappeared. They still need income, housing, healthcare and food. The question is who now carries that burden: a spouse, parents, savings, credit cards, disability programs, or Social Security.

The labor market may have enough jobs. The deeper question is whether those jobs actually match the skills, pay expectations, and life circumstances of the people available to fill them—and whether enough Americans can, or want to, take them.

For generations, the American promise was simple: if you were willing to work, there would be a place for you—and that work would buy stability, independence, and a shot at something better. If hundreds of thousands of Americans are now stepping away—not because they are unwilling, but because the math no longer adds up—then this isn’t a labor-market story. It’s a question of whether work still works.

Platner Blindness

The New York Times has reconstructed the rise and collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, and its reporting suggests the implosion was not caused by one revelation but by a repeated failure of vetting. Again and again, campaign advisers, Democratic officials, donors and allied organizations asked Platner the same question: Is there anything else? Again and again, they were told no. Again and again, there was something else.

The allegations and controversies were different—a Nazi-linked tattoo, inflammatory online posts, sexual messages, accounts from former girlfriends, and finally a rape allegation that Platner denies. What linked them was not their subject matter but the campaign’s inability to anticipate them. The Times reports that key advisers believed a thorough background investigation had been done. In reality, much of the vetting depended on what the candidate disclosed about himself.

That distinction matters beyond one Senate race. Every campaign constructs a story about its candidate. Good vetting is an effort to destroy that story before opponents do. It assumes the candidate may be wrong, forgetful, embarrassed, or simply unwilling to tell the whole truth. The purpose isn’t to protect the candidate. It’s to protect everyone else who decides to invest their reputation in that candidate. In campaigns that call themselves movements, that means protecting the movement from becoming captive to one person’s blind spots—or the blind spots of the people closest to him.

By the time Democrats began asking whether there was “anything else,” the campaign no longer controlled the answer. The press did. The next question isn’t simply who replaces Platner on the ballot. It’s whether Democrats treat this as a lesson about better vetting or turn it into another chapter in the party’s long-running argument over whether outsider, grassroots candidates or establishment candidates make better nominees. If Platner’s collapse becomes evidence in that larger ideological fight instead of a lesson about how campaigns should examine their own candidates, the damage won’t end with one Senate race.

Cartel Drones

In Mexico, drones are not changing a war between states. They are changing what happens when the state is absent.

Cartels have used drones before—primarily for surveillance and, in recent years, to drop explosives—but attacks like the one in Guerrero show how routine and destructive that tactic has become.

At 6 a.m. Wednesday, as the sun came up over the mountains of Guerrero, bombs began falling from cartel drones on a cluster of rural communities. Residents had spent weeks warning state authorities that La Nueva Familia Michoacana was closing in. They posted videos of cartel drones overhead. They shared locations of cartel fighters approaching their homes.

Help did not come.

So a group of more than 70 residents hid in an abandoned medical clinic– women, children, and elderly residents– huddled while explosions and gunfire sounded outside. Others sheltered in churches. “While some are celebrating goals, others are getting massacred by drones carrying bombs,” one woman told the Associated Press. The World Cup cities in Mexico were secure; places like Guerrero were not.

Authorities have not confirmed how many people were killed in the attack, and early reports focused more on the scale of the assault and the displacement of residents than on a verified death toll.

Authorities initially denied the attacks, even as residents livestreamed gunfire and smoke from mountain lookout posts. After the AP asked about the reports, Mexico’s Security Cabinet said forces were heading to the area to verify the situation and strengthen the state presence.

In the absence of government protection, residents formed a self-defense group. But that solution carries its own corruption. The vigilantes have been armed by rival cartels fighting La Nueva Familia Michoacana for territory. They carry military-grade weapons smuggled from the United States, grenades, and drones of their own.

So the village is not choosing between the state and the cartel. It is choosing among armed powers, none of them fully protective, all of them dangerous.

Eswatini Immigration

Sometimes, when Americans are asked to care about a country far away, someone inevitably says, “Most people couldn’t even find it on a map.” I’ve always disliked that argument. Your inability to locate a country should not determine whether you care about actions taken there in your name.

Which brings us to Eswatini, a kingdom of about 1.2 million people, wedged between South Africa and Mozambique.

This week it accepted another 11 people deported from the United States, making this the fourth group of deportees Eswatini has taken in under an agreement with the Trump administration. None of them are citizens of Eswatini, which means they are being sent to a country where they likely have no family ties, may not speak the local languages, and have no established support networks. Many cannot easily be returned to their own countries. Under the agreement, they are expected to remain in Eswatini while their cases are worked out.

For generations, immigration detention has largely happened inside the American legal system. People were held in American detention centers, under American rules, with access—however imperfect—to American courts.

Now another model is emerging. The United States is increasingly asking other countries to perform part of that function instead.

We’ve seen versions of this before. Australia has processed asylum seekers offshore. Britain tried to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Italy has pursued migrant processing in Albania. The details differ, but they all ask the same institutional question: When governments run into legal, political, or practical limits at home, do they move the function somewhere else?

The Trump administration has reached agreements with nearly two dozen countries to accept third-country deportees. Eswatini is one of the most active participants. Human-rights groups say the secrecy surrounding these arrangements makes it difficult to know where people are being sent, what conditions they face, or what legal protections they have once they arrive—raising the possibility that individuals could be held for long periods with little oversight or recourse, even as the Eswatini government says it is acting lawfully and on humanitarian grounds.

As an example of the kinds of thing that can go wrong, migrants deported from the U.S. and detained in a hotel in Equatorial Guinea say that authorities there also have used the facility to quarantine at least one suspected Ebola patient, deportees and lawyers representing them said Thursday.

Peanut Butter Floor

One of the easiest ways to make people look at something is to tell them it’s important. Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers spent a career trying the opposite.

A museum in Rotterdam this week covered a 270-square-foot floor with more than 800 pounds of peanut butter—enough for roughly 15,000 sandwiches—to recreate one of Schippers’ best-known works after his death last month. Museum staff told visitors simply to “follow the smell.”

The work, first created in 1969, has no hidden message. Schippers insisted the peanut butter be spread “as smoothly and boringly as possible.” He once said, “Isn’t it fantastic that we are all standing here looking at peanut butter?”

Schippers believed art had become too serious, too eager to declare everything profound. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, he spent decades directing people’s attention toward things that seemed almost aggressively unimportant: a bottle of lemonade poured into the sea, a floor covered in peanut butter, absurd television programs, even voicing Ernie and Kermit the Frog in the Dutch version of Sesame Street.

Most artists try to persuade you that ordinary things contain hidden meaning. Schippers asked a different question: What if simply paying attention is enough? In 1969, that was a prank on profundity. Then the world changed around the joke. In an economy engineered to harvest every spare second of human attention, standing in a room looking at peanut butter is no longer nothing. Schippers spent a career insisting his work meant nothing. In celebrating him, we have discovered that the work is also useful.

Update

A little update on that Manhattan skyscraper that listeners have been following closely. We’ll let the New York Times take it from here.

“A developer behind the Midtown office conversion project that suffered structural damage on Tuesday played down the problems in an interview, saying there was never a danger of a building collapse and that he expected the project to be delayed for only a few weeks.

“This incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap,” Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, said on Tuesday evening. “It happens unfortunately far too often on construction sites: falling cranes, people — God forbid — falling off buildings, windows falling out.”

God forbid.

Editorial Note

One editorial note before we go.

President Trump ended the NATO summit sounding markedly warmer toward America’s European allies than he had when he arrived. He spoke of the “respect and the love in the room,” adding, “They like the job I’m doing,” and described the summit as showing “tremendous unity.”

We could spend the next ten minutes asking whether he meant it, whether it was tactical, whether European leaders believed it, or whether it signals another turn in American foreign policy.

I decided not to.

There is simply too much else to understand. What countries actually do matters more than what everyone spends a day guessing the president really meant. Germany is buying Tomahawks. Europe is investing billions in long-range strike weapons. Ukraine is trying to manufacture Patriots. Iran is trying to use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage. Those are durable facts. They will shape events long after today’s interpretations of presidential tone have disappeared.

One of the hardest editorial decisions every day is deciding what not to chase. With a President who lies as often as you and I receive and expel breaths, the challenge is greater. He is a deeply consequential figure, but his words are not. Today, I chose to spend our time on the machinery rather than the mood.

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 8th, Wednesday, which is still not Friday.

The experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback and the reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you’re reading this instead of listening, remember this is also a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re driving, making dinner, or finally finishing that wooden boat you’ve been building in the basement since the Hoover administration.

Thank you to Laura Doan for helping me put this together.

We sort the news into sections to make it manageable. Foreign news over here. Markets over there. Elections down at the local level, run by county clerks. The world doesn’t work that way:

The Iran war is across the globe but hit us in our gas tank on Wednesday. A president gave away a private company’s license. Federal officials crossed the boundaries into state-level election decisions. In Maine, a candidate and the party are each drawing a different line. Detention centers can’t detain viruses. Viruses don’t stay inside detention centers…

… Only the inhabitants of the worst corners of the internet were content to stay inside their box.

The Iran war arrives on Wall Street

On Wednesday, President Trump declared the ceasefire with Iran “over” and promised to “hit them hard again tonight.” Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, he called Iran’s leaders “scum,” “sick people,” and “vicious, violent people,” adding: “And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it.” Tehran answered that it would not negotiate under military threat. “The era of bullying and extortion is over,” said Iran’s parliament speaker. “It leads nowhere. We don’t fold.”

Events on Wednesday proceeded from the exchange of fire on Tuesday. Iran fired on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces answered by striking more than 80 Iranian targets—air defenses, coastal radar, and dozens of Revolutionary Guard boats. Iran then launched missiles and drones Wednesday at American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.

Brent crude jumped about eight percent—its largest one-day increase since this phase of the conflict began. Earlier spikes in this conflict had been roughly two to three percent.

The Dow fell roughly 800 points. Higher oil prices eventually reach trucking companies, airlines, manufacturers, farmers, grocery distributors, and ultimately consumers. Traders were no longer pricing isolated attacks. They were pricing the possibility of a prolonged conflict that could repeatedly disrupt oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. How much will corporate profits sink, or will they pass along the higher prices?

NBC News reported Tuesday that the Defense Department, with a budget of nearly a trillion dollars, is running out of cash. Defense officials asked Congress for more than $67 billion. Lawmakers haven’t approved it, in part out of frustration over how little the administration tells them about the war.

Ukraine gets a license, not missiles

Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv Tuesday night into Wednesday—the third attack on the capital in less than a week. The strikes exploited the shortage we talked about Monday: Ukraine can shoot down ballistic missiles only with Patriot interceptors, and it is running out of them. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spent six months asking Washington both for more Patriot interceptors and for permission to build his own.

Lockheed Martin builds roughly 600 Patriot interceptors a year. Russia builds roughly 120 ballistic missiles a month—and recently fired 30 in a single night. Everyone defending against ballistic missiles draws from that same limited supply. Gulf states have fired more than 1,100 Patriots defending against Iran, and every interceptor the production line replaces for the Gulf is one that can’t protect the golden church domes of Kyiv.

At the summit Wednesday, President Trump granted the license—while ruling out more American missiles, because “we need them for ourselves too.” He announced the license before telling Lockheed Martin, the company whose technology he had just promised away.

A license, however, is not a missile. Trump claimed new U.S. plants could stand up production in two to three months. Lockheed Martin’s expansion of its existing line will not reach 2,000 interceptors a year until 2030. It remains unclear whether the license covers interceptors, the full Patriot system, or where production would happen. And a missile factory in Ukraine would sit inside the range of the weapons it is meant to stop. Or, Russians could seize production and use it themselves.

In the main, the Trump complain was mainly aimed at Spain. The U.S. president continued his long-running push for NATO members to increase defense spending. Spain is the only alliance member that has not committed to spending 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035.

“I don’t want anything to do with Spain,” he said. “Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.”

But it is unclear whether Trump could single out Spain, the European Union’s fourth-largest economy, without threatening the broader U.S. trade relationship with the EU’s 27 member countries. The president has made similar threats toward Spain before without following through.

The DOJ sends 51 letters

The Justice Department warned every top election official in the country Tuesday that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting.

The threat targets a crime that, like overcrowding at a seance or unicorn stampedes, doesn’t exist. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime—punishable by prison and, for the voter, deportation. That is why it rarely happens. State audits, including in Republican-led states, have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare, and every state already has procedures to prevent it.

So why would the head of the Civil Rights Division bang out a directive on the keyboard? For the same reason World Cup Soccer players flop all over on the ground and pretend they’ve been fouled.

President Trump has spent years claiming that elections he loses are rigged. Republicans are not favored in November’s midterms. If the Justice Department is already telling states they could be prosecuted for allowing noncitizens to vote, then after the election it can point to those warnings and argue that any Republican loss was caused by illegal noncitizen voting.

The pushback is bipartisan. Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state called the letters insulting to county recorders. Utah’s Republican chief election official, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, described “another love letter” from the DOJ and called the threats “truly bizarre behavior” from “the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

The letters follow a losing streak. The department has sued 30 states and D.C. for their voter rolls and has yet to win a case. Eleven federal courts have dismissed its demands, and the department lost its first appeal. Courts also blocked key parts of Trump’s executive order that sought to restrict mail voting. The department keeps losing for the same reason: the Constitution assigns the running of elections to the states.

Five Days

You can tell a live oyster from a dead one with a tap. A live oyster snaps shut. A dead one gapes. Within hours the meat begins to rot, announcing itself to everyone huddled over a Red Stripe looking for solace.

Which brings us to the dying candidacy of the Democratic nominee for Maine’s Senate seat.

Graham Platner farms oysters for a living. Since Monday, Democrats have been tapping. Even Stephen King, Maine’s most famous Democrat, deleted his post defending Platner. No snap. Platner was silent Wednesday, and the smell of a dead campaign has reached every passerby since Monday’s rape allegation—which he denies.

His campaign held a staff call that set no timeline for a decision. A person close to the campaign told CNN: “I think he knows it’s over,” but “he thinks ‘I built this thing’”—and wants a say in who gets the nomination.

The Maine Democratic Party is already designing a replacement process. It rebuffed Platner’s attempts to shape the pick. His campaign insists it wants “voters and volunteers” choosing a successor, “not the political establishment.” The party’s answer: nothing starts until he withdraws.

The candidates aren’t waiting. Troy Jackson, the former state Senate president who campaigned alongside Platner, filed exploratory paperwork Tuesday—the first to do so. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is considering a run. So is Nirav Shah, the former CDC director.

Platner has until 5 p.m. Monday to withdraw; the party has until July 27 to name someone.

A virus inside, a shooting outside

Measles is loose in federal custody. DHS confirmed seven active cases among detainees at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona. It’s the second cluster in Arizona federal custody this year.

The system is designed to spread it: ICE constantly transfers detainees from one facility to another—to open up beds, to stage deportations—so an infection doesn’t stay where it starts. It rides the bus to the next facility. In June, one infected detainee from the Arizona network arrived at Fort Bliss in Texas, and the facility had to quarantine nearly 180 people. That’s the arithmetic of measles, among the most contagious viruses we know: one case in a crowded building means everyone unvaccinated nearby is presumed exposed.

A detention center gives measles everything it wants: people packed in close quarters, a population that turns over constantly (fresh virus shipments daily!), and no reliable record of who’s been vaccinated. In response, ICE has stopped in-person visits at Florence, stopped moving detainees around inside the facility, and quarantined anyone suspected of contact with an infected person.

Quarantining the building doesn’t quarantine the outbreak, because immigration detention isn’t a prison sentence—people leave all the time. They post bond. They win their cases. Judges order them freed. When someone who’s been exposed walks out the door, local health officials and the migrant shelters that receive them need to know, so they can watch for symptoms and trace contacts. The shelters say ICE isn’t telling them. The virus’s trail goes cold at the gate.

Around 6:30 Tuesday morning in Houston’s Magnolia Park, a historic Mexican-American neighborhood, ICE officers attempted a traffic stop on Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years, worked construction, and was in the legal process of obtaining a work permit. An officer shot him in the abdomen. He died shortly after reaching the hospital.

ICE says Araujo tried to evade arrest, rammed a law-enforcement vehicle, and “weaponized his vehicle” against an officer, who fired in self-defense. Business surveillance footage didn’t capture the shooting, but it recorded Araujo afterward, handcuffed face down on the ground, groaning. Neighbors heard him cry out in Spanish: “They’re killing me!” The League of United Latin American Citizens says he was on his way to work to pick up his employees.

ICE accounts of vehicle-ramming in past shootings have been contradicted by video, producing dropped charges and lawsuits.

How an insurance pool dies

Health insurance works by pooling money. Everyone pays premiums; the money covers whoever gets sick that year. Healthy people pay in more than they use. Sick people use more than they pay in. The insurer needs enough healthy people paying to cover the sick ones’ bills.

A death spiral is what kills that arrangement. Premiums rise. Healthy people look at the new price and decide they’d rather risk it—they’re not sick, so insurance feels like money spent on nothing. They cancel. But the sick people can’t cancel; they need the coverage. Now the insurer is collecting less money and paying the same medical bills. To cover the gap, it raises premiums on everyone left. That new price drives out the next-healthiest group. Fewer payers, same bills, higher premiums, more cancellations. Each round the pool gets smaller and sicker, and the price climbs until almost no one can afford it.

That is now happening in the individual insurance market. Insurers are proposing a median 14 percent premium increase for 2027 Affordable Care Act plans, according to a KFF and Peterson Center report out Wednesday—the second consecutive year of double-digit hikes. Congress triggered it. Federal subsidies had been paying part of everyone’s premium, which kept the price low enough that healthy people stayed. The subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Prices jumped, healthy people canceled, and the pools got sicker. The 14 percent is the insurers’ forecast: they expect the people still buying coverage next year to be sicker and more expensive, and they’re setting premiums high enough to pay those bills.

The people who will pay the higher premiums are the roughly 20 million Americans no employer covers: contractors, farmers, gig workers, people who retired before Medicare kicks in.

The 14 percent is a proposal, not the final price. Two things could still lower it. State insurance regulators review these requests every summer and often force them down. And Congress could bring back the subsidies that kept healthy people in the pool in the first place. What won’t change is the timing: the final prices arrive in mailboxes this fall, a few weeks before the midterm elections.

50,000 people watched and no alarm rang

A Berlin court on Wednesday sentenced a 32-year-old medical professional, identified as Zhiting S., to five years in prison as an accessory to aggravated rape. He never assaulted the victims himself. Instead, he used his medical training to teach men in a Telegram network which drugs, and in what doses, would render women unconscious without leaving evidence. He is the fourth member of the network’s inner circle convicted this year. The ringleader received 14 years in February for serial rape and attempted murder.

An Associated Press investigation reveals what the network had become. About two dozen Telegram channels, operating under the innocuous name “German Driving School for Experts,” used coded language—women were “cars”—to evade automated moderation. Behind the code, eight core members, mostly Chinese nationals living in Germany, drugged and raped Chinese women studying and working across Western Europe, filmed the assaults, and distributed the videos to channels that eventually drew 50,000 members who bought, traded, and reviewed them.

The network survived for at least four years because its design defeated detection. Telegram permits groups of up to 200,000 members with little internal moderation. The coded language slipped past keyword filters. No participant reported the channels because every viewer was implicated, and the victims often had no memory of the assaults because of the drugs.

Police uncovered the operation only after the ringleader escalated from women he knew socially to strangers he met online. Strangers knew something had happened and went to the police.

Telegram told the AP that sexual violence is prohibited on the platform and that it complies with European law, but declined to explain how channels with tens of thousands of members shared evidence of rape for years without intervention. Its founder was arrested in Paris in 2024 over allegations that the platform’s architecture facilitates organized criminal activity.

The German judges rejected the idea that this was an isolated group. They called it the “industrialization of abuse.” The description fit: the network had instructors, logistics, distribution, and customers. What it lacked, for four years, was anyone looking inside.

Generational roomates

One-third of Americans under 35 now live with their parents, according to a recent Realtor.com report highlighted by The New York Times. At 33 percent, the share has climbed back near the pandemic peak of 34 percent reached in 2020.

Young adults are more educated and broadly employed, but home prices, rents, and borrowing costs have risen faster than wages. Many working professionals are moving home not because they can’t find work, but because they can’t afford a household of their own.

What feels like a new social failure may actually be a return to an older economic pattern. For most of American history, young adults did not leave home at 18 or 21 to establish independent households. In the 18th and 19th centuries, they typically remained part of extended family economies or lived with other households while learning trades and accumulating savings. The expectation that young adults would quickly move into homes of their own was largely a product of the extraordinary prosperity that followed World War II. From that perspective, today’s living arrangements may say less about a generation failing to launch than about an economy that no longer supports a postwar exception.

Soccer advantage

Soccer socks are skin-tight by design—they anchor the shin guards and steady the ankle—but the calf muscle swells every time it fires, thousands of times a game, and the fabric squeezes back. Legs tingle. Legs go numb. So players cut holes in the socks, at the calf — the back of the lower leg, over the muscle, between the ankle and the knee to let the muscle breathe, and swear they run freer.

Science’s response: no. Wired reports there’s not a single study showing the holes help. The research on compression gear contradicts the folk wisdom —a snug sock, properly fitted, actually limits muscle inflammation. Sports medicine specialists say the benefit lives entirely in the player’s head.

Which doesn’t make it worthless. A player who believes his sock is strangling his calf plays like a man being strangled. Cut the hole and the belief goes away—performance unchanged, confidence restored.

The rules permit it, by the way. You can shred your socks so long as the shin guards stay covered. Tear your jersey and you have to change it. FIFA, an organization facing questions about heat, ticket prices, and stadium surveillance, has taken a firm regulatory line on shirts.

Trump ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll

It’s been roughly 30 years since Donald Trump sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room, and three years since a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and awarded Carroll more than $5 million.

On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Trump to finally pay that judgment, which has grown to $5.8 million with interest. The money had been held in a court-controlled account while Trump appealed. Last week, the Supreme Court let the 2023 civil verdict stand, clearing the way for Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to release the funds.

Trump’s legal team is still trying to delay payment by asking the Supreme Court to rehear the case, though such requests are rarely granted.

A much larger judgment remains unresolved. Trump is also appealing the separate $83.3 million verdict a jury awarded Carroll in 2024 after finding he defamed her after she publicly accused him of the assault.

Updates

Yesterday we told you about a skyscraper in Manhattan that was abruptly freaking everyone out as a result of structural failures created by the effort to turn it from an office building into a residential building. Engineers discovered buckling columns. The project is a byproduct of the post-COVID office glut: developers are trying to turn half-empty towers into housing. But converting offices into apartments isn’t like repainting the walls. Every kitchen and bathroom means more plumbing, more holes cut through concrete floors, and much more weight than the building was originally designed to carry. The Wednesday update: emergency crews spent the night installing temporary steel supports, and city officials now say the building has stabilized, with no further movement detected since Tuesday morning. Some nearby buildings have reopened, but several remain evacuated while engineers investigate what caused the failure and determine whether the project can safely continue.