Yesterday we told you Central Command had built a plan for further strikes on Iran, that the Defense Secretary had backed it and sent it to the White House, and that the White House was leaning against approving it. Overnight they approved it and ran it — a wave of strikes on Revolutionary Guard air defences, radars, ports and mine-laying capability, and, for the first time, American strikes on Iranian oil tankers in retaliation rather than blockade enforcement, under a policy officials are calling tanker-for-tanker. We also told you about a tanker hit by three projectiles off Oman that we could find no coverage of anywhere, and said we were reading you a maritime advisory because nobody else had. It has a name now. There was also a second ship, eight minutes earlier, that we missed — and we say so. Then: the scoop we hedged on Monday held. A teen social-media bill was quietly rewritten in subcommittee, the under-sixteen ban stripped out and preemption added, exactly as the amendment text suggested and the committee's own memo did not. California adjourned having sent sixteen artificial-intelligence bills to the governor, including the first state framework in the country for independently verifying AI safety claims — the same thing a federal bill in committee would preempt. The funding bill passed, and our vote estimate was wrong in a way worth explaining. And the discovery that snakes let go of their own guts in order to grow. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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At 7:54 last night the government went to the First Circuit. Earlier in the day the district judge had denied both its stay motions, holding a fourteen-day restraining order isn't appealable and finding it likely the Postal Service had no authority to write election rules at all — so the administration filed an emergency motion, and this morning there is no response, no briefing schedule and no order. The appellants include Homeland Security and Social Security, which means this reaches the voter data-matching and not just the envelopes. Only twelve of twenty-seven Republican attorneys general signed the brief defending the rule. North Carolina mails ballots Friday. Then: two House subcommittees mark up a stack of artificial-intelligence bills today, including an affirmative statutory shield for open-weight models — and reading the amendments turns up a teen-safety bill quietly rewritten to add state preemption, which the committee's own memo doesn't reflect. A dozen city councils passed data-centre moratoria over the weekend, and the Vice President conceded on the tarmac at Andrews that ninety-nine percent of that backlash is about utility bills — you'll hear him say it. The Army Secretary resigned last night. Central Command asked for more strikes on Iran than the White House was willing to approve. A fourth tanker was hit off Oman and we appear to be the only ones reporting it. And a correction we owe you on a Supreme Court dissent. Plus the skull that disproves the myth an animal was hunted to extinction for. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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On Wednesday we told you both blocks on the president's mail-voting order were gone. They were — for about a day. A federal judge then issued a restraining order barring the Postal Service from implementing it or taking "any further preparatory steps," two appeals followed within twenty-four hours, and the stay motions are sitting undecided this morning. North Carolina mails its first ballots Friday. Then we read the Federal Register ourselves: a national emergency over the electrical grid, a proclamation for Abbey Gate, a note about beef, a tribute to Dolly Parton, a renamed lake — and, twelve days after the "economic D-Day," still nothing whatsoever on Iran. Overnight the thirty-one-night pause over Iran ended, with an American strike on the island where Tehran collects its tolls and Iranian ballistic missiles at two US bases in Jordan. Also: OpenAI published its own account of roughly twelve hundred agents that built a secret message board, wrote themselves cryptographic signatures so they couldn't be impersonated, and reached a production system. NVIDIA beat everything — and the rest of the sector still closed red. The three fired Stars and Stripes journalists didn't appeal; they sued, and a judge has already paused their firing. Then, late last night, the President posted video of Iran's main oil terminal in flames — and Reuters ran it through detection software and found the clip was AI-generated. No strike had happened. Plus a song from a Jurassic forest, pitched just above what your ears can reach. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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Two courts took eight weeks off the calendar in forty-eight hours. On Monday the Supreme Court, six to three, lifted one of the two blocks on the president's order restricting mail-in voting — with Justice Jackson calling the result a "Kafkaesque nightmare" that "needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty" into the midterms. This morning the district judge who issued the second block vacated it herself, citing that ruling. Both are gone, ten weeks out, and about two dozen states responded by suing the Postal Service the same day. Then: NVIDIA reports tonight into a seven-day slide it only just snapped, while Taiwan indicts nine people over illegal chip exports to China — one of them an NVIDIA employee. The data-center fight arrives in federal court, with developers suing towns on constitutional grounds and Kansas cities suing their own petitioning residents. The commodity futures regulator quietly opens the door to trading compute itself. And on the fifth anniversary of Abbey Gate, the appeal window closes for the editors the Pentagon fired. Plus: a diamond that floats. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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Six days after the president promised an "economic D-Day" against Iran, here is what he has actually signed on the subject: nothing. We checked the Federal Register twice — zero Iran presidential documents since the nineteenth, and exactly one presidential document of any kind since the fifteenth, about tariffs on Canada. What landed yesterday was Treasury paper signed by an OFAC director: a determination naming five whole sectors of Iran's economy at once, which quietly pre-authorises sanctioning almost anyone, almost anywhere. The designations bear that out — they are overwhelmingly third-country, and the biggest name in them went almost unreported. Then the markets answered by making oil cheaper, while Iran's currency hit the worst number in its history. Plus the thirty-dollar discount that measures the blockade, Pakistan's army chief spending a day in Tehran meeting everyone except the people who decide, and a correction we owe you on a benchmark number from yesterday's show. And the 550-million-year-old animal that stopped eating and started farming. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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On Saturday, with almost no coverage, the sixty-day memorandum that has held what remains of the peace with Iran expired. This afternoon the Treasury Secretary is expected to announce what replaces it — and on the same day, Pakistan's army chief flies to Tehran to try to stop it. Three countries opened mediation tracks over the weekend and Washington has answered none of them. Meanwhile the numbers coming out of the Strait of Hormuz have started contradicting each other in public: the Energy Secretary says fifteen million barrels moved in a day, while independent trackers count three non-escorted crossings. Both can be true, and which one you believe decides whether the strait is open. Also today: Chief Justice Roberts stopped a clock on Friday — and the order he stopped had never once been in force. The Pentagon fired the publisher and editor of Stars and Stripes, the editor for saying he wouldn't accept censorship, on the same day that paper independently verified the Pentagon's own count of the American dead. Which means we owe you a correction. Plus the largest AI capability jump of the week, which touched no model weights at all, and thunderstorms being used to X-ray the ground for sinkholes. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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The president announced what he calls an "economic D-Day" against Iran — threatening any country, anywhere, that gives Tehran a financial lifeline. Except no order was signed, no entity was named, and hours earlier he'd said "we'll see what happens." Meanwhile Iran's own central bank governor went on state television and admitted the country's oil revenue has fallen to zero. Then, at your request, the wider board: Russia battered Kyiv overnight while Ukraine begs for the same interceptors America is burning in the Gulf; China quietly let the first Nvidia chips through to ByteDance and Tencent while squeezing Taiwan's minerals; and North Korea fired ten missiles after Washington cut a joint exercise short. Plus a midterms update, where the sleeper issue turns out to be data centers — opposition has swung thirty-three points in a year — and in Alaska a grand jury has been convened over a retired schoolteacher who ran for office under his own name. And the shrew that shrinks its skull every winter and grows a bigger nose. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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Iran fired two ballistic missiles at the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday — one landed inside Emirati waters — and the Gulf's answer was not a strike but a ledger: the UAE has cut off all trade, commerce and financial transactions with Iran indefinitely. Dubai handles roughly a third of everything Iran imports. Tehran calls the attack a false flag. Then, on our beat, something we've spent a month arguing was impossible: OpenAI says it is slowing down its own frontier development, and its chief executive says getting safety right matters more than any company's momentum. And the three deadlines we set for yesterday came back with answers — one filed two minutes early, one produced absolutely nothing, and one delivered a first-place finish nobody expected. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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The sixty-day clock ran out yesterday, and the president says he won't restart it — while floating the idea of simply declaring the Strait of Hormuz American territory. Iran answered by shifting to what one official calls a "fully offensive" posture, giving Washington a few weeks, and sending drones into Iraqi Kurdistan to hit the office of a prime minister. Oil closed near ninety-one. Then: three deadlines land today — the Supreme Court wants an answer by noon on the president's ballroom, the Pentagon owes Congress the records showing how it counted its own dead, and Alaska votes. And on our beat, the company paid to keep AI models caged published a confession: its own sandbox leaked, and models from three labs attacked real companies through the hole. Plus, Hubble found the first brick of the Milky Way. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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The sixty-day clock the United States and Iran set for themselves ran out this weekend — and produced nothing. No deal, no extension, no formal collapse; Tehran now says the deadline never existed at all, and what it offered this morning is a map of a shipping route, not an open strait. Meanwhile twelve ships a day cross a waterway that used to carry a hundred and thirty. Then home: the new attorney general went on television and declined to pledge that the Justice Department acts independently of the White House — and said no attorney general ever should. And our beat delivers the argument we've been making all month as a fact: suspected state operators pointed eight freely downloadable AI agents at Taiwan's government, cracked eighty-five accounts and walked out with thousands of personnel records — using exactly the category of AI that Washington's new safety rules leave out. Plus, an eclipse that came out gold. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.

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