August 1, 2026

Middle East


Toys for Trump

Daily Beast The White House ballroom. The Triumphal Arch. The relined Reflecting Pool. The new 747. Together, they cost a small fraction of just one of the “Golden Fleet” of battleships that President Trump has ordered in a multibillion-dollar scandal that gets less notice than the gilded cherubs in the Oval Office. Their name: The Trump Class.

The first Trump-Class battleship is expected to cost $17.5 billion, with the next two coming in at $14.5 billion each, a total of $36.5 billion for three. A Naval warship expert describes them as hugely expensive, easily targeted behemoths that drain funding for small, more effective alternatives that the U.S. Navy actually needs.

Federal government wants to cut water use in three states

The Hill - The federal government is proposing potentially steep cuts to water used by California, Arizona and Nevada, a major step toward figuring out the management of the dwindling Colorado River.  The river provides water to states throughout the West, including drinking water and water for agricultural, industrial and municipal uses.

As the West becomes drier, figuring out how to manage the shrinking resource has been a challenge.  A final environmental impact statement released Friday by the federal government cuts to California, Arizona and Nevada, collectively known as the Lower Basin states of the Colorado River, of up to 3 million acre-feet per year.

That could be dramatically deeper than the 1.6 million acre-feet per year that the lower basin states themselves have proposed for the next two years.

Arizona’s Department of Water Resources said in a statement that a cut of 3 million acre feet per year “would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.”

However, the federal government has yet to release anticipated specific plans for managing the river over the next two years.

The Washington Post reported Friday that the forthcoming two-year plan is more in line with the cuts proposed by the states for the next two years.

Economy

Greg Gerritt  -  In the first quarter of 2026 the economic growth rate was 2.1%, which is not that far off of the long term trend, in which the US has averaged something like 2.3 or 2.4% economic growth per year for the last 40 years. Admittedly the guy who invented Gross Domestic Product thought it was a really lousy way to measure the economy, but it is what we use, so it is worth noting. Growth in the second quarter was 1.5%, mostly due to the stupidity of the Trump administration in starting a war that has no plan and resulted in a major disruption of global energy markets and rising inflation. The data from the BEA is adjusted for inflation, but even so, rising prices caused consumer spending to slow.

Unemployment rates are barely changed for the last year, the rate nationally is about 4.3%, which is pretty close to the long term average, though when the rate is lower it is much easier to find a job so a lot of us prefer to see a rate closer to 3%. But the interesting thing is that overall employment has barely moved, even in places in which the unemployment rate is down. I have not done any kind of statistical analysis, just eyeballed the raw data which is presented as total employment in each state comparing the last two months, and the same months last year, the total number of people employed in those same months, and the unemployment rates in the same months.


Polls

Pew Research Ctr - Far more Americans support than oppose in-class cellphone bans for middle and high school students (77% vs. 18%). And for the first time in our surveys, more people now support than oppose banning cellphones during the entire school day (48% vs. 43%).

Just over half of Americans (53%) have an unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court, while 45% have a favorable opinion. While Democrats largely describe the court’s ideology as conservative, Republicans tend to see it as “middle of the road.”


Climate change

Study Finds - Summer heat is more than a seasonal discomfort. A new study suggests it may be aging people from the inside out, faster than the calendar ever could. Researchers found that exposure to extreme heat events was linked to accelerated biological aging in middle-aged and older adults. Under the study’s strictest heatwave definition, each additional heatwave event was associated with pushing the body’s internal clock forward by roughly half a year, though the size of that effect varied considerably depending on how heatwaves were defined, and was weaker or statistically insignificant under looser definitions. As heatwaves grow more frequent and more intense worldwide, that finding carries serious consequences for public health.

The Guardian -   A senior policymaker at the European Central Bank has said the climate emergency and the breakdown of nature poses a dramatically growing risk to the global economy.  Frank Elderson, a member of the ECB’s executive board, said the eurozone lender of last resort was stepping up its monitoring of the financial risks linked to the destruction of “ecosystem services”, which are nature-related processes or assets that support human activity.

ICE

NBC News - ICE plans to sign contracts for new detention facilities in its Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami and Denver jurisdictions that together would have the capacity to hold 5,500 detainees, according to a public solicitation document. It is the latest sign of the agency’s push to boost immigration arrests, even as two fatal shootings by ICE officers in recent weeks have drawn scrutiny across the country.

Health

NBC News -   Starting Wednesday, terminally ill patients in New York will gain the legal right to end their lives. Under a new law allowing medically assisted death, patients who a doctor says have less than six months to live will be able to take a lethal prescription medication that puts them to sleep, then ultimately stops their heart.

 group of medical professionals has been readying for the change. Some patients, meanwhile, say the law brings relief. “I can have some assurance that if the suffering is too much to bear, that I have a peaceful option. And that peace of mind is invaluable,” said one breast cancer patient.


Scope of Hacks on U.S. Water Supply Widens

NY Times - The scope of cyberattacks on U.S. water systems has grown to include at least seven states and may be far wider, officials and experts warned, as the authorities raced to safeguard the nation’s water supply against an assault that increasingly appeared to be the work of Iran.

While there were no indications that any water supply had been altered or made unsafe to drink, state and local officials throughout the country were on high alert for potential problems in vulnerable computers that are commonly used to monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels and water pressure. Minnesota first publicly reported the attacks, and now Michigan says its systems have also been targeted.

The attack has little precedent, experts said, but has long been the stuff of nightmares and sensationalized Hollywood thrillers: an apparent cyberattack by a foreign power during a time of war that could, at least in theory, jeopardize the health and safety of Americans.

Officials cautioned that they had not definitively determined that Iran was responsible for the attack and that the investigation was still preliminary. But they said Iran had stepped up cyberattacks since the U.S. and Israel launched a war against the country five months ago, and had previously targeted similar water systems and other critical infrastructure in the U.S. There seemed no financial motive, making a criminal attack less likely.

Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool

In a court filing, former Fox News host-turned-U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro asked a judge to dismiss the federal indictment against U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who had been arrested and publicly accused by Pirro of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Pirro acknowledged that investigators had concluded the damage wasn't caused by Hearn after all, but by a "flawed installation" of the pool's newly installed liner.

The filing also contained a remarkable bit of finger-pointing: Pirro blamed the Trump administration's own Interior Department for withholding information that could have prevented the prosecution from moving forward. She wrote that officials at the Doug Bergum-led agency failed to disclose that the pool's liner had been improperly installed, despite "dozens and dozens" of requests from prosecutors. "Had [the Interior Department] been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment," Pirro acknowledged.

The Hill -President Trump called out U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro on Saturday for agreeing to dismiss the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn.

The Justice Department moved to drop the case on Friday, finding that the damage to the tidal basin resulted from a “rushed and botched installation,” not alleged vandalism. Trump a day later distanced himself from that decision.

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area.”


Politics

Prime Chronicle - California’s voter ID initiative, Proposition 39, would add ID and citizenship checks to state elections. Top Democratic leaders are organizing a major campaign to defeat the measure and protect broad ballot access. Attorney General Rob Bonta changed the official ballot wording, triggering accusations that Democrats are trying to mislead voters.  Supporters say the fight shows how political insiders can tilt the playing field even after citizens qualify a measure.

Gavin Newsom - $100,000,000.  That is the amount of money Elon Musk plans to spend in order to help Republicans win in the midterm elections this November. That includes Michigan - where control of the House and Senate runs through Michigan — with what will be some of the closest and most expensive campaigns in the country.

Bloomberg - Michigan’s Senate primary on Aug. 4 is shaping up as the biggest test yet of whether the Democrats’ progressive wing can score a major victory in a presidential battleground heading into 2028, or whether longstanding weakness with Black voters will undercut its national ambitions. The contest pits Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate backed by much of the party establishment, against progressive Abdul El-Sayed, a former Detroit-area health official endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A swing state won twice by Donald Trump but carried by Joe Biden in 2020, Michigan is a must-win for Democrats hoping to retake the Senate in November

Auto workers stop support of Isra

In These Times - At the 39th Constitutional Convention of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Detroit, Michigan, union delegates voted to divest the union from Israel bonds, which provide financial support to Israel’s government. Working People’s Maximillian Alvarez recently sat down with a panel of rank-and-file workers and members of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a left-wing caucus within the UAW, to discuss the historic vote and the broader trajectory of the UAW.t.com/

July 31, 2026

It's not just Trump; it's our obsession with personalities

Sam Smith – Most of the important and positive national legislation of the past century was the product of the Democratic Party. In part because politics has become, in the eyes of voters and reporters, the action of individuals rather than institutions. Donald Trump has been a prime beneficiary of this change even though he can’t even run for president in the next election and despite the fact that he has  been charged with an unprecedented number of serious offenses.

Television is a major participant in this shift from policies to personalities and as  result, for example, we find serious matters such as the cost of food and driving getting only a fraction of the attention they deserve. And decades of great liberal legislation is treated with near total indifference.

It’s time to revive the Democratic Party and its record as well as targeting not just Trump but the Republican Party that constantly bows to leaders like him.  Our problem is not just individuals but whole organizations and movements.

Workers

Robert Reich - This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the labor participation rate — the percentage of people of working age who are working or actively looking for work — is now down to 61.5 percent. That’s 0.6 percentage points lower than it was at the first of the year.  In other words, the U.S. economy has lost 1 million workers since January.

Return of McCarthyism

The Guardian - There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era, roughly 1946 to 1956, and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own updated McCarthyism.

Both regimes crafted a monster of quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear: an enemy within, well-organized and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on overthrowing capitalism, democracy and Christian morality. Both used flagrantly unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace.

Each time, federal employees were targeted first. President Harry S Truman’s Federal Loyalty Program screened 5 million workers for communist affiliation; 2,700 lost their jobs, 12,000 resigned. Schools, unions and Hollywood fell in line; blacklists outlasted their makers. The Trump administration purged the federal agencies of his equivalent of the cold war communist, the “woke”. Applicants for civil service jobs were asked to identify their favorite administration policies and explain how they would advance them if hired. The federal employees’ union correctly called this request a “loyalty question”.

Then as now, law firms quailed, media companies capitulated, universities collaborated. Artists and performers – Zero Mostel, Jimmy Kimmel – were exiled from film and television. In the 1940s and 50s, the attorney general compiled lists of supposedly subversive organizations, which, along with communists and socialists, included groups from the National Negro League to the Nature Friends of America. Trump’s justice department is investigating progressive non-profits, including ActBlue, a chief funding source for Democratic candidates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, best known for supporting democracy movements in the former Soviet Union.

Climate change

Climate change and its effects are possibly the most important story of our time

The Guardian - Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France, experts from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium calculated. The finding is the latest to pin the blame for the continent’s sweltering and deadly summer firmly on the heating caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal.

The intense heatwave at the end of June, which is estimated to have killed 20,000 people, could not have happened without the extra heat trapped by carbon pollution, a previous WWA study showed. Another found that the climate crisis-driven heat was “sucking soils dry” as extreme drought spread across Europe…

This year’s wildfires in western Europe have been made worse by a wet winter and spring, which boosted the growth of vegetation, which then dried out and provided fuel for the fires – so-called whiplash conditions. Global heating is making winters wetter and summers drier and hotter in Europe.

Dr Clair Barnes, a research associate at Imperial College London and part of the WWA study team, said: “We’ve seen repeatedly how climate change increases hot, dry, flammable conditions that are extremely conducive to wildfires.

“What’s unique about [the July fires in Spain and France] is that it’s still early in the season – and with another heatwave looming, these findings are extremely scary. What we’re seeing is a clear sign of the escalating impacts of [human-caused] warming.”….

The wildfires have released huge plumes of toxic smoke. Dr Augustin Colette, at the French National Institute for Industrial Environment and Risks, said: “The smoke increased particulate [pollution] peak levels up to 20 times above what is considered ‘fair air quality’, and extremely poor air quality was felt up to 400 km away from the fires.” About 1.5 million people a year are estimated to have their lives shortened by wildfire smoke.

….The UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, said: “These European megafires show how fast climate-driven extreme heat and dry landscapes can turn wildfires into devastating national disasters. “Humanity continuing to burn colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas is making these conditions more dangerous, and these megafires more deadly and destructive,” he said. “But the solutions are equally clear: all countries must move faster from fossil fuels to renewables and protect people from worsening climate impacts, from wildfires, to megastorms and floods, to droughts hitting food production.”

Blanche appears to given up sme Epstein material

Alternet  - President Donald Trump’s interim AG Todd Blanche appears to have given up the ghost on hiding information that could potentially out cohorts of convicted Jeffrey Epstein…. After months of stalling by the Trump administration and ignoring the letter of a new law demanding the release of the sex-trafficker’s files, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan demanded insight on Trump’s longtime friendship. Sullivan sided with former MS NOW show host Phang in her lawsuit demanding the Trump administration adhere to the Epstein Transparency Act.

….But instead, Blanche handed over the unredacted information to Sullivan to review, possibly for release to the public….

Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein spans decades, with the two meeting in the 1980s at Mar-a-Lago and socializing frequently in New York and Palm Beach. Multiple women have described witnessing Trump and Epstein together at parties and events during the 1990s.  After Epstein's 2008 conviction, Trump publicly distanced himself, claiming he barely knew him.

Artificial intelligence booms in China

The Guardian - China is encouraging the deployment of AI at a scale unseen in the west. The technology is being rolled out at a staggering rate in an increasingly precarious labour market, and the Wuhan episode helped to highlight the social tensions it is causing.

Gig workers … are fearful about the impact of AI on their livelihoods, while recent incidents of white-collar workers being replaced by AI have also sparked a debate over whether workers should embrace the technology – or try to compete with it.

Addressing Shanghai’s World AI Conference in July, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said that AI should be “an important driver for shared prosperity and common security”.

But that goal is being pursued amid an increasingly fragile labour market. As well as suffering from high levels of unemployment, China has seen tens of millions of workers drop out of formal employment into the gig economy. According to one thinktank, the number of people in flexible employment will rise to 320 million this year, up from 160 million in 2019. That is about 44% of China’s workforce.

Taxi drivers are one part of this huge cohort. Across the country, as previously heavyweight industries such as real estate and education have floundered, workers have turned to ride-hailing apps to make ends meet. But now the rollout of robotaxis, one of the most popular applications of AI that is already in use in China, is threatening their livelihoods.

 


July 30, 2026

The hazard of finding an old book in the house you just bought

Independent - A book has been returned to an Australian public library an estimated 150 years late after being found in a sealed fireplace during recent home renovations.

Antiquities of Athens, published in 1858, was returned to a library in the seaside town of Kiama last week after a local man discovered the text inside a tea crate, bricked into a disused fireplace.

“We’ve never had anything that old come back to us,” Kiama Library manager Michelle Hudson said.

“I follow lots of libraries on social media, and often you’ll get things that are maybe 30 or 40 years old when they’re cleaning out estates and stuff like that,” she added.

The late return fine would be about AU$28,000 (£14,600), allowing for inflation, Hudson said. That was calculated on the British three pence-a-week overdue fee that was printed on the inside cover of the book, along with a list of rules that applied when the library opened in 1872.

Polls


Feedly - Trump’s overall approval rating slumps to 34%, according to new CNN poll, as midterms testing Republican power loom. Three-quarters of Americans believe Donald Trump is not paying enough attention to the country’s most important problems, and two-thirds think he places himself above the needs of the US, according to a new poll. The CNN survey, conducted by market research company SSRS, comes less than 100 days before November’s midterm elections in which the president’s Republican party is widely expected to lose control of one or both chambers of Congress. 

This new Quinnipiac poll is one of the worst yet for Trump: approval at 32 percent, and support for Iran policy (28), foreign policy (34), handling of economy (34), and handling of immigration (40) at abysmal lows. He’s 17 points underwater on immigration. Also—57 percent of Democrats say they’re more motivated to vote than usual; corresponding number for Republicans, 39 percent.

The Hill - It’s no secret that both political parties are unpopular.  This is particularly true of Gen Z, which polls suggest feels like it is set to inherit a political system riddled with partisan hostility and congressional gridlock.

A report from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University found that 62 percent of adults aged 18-29 said that the design and structure of our nation’s government needs significant changes, no matter which party is elected. Additionally, 58 percent said the party they identify with needs to dramatically change.

The study’s conclusions pointed out that older generations have longer histories with politics (duh) and have lived through a mix of both steady and unstable leadership. They have been able to ground themselves in the political framework produced by prominent leaders, like former Presidents Reagan and Obama, the study cites. 

Gen Z, in contrast, grew up or continues to grow up through volatility with fewer frames of political reference, which makes it harder to feel anchored by today’s politicians and system overall.

At the same time, Gen Z is less likely to describe the opposing political party as “evil” or “less than human.” While 39 percent of Gen Z respondents said the opposing political party is “evil” or “less than human,” 44 percent of millennials aged 30-44 and 61 percent of baby boomers who are 65 years or older characterized their opposing political party negatively. 

But if Gen Z is less likely to see their political opponents as “evil,” they see more justification for political violence. Forty percent of Gen Zers said political violence is justified to some degree, compared with 30 percent of millennials and 11 percent of boomers.


Middle East

NY Times - Investigators believe a cyberattack this week on dozens of municipal water systems in Minnesota was probably the work of Iranian hackers, according to U.S. and state officials and others familiar with the matter, a potential act of aggression that comes at a precarious moment in the U.S. war against Iran.

Officials cautioned that they had not definitively determined who was responsible for the attack and that the preliminary assessment could change as the authorities collected more technical data.

They also warned that the hackers could be attempting to pose as Iran-based in an effort to ratchet up tensions between the two countries, though former intelligence officials said such a scenario was unlikely.

Local officials reported that the well and treatment plant in at least one city was temporarily offline on Monday, while other cities in the state had to use manual workarounds to cope with attempted attacks on automated operations.

1440 - Saudi Arabia confirmed yesterday it publicly joined the US' military campaign against Iran. The kingdom participated in a joint strike on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, reportedly killing at least 20 combatants. In announcing the strikes, the kingdom's Ministry of Defense cited Iranian attacks on its oil industry: Saudi Arabia blames Iraqi militias for up to half of the nearly 1,000 drone strikes it has weathered since February. Earlier this week, drones and missiles struck Saudi Arabia's Abqaiq oil facility (see map). Although Riyadh had not openly participated in military offensive action until this week, US officials say the kingdom has secretly participated in US-led attacks in the past.

Todd Blanche

The Hill - President Trump on Thursday floated the possibility of temporarily pulling Todd Blanche’s nomination to serve as attorney general to circumvent the opposition of Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and then resubmitting Blanche’s name after Cornyn and Tillis leave Congress.https://freeportfunfacts.blogspot.com/

The new housing law

NY Times -   The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the first major housing package to become law in decades — and passed with impressive bipartisan support — has the potential to put a real dent in the nation’s affordable housing shortage.

The good news is that if carried out as intended, the law will break through a lot of the regulatory sludge holding back the construction industry. It will create a mix of financing and building incentives that will help the nation close the supply gap that has contributed to rising rents and put homeownership out of reach for many people.

The bad news is that President Trump let the act become law without his signature, calling it “a yawn” — not a great sign that his administration will dedicate the considerable resources needed to put it into effect.

Most of that work will fall to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has to establish an array of pilot programs, reports and other acts of rule-making and industry guidance the law calls for. After last year’s purge of agency staff members, however, HUD is down about 30 percent of its work force in many of its key offices.

 

Health

NY Times -  The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it intended to end a Biden-era program that for the past two years has helped tamp down the cost of monthly premiums for drug coverage for people on Medicare.

The decision means that millions of Americans 65 and older could face higher Medicare drug premiums next year, when the cost of living is already a major concern. That could be politically damaging for Republicans in the midterm elections. In the weeks leading up to November, Medicare beneficiaries could experience sticker shock while shopping for next year’s drug plan./

Voting

The Guardian -A new analysis of Black voters in the south indicates that Republican attempts to dilute their political power is driving them to the polls in larger numbers and shifting their counties further left.

After the supreme court effectively gutted section 2 of the Voting Rights Act protections in late April, Republican legislatures across the south rapidly pushed to disenfranchise Black voters by redrawing congressional maps. Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama all immediately worked to pass new maps, while the Mississippi governor has said that he wants legislators to redraw maps before the upcoming midterm elections.

The analysis by VoteHub, a data-focused election organization, indicates that the efforts have only motivated Black voters in the 78 Black belt counties it tracked. All but one shifted left in partisan turnout compared with 2024. Further, majority-Black counties that voted after Louisiana v Callais, the landmark supreme court decision that triggered the Republican-led redistricting efforts, had a surge in voter participation.

The trend was clear earlier this year when Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia held primaries after the supreme court ruling. Louisiana, from which the Callais decision stemmed, disregarded votes that had already been cast until the state was able to redraw congressional maps, while nearby Alabama quickly split its majority-Black districts.

Todd Blanche

The Guadian -     Todd Blanche’s hopes of becoming US attorney general seemed to be in jeopardy on Wednesday after the Department of Justice did not provide written assurances to a key Republican senator that a $1.8bn slush fund was dead.  The US Senate judiciary committee postponed a vote scheduled for Thursday on whether to advance Blanche’s nomination.

“Chairman [Chuck] Grassley works to set President Trump’s nominees up for success in committee, not failure. Senators [John] Cornyn and [Thom] Tillis want written assurances from the Department of Justice regarding the Trump-IRS settlement,” a committee spokesperson said in a Wednesday statement. “Tomorrow’s markup is postponed as work continues to secure sufficient support in committee to favorably report Attorney General-nominee Todd Blanche, who is highly qualified for the job.”

Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, is already serving as acting US attorney general. He needs the vote of every Republican on the Senate judiciary panel to advance his nomination to land the role on a permanent basis.

But a swing vote on the committee, John Cornyn of Texas, told reporters on Wednesday he would not support Blanche’s nomination until he received written confirmation that the fund was not moving ahead.

Cornyn also wants to clarify that a provision giving the president, his sons and related businesses blanket immunity from tax audits for all matters up until this year could not be applied to future matters, or to people who were not parties to the settlement.

“Maybe they think I’m just going to give up or, you know, go along, but they’re mistaken,” said Cornyn, a four-term Republican senator who lost a re-election bid earlier this year to a Trump-endorsed rival. “We actually sent them a red-line strikeout of what we need, and they just need to make a decision. And if they do, then we’ll proceed with the markup tomorrow.”


Economy

Bloomberg - The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 1,100 points after the Federal Reserve voted to hold interest rates steady amid economic uncertainty from the Iran war. Wednesday was the Dow’s worst decline since April 2025, when Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

NY Times -   The American economy slowed in the second quarter of the year, expanding at an annual rate of 1.5 percent as the war with Iran upended prices, supply chains and energy markets.

Oil prices have receded from their peaks in the spring. But damage in the form of higher prices for gasoline and other petroleum-based products is still hitting households and businesses. Because G.D.P. is adjusted for inflation, these rising costs dampened the growth reflected in the data.

July 29, 2026

ICE

NY Times -   The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired visas, including spouses of Americans, at U.S. airports. The arrests, at check-in counters and arrival gates, have taken place in at least 15 airports in recent weeks, and footage of the encounters has flooded social media.

The effort appears to be an expansion of an arrangement between T.S.A. and ICE, which began by targeting people with deportation orders. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and visitors overstay visas each year, including many in a legal gray area who have active applications to stay in the country and have been issued work permits.

Such individuals were not prioritized for deportation in the past unless they had committed crimes, and they were rarely detained while waiting for visa extensions or green cards. But that has changed under President Trump, whose administration views all visa overstays as illegal.

The Intercept - Federal judges in Texas have sentenced 16 so-called antifa activists to a combined 560+ years in prison in a case stemming from a July 4 protest last year outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center.

Word

Joe Biden - "Netanyahu pushed me for war with Iran. I shut it down. Called him a war criminal and threw him out of office. He sold it to Trump. The rest is history."

Ranked choice voting

Fair Vote - Since July 14, city officials in HonoluluIrvine, CA; and Longmont, CO all voted to put ranked choice voting (RCV) on the ballot this November. Honolulu is Hawaii’s capital, and home to nearly 70% of the state’s population. Irvine is home to over 300,000 people, and Longmont is one of our nation's fastest-growing cities. Together, these cities are home to 1.4 million Americans who could soon have better elections with ranked choice voting.