National / Federal News
Pretty Soon the Strait Is Ours — Pay a Tiny Bit More
World & Security
On what Saturday’s roundups called day 169 of a war sold as a matter of weeks, President Donald Trump stood at a Long Island police academy and treated a chokepoint like a closing. After “we finish defeating Iran,” he told the Garden City crowd — with a chuckle — that “pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, answered that the waterway “has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian,” and that so long as Washington refused to “accept the reality of defeat,” Tehran would keep enforcing the blockade. Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Iran had not decided to resume talks; the June arrangement, he added, had never been a ceasefire in the first place.
The world’s oil tap stayed mostly shut. Ship-tracker Kpler counted only two vessels through Hormuz on Friday and no visible crude, versus more than 130 a day before the war that the United States and Israel launched on February 28. The United Arab Emirates accused Iran of hitting Abu Dhabi National Oil Company ships; Britain’s maritime-trade office logged drone strikes on tankers. U.S. gasoline averaged about $4.08 a gallon, up 29 percent from a year earlier — which Trump recast as “a tiny little bit more” to keep “a very evil country” from a bomb. He would “never apologize,” he said. Vice President JD Vance was blunter, calling cheap fuel “goal number one.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Navy could rotate an indefinite blockade. An Iranian-China chamber official warned that the squeeze would hurt more than the shooting war; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised isolation “like the world has never seen” in announcements due the following week.
The hardware, and the people on it, are wearing out. The USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea more than 240 uninterrupted days, with sailors describing rationed hygiene kits, broken toilets and low morale; Trump called the cruise “not nearly long enough.” The Japan-based USS George Washington is leaving the Pacific to relieve her, leaving the western Pacific without a U.S. carrier while China drills near Scarborough Shoal — an absence, analysts said, that Beijing is “quite happy” to narrate to Manila and Tokyo. The war has also chewed through roughly a quarter of the MQ-9 Reaper fleet — at least 45 of about 185 — as Washington experiments with cheaper one-way drones. At home, Northern Command’s deputy said the United States cannot stop a domestic drone swarm. Ukraine, keeping its own factory list current, said it hit Russia’s Progress rocket center in Samara with Flamingo cruise missiles.
Markets & Economy
Two years to the day after Trump’s 2024 grocery-table photo-op in Bedminster, the receipts were still climbing. A Reuters tally of 26 staples from that display found prices up 3.4 percent in the first 19 months of the second term — slower than the Biden-era sprint, and still the opposite of a cut. Beef, apples and coffee did the damage; eggs and butter helped. Voters, per Reuters/Ipsos, now give Democrats a slight edge on the economy for the first time in nearly a decade. Trump’s cost-of-living net approval sat at minus 47 percent. He would like $4 gasoline filed under patriotism. Shoppers near Bedminster, unloading $70 of meat and iced tea, were less metaphysical.
The administration’s other growth story is the family coin. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted preliminary conditional approval for World Liberty Trust Company — a national trust bank 38 percent owned by a Trump-family entity — to issue and custody the USD1 stablecoin under federal supervision. It cannot take FDIC deposits or make ordinary loans, and it still has to raise capital and clear preopening hurdles. Sen. Elizabeth Warren called the nod “the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen.” Next Wednesday, Trump is due to host Coinbase, Ripple, Robinhood and prediction-market bosses at a White House crypto session while the Clarity Act sits in the Senate, snagged in part on ethics limits on the president’s own crypto income.
Wall Street, for its part, is pricing miracles two years out. Sources told Reuters that Anthropic’s IPO math leans on 2028 revenue of $190–$200 billion, up from a $47 billion run rate publicized in May; documents seen by Bloomberg put second-quarter revenue above $11.5 billion. Nvidia, after investor nerves, cut its proposed guarantee for OpenAI’s Ohio mega-campus from $250 billion to under $120 billion for the first five gigawatts. Bond desks are staring at some $70 billion in off-books residual-value backstops for AI chips and data centers — liabilities that look free until they do not. On the real-economy side, the U.S. Court of International Trade let Trump kill the $800 de minimis tariff exemption during the emergency, and new drone duties of up to 100 percent land in September. Somewhere a photographer is about to learn that a thermal camera just doubled.
Technology & Industry
SpaceX closed a $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor, Anysphere’s AI coding shop, effective August 14 — one of the largest AI-startup takeovers on record, and a reminder that Elon Musk’s rocket company now wants your autocomplete. Cursor had already trained on SpaceX’s Colossus GPU farm and helped with Grok 4.5 and 4.6. The coding tool also throws off the kind of structured developer data that model-makers covet. Rockets, satellites, and now the intern who writes the Python.
Washington’s other software product is licensed piracy. A presidential memorandum dated August 12 creates the first U.S. program letting vetted private firms run offensive “hack-back” operations against foreign cybercrime groups — quiet surveillance and, with written Justice and Homeland Security approval, disruption or destruction of systems and data. Participants must post $1 million in escrow. Months earlier, officials had said they were “not interested in fighting pirates with pirates.” Veterans of the industry warned of collateral damage, overseas criminal liability, and Americans being treated as non-uniformed combatants the moment they land. Implementation guidance is due in 60 days, which is either careful or a generous head start for a ransomware crew.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, touring Apple’s new Houston plant, said “plainly” that the administration does not want Apple buying Chinese memory from CXMT or YMTC, both Pentagon-designated military companies. Tim Cook has argued the shortage requires looking at “all supply.” Across the industry in spirit, USA TODAY Co. tried to hire Palantir to mine reader data for ads; 31 unions representing about 800 journalists demanded the deal die, citing Palantir’s ICE work. Local papers covering raids, it turns out, would rather not share the clickstream with the raid software.
Politics & Policy
The White House asked the Supreme Court to keep pouring concrete. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wants a stay of a D.C. Circuit order pausing the $400 million East Wing ballroom, recast in the papers as an “integrated military complex” with a “totally secure ballroom space.” The filing confirmed, for the first time, a July 8 missile threat against Air Force One in Turkey. Preservationists say the administration is racing a million pounds of rebar before August 21. A Justice Department lawyer had already told an appeals panel, hypothetically, that the government could bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and descendants would lack standing. The majority said a ballroom is for Congress, not “Executive self-help.”
Judge Emmet Sullivan, in a different courtroom, told Justice Department lawyers fighting further Epstein-file releases that “the public has a right to know what the hell is going on,” then spent nearly half an hour reminding them how he held prosecutors in contempt in the Ted Stevens case. He insisted they were “not in trouble.” It did not sound like a compliment. Anthony Fauci, after invoking the Fifth Amendment 100 times and drawing a partisan Homeland Security contempt vote, declined a second Senate invitation; his lawyer called a further appearance political harassment.
Democrats, looking past November, were set to approve a 2028 calendar that leads in South Carolina, then Nevada, with Iowa out of first. A Boston judge, bound by a June Supreme Court ruling, lifted a stay so the administration can end Somali Temporary Protected Status for a few thousand people. Democratic attorneys general, no longer talking about “hypothetical situations,” are war-gaming federal officers at polling places even as ICE says it is not planning operations targeting voting sites. And the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued over Truth Social’s new API, which charges Wall Street $60,000 to $100,000 a month for a millisecond head start on the president’s posts. Sunlight, as one crisis-comms adviser put it, is still the best disinfectant. It is also, apparently, a premium product.
Human Stories / Social Trends
The FBI said the 2025 homicide rate fell to 4.1 per 100,000 — tied with 1955 and 1956 as the lowest since those rates were tracked — with murders down 18.1 percent and violent crime 9.3 percent. Trump claimed the war on crime at that same Long Island academy. Criminologist Adam Gelb called the drop “historic and crystal clear” and the cause “as clear as a glass of milk,” noting declines across cities with very different politics. The bureau, unusually, also flagged continued drops in the first half of 2026. Motor-vehicle theft, after the Kia-Hyundai TikTok years, was down almost 23 percent.
In Manhattan federal court, Luigi Mangione, 28, pleaded guilty to stalking charges in the 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. “On the morning of Dec. 4, 2024, I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan, and he died.” He described years of back pain and insurance obstacles; police and the company say he was never a UnitedHealthcare customer. Prosecutors want life at a December sentencing. His lawyers immediately moved to kill the state murder case on double-jeopardy grounds. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch: “A killer is certainly not a hero.” Separately, a West Health-Gallup survey found roughly 23 million workers locked in unwanted jobs by fear of losing employer insurance — 24 percent of those with job-based coverage, up from 16 percent in 2021. The health system, it seems, can inspire both a guilty plea and a quiet refusal to quit.
Five years after Kabul, Afghans who interpreted, engineered and cleaned for the United States are opening letters warning that the basis for their Special Immigrant Visas has been revoked or denied. Advocates say the notices, which began under President Joe Biden as a fraud check on letter-writers, have spread in volume and vagueness. Green cards have not been yanked at scale, but people with U.S.-born children are afraid to apply for citizenship. Aboard the Lincoln, a sailor’s wife told CNN the president should try empathy for “your war.” Historic murder lows and a carrier that cannot come home: Saturday’s wires held both, and did not bother to reconcile them.
This retrospective news edition uses archived reporting scoped by publication date, or arrival when publication was absent. Collection may have occurred later.