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Karen DeYoung, Tara Copp, Dan Lamothe @ Washington Post:
U.S. teeters on return to all-out war with Iran after more troops killed

The United States and Iran moved closer to all-out conflict on Sunday, as the exchange of attacks on civilian and military structures continued to escalate and with at least three and possibly four U.S. service members killed since combat resumed a week ago.

On Sunday, after two service members were killed during an Iranian strike on a military base in Jordan on Friday, U.S. Central Command said another set of unidentified remains had been found there. Separately, Centcom said a U.S. service member in northern Iraq was killed in action Saturday during a “controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance” from a downed Iranian drone.

President Donald Trump said that U.S. Central Command launched another wave of attacks against Iran in retribution.

Brandon Weichert @ National Security Journal:
There’s a Hidden Reason Oil Prices Never Went Stratospheric During the Iran War — and That Safety Net Is Quietly Disappearing Now

Oil prices never hit the feared stratosphere during the Iran War for a hidden reason: China pulled back from the market, living off vast stockpiles and freeing three million barrels a day for everyone else. With Beijing’s refiners cautiously returning and Hormuz still a trickle, the war’s second energy shock may be demand-driven.
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Dara Kerr @ Guardian:
Off-duty employee at Colorado ICE facility arrested for shooting protester

Woman has non-life threatening injuries after Brandon Booth shot her with pistol outside ICE facility and drove off

An employee of a company that runs an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Colorado is under arrest after shooting and injuring a woman on Thursday evening. The incident happened after the woman participated in a protest in front of the facility earlier that day, according to the Aurora police department.

When officers arrived on the scene, they said they found the woman with a gunshot wound in her lower body. She had a friend with her, who was unharmed.
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James Eagle:
Orbital launches are crowding the skies

Space used to be easy to picture as a series of rare national moments. The launch calendar now looks more like an industrial schedule.

Global orbital launches rose sharply through the early 2020s and reached a record in 2025. The 2026 bar is only year to date, but it is already high enough to show that the boom has not faded.

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Catherine Rampell @ Bulwark:
Racist Law From 1882 Is Not That Racist, Trump Says

Buried in the White House’s broadside against the Smithsonian is a bizarre—and revealing—claim about the Chinese Exclusion Act.

A RACIST LAW THAT INSPIRED MORE RACIST LAWS and was literally named after its racism is definitely not racist. At least according to the Trump administration.

Laser-focused on the midterms, the White House recently released a 162-page report on the most critical issue facing voters: woke museum exhibitions. The report follows a prior Trump executive order complaining about the Smithsonian Institution, which the president said had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
…
… Among [Smithsonian’s] worst transgressions:

• Museum exhibitions acknowledge that some of the nation’s founders were slaveholders.
• In a PowerPoint slide in 2022, a museum director included an image of a butterfly. This is offensive, the White House report explains, because butterflies are “a well-known symbol in the illegal alien activist community, symbolizing illegal aliens crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S.”
• The National Museum of American History refuses to present a single “unified, national narrative,” and instead “asks visitors, ‘How should Americans remember their Revolution and the founding of the nation?’ without providing an answer.” Just as it was taken to pose a threat to the ruling powers in ancient Athens, the Socratic method is apparently an affront to real patriotism today.

But arguably the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus. After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.

Qasim Rashid, Esq.: A White Supremacist Stabbed A Muslim Man 15 Times Because of His Faith

National Media Is Ignoring It And American Muslims Are Seeing The Hate Escalate

Andrew Perez @ Zeteo: ‘My Neighbor Was Murdered by White Supremacists’: Zeteo Reports From Maine on Yet Another ICE Killing

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Bill McKibben:
Setting money on fire

(Also the planet)

… I will try to see clearly enough to discern some of the latest numbers in the climate and energy battle—numbers which prove to me the economic folly of staying on our current course.

… There is at this point no doubt that the world would operate more cheaply on clean energy, which is a lucky thing, and one that needs to be hammered home till the conventional wisdom (that sun and wind and batteries are a luxury) is finally routed.

The most basic point, of course, and yet one often lost in the debate is that once you’ve installed renewable energy you no longer have to pay for fuel. …

In 2025, renewables helped to avoid an estimated USD 480 billion in fossil fuel costs and around 8.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

If we round the number of our fellow humans off to about 8 billion, that’s $60 for every man, woman and child on the face of the planet, even though we’re still fairly early on the adoption curve for clean power. The numbers are stark:

Since 2010, the cost of solar PV has fallen by 89%, onshore wind by 71%, and offshore wind by 63%. This highlights how renewables are now the cheapest source of new electricity in most markets. In 2025, more than 90% of newly commissioned, utility-scale capacity delivered power at a lower cost than the cheapest, newly-installed fossil-fuel-based alternative.

…

Just to reiterate: instead of speeding the conversion to clean cheap energy, which would save households huge amounts of money, we’re instead shoveling taxpayer cash to the fossil fuel industry, and in the process overheating the earth, which will be the most expensive thing that ever happened, by orders of magnitude. …
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Lucian K. Truscott IV:
It took a woman of immense courage to bring Trump to justice. E. Jean Carroll is that woman.

It is truly worth celebrating, what happened today when Donald Trump was finally forced by a court of law to transfer $5,625,005.48 to E. Jean Carroll’s bank account. We cannot forget the living hell she went through. E. Jean was sexually assaulted in a Bergdorf’s dressing room by Donald Trump. She was penetrated in such a way that it did not amount to rape under New York law but was declared a rape as “the word is commonly understood” by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who presided over her defamation suit against Trump.

I don’t know of any way to calculate how much courage it took for E. Jean to sue the President of the United States. She filed suit in 2019, claiming that Trump had defamed her in an interview after her article in New York Magazine, “Hideous Men,” was published in June of that year. Trump denied knowing her, he called her a liar, and of course, as proof that it never happened, Trump said “she’s not my type.”

That’s not just a regular lawsuit to file. …

Dean Blundell: E Jean Carroll Has Officially Been Paid in Full: The Wire Cleared, the Record Is Permanent. Trump is a Rapist. Forever.

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Gregory Andrews:
The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News

Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth’s climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is this year. It doesn’t just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations.
…

The question is whether we’re willing to pay attention and act before the changes become too large, too rapid and too interconnected for us to manage.

Zahra Hirji, Laura Millan, Joe Wertz, Ana Campoy @ Bloomberg: Funding Cuts Threaten World’s Champion For Cutting Heat Deaths

Few places have had as much success in tackling heat-related deaths as Maricopa County in Arizona, which saw fatalities fall in the past two years after almost a decade of increases. But now officials are contending with a blazing summer and looming cuts to funding.

Fiona Macdonald @ BBC: ‘At risk of horrific contamination’: The Soviet nuclear submarine wreck that is a ‘ticking time bomb’

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Asawin Suebsaeng, Prem Thakker @ Zeteo: Trump’s Illegal Boat Bombings Are Just ‘Murder for Murder’s Sake,’ U.S. Official Says

Donald Trump’s boat strikes aren’t working – because they’re ‘not actually designed to end the fentanyl crisis,’ a senior administration official tells Zeteo.

Even as national media coverage of it ebbed since last year, Donald Trump’s “Murder Inc.” at sea never stopped. As of last month, the Trump-Vance administration is still conducting its (almost certainly criminal) lethal bombing campaign against supposed “narcoterrorist” drug boats. The killing spree shows no sign of abating.

Sources familiar with the situation tell Zeteo that President Trump wants more of them and has talked to key officials in recent weeks about expanding operations. He still goes over menus of different plans and boat routes to target. He and his administration keep propagandizing about how they’re winning this war, making the U.S. safer, saving tens of thousands of lives per strike, and keeping illicit narcotics off of American streets, all without actually knowing who they’re killing.

But the bombings aren’t just illegal or wrong. According to U.S. intel and government data described to Zeteo by several American officials and others familiar with the situation, the killing also isn’t working. At all. And the White House knows this.
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Tyler Pager, Eric Lipton, Adam Goldman, Eric Schmitt, Julian E. Barnes @ NY Times: New Air Force One Lacks Defensive Countermeasures of Previous Model, Officials Say

Experts said the lack of such capabilities poses a potential risk when the president travels overseas. The White House defended the aircraft’s safety.

Mitch Jackson: Federal agents showed up with grand jury subpoenas this week, not because these journalists broke the law, but because they broke a story the government did not want you to read.

…
Read this twice. The government did not investigate why the plane might be unsafe. The government investigated the people who told the country the truth.

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – July 11, 2026

… when tensions escalated with Iran while Trump was in Türkiye for the NATO summit, [Secret Service] asked the president to use one of the other, older, Air Force One planes for his return journey.

Trump and White House officials pushed back strongly against the idea that the new plane had any security problems after pouring what appears to have been hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into renovating the plane. But, according to Adam Gramegna of Military.com, U.S. officials told CBS News that the speed with which the plane was rushed into service meant that it does not have the same protections as the older planes.
…

… issuing subpoenas to U.S. journalists, who are protected from government interference by the First Amendment, is a huge red flag. As former Time magazine editor Rick Stengel noted: “The reporting that the Times journalists have been subpoenaed for is exactly the kind of journalism the First Amendment is designed to protect: matters involving national security and taxpayer dollars. Reporting that embarrasses a president is protected speech.”
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)
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Thom Hartmann:
Police State: Are We Already There and Just Don’t Know It?

History shows that police states aren’t declared: they’re assembled piece by piece, until one day ordinary people realize the freedoms they once took for granted have quietly disappeared…

Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century.

He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.

By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”

ICE says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement.

The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”

The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”

Greg Sargent @ TNR: Texas ICE Killing Takes Damning Turn as Even MAGA Judges Abandon Trump

Gaby Del Valle @ Verge: ICE is threatening to deport witnesses of its latest shooting

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