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President Trump announced a temporary tariff waiver allowing up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef into the US with no out-of-quota tariff for the next 90 days. Importers committed to selling that beef at roughly 25 percent below current market prices, an explicit affordability play with the midterms bearing down. Beef has been one of the stickiest line items on the grocery receipt all year.
Chief Justice John Roberts issued a stay on a lower-court injunction that had frozen construction of President Trump's White House ballroom project. The pause lets work resume while the underlying legal fight over the East Wing addition continues. It's an administrative stay, not a ruling on the merits.
Walmart's comparable sales rose just 2.6 percent last quarter and the stock dropped more than 9 percent, the clearest sign yet that consumers are tightening up. Executives pointed to fuel costs, with the national gas average having spiked past four dollars a gallon after the Iran conflict began. It's an awkward counterpoint to an otherwise record-setting stock market.
Federal agents arrested a woman accused of pledging allegiance to ISIS and plotting to bomb the New York State Capitol and kill state senators. Investigators say the plan involved disguising the explosive device as a food delivery. She's in custody and facing federal terrorism charges.
Iran's Armed Forces chief of staff Ali Abdollahi warned Friday that Tehran will answer any American "miscalculation" with crushing force, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent teased the harshest sanctions package in US history. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and Iranian oil exports to China have cratered from roughly 823,000 barrels a day in July to about 534,000 in August. Two ceasefire deals this year have already collapsed.
Beijing has launched a commercial shipping route to Europe running along Russia's northern coastline, a milestone in the deepening Moscow-Beijing Arctic partnership. Russia's isolation from the West has pushed it to accept a Chinese presence in a region it long guarded as sovereign turf. The two nations logged at least 119 joint military exercises as of April 2026.
Portugal's center-right government signed into law a bill originally pushed by the populist Chega party banning full-face coverings in public spaces. It's a notable win for a party that was on the political fringe just a few years ago. The measure puts Portugal alongside France, Belgium, and several other European states with similar bans.
The administration's new space directive orders federal agencies to expand launch and reentry infrastructure to handle more than 1,000 rocket launches and spacecraft returns annually by 2030. That works out to roughly three launches or reentries every single day. The goal is to make spaceflight routine infrastructure rather than a televised event.
NASA is readying the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for a five-year mission a million miles from Earth, where it will survey more than two billion galaxies. Roman can do in a single month what would take Hubble roughly a century. Scientists want to map how stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters actually grew over cosmic time.
A boater in Norway's Svalbard archipelago got hit with a substantial fine after spotting a polar bear napping on shore and sounding the vessel's horn to wake it up. The startled bear got up and left. Svalbard's wildlife protections are strict, and authorities were in no mood to call it a prank.
