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Sen. Lindsey Graham died of cardiac arrest on July 11, leaving South Carolina's seat vacant heading into the midterms. Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham's sister Darline as interim senator — the first woman ever to represent the state in the US Senate. A special Republican primary is set for August 11, with Rep. Nancy Mace already circling, and President Trump has said he'll back Darline if she chooses to run.
Around 800 Canadian wildfires are pushing hazardous PM2.5 particulates across more than 20 US states, with Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Washington all under air quality alerts. Milwaukee recorded its worst air quality day in history. President Trump publicly accused Canada of willful negligence in forest management and suggested the economic cost of American pollution exposure should be folded into existing tariffs. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno announced plans to introduce legislation directly sanctioning Canada over the crisis.
Court filings unsealed this week allege that federal Medicaid officials in January illegally shared data on millions of Americans — including US citizens and legal immigrants — with ICE, which then passed it to Palantir for use in its ELITE deportation-targeting app. Attorneys say the data was "deleted" by removing it from a Microsoft Teams chat, raising serious questions about whether it was ever actually purged from Palantir's systems. A federal judge has scheduled an August hearing to clarify what data ICE may lawfully obtain from federal health agencies.
Trump's sweeping reconciliation law hit its one-year anniversary July 4 with a split economic report card: unemployment is holding at 4.1% and tax refunds are up, but the CBO projects the bill will add $3.4 trillion to the national deficit over the next decade, and significant Medicaid and safety-net cuts have now taken effect. A June poll put public approval of the law at 34% versus 53% disapproval. Discussions about a potential "Second Big Beautiful Bill" are already circulating in congressional circles.
Less than a month after a preliminary ceasefire, the US-Iran conflict has fully re-escalated following an Iranian drone strike on a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz. The US launched new retaliatory airstrikes over the weekend after Iran hit an American base in Jordan, killing two US troops. Iran has now struck US allies across Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Oman, and Syria, and Brent crude is up 16% in a week to roughly $88 a barrel with about 20% of global oil flow effectively bottlenecked at the strait.
Israeli military operations remain active on three simultaneous fronts — Gaza, southern Lebanon, and intermittent strikes into Syria — as Israeli officials describe the theaters as a strategically unified campaign rather than separate conflicts. European diplomatic pressure and UN calls for a ceasefire framework have so far failed to gain traction. The renewed US-Iran hostilities are further complicating any regional off-ramp.
The 2026 Global Peace Index reports global peacefulness has declined for twelve consecutive years, with the world now hosting more active state-based armed conflicts than at any point since the 1940s. The report identifies armed conflict — not economic instability — as the primary driver. Simultaneous flare-ups in the Middle East, ongoing Ukraine war fallout, and rising East Asia tensions are all cited as key contributors.
Physicists have unveiled PLATON, a particle detector prototype that replaces the millions of individual components in conventional detector designs with a single block of scintillating material read by light-field cameras and ultra-sensitive photon sensors. The device reconstructs particle tracks in real-time 3D, and simulations show it can match or outperform current state-of-the-art detectors at dramatically lower cost and complexity. If it delivers in practice, next-generation high-energy physics experiments just got far more accessible.
Scientists have found evidence that a major earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the Pacific Northwest could trigger a secondary rupture on California's San Andreas Fault — a scenario not previously incorporated into most western US seismic risk models. The findings are prompting calls to overhaul emergency preparedness frameworks from Oregon to Southern California. A separate study released this week also found popular artificial sweeteners are linked to significantly faster cognitive decline in adults under 60, adding new fuel to the debate over their long-term safety.
Archaeologists excavating the ancient Egyptian site of Oxyrhynchus discovered a Roman-era mummy with a papyrus fragment from Homer's Iliad deliberately placed on its abdomen as part of the embalming ritual — the passage is from Book II, the famous Catalogue of Ships. It is the first time a purely literary text, rather than a magical or religious one, has been found used in mummification. Researchers believe the deceased may have been a scholar or devoted fan of classical Greek literature in Roman-period Egypt — someone who took Homer with them into the afterlife.
