A coordinated "Never Vance" campaign is gaining steam inside the Republican Party, with critics targeting the VP over his role in a collapsed Iran peace deal and his absence from Capitol Hill during key legislative votes. Vance abruptly canceled a planned meeting with House Republicans this week, citing a scheduling conflict, and his chief of staff is departing by summer's end. His allies say it's a coordinated hit job designed to kneecap his expected 2028 presidential run.
The House voted 216 to 212 to pass a Republican-only $95 billion package covering Pentagon costs for the Iran war, tariff relief for farmers, and SAVE Act voting changes. Republicans used budget reconciliation to sidestep a Senate filibuster, though six conservative members voted against it over concerns about deficit spending. The bill now heads to the Senate with internal GOP divisions still simmering.
A new national survey finds 26 percent of Americans now name government dysfunction as the country's top problem, edging closer to the 36 percent who cite economic concerns. With inflation still a sore spot nearly two years into Trump's second term, voters appear to be losing patience with gridlock itself ahead of November's midterms. The data is being read as a warning sign for both parties.
The Justice Department withdrew subpoenas demanding grand jury testimony and phone records from Times journalists after a federal judge pressed prosecutors sharply during a hearing. The retreat is being hailed as a win for press freedom advocates who feared a crackdown on reporter sources. Broader questions about the administration's appetite for targeting media organizations remain unresolved.
After peace talks collapsed over a disputed Strait of Hormuz agreement, the US carried out its ninth consecutive night of airstrikes against Iran. The Supreme Leader declared Trump's signature on any deal worthless, and a senior Iranian military adviser warned that two more days of US bombing would trigger a full-scale Iranian offensive. Two US service members have been killed and one is missing — the first American fatalities from Iranian fire since March.
Former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham was confirmed as UK Prime Minister on July 20 after Labour leader Keir Starmer resigned following devastating local election losses and 18 months of political turbulence. Burnham, elected Labour leader on July 17, promised stability in his first Downing Street address. Britain has now cycled through seven prime ministers in just ten years.
The Bundibugyo strain Ebola outbreak has now killed more than 1,033 people across the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, with 2,536 confirmed cases — making it the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record. The WHO declared a global health emergency in May, but response efforts are stalled by conflict zones, community resistance, and no approved vaccine for this strain. International funding remains critically short.
Scientists at Seoul National University have built a fully programmable photonic chip that can slow, pause, reshape, and reroute light signals entirely through software — no hardware changes required. The breakthrough, published in Advanced Science, could replace multiple separate optical components with a single reconfigurable chip, slashing energy and cost in data centers. Engineers say it solves the synchronization bottleneck that has long held back practical light-based computing.
NASA is prepping an unprecedented orbital rehearsal for the 2027 Artemis III mission in which the Orion crew will rendezvous separately with both the SpaceX Starship and Blue Origin Blue Moon landers in lunar orbit. The dual-lander exercise is designed to stress-test abort procedures and communication protocols before anyone descends to the surface. It would be the most operationally complex crewed mission NASA has attempted since ISS assembly.
A case study in the New England Journal of Medicine describes an elderly woman who dissolved a large bezoar — a compacted stomach mass — by drinking one and a half liters of Diet Coke. The mass had formed as a side effect of GLP-1 weight-loss medication she had been taking for a year. Doctors say the carbonation and phosphoric acid in diet cola broke up the blockage where other interventions had failed, in one of the most formally documented cases of this folk remedy appearing in a top medical journal.
