The suspension lasted barely long enough to become a policy.

After another death involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump administration officials told ICE officers to suspend most vehicle stops, according to people familiar with the decision reported by the Associated Press. The move followed a run of fatal encounters: two motorists shot by ICE officers in Texas and Maine, and a 28-year-old man in Florida killed after authorities said he ran from immigration and other federal officers and was struck by a tractor trailer.

Then President Donald Trump intervened in public. On Wednesday he said ICE should keep using traffic stops, calling them one of the agency's essential enforcement tools. Hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin issued a statement that did not plainly say whether the pause still stood. He said people in the country illegally would be arrested and deported wherever they were, and later said he and the president were aligned on keeping options available to officers.

That left the operational question sitting in the open: when the president praises a tactic after his own administration has moved to restrict it, who is actually commanding the line officer at the window?

The facts behind the argument are not abstract. AP reports at least 10 deaths involving encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched his deportation campaign, at least four involving people in vehicles. In Maine, 25-year-old Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, a Colombian national, was shot in his car Monday. Hundreds gathered in Biddeford for a vigil. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine urged DHS to halt non-urgent vehicle stops, saying the shootings raised serious questions.

The vehicle stop has always been a peculiar form of state power: ordinary enough to feel administrative, sudden enough to become lethal in seconds. In immigration enforcement, it carries extra instability. The target is not necessarily a criminal suspect in the common street-policing sense, but a person sought under civil immigration authority, often amid a national push to raise arrest numbers. ICE says people subject to arrest are increasingly staying home and that officers must find other ways to locate them. That explanation may describe the pressure. It does not answer the risk.

Mullin is now facing his first serious test as DHS secretary. He took over after Kristi Noem was fired in the wake of earlier deadly immigration operations, promising steadier management of a department that had become the face of the president's mass deportation pledge. AP reports that under Mullin, DHS had shifted away from splashy city operations toward a quieter enforcement style. But quiet enforcement is still enforcement. ICE arrested 10,000 people over five days in late June, according to AP's account of the department's activity.

The politics are obvious, and so is the machinery. Trump wants visible toughness. Mullin wants control without appearing to dilute the mission. ICE officers want latitude and numbers. Families and local officials want an end to scenes in which a stop becomes a shooting, a chase, a vigil, an inquiry and then, perhaps, another stop.

The administration may yet clarify the rule. But the story of the past 24 hours is already clear: a safety pause became a loyalty test. In that gap, every driver approached by a federal immigration officer is being asked to trust a system that has not decided whether restraint is an order or merely a suggestion.

More than 500 people are feared dead after two boats carrying Rohingya passengers reportedly capsized in the Bay of Bengal, according to the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. refugee agency.

The preliminary account is devastating in its simplicity. Two boats left Myanmar's Rakhine state in late June. One, believed to be carrying about 250 people, lost contact soon after leaving. Another, reportedly carrying about 280, is believed to have sunk off Myanmar's Ayeyarwady coast on July 8. Officials have not confirmed the casualty count, but the agencies said they were gravely concerned by the scale of possible loss.

The timing tells its own story. Rohingya refugees often avoid sea crossings during monsoon season, when the Bay of Bengal becomes especially treacherous. That people still boarded crowded boats in late June is a measure of desperation, not ignorance. Around 1.2 million Rohingya remain in overcrowded camps in Bangladesh. Those still in Myanmar face severe restrictions, internment and violence in a country where the 2017 military campaign against them was declared genocide by the United States.

Aid cuts have made the camps harsher. Fighting in Rakhine has narrowed the options further. The sea route to Malaysia and other destinations has become one of the world's deadliest for refugees and migrants. In 2025, more than 6,500 Rohingya fled by boat and nearly 900 were reported dead or missing, according to UNHCR figures cited by AP.

The phrase 'feared dead' performs a small bureaucratic mercy: it leaves room for confirmation. But the larger fact needs no autopsy. A stateless people was left with no safe return, no durable resettlement, shrinking rations and smugglers' boats. The disaster was not unforeseen. It was only uncaught.

The war around the Strait of Hormuz has moved from threat to exchange.

The United States intensified strikes on Iran early Thursday, hitting targets farther north and firing on an oil tanker it accused of trying to break the renewed naval blockade. Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks aimed at Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait, all countries that host U.S. forces. No immediate damage or casualties were acknowledged in those retaliatory attacks, according to AP.

The widening target map matters. AP reports U.S. strikes near Tehran and in Semnan province, tied to Iran's ballistic missile production and space program, as well as attacks in several other provinces. Central Command said an American aircraft disabled the Curacao-flagged Belma by firing into the ship's smokestack after it ignored warnings while sailing toward Kharg Island, Iran's main oil export terminal.

The interim deal to cool the Iran war is effectively shredded. The Strait of Hormuz remains the hinge: a narrow commercial passage through which fear becomes oil, fertilizer, shipping cost and domestic political risk. Brent crude was trading above $85 a barrel Thursday, more than 15% above its prewar price, though still below the conflict's peak.

The American strategy now looks less like reopening a passage than imposing pressure around one. Iran's strategy is to make that pressure regional. The danger is not simply escalation by announcement. It is escalation by routing: each ship, drone and radar site becomes a vote on who controls the corridor.

Wall Street spent Wednesday doing the financial equivalent of whistling past a burning pier.

The S&P 500 rose 0.4%, returning to within 0.5% of its record, while the Dow gained 150 points and the Nasdaq rose 0.6%. Strong earnings helped. BlackRock climbed after beating expectations, and CEO Larry Fink said the firm's iShares funds topped $6 trillion in assets under management.

At the same time, oil prices were swinging higher because of the Iran war. That should be a problem for the market's favorite summer story, which is that inflation is easing enough to keep the Federal Reserve from tightening again. The government reported wholesale inflation slowed in June, and consumer prices fell from May to June for the first time in six years. Year-over-year inflation cooled to 3.5% from 4.2%.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, in Senate testimony, refused to turn that into a promise. He said the data were moving in the right direction but called the gauges imperfect. He also fielded questions on whether AI infrastructure spending is creating a new inflation channel through chips, memory, electricity and data centers. Warsh's answer was essentially: maybe price increases, maybe not inflation, ask the task forces.

That is unsatisfying, but not irrational. The market is trying to buy the soft landing and the AI boom while ignoring the oil shock. The Fed is trying not to be trapped by one month of better data while electricity demand, chips and war premiums keep reappearing in the invoice stack. Investors can live with ambiguity. Rates cannot live there forever.

The artificial intelligence boom has reached the power-plant stage of its life cycle.

Data centers are demanding electricity at a speed renewable construction cannot easily match. AP reports that some facilities consume more energy than a midsize city, and that the AI buildout has helped set off the largest construction boom ever for natural gas-fired power plants, alongside efforts to keep some older coal plants running longer.

That is the collision now showing up in statehouses. A bill on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's desk would require large data centers to meet renewable benchmarks starting in 2030 and reach at least 90% renewable energy by 2040. Michigan, Oregon and Minnesota have already enacted laws meant to keep data centers from undermining emissions-free electricity requirements. Similar bills have appeared in more than a half-dozen other states.

The interesting fight is not only climate versus growth. It is grid access versus utility control. Google and other large buyers are pushing models that let big power users build clean energy projects and connect them to the grid. Colorado regulators ordered Xcel Energy to create such a program. Georgia approved an agreement allowing large corporate buyers to build clean sources and connect them.

The old bargain was that utilities built supply and customers paid. The AI bargain may become: customers build supply because utilities cannot move fast enough, and regulators decide whether that speed arrives clean or gas-fired. The machine wants electricity. The politics begin at the plug.

The first landmark social media addiction verdict is moving into its next arena: appeal.

YouTube filed notice this week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, joining Meta in challenging a jury verdict that found the companies' negligence substantially contributed to harm suffered by a young woman identified in court as KGM, or Kaley. She said she became addicted to social media as a child and that the platforms worsened her mental health.

The jury awarded $3 million in damages and recommended another $3 million in punitive damages. TikTok and Snap had been named earlier in the case but settled before trial. Meta and Google sought a new trial; Judge Carolyn Kuhl denied those motions in early June.

The appeal will likely test a boundary Big Tech has defended for decades. The companies pointed toward Section 230, the law that shields platforms from liability for third-party content. The plaintiff's lawyers pushed the case toward product design: autoplay, engineered engagement and features that make use less intentional and more compulsive.

That distinction is why the appeal matters beyond one plaintiff. If courts treat addictive design as a product-liability problem, the industry cannot hide entirely behind the speech of users. The feed becomes less like a bulletin board and more like a machine with design choices, incentives and foreseeable effects. Silicon Valley has always wanted credit for building the machine. It may now have to defend the machine as built.

Christopher Nolan has always liked a maze. In The Odyssey, he finally gets one with saltwater, monsters and a wife who has heard every excuse in the civilized world.

AP's review finds Nolan's adaptation of Homer both massive and intimate: Matt Damon as a guilt-burdened Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Robert Pattinson as Antinous and Zendaya as Athena. It is shot for IMAX scale, but the point is not merely gigantism. The review gives the film 3.5 stars out of 4 and describes a work less interested in decorative myth than in the psychic cost of return.

That is exactly the right contemporary nerve. The culture has had enough origin stories; it is drowning in them. The harder drama is aftermath. What does victory do to the victor? What does the household become while it waits? What if the monster is less the Cyclops than the version of yourself that learned to survive war and cannot stop surviving it?

Nolan is not, by temperament, a lush sensualist. He is a clockmaker with storm clouds. But Homer can absorb that severity. The Odyssey is already a machine of delays: island, cave, temptation, shipwreck, disguise, recognition. If the new film works, it is because the old poem was never merely about adventure. It was about the scandal of duration. Ten years is a long commute. A life can mutate before the door opens.

There is something touching, and faintly deranged, about Congress choosing this moment to legislate the sun.

The House passed a bill 308-117 to make daylight saving time permanent, sending the matter to a Senate whose intentions remain unclear. The argument for it is familiar: stop changing clocks, give families more usable evening light, help restaurants, shops and tourism. The argument against it is also familiar: winter mornings get darker, schoolchildren wait for buses in blackness, commuters drive before dawn.

I am sympathetic to ending the twice-a-year civic concussion. It is a stupid ritual, defended mostly by inertia and exhausted jokes. But the permanent daylight bill is not just a scheduling measure. It is a perfect little artifact of American governance: the easiest inconvenience gets a supermajority while the heavier ones queue forever.

Rent does not care that sunset moved. Groceries do not cheapen under a brighter patio. Utility bills remain wonderfully indifferent to congressional vibes. Rep. Jim McGovern, who supported the bill, still asked whether this was really the chamber's most pressing work. It was a fair question because symbolic relief is still relief, but it should not be mistaken for repair.

Pass it, if the Senate can stand the thrill. Stop making everyone relearn their mornings. But let us be honest about what Congress is buying: not time, not health, not prosperity. Just a longer-looking evening in which to notice what remains undone.

The crimes alleged in El Salvador's MS-13 mass trial are monstrous. That does not make the trial less monstrous.

A three-month virtual proceeding against 485 alleged MS-13 members wrapped Wednesday, with prosecutors seeking maximum sentences on charges tied to homicide, extortion, drugs, arms and human trafficking. The prosecution says the defendants were connected to 14,420 crimes, including 444 killings, and requested $9 million in civil damages. No one serious should romanticize the gangs that terrorized Salvadoran neighborhoods for years.

But a state can be right about the enemy and wrong about the method. Human Rights Watch says the trial gives legal polish to arrests made without credible evidence or meaningful defense. El Salvador's state of emergency, imposed in 2022, suspended constitutional rights and enabled mass detention. Officials say more than 92,000 alleged gang affiliates have been imprisoned; Bukele says 8,000 innocent people have been released. Rights groups say they have documented thousands of complaints and hundreds of deaths in custody.

The popularity of the crackdown is not mysterious. People who lived under gang rule wanted the state to become real. Bukele gave them that. The danger is that the state, once made real, becomes too large to distinguish justice from throughput.

A court should be slow enough to see a person. A mass trial is built to see a category. That may feel efficient when the category is feared. It remains a lesson future governments will remember when they pick the next one.