Weekend Edition.
News Nuggets!
1. The New York Times:
U.S. and Iranian forces edged closer to wider war over the weekend after the killing of two American service members in Jordan during an Iranian missile barrage.
They were the first U.S. soldiers killed by hostile fire since a truce with Iran unraveled in recent weeks, bringing the death toll to 16 among U.S. military personnel since the war began in February. Another service member is still missing after Iran on Friday bombarded a military base in Jordan that hosts U.S. forces.
The deaths of the soldiers capped a week of spiraling attacks that chipped away at what remained of the deal that President Trump agreed to with Iran last month, which was supposed to end the war. Sensitive infrastructure targets like bridges and water facilities have come under fire in Iran, and in U.S.-allied countries on the other side of the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. military said early on Sunday that it had struck Iranian military coastal surveillance and air defense facilities, as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps forces responsible for striking U.S. forces in Jordan.
Iran responded by launching strikes on Kuwait, where the United States has a significant military presence. The Kuwaiti government said an oil facility as well as a power and water treatment plant had been attacked. Jordan’s military said on Sunday that it had intercepted hostile drones and missiles. (Source: nytimes.com)
2. Robert Pape:
Last night Iran crossed another escalation threshold.
Instead of concentrating on military bases, Iranian missile and drone strikes hit a vital power and water desalination plant in Kuwait —part of the system that produce roughly 90 percent of the country’s drinking water. Unlike past fragments by Iran strikes that inadvertently hit desalination plants earlier, there is no question this plant was directly targeted. The fire was contained and emergency crews are restoring stability, but the strategic message is unmistakable: civilian survival infrastructure is now becoming a direct battlefield target.
Kuwait relies on eight major desalination plants to sustain its population, which supply over 90% of the country’s drinking water. Because all eight desalination plants sit directly on the Persian Gulf coast, approximately 100 miles from Iran, they reside well within the immediate range of Iranian saturation tactics, including by drones and more powerful sea-skimming cruise missiles. To critically stop Kuwait’s entire freshwater supply system, Iran would need to knock out just two to three of its largest desalination plants, which together produce roughly 70% to 80% of the country’s entire daily desalinated water supply.
The timeline required to bring a heavily centralized desalination plant back online after a military or drone strike varies wildly depending on which specific component of the facility was damaged, ranging from several days for damage to electrical connections to the power grid to one to two months for piping to one to two years for the distillation tower or its co-generation steam turbines which must be custom built.
Kuwait has approximately 5 days of national emergency water storage in its ground reservoirs and distribution networks. With rationing the emergency period can stretch to a month or so – exact estimates impossible since there is little historical experience.
The plant Iran hit is the fourth largest. (Source: escalationtrap.substack.com)
3. The Trump administration notified Israel it is sending dozens more refueling planes to the country ahead of a potential expansion of military operations against Iran, three U.S. and Israeli officials said. After he was presented with several new military plans in a Situation Room meeting Tuesday, President Trump is considering a massive offensive in Iran that would be wider in scope than the current strikes around the Strait of Hormuz. Among the options being considered are bombing Iranian infrastructure facilities like power plants, conducting more attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to bury Iran’s enriched uranium even deeper, and bombing the Pickaxe Mountain underground site that is suspected to be a facility in the making. (Source: axios.com)
4. One person has been killed and 16 wounded after Russia unleashed its largest ballistic missile attack of the war on Ukraine on Saturday night. Moscow launched 41 missiles and 125 attack drones, largely targeting the Ukrainian capital, starting at 1.30am local time and continuing for several hours, according to the Ukrainian air force. Russia has launched several large-scale attacks against Kyiv in recent weeks as Ukraine faces a shortage of its most effective air-defense weapons to intercept the strikes. Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, wrote on X: “Russia unleashed the largest number of ballistic missiles since the start of the war – around four dozen – in a brutal terrorist attack on the Ukrainian capital, killing and injuring people. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)
5. A Ukrainian drone attack on a logistics center belonging to the Russian equivalent of Amazon has caused clouds of smoke so large they have darkened the skies across the Moscow region. Long-range drones struck the Wildberries facility in the city of Elektrostal, about 30 miles east of the capital, in a bombardment that also targeted another of the company’s fulfilment centres in the city of Kotovsk, some 300 miles south-east of Moscow. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said the Wildberries depots were used to “supply sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment” and described the strikes as retaliation for Moscow’s attacks on “our civilian infrastructure”. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)
6. Chinese AIModels:
(Source: openrouter.ai)
7. No edition of News Items would be complete without an item like this one:
On a frigid Thursday last December, 50 finance and technology experts shuffled into the International Monetary Fund’s Washington, DC, headquarters with a dire mission: to war-game how artificial intelligence might upend the global economy.
For hours, a disparate cohort from organizations including Google DeepMind, Rand Corporation and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System split into six groups to map and debate AI’s potential impact on tax systems, spending and gross domestic product under the secrecy of the Chatham House Rule.
While the conclusions were mixed, the exercise reflected a growing realization among some of the world’s smartest thinkers that the most pressing AI doomsday scenario may not involve killer robots or sentient computers.
Instead, the end of civilization as we know it will likely be caused by income tax erosion.
The logic is straightforward. Ever since the First Industrial Revolution saw peasants pushed off the land, governments have relied on taxing people and their paychecks. Rand estimates that 66% of US federal revenue in 2024 came from either individual taxes or payroll taxes due directly to labor. Even in Australia, where resource exports generate vast wealth, individual income tax accounts for almost half of federal government revenue.
Despite barely scratching the surface of usefulness, AI is already threatening to erase entire categories of white-collar work around the world. Standard Chartered Plc Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters may have apologized after airing plans to replace some “lower-value human capital” with AI, but only for causing offense, not for the underlying message. Peers including HSBC Holdings Plc are weighing deep cuts enabled by the technology. (Source: bloomberg.com)
8. Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans in the congressional midterm elections by only a slim margin, but Democratic supporters are far more motivated to vote, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll. Because of partisan redistricting that favors Republicans this year, analysts estimate that Democrats need to win by three to four percentage points overall to gain a majority in the House. The poll shows Democrats leading Republicans by about that margin, 48 percent to 45 percent. The blue advantage grows to eight points among those “absolutely certain to vote,” with 53 percent of highly motivated voters supporting Democrats and 45 percent supporting Republicans. (Source: washingtonpost.com. Our view is that the Democrats remain favored to recapture the House, but are more than capable of not doing so.)
9. Nature.com:
Scientists have harnessed artificial-intelligence models to create synthetic CRISPR proteins that edit the genome more efficiently than their naturally occurring counterparts. Such synthetic CRISPR systems could one day power discoveries in fields from medicine to agriculture.
The results were published on 16 July in Science.
“Much like CRISPR democratized the ability to edit DNA at will, AI-based protein design promises to allow anyone to create totally novel properties in the protein space,” says Soeren Lienkamp, a molecular biologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who was not involved in the research. He adds that the paper “marries two transformative fields”: AI-guided design and enzymes called RNA-guided nucleases, which can cut DNA and RNA strands. (Source: nature.com)
10. Pithy!
Peter Kafka: What did you read this morning?
Joseph Kahn, Executive Editor of The New York Times:
There’s this, John, John Ellis puts together a kind of kind of news Nuggets Substack every day, which I always, there’s always something in there that I otherwise would have missed.
You know, he reads very, very widely and summarizes in a very pithy way.
I find that very useful in the morning. (Source: podcasts.apple.com, 8 July 2026)
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