Let's get into the executive summary.

NEWS NEWS.

First, the Iran update. The United States has gone nearly a month without a large-scale strike as the Trump administration shifts back toward sanctions, but the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to normal commercial traffic. The United States and Israel began striking Iran on February twenty-eighth. Six months later, eighteen American service members have been killed and more than seven hundred fifty wounded. Trump originally predicted four to five weeks of war. Yesterday's issue covered the domestic and financial costs. An A.P.-N.O.R.C. survey of one thousand one hundred sixty-five adults, conducted July twenty-third through twenty-seventh, found sixty-four percent said the war was not worth fighting. The conflict had cost thirty-five-point-seven billion dollars, more than half the Pentagon's sixty-seven-billion-dollar emergency request. Today's change is the pause in major attacks and the renewed economic pressure, with negotiations still stalled.

A federal judge has blocked the Postal Service for fourteen days from rejecting ballot mailings that do not comply with the Trump administration's new voter-list, envelope-data and formatting rules. States are due to send the first midterm ballots next week. The judge said the rule would probably disenfranchise voters and found no evidence of mail-ballot fraud. She set a September third hearing. The Justice Department appealed to the First Circuit. This is a new ruling: yesterday the same judge lifted an earlier injunction because the Supreme Court said that challenge came before the Postal Service finalized its rule. Twenty-four states and Washington D.C. then immediately sued over the final version; this temporary order is the first ruling in that new case.

A federal judge permanently blocked the Pentagon's Anthropic blacklist as unconstitutional. In a fifty-nine-page ruling, Judge Rita Lin found violations of the company's First and Fifth Amendment rights, arbitrary action and no statutory authority for the supply-chain-risk label. The Pentagon imposed the designation and told agencies to stop using Claude after Anthropic refused to permit domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons while the department demanded access for all lawful purposes. The Defense Department cannot enforce that designation while the administration prepares an appeal. The ruling stops this blacklist, but it does not force the government to keep using Anthropic if officials end that use through other lawful means.

NOT NEWS NEWS.

Trump ordered a plan for a NASA-led United States Space Academy and gave a presidential commission one hundred twenty days to design it. The order does not create a campus, curriculum or incoming class. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will lead recommendations on governance, location, graduate service and legislation. NASA already trains small astronaut classes, while the Air Force Academy commissions officers into both the Air Force and Space Force. This proposal would cover a broader mix of engineers, scientists, technicians, operators, pilots and astronauts, but its structure remains undecided.

Interior is weighing a Yosemite land swap that could provide a shorter road to a Trump donor's planned luxury homes. Kingsbarn Realty Capital wants access from its property in Stanislaus National Forest to a Yosemite service road. The Park Service says the company cannot directly buy park land but could acquire land of equal or greater value and propose an exchange. No parcel has been selected, no transfer has been approved and the reporting does not establish that the developer's political donations caused the review.

The Park Service backs Memorial Circle for Trump's proposed two-hundred-fifty-foot Washington arch even though its preservation review says the structure would disrupt landmark sightlines. The arch would be about two and a half times the height of the Lincoln Memorial. The agency says the symbolic landscape that makes the site sensitive also makes it historically appropriate. This is a Section One-oh-Six effects review, not final construction approval, and the preservation consultation must finish before the project can proceed.

You're caught up.