👀 STORIES TO WATCH

🚨 THE REGION IS ON EDGE. THE THREAT IS AT AMERICAN HOMES.

Hackers hit water systems in at least seven states, the FBI and EPA said — and the President told Americans it wasn’t Iran. “I think the governor’s behind it,” Trump said of Tim Walz, offering no evidence, four days after his own agencies warned that Iranian hackers were targeting water systems. The war he says isn’t here has been inside America all year: a Brooklyn jury convicted an IRGC-directed operative in March of a murder-for-hire scheme whose reported targets included Trump, and a federal alert has warned police of “prepositioned sleeper assets.” On Monday, Tasnim — Iranian state media tied to the Revolutionary Guard — posted a video detailing how to assassinate the First Lady; the Secret Service is investigating. Kuwait — the hardest-hit Gulf state of the war, twelve dead — took Iranian drones again Saturday while a fuel depot burned at its airport. Strikes that keep returning to Kuwait’s bases, power plants and airport fuel read like softening for a ground escalation. The Saudis walked into the West Wing to say stop, but the president won’t acknowledge Americans are at risk

Read the full story →

💰 TRUMP MOVES TO REVIVE THE $1.776 BILLION FUND

Trump told Congress on Saturday to write the $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund into federal law — one day after saying, on camera, “it is dead, but… I wish it weren’t.” He made the move after learning Todd Blanche didn’t have the votes to be confirmed: a statute would carry the money past both federal judges blocking it, but more importantly than legalizing the fund, is stopping Blanche and possibly himself and his sons from being implicated in a conspiracy to defraud the US government by creating this fund. His move to turn the fund into law represents a hidden acknowledgement that Blanche won’t get confirmed — and that he’s legally liable for fraud.

Read the full story →

🏛️ PROSECUTORS DROP THE REFLECTING POOL FELONY

Prosecutors moved Friday to dismiss the Reflecting Pool felony — the third Justice Department case to collapse in nine days. Their own filing says Interior withheld what it knew while Trump described a knife, a box cutter and a razor nobody was ever charged with using. Saturday he rejected the filing: “a pure case of VANDALISM,” naming his own prosecutor and never the evidence. The courts keep making the government tell the truth; he answers each collapse by insisting harder. Two people are still being prosecuted.

Read the full story →

⚖️ THE INDICTMENT NOBODY FILED

In 2007, prosecutors drew up a 56-page, 32-count indictment of Jeffrey Epstein. It was never filed — and DOJ now tells Judge Sullivan it “has not been able to locate an unredacted version” of its own document. Four co-defendants’ names stay inked out. What Sullivan holds: the emails, including a “torture video” exchange. He has not ruled.

Read the full story →

🌊 CEUTA EMPTIES

The invasion of Ceuta was real — 50,000 crossed, and at least 67 died. It also reversed in two days: 48,300 have walked back into Morocco. Europe’s emergency talks begin Tuesday, driven partly by a 2021 video and an AI clip. The invasion lasted two days; the panic is still going.

Read the full story →

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

Donald Trump lives in a make-believe world. In it, he is winning the war with Iran; nobody is attacking America’s water systems; Todd Blanche is his Attorney General and the $1.776 billion fund is legal; the Reflecting Pool is crystal blue and was slit by vandals; and Mitch McConnell is well enough that nobody has to ask until 2027. Outside it, Kuwait burned again this morning, seven states reported water intrusions, a Judiciary Republican called the nomination dead, two judges hold the money, his own prosecutors filed the truth about the pool, and a senator has been visible only in two office photographs in 49 days. The people around him keep telling him he looks fantastic. The courts stay the front for saving America because a courtroom is the one room where the make-believe has to stop — and on Tuesday the Senate decides who runs the department that keeps losing there.

🔴 LIVE TODAY ON NARATIV

Nothing airs Saturday. We are back Monday: Fivestack, 3 PM ET, with Dean Blundell, and Narativ Live at 7 PM ET.

📚 READ THIS ON NARATIV

Blanche asked Sullivan to spare him a $1,000-a-day fine and called the contempt case “absurd” — a week before he sent his number three to hand-deliver ten documents.

https://www.narativ.org/p/breaking-news-bombshell-internal

Share

In 2007, federal prosecutors in Florida drew up an indictment of Jeffrey Epstein — 56 pages, 32 counts: sex trafficking, enticement of minors, conspiracy. The case number was left blank. Alexander Acosta’s name sits unsigned on the signature block. Someone later wrote two words across page one: “OLD Draft.” It was never filed.

That indictment is in the public court file of Phang v. Blanche today, with the names of four co-defendants — described in its first paragraph as people employed to serve as Epstein’s “personal assistants” — still blacked out. The Justice Department told Judge Emmet Sullivan it “has not been able to locate an unredacted version” of its own draft indictment.

What the Associate Attorney General hand-delivered to Sullivan’s chambers Thursday — at 2:28, thirty-two minutes before a deadline the department twice tried to move — are the ten documents DOJ is still fighting to keep marked: eight emails, including exchanges with Epstein about a “torture video” and sexual activity with minors; a 2019 department briefing document; and a records page. Two of the emails were written by a survivor while Epstein was abusing her.

The briefing document is where the department’s redaction logic shows itself. Under its “co-conspirators” heading, only Ghislaine Maxwell’s name is readable — and DOJ told Sullivan that three of the four names it blacked out there “are, in fact, victims.” It unredacted Leslie Groff’s name because she “has not asserted victim status.” Same category of person. One asked. One did not. The same document records what the department knows: 80 victims identified, hundreds more unidentified.

Read more

Read more

Trump described the crime three times, in detail. Someone had slit the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool liner with “a knife, a box cutter and a razor,” he said, opening 350 feet of it. He called them “thugs,” “sick,” “terrible.”

Nobody was ever charged with making those gashes.

Park Police searched the pool anyway. Interior swore out its account, a grand jury indicted, and Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, accused David “Davey” Hearn, an Olympic canoeist arrested in June, of “forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner with both hands” on 2 July.

Prosecutors gave it up on Friday. They moved in D.C. Superior Court to dismiss the felony indictment. “Had [the Interior Department] been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment,” they wrote. Interior “provided less than fulsome information at the outset of this case.”

That makes three Justice Department cases to collapse in nine days. The Minnesota anti-ICE protester prosecutions came apart on 31 July with “missteps mounting,” the New York Times reported. Axios reported on 23 July that the department walked away from its subpoenas against the Times.

Read more

Hackers hit water utilities in at least seven states, the FBI and EPA said Thursday, and some of the attacks degraded water operations. President Donald Trump told Americans it wasn't Iran. "I think the governor's behind it. I don't think there was an Iranian cyberattack," he said at Friday's Cabinet meeting, naming Tim Walz and offering no evidence. His own agencies had warned, four days before the first breach, that Iranian-affiliated hackers were targeting water systems.

The attackers seized controls at close to 36 Minnesota water plants overnight on 26–27 July; a state memo said the likely goal was contamination. It failed — no water was contaminated, and Braham's town crew had its plant back in 90 minutes. Wisconsin detected intrusions in the same window, CNN reported. US intelligence preliminarily assesses Iran as the likely actor; investigators are still testing whether the intruder worked to look Iranian, and no agency has ruled.

Read more

Start with the place. Ceuta is Spain — a Spanish city of 84,000 on the northern tip of Africa, bordering Morocco, separated from Europe by nine miles of sea. To reach mainland Europe from Ceuta you still have to cross the Mediterranean. Almost nobody did.

Here is what actually happened. Starting Thursday, roughly 50,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta — swimming around the breakwater at Tarajal or climbing the border fence. Spain’s Interior Ministry counted the crossings; Ceuta’s president, Juan Jesús Vivas, puts the number as high as 60,000. At least 67 of them died — most drowned, others were crushed against the breakwater and the fence. The count is Spain’s, and it is still rising.

Then, almost as fast, it reversed. By six on Friday evening, 48,300 had walked back into Morocco — hungry, unhoused, and met with hostility, some told Reuters. Spain laid a 500-metre floating barrier across Tarajal on Saturday morning; by midday, soldiers were escorting the last swimmers back. The city that was invaded on Thursday was emptying by Friday night.

Why did it happen at all? A Guardia Civil spokesperson gave Reuters the trigger: a Spanish Supreme Court ruling in late June barred the summary return of migrants intercepted at sea. “It has been a slow trickle since the Supreme Court’s ruling, but today has been an explosion,” the spokesperson said. Morocco’s ambassador said the crossings were “not wanted by the Kingdom of Morocco,” and Pedro Sánchez thanked Rabat for cooperating.

Read more

Mitch McConnell last cast a vote on June 11 — roll call 171, a Yea. He has missed the 46 since — number 172 on June 15 through 217 on July 30. On vote 216, his was the only name in the Not Voting column. On Monday, Kentucky reaches a date written into its own constitution, and after Monday the state may hold one senator until 2027.

McConnell announced on July 27 that he will not attend the Fancy Farm picnic in Graves County today, where the speeches start at 3 p.m. "There's no place I'd rather be on the first Saturday in August than with the good people of western Kentucky, feasting on pork and mutton," he said.

Gov. Andy Beshear wrote him the same day, calling on him "to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign." Beshear also asked Majority Leader John Thune to investigate and, if McConnell cannot demonstrate capacity, to begin a process. Thune declined on Tuesday: "that's an issue really that's between Sen. McConnell and the people of Kentucky." No senator has called for expulsion, which takes 67 votes.

Section 152 of the Kentucky constitution sets the date: "If three months do not intervene between the happening of said vacancy and the next succeeding election… the office shall be filled by appointment until the second succeeding annual election." Three months before the November 3 general election falls on Monday, August 3. Beshear flagged it: "There's an argument out there that that's a date where I could not later call a special election."

Kentucky lawmakers took the appointment away in 2024. House Bill 622 repealed KRS 63.200 — Beshear vetoed it, the legislature overrode him. A governor can now only call a special election, and the seat sits empty until a winner is certified. Senate Bill 228, the 2021 law it replaced, had already forced the governor to choose from a list supplied by the departing senator's own party. McConnell backed it.

Section 152 also says vacancies "for the State at large… shall be filled by appointment of the Governor" — which legal experts quoted by the Kentucky Lantern and CNBC call a colorable argument that HB 622 is invalid. No court has tested it. A vacancy would put a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature in court over a US Senate seat.

Read more

Melania Trump's personal lawyer sent me a letter this month demanding I retract Narativ's reporting, apologize, and pay damages. It threatens to sue me if I don't.

I read the letter aloud, in full, on Fivestack on July 27, and declined every demand on air.

Today I've retained John B. Williams, one of America's foremost trial lawyers, to defend this reporting. And I've opened a legal defense fund.

Donate to the Narativ Legal Defense Fund

The reporting they want erased ran on July 11. “The Spy at the First Lady's Side” is a months-long investigation into Paolo Zampolli, Donald Trump's Special Envoy for Global Partnerships — ambassador rank, no Senate confirmation, no security clearance, three decades in the orbit of Russian officials. Read it and judge it yourself.

It asks one question, and nobody in the United States government has answered it: who vetted this man?

The letter doesn't answer that question. It puts a price on asking it.

We have all watched this administration work over newspaper reporters and 60 Minutes. It has now reached Substack — the last place a reporter can work without a corporate owner deciding what runs. I may be among the first on this platform to face this but if I don’t push back, I won't be the last.

A letter like this doesn't have to win in court. It only has to make reporting expensive enough that people like me stop.

I won't stop. I can't do it alone.

Your money answers the letter, covers the cross-border work — I'm in Canada, the threat invokes US law — funds an anti-SLAPP defense if they sue, and keeps Narativ publishing while this is fought. Every dollar goes to legal defense, paid directly to counsel. I'll account for it publicly and post updates as the case moves.

Help me cover some of the legal fees, and build a defense for independent journalists here on Substack and elsewhere. If we don't have a free press, we'll never know what's really happening in our country and world.

Donate to the Narativ Legal Defense Fund

Share it too. Sharing is worth as much as giving.

They want it gone. It's still up.

— Zev

Share

👀 STORIES TO WATCH

⚔️ TRUMP VOWS A BEATING AS SAUDI JETS JOIN THE WAR

Trump vowed Wednesday to hit Iran back for its overnight salvo, telling Fox & Friends: "We'll be hitting them hard. They're going to get a beating." Saudi jets flew the kingdom's first combat missions of the war, joining US strikes on Iran-backed militias across seven Iraqi provinces. Iran fired five ballistic missiles at the US airbase in Jordan; Jordanian and American crews downed all five, no casualties. Trump told Fox that Baghdad coordinated the Iraq strikes; Baghdad condemned them by mid-morning as a sovereignty violation and canceled Thursday's meeting with Mohammed bin Salman. Netanyahu sat with Trump Tuesday, his eighth visit, pressing to go in hard — Iran's salvo flew while the two men met, and the vow came the next morning; the sequence is Narativ's read. Nothing else moved: Iran rejected Oman's plan to split the Strait of Hormuz, crude jumped almost 7 percent, and AP reports the Pentagon's interceptor shelves are emptying. The coalition gained a kingdom overnight. It has not gained an exit.

Read the full story →

🚪 RAND PAUL HAD FAUCI'S LAWYER REMOVED FROM THE ROOM

Rand Paul called security Wednesday and had Anthony Fauci's attorney escorted out of a Senate hearing room, minutes after Fauci invoked the Fifth on his advice. The question that drew it was not about Wuhan: did Fauci fund gain-of-function research in labs worldwide. Paul denied the privilege from the chair, argued Biden's pardon killed it, and warned of repercussions. A chairman is not a court — contempt runs through the committee, the floor, then a Justice Department that wants the case. Fauci answered the origins question six years ago, in his diaries.

Read the full story →

⚖️ BLANCHE'S TWO CLOCKS, SIX HOURS APART

Todd Blanche faces two clocks Thursday. Senate Judiciary votes on him at nine, TPM reports; at three, Judge Emmet Sullivan requires the acting Attorney General to surrender the unredacted Epstein emails he has withheld for a month. Blanche has not said whether the DOJ memo typed the morning he met Ghislaine Maxwell briefed him for that room. Jay Clayton took over the DNI Tuesday night, an office cut in half.

Read the full story →

🌏 EIGHTEEN DEAD IN KUMAMOTO, FOUR IN THE MALL THAT REOPENED IN JUNE

Kumamoto's dead reached 18 by Wednesday, and four of them died inside a mall Aeon reopened six weeks ago — rebuilt after the 2016 quake, marketed on its reinforced ceilings. Staff walked 3,000 customers out and a manager called the building clear; half an hour later an explosion brought the second floor down on the employees inside.

Read the full story →

🛡️ WE NEED YOU

Melania Trump's attorney demanded Narativ retract its Zampolli reporting. Narativ is launching a legal defense fund instead. Zev Shalev, on air: "I don't even know how to retract it, because it's just accurate reporting."

Read the full story →

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

Lawfare is how public service gets done now, and the chill runs across the whole system. Rand Paul muzzled Anthony Fauci with a subpoena and a threat of prosecution. Todd Blanche is hurling everything he has at Katie Phang, the lawyer who asked a court to make him obey a law he had already conceded he was breaking. Melania Trump's attorney sent this newsroom a demand over reporting Narativ cannot retract because it is accurate, and answering it costs money the newsroom now has to raise. When basic government requires a judge's ruling, that is the clearest sign of a decline to autocracy we have seen. This is not business as usual. It is the difference between open government and autocracy, and the judiciary is holding the line.

🔴 LIVE TODAY ON NARATIV

FIVESTACK — 3 PM ET, Zev with Dean Blundell.

NARATIV LIVE — 7 PM ET.

📚 READ THIS ON NARATIV

The memo Blanche won't answer for has a second name typed on it:

https://www.narativ.org/p/barr-epstein-files

Share

Akio Yoshida bowed Wednesday at a Kumamoto press conference, two of his executives bowing beside him. "We take it seriously that an explosion happened and precious lives were lost," the Aeon Mall president said. He was answering for a building Aeon reopened on June 13 — wrecked in the 2016 quake, rebuilt in a 2017 redevelopment the company marketed on its seismically reinforced ceilings, relaunched under Aeon's own banner: a "re-start." Six weeks and three days later, its second floor sits on top of its dead.

Narativ closed Tuesday night's report with the only honest line available: no official toll existed, and the numbers would arrive when the digging ended. They started arriving at dawn. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi counted 13 dead Wednesday morning in Tokyo, with five more feared dead. By 6:18 a.m. Eastern, AP's refresh folded the feared five into the count: 18 dead, 62 injured, six of them seriously. Not two tolls — one toll, read at two hours of the same day, and rescuers are still digging. "There are people who are still waiting to be rescued," Takaichi said, "and it's a race against time."

Read more

The Senate confirmed Jay Clayton as Director of National Intelligence Tuesday night, 51–47, without a single Democratic vote. Clayton arrives carrying a House Judiciary demand for records on whether Jeffrey Epstein operated as an unregistered foreign agent — for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia and Israel. Tomorrow morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee votes on Todd Blanche for Attorney General. Six hours after that, Blanche owes a federal judge the unredacted Epstein emails he has spent a month refusing to surrender.

Blanche walks into that day still silent on the memo. Narativ surfaced the internal DOJ email Friday — EFTA01648946, typed at 7:49 on the morning of July 24, 2025, the morning Blanche sat down with Ghislaine Maxwell in Tallahassee. The email catalogued the most serious accusations in the Epstein files against Donald Trump, Bill Barr, Howard Lutnick, Les Wexner and seven other men. Blanche asked Maxwell about nearly every name on that list. Did the memo brief him for the room? Still no response.

TPM reports the committee vote set for 9 a.m. Judge Emmet Sullivan set the second clock: by 3 p.m., Blanche must hand him eight unredacted emails plus proof that the names he blacked out belong to victims, and a separate document with proof the redacted senders are law enforcement. Sullivan ruled in June that Blanche had conceded he was violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Katie Phang's lawyers now want him fined $1,000 a day for it. Blanche called the contempt motion "absurd."

Share

Read more

Rand Paul called security on Anthony Fauci's attorney Wednesday morning and had him escorted out of a Senate hearing room, minutes after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment on that attorney's advice.

Narativ captured the four and a half minutes as they aired.

The question that drew the first invocation was not about Wuhan. "Did you fund gain-of-function research in other bio labs around the world?" Paul asked. Fauci answered: "On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution." He repeated it word for word. Then again.

Over two hundred scientists at the Cambridge Working Group signed a protest against the avian-flu research NIAID money supported, Paul said, because it read as "a roadmap as to how to make a bioweapon." That flu kills roughly half the humans it infects. "It may be the most important question we get to here today," Paul said.

Then he ruled from the chair.

"The chairman has denied your assertion of privilege and directed you to answer, but you nonetheless refuse and stand on privilege despite the existence of the pardon," Paul said. Joe Biden pardoned Fauci preemptively on January 20, 2025, covering conduct from January 1, 2014 forward tied to his NIAID and task force service. Paul's argument is that the pardon removes the exposure and with it the privilege. A chairman denying a privilege does not settle it — contempt runs through a committee vote, then the floor, then a Justice Department that has to want the case.

PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Subscribe now

Read more

Trump vowed Wednesday morning to hit Iran back for its overnight missile salvo, telling Fox & Friends: "We'll be hitting them hard. They're going to get a beating." He said his troops had minutes to shoot down the missiles, that he watched video of personnel calling in coordinates in real time, and that America could take out most of Iran's bridges "in less than an hour." He called the militias fighting for Tehran "a cancer on the world." By late morning the beating remained a promise — no new American strike had followed the vow.

Last night Saudi jets flew the kingdom's first confirmed combat missions of the war, joining US strikes on Iran-backed militias across seven Iraqi provinces — at least 20 fighters killed and 32 wounded, by the militias' own count. CENTCOM said the targeted groups had hit US bases and Saudi energy infrastructure. Iran then launched five ballistic missiles aimed at the US airbase in Jordan; Jordanian and American crews downed all five at dawn. No casualties, Amman said.

Trump told Fox the Iraq strikes were coordinated with Baghdad.

Baghdad disagreed.

Read more

Melania Trump sent us a demand letter, and is demanding a response by today. To pay for legal costs we will launch a klegal defense fund today.

I read the letter on the July 27 Fivestack. The First Lady's attorney demands that Shalev and journalist Amanda Ungaro "immediately retract the false, malicious, and defamatory statements" in Narativ's reporting on Paolo Zampolli, and that they compensate the First Lady for "overwhelming financial and reputational harm." The attorney has filed no suit. Shalev declined every demand on air. "I don't even know how to retract it, because it's just accurate reporting," he said.

The reporting is at Narativ.org "The Spy at the First Lady's Side," published July 11, documented Paolo Zampolli — the modeling agent who brought Melania Knauss to America thirty years ago and now serves as US Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, a rank-of-ambassador post that required no Senate confirmation and no security clearance. Narativ built the investigation on Zampolli's own emails — Ungaro, his partner of two decades, released them — and vetted every document against the Epstein files, court records and contemporaneous reporting. Zampolli and the First Lady text constantly, Ungaro said.

Read more

👀 STORIES TO WATCH

⛏️ THE PICKAXE PUSH

Donald Trump's own allies fear what today's White House meeting does — pull him deeper into the Iran war, Politico reports. Benjamin Netanyahu arrives carrying the instrument: Israeli intelligence that Iran moved centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain, the complex dug too deep for Israel's bombs. Trump read the visit before it happened — "he wants me to stay involved" — days after promising to hit the site "very heavily" and "pretty soon." He paused the bombing thirteen nights in because the Patriot interceptors are running low. Volodymyr Zelensky meets Trump separately today, asking for air defenses from the same emptied stockpile, while Gulf states back Iran collecting "voluntary fees" for Hormuz passage, Reuters reported this morning. Both men built their schedules around a funeral: Washington buries Lindsey Graham today — dead at 71, hours after flying home from Kyiv — the man who spent four decades insisting Ukraine and Israel belonged on the same American side. Two leaders who cannot share a room share a funeral.

Read the full story →

🌏 A MALL CAME DOWN IN KUMAMOTO

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Kumamoto Prefecture at 4:27 PM local time and dropped the second floor of the Aeon mall in Kashima onto the shoppers below. NHK reports a "considerable number" of deaths inside; police cannot reach 20 to 30 mall employees, and no official toll exists yet. More than 50 people reached hospitals, the Shinkansen stopped, the airport shut, and 46,000 homes lost power. Kumamoto dug out of the same ground in April 2016 — then kept counting deaths for months. Rescuers work through the night. Developing.

Read the full story →

🎯 "BARRON, WAIT FOR US"

The Secret Service opened an investigation into an AI video from Tasnim, the Revolutionary Guard's news agency, that maps where and how to kill Melania Trump. Tasnim walks through her locations, her code name, her motorcade procedures — and signs off: "Barron, wait for us." The agency named no specific plot. Abbas Araqchi spent the weekend talking Hormuz fees with Gulf ministers; Tasnim spent it mapping the First Lady.

Read the full story →

⚖️ TWO DAYS TO ASK BLANCHE

Grassley gavels the Judiciary Committee to a vote on Todd Blanche Thursday morning. Darline Graham sits in her brother's seat and counts as a likely yes; Cornyn and Tillis hold the balance over the Epstein files. Narativ put the memo on the record — typed the morning Blanche met Maxwell — and senators have two days to ask.

Read the full story →

🗳️ TRUMP ASKS THE COURT TO HURRY

Trump asked the Supreme Court on Monday to free his blocked mail-ballot order — the one routing ballots only to a federal citizenship list — 99 days before the midterms. He asked the justices to hurry.

Read the full story →

🎯 THE BIGGER PICTURE

Lindsey Graham's burial marks more than a death. The world is shifting east — America's authority declines by the month, its arsenal runs low, its word buys less — and Israel now holds a swing position in the balance of power, courted by Washington while Russia leans on it from inside. Netanyahu met Trump today for the eighth time, more than any leader on earth, and came asking America to go deeper into Iran — not to defend the old alliance Graham preached. The old world went into the ground this morning; the next one gets built by whoever shows up most often. Read the originals.

🔴 LIVE TODAY ON NARATIV

FIVESTACK — 3 PM ET, Zev with Dean Blundell.

📚 READ THIS ON NARATIV

The special that mapped the merge, the night before it checked into the White House:

Share

Benjamin Netanyahu walks into the White House today — his eighth visit, more than any foreign leader. He carries a file on Pickaxe Mountain. Donald Trump's own allies fear what the meeting does, Politico reports: pull him deeper into the Iran war. Trump read the visit before Netanyahu landed: “He wants me to stay involved.”

The file says Iran moved thousands of nuclear centrifuges into the mountain — Israeli intelligence, first reported by the Jerusalem Post, the first known transfer of equipment into the site. Iran began digging the complex in 2020, about a mile south of Natanz. Its halls run as deep as 145 meters, by the Institute for Science and International Security's estimate. Israel never struck it — not even during last June's twelve-day war. Israel's bombs can't reach that deep. America's can.

Read more

A magnitude-7.1 earthquake hit Kumamoto Prefecture at 4:27 p.m. local time Tuesday and dropped the second floor of the Aeon mall in Kashima onto the shoppers below. Local officials told NHK a large number of people remain trapped in the wreckage. Police cannot reach 20 to 30 mall employees. Most customers got out. Japan's TBS network reports a “considerable number” of deaths inside the building. Police have confirmed none. No official toll exists yet — that is the limit of what is known, and it will move.

The Japan Meteorological Agency measured the quake at 7.1; the US Geological Survey put it at 6.8. The shaking registered 7 on Japan's shindo scale — the top of the scale, the level Kumamoto last hit in April 2016. The epicenter sat near Uto, a coastal city on Kyushu, Japan's southern main island. JMA issued tsunami advisories along the coast and lifted the last of them at 6:10 p.m., inside two hours.

Read more

The Secret Service opened an investigation into an AI-generated video from Tasnim — the news agency Iran's Revolutionary Guard runs — that maps where and how to kill Melania Trump, and closes with a message for her son: “Barron Trump, wait for us!”

Tasnim published the video Monday. It opens on the First Lady's profile, drawn in blood, beneath the title “Where to Kill Melania?” A Farsi-speaking narrator calls on “global freedom fighters” to act. He walks them through her Manhattan routine and names the stores — Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue. “Melania's obsession with fashion has become her biggest weakness,” he says. The video mocks up her motorcade moving through New York streets. Tasnim splices in the Secret Service code names both Trumps carry and the procedures agents use to lock down a route. Newsweek and Fox News detailed the contents. Barron Trump is 20.

Read more

Chuck Grassley gavels the Senate Judiciary Committee to a vote Thursday morning on Todd Blanche's nomination for attorney general. The math changed two weeks ago. Darline Graham took her late brother's Judiciary seat on July 21. She restored the Republicans' 12-10 edge, and she counts as a likely yes. That leaves two Republicans holding the outcome: John Cornyn and Thom Tillis.

Cornyn wants Blanche's commitments in writing — kill the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, tighten Trump's audit-immunity deal. Asked whether Blanche should count on his vote without them, Cornyn said: “That is correct.” Tillis says he still lacks what he needs. Both men run their stated doubts through Blanche's handling of the Epstein files. Grassley already recessed one committee vote when his own members failed to show. “Kind of rude,” he said.

Read more

Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Monday to revive Executive Order 14399 — the order that routes mail ballots only to voters on a federal citizenship list — 99 days before the midterm elections.

The whole story fits in one sentence: Trump's government, not your state, decides who receives a ballot in the mail.

Read more