Netanyahu orders Iran strikes despite Trump claiming ‘I call all the shots’ | First Thing

• How did Welker respond? When the veteran reporter asked the president for any evidence, he accused her of being “crooked”. “You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

Silicon Valley has embraced Maga politics, says Nick Clegg, formerly of Meta

Nick Clegg during day 3 of SXSW London 2026. Photograph: Antony Jones/Getty Images for SXSW London

Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the UK who spent nearly seven years at the tech company Meta as the head of global affairs, has said executives at big US tech companies who had previously shunned politics pivoted to the right at the start of the second Trump administration.

Speaking to The Rest Is Money podcast, Clegg also said social media products themselves “changed utterly: from being human-centric to being much more about content, often synthetic content, algorithmically recommended to you.”

In other news …

Posters dedicated to Renee Good and Alex Pretti outside a commercial strip in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photograph: Bridget Bennett/The Guardian

• The fired 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley has accused the CBS boss Bari Weiss of wanting to inject “falsehoods and bias” into programming, including repeating an untrue claim about the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by immigration agents.
• The former executive intelligence agent David Rush reportedly created a fake spy program to siphon money. Rush, arrested in May, is accused of stealing more than $40m in gold bars from the CIA.
• A magnitude-7.8 earthquake shook part of the southern Philippines early on Monday, collapsing buildings and killing at least 19 people.
• The US gymnastics star Simone Biles revealed she recently had a serious health scare. She did not explain what the medical emergency involved, saying only: “Almost dying wasn’t on my bingo card.”
• The US is reportedly weighing a plan to buy the Chagos Islands from Mauritius amid stalled plans from the UK to cede sovereignty of the territory.

Stat(s) of the day: Billions spent and hypothetical returns – the AI boom explained in charts

The shape of a brain made in circuits. Photograph: Artem Burduk/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Sticking out for me in this detailed look at the numbers behind the AI boom was a Harvard economist who calculated that “investment in information processing equipment and software” accounted for 92% of the US’s GDP growth in the first half of 2025. How sustainable can that be?

Building power: ‘They have nothing else to lose’ – Delaney Hall hunger strikes are a hallmark of resistance in detention

ICE agents and immigration activists clash outside Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey. Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images

Fabiola Cineas talked to Jessica Ordaz, a historian and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, about the conditions at Delaney Hall, the history of hunger and labor strikes at detention centers, and why repression and resistance persist in tandem.

Don’t miss this: The Beatles’ chaotic, controversial final tour – as never seen before

Images by rock photographer Jim Marshall of the Beatles in the US. Composite: Jim Marshall Photography LLC

If you think the story of four lads from Liverpool conquering the US and changing pop music forever has nothing new to be retold, think again. This fab-four-tastic collection of images by the rock photographer Jim Marshall captures their final gigs in the US, as the lustre of touring was very much wearing thin for the band. And if you missed it last week, it is worth savouring every word of Laura Barton’s interview with 83-year-old(!) Paul McCartney about his new album.

… or this: ‘It’s Bible time’ – How religion became part of the USMNT’s World Cup identity

Christian Pulisic in New York. Photograph: Jess Stiles/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

With the men’s Fifa World Cup kicking off later this week, Leander Schaerlaeckens examines a radical change in the host nation’s public engagement with religion, with the US men’s national team players opening up about their beliefs – coinciding with the backdrop of a governing party that trades (when convenient) on demonstrative religiosity.

Climate check: Scientists warn axing US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’

Meltwater drips at the collapsing terminus of the Morteratsch glacier. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The Trump administration has plans to shutter the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a massive US-funded network of seafloor sensors and underwater gliders. Why worry? Because a recent study found that losing this specific network would do more damage to global climate tracking than randomly losing 80% of all other ocean data combined. It plugs gaps no other nation fills, and losing it will severely degrade the data that underpins the world’s weather predictions, El Niño forecasting, and fisheries management.

Last Thing: What are New York’s ‘mole people’ up to?

People emerge from a manhole in New York City. Photograph: Williamsburg365

A very peculiar summer intrigue. Groups of people wearing hip waders have been caught on camera popping open manholes in Queens and Brooklyn to clamber into the sewers. Are they hunting lost gold, doing black market work, or just living out Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fantasies? Either way, the police are not amused. Adam Gabbatt reports – though I note he did not volunteer to do a sewer delve himself to investigate firsthand. And who could blame him?

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