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July 17, 2026
Global Edition
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Skyline Vanishes: Wildfire Smoke Will Worsen in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Through Today (Washington Post)
Dangerous wildfire smoke is filling the skies from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic. And in some areas, conditions are expected to worsen, the Washington Post reports.
Through today, more than 115 million people are forecast to be exposed to air quality levels that are unhealthy or worse as winds funnel smoke south from out-of-control fires in Canada and Minnesota — and a heat dome traps that smoke near the ground.
From late Wednesday into early Thursday, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis and New York had some of the worst air quality among the world’s major cities, according to data from IQAir. In Detroit, the air quality index reached a value of 728 late Wednesday, far worse than the peak of 465 in New York during the apocalyptic June 2023 fires.
Farther north and west, air quality reached hazardous levels — the worst on the scale — in parts of northern Minnesota, Michigan and northern Wisconsin on Wednesday. These dangerous conditions showed no signs of abating on Thursday, although a wind shift on Friday could cause some brief improvements before more smoke may pour south from Canada over the weekend, the Washington Post reports.
The scene from the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building in NYC right before sunset on Wednesday:
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Illinois Shock: Chicago Records Worst Air Quality In Its History (WGN-9)
Chicago has logged its worst air quality in the city’s history and new data shows Chicago had the worst air quality in the world among major cities.
Emergency Up North: Ontario Asks Canada to Ready Military for Wildfire Evacuations (Bloomberg)
Ontario has asked the Canadian government to prepare to expedite federal resources to support wildfire evacuations, including possible Armed Forces deployments.
Emergency Preparedness Minister Jill Dunlop issued a statement amid the active fires across northern Ontario and related severe air quality warnings issued in parts of Canada and the US.
Fifteen communities in northern Ontario have initiated or are considering evacuation, Dunlop said in the statement. Around 180 fires were active in the northeast and northwest regions as of Wednesday evening, according to the provincial government.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday night that the wildfire situation has escalated significantly over the last three weeks. “Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their communities, not knowing if their homes will survive,” he said in a statement.
Air Quality 101: How to Protect Yourself From Wildfire Smoke (New York Times)
Texas Underwater: Life-Threatening Texas Floods Kill Two, More Storms to Come (Bloomberg)
Mandatory evacuations across the Texas Hill Country are underway as life-threatening flash floods wreck bridges and roads with more heavy rain expected overnight.
A wide swath of Texas is forecast to receive as much as eight inches (20 centimeters) of additional precipitation through Friday morning to cap off a week of downpours that revived memories of the catastrophic deluge that killed more than 130 people a year ago.
Science Speaks: Scientists Affirm Climate Change Fuels Extreme Weather (Bloomberg)
Human-induced changes to the global climate have “a direct and well-understood impact” on extreme heat and rainfall, according to a landmark new US National Academies report.
The assessment comes as weather disasters dominate the headlines and as the public and private sectors pour resources into trying to understand what’s coming next.
This week alone, the eastern US grappled with intense heat and wildfire smoke; forecasters warned of dangerous flooding in
Texas; and fire
risk in Northern California prompted power shutoffs. The report is a step up in seriousness and authority — and potentially influence — for attribution science, a field that’s blossomed in plain view and relatively quickly.
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Trump Rails Against Election Systems — and Familiar Enemies (Politico)
President Donald Trump on Thursday announced his administration is declassifying documents that he says outline vulnerabilities in US election systems, Politico reports.
In his 25-minute speech from the White House, Trump described efforts by China to access US voter rolls and offered details about long-studied risks with electronic voting machines.
If you strip away the typical Trump hallmarks — from “rigged and stolen” elections to punishing broadcasters that declined to air the speech live — what we saw was a pretty vanilla, sneakily boring policy speech, Politico Playbook writes
.
Hardening election infrastructure against foreign interference. Assisting states in protecting their voting systems. Shoring up well-known vulnerabilities. These relatively uncontroversial ideas, dressed up in the president’s fire-and-brimstone garb, have been priorities for every recent administration.
Trump's wishlist, the SAVE Act, appears dead in the Senate and there’s no indication his address will move the needle. And the administration’s confrontational approach with uncooperative states has fueled anxiety about just how far Trump will go to enforce his will.
Democrats fear Trump is gearing up to blunt their momentum in the midterms — from deploying the National Guard or ICE to polling locations, ordering the Postal Service to block mail-in ballots to axing legitimate voters from rolls through efforts purportedly aimed at noncitizens, according to Playbook.
But there’s a version of last night’s speech that any president could have, and indeed has, given: a warning that foreign adversaries pose a threat to US elections and that “every American… should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest and fair election system anywhere in the world.”
What comes next, Playbook writes, particularly after Trump dismantled some agencies charged with overseeing election security, is murkier.
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Receipt Reality: Two-Thirds of Americans Find Groceries Unaffordable, Post-Ipsos Poll Finds (Washington Post)
About two-thirds, or 66 percent, of Americans say they would describe the cost of groceries as unaffordable, up sharply from the 45 percent who said the same thing in February before the conflict started.
Pump
Pressure Returns: US
Drivers Are Again Paying More Than $5 a Gallon for Diesel (Bloomberg)
The flare-up between the US and Iran has prompted a severe tightening in fuel markets in the US and Europe this week, coming just a week after Moscow imposed a ban on
diesel exports as Ukraine steps up strikes on Russian refineries. A surge in wholesale costs is now being passed on to prices at the pump.
Fuel
has spiked faster than crude since the onset of the war, straining consumers and stoking speculation that the Federal Reserve will soon need to hike interest rates to tame inflation.
Premium MAGA Rants: Trump Media to Sell Faster Access to President’s Social Posts (Wall Street Journal)
President Trump broke with tradition by posting near-constant policy decisions and market-moving news on his social-media platform. Now his media company wants traders and investors to pay for instant access to his Truth Social posts, the latest example of the first family mixing its business interests and White House affairs.
Trump Media said Thursday that it plans to launch a data feed that gives real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking accounts on its Truth Social platform. The company didn’t provide details on how much the service would cost or how much more quickly customers would receive Trump’s posts than the rest of the world.
Financial firms routinely pay for APIs
from social-media platforms, including X and Reddit, to get data milliseconds faster than it becomes available online.
Changes to tariff policy beginning last year shifted stock prices within moments. During the US war with Iran, Trump’s periodic posts on stop-and-start peace talks have at times battered oil futures, leaving some traders on the
wrong side of million-dollar bets.
Public
Health Alert: Lab Closures Threaten Cyclospora Research as Parasite Outbreak Sickens Thousands (Bloomberg)
Tensions Build in Ukraine: Zelenskiy's Government Plunged Into Turmoil After Defense Minister Fired (Financial Times)
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
was on Thursday facing one of the biggest displays of dissent since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion after a move to oust his defense minister prompted a public and political backlash, the Financial Times reports.
The firing late on Wednesday of 35-year-old Mykhailo Fedorov after only six months prompted angry demonstrations across Ukraine and the resignation of a senior air force commander.
AI Race Rewritten Overnight: China’s Kimi Model Erases America’s AI Lead (Axios)
America's commanding lead
in advanced AI is gone.
A Chinese moonshot — literally and figuratively — has caught up to models that defined the US frontier just weeks ago, at a substantially lower price.
Kimi K3, a massive new model by Beijing-based Moonshot AI, threatens the foundations of America's AI boom. Its release Thursday dazzled developers, jolted Silicon Valley and reset the AI race overnight.
Kimi immediately vaulted into the top tier
of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests by
AI evaluator Arena.
Cash for Guardrails: Dario Amodei, Anthropic Employees Give Millions to Regulate AI (Bloomberg)
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and five other employees of the company gave more than $2 million to a super political action committee, Public First, focused on regulating artificial intelligence, boosting the AI safety movement’s war chest in this year’s midterm elections.
Underlying the dynamic is a policy disagreement between the top AI companies: OpenAI wants lenient federal rules focused on transparency, while Anthropic has lobbied for more stringent government oversight, including mandatory testing and audits of the technology.
New in Tech: Apple Readies OLED iPad Mini, With Low-End and Air Updates Coming in 2027 (Bloomberg)
Football Politics: UK Urges FIFA to Investigate Argentina’s Falklands Banner (Bloomberg)
The UK government has called on football’s governing body FIFA to investigate whether the Argentinian team breached its rules by waving a banner in support of their country’s claim to the Falkland Islands after defeating England in the World Cup semifinals.
After Argentina came from behind to seal victory with two late goals in a fractious match on Wednesday, the team’s players including superstar Lionel Messi celebrated with a fan’s banner that read “Las Malvinas son Argentinas,” or "The Falklands are Argentinian.” The UK has sovereignty over the archipelago off the Argentinian coast, and the two nations fought a war over it in 1982.
The banner appears to breach FIFA rules stating that teams are liable and may be subject to disciplinary measures for “the use of gestures, words, objects or any other means to transmit a message that is not appropriate for a sports event, particularly messages that are of a political, ideological, religious or offensive nature.”
“The World Cup might not be ours, but the Falkland Islands definitely are,” outgoing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesperson said Thursday. He “wishes both teams well for the final, especially Spain.”
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UK Sports Reset: The British Open Brings Golf’s Biggest Names to Royal Birkdale (ESPN)
The Open Championship, golf’s oldest major and the final major of the season, is underway this weekend at Royal Birkdale in Southport, England, where the Claret Jug will be awarded Sunday.
The field is loaded, with defending champion Scottie Scheffler leading the favorites, followed by Rory McIlroy, Matt Fitzpatrick, Tommy Fleetwood and Jon Rahm, while European contenders like Viktor Hovland, Robert MacIntyre, Tyrrell Hatton and Justin Rose are drawing serious betting attention.
Scheffler remains the projected winner, but his missed cut at last week’s Scottish Open, his first in nearly four years, has made the race feel more open than usual.
Fast, firm and dry conditions at Royal Birkdale could turn this into a classic links test, giving homegrown European players and in-form risers like Scottish Open winner Tom Kim a real chance to shake up the leaderboard.
Fans can stream the British Open on Peacock, with live TV coverage also available on NBC and USA Network.
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NYC Chatter: Chic London Club Annabel’s Acquires $100M Meatpacking Site (The Real Deal)
The owner of London’s famed private members’ club Annabel’s has acquired the “Little Flatiron” building in the Meatpacking District with plans to make the site its New York outpost, according to numerous media reports.
Title Encore: New York Knicks Named Best Team at ESPYS After Winning 2026 NBA Finals (People)
The New York Knicks are adding even more hardware to their growing collection.
The reigning NBA champions took home the prize for Best Team at the 2026 ESPYS this week, roughly one month after clinching their first title in 53 years.
Knicks captain Jalen Brunson was joined on stage by teammates OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges, Miles “Deuce” McBride and Karl-Anthony Towns, where the newly minted champs reflected on their epic playoff run earlier this summer, which concluded with a Game 5 triumph over the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals.
It was a big day for not only the Knicks, but especially Brunson, who also won the award for Best NBA Player. His nominations included Best Athlete, Men’s Sports and Best Championship Performance.
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Weekend Streaming and Film Guide
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World Cup Final (Fox, Telemundo)
Spain and Argentina meet for the 2026 World Cup title on Sunday at 3 PM ET at MetLife Stadium, airing on Fox and Telemundo. The spectacle goes beyond the match, with a 25- to 30-minute Super Bowl-style halftime show featuring Madonna, Shakira, BTS and Justin Bieber, curated by Coldplay’s Chris Martin.
The Odyssey (In Theaters)
Christopher Nolan turns Homer’s ancient epic
into a massive IMAX spectacle, following Odysseus’ dangerous, decade-long journey home after the Trojan War. With Matt Damon leading a stacked cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson and Charlize Theron, this is mythology rebuilt as a blockbuster.
The Hawk (Netflix)
Will Ferrell is back in sports-comedy mode as Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, a washed-up golf legend chasing one last shot at greatness. With Molly Shannon and Luke Wilson joining the chaos, Netflix’s new comedy looks like an easy weekend watch built on big swings, family dysfunction and comeback-sports absurdity.
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On US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announcing that the US Mint will produce golden $1 coins featuring Trump’s portrait:
"Job growth is slow, wage growth is down, and oil is spiking again, which is why the president is laser-focused on putting his name and face on currency."
-- Seth Meyers
"Cool, that should buy almost a full tank of gas."
-- Seth Meyers
“Trump’s
signature isn’t elegant enough to be on money. It doesn’t even look like it says Donald Trump; it looks like it says, ‘Aah!’ It looks like he was trying to draw a straight line on a piece of paper while riding the bumper cars.”
-- Seth Meyers
And from the ESPYS stage: Marcello Hernandez kicked off the 2026 awards show in New York City with a monologue packed with jokes about Jake Paul, the Knicks’ championship breakthrough and more.
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