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A Stunning Democratic Primary & SpaceX Just Crashed, Twice

An AI Shakeup At Google & Kyiv Runs Out Of Interceptors

Author

Marcus Gee-Lim
August 06, 2026

Hi readers, happy Thursday! Today, we’re covering a primary surprise in Michigan, a deal in the Strait of Hormuz, a pair of crashes at SpaceX, Kyiv’s interceptor crisis, the Air Force causing a civilian plane crash, Trump’s $100 billion in tariff refunds, and an AI shakeup at Google.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” ― George Orwell 

Mission Impossible In Michigan

@AbdulElSayed via X.

On Tuesday night, progressive public-health-official-turned-politician Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat. The race saw him narrowly defeat establishment Democrat Haley Stevens (a U.S. representative from Michigan) by less than 15,000 votes in an election where more than 1.5 million ballots were cast.

El-Sayed’s campaign overcame a massive spending gap to eke out its win. A group of six outside political organizations spent a whopping $62 million in order to air ads in support of Stevens, while Sayed’s supporters spent less than $4 million. Over half of Stevens’ political spending came from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an organization dedicated to promoting Israel’s political interests in the U.S. – the rest of her funding came from an assortment of mysterious organizations that are hiding where their money comes from. During their last debate of the campaign, El-Sayed grilled Stevens over a recent vote she’d cast in favor of a pro-Israeli bill, accusing her of engaging in a quid pro quo pro-Israel funders.“That is the pro quo that comes with the quid,” he said, adding, “It really comes down to how you are funded.”

Now, El-Sayed will face off against Republican Mike Rogers in November’s election. While he might have some of the Democratic Party’s funding behind him this time, it’s likely that November’s race will also be an uphill funding battle for the Democratic candidate. The GOP’s Senate campaign arm has already set aside $45 million to help Rogers win Michigan’s Senate seat, and AIPAC is also reportedly considering a major financial campaign to support the Republican candidate. 

These Aren’t The Deals We’re Looking For

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a deal! Almost. And also, it’s not The Big Deal that will actually end the war in Iran. Yesterday, Iran and Oman agreed in principle to a deal to open a shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz. The temporary deal is set to last for 60 days, and would see all ships looking to enter the strait sail through Iranian waters on the north side of the waterway, while outbound traffic would exit the area through Oman-controlled waters on the south side of the strait. In a change from an earlier draft of the deal that we wrote about on Tuesday, no tolls would be charged on ships moving through the area during the 60-day period.

According to Axios (citing two regional sources and a U.S. official), the U.S. is also involved in the negotiations, though the shipping deal is separate from a peace deal that would bring about a full end to the U.S.-Israel-Iran war. A spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson stated that the negotiation process was “professional” and “moving forward,” adding that “the two sides had reached a mutual understanding ⁠on the geographical parameters of the route under discussion.” The deal, he went on, would likely be signed soon as long as “third parties” don’t interfere with the review process.

SpaceX Comes Crashing Down

Image: “CRS-4” by SpaceX via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0

  • This week, SpaceX was involved in two major crashes. Let’s start with the first – on Tuesday, the company issued its first earnings report since going public. The firm’s revenues almost doubled year-over-year to an impressive $7.8 billion, but its spending far outpaced that, rising to an eye-watering $18.3 billion (up from 2.8 billion last year). 

  • Executives seemed unconcerned about the rising expenditures, with Musk predicting that the company should hit $1 trillion in revenue by 2030 and others predicting that the firm’s Starlink internet service could soon outperform the “the big three” of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Despite those high-flying predictions, the stock fell by 8% after the news – that’s because investors are concerned about the firm burning money and the fact that the company’s IPO lock-up period is ending today, meaning early investors and employees will be allowed to sell up to 912 million shares on the market.

  • Besides Tuesday’s financial crash, SpaceX also suffered a physical crash yesterday when one of its rockets slammed into the Moon. The rocket in question was a Falcon 9 rocket which was used last January to bring two commercial lunar landers to the Moon. Since that mission, the abandoned rocket has been floating in space with no fuel, and its trajectory eventually led it to yesterday’s crash, which created a crater 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.

Kyiv Needs Cover

  • Yesterday, Russia fired 115 drones and 24 ballistic missiles at Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city. While the city’s air defenses were able to shoot down most of the drones, Ukraine is currently facing a shortage of missile interceptors, meaning all of the missiles made contact. 21 people were killed in the attack, dozens more were injured, and multiple buildings – including warehouses and a postal sorting center – were destroyed by the missiles.

  • The attack highlights an unfortunate new reality for Ukraine: Russia’s air attacks are becoming increasingly deadly as the country’s supply of ballistic missile interceptors is running low. Just last weekend, Russia fired off a similar attack – Ukrainian air defenses were able to intercept just one of the 27 ballistic missiles fired off in the barrage, and at least 10 people were killed.

  • Why is Ukraine running out of interceptors? It’s simple – over the course of the Russia-Ukraine war, the vast majority of Kyiv’s interceptors were supplied to it by the U.S. But now that the U.S. is fighting its own war with Iran, Washington has diverted much of its interceptors to protect its assets and allies in the Middle East. “Ballistic missile interceptors could have saved the lives of those killed today,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in the wake of yesterday’s attack.

Additional World News

That’s Not What The Air Force Is For…

  • According to recent reporting from Wired, the U.S. government directly caused a medevac plane to crash into the side of a mountain this May. The plane, which had taken off from Roswell, New Mexico just before midnight, was headed to pick up a patient in the nearby town of Ruidoso, which is usually a short 30-minute flight. Unfortunately for the two pilots and two nurses aboard the medevac plane, they wouldn’t make it to their destination. That’s because 100 miles to the west, the U.S. Air Force’s 746th Test Squadron (of the 704th Test Group) was holding its annual NAVFEST event, which involved multiple units testing electronic warfare technology including GPS jammers.

  • As the medevac plane flew west, its GPS technology was jammed by the Air Force event. An air traffic control tower instructed the crew to fly west for a minute before flying north, at which point they’d receive more instructions “in a couple of minutes.” This was because the controller was dealing with multiple other planes who’d also had their GPS shut off by the military. By 12:08 a.m., the medevac plane had already overshot its destination by 10 miles, but caught sight of the Ruidoso airport and were granted a request to try a visual landing without the use of instruments. But completing a landing in the pitch black of the desert at midnight isn’t easy by any means. In this case, the crew didn’t realize that the 10,000-foot-high Capitan Mountains were in between them and the landing strip – they tried to pull up at the last second, but still hit the mountain at full speed, instantly killing all four people on board.

Liberating Those Tariff Refunds

  • Last April, Trump announced a series of “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries across the globe, with tariff rates ranging from a baseline 10% to a high of 47%. This February, the Supreme Court ruled those tariffs unlawful, forcing the federal government to pay back all the money it had collected via a series of refunds.

  • Yesterday, those refunds officially passed the $100 billion mark, which accounts for roughly 60% of all the revenue collected during the 10 months the tariffs were active. As for the rest of the money, $29 billion is still under review by trade authorities, and $1.6 billion is being held because some companies who are owed a refund still haven’t provided the government with their billing information. While the refund effort has cost the government a fair amount of resources, that doesn’t seem to have stopped Trump’s drive to tariff other countries – since the February Supreme Court decision, the White House has replaced its now-illegal tariffs with equivalent tariffs under different laws, including a 50% tax on some imports from Canada.

Additional USA News

 

Google Loses Its DeepMind

  • After suffering a slow start in the AI race, Google has recently taken a commanding position in the competition, especially after the release of its Gemini 2.5 Pro model last March. The vast majority of the tech giant’s AI growth has (up until now) been steered by DeepMind, a subsidiary company headed (up until now) CEO and founder Demis Hassabis. 

  • Now, it looks like a Succession-style event has struck the company’s AI division. Yesterday, Deepmind’s chief scientist Jeff Dean – alongside a raft of other top scientists – announced that he was leaving the company, and Hassabis announced that he was stepping down from his role as CEO. Moving forward, the AI trailblazer will serve in a hands-off chairman role at Deepmind, and has also been given the title of Chief Scientist of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. 

  • The mass exodus is just the latest in a series of AI talent departures from Google, with multiple top AI scientists leaving the tech giant this year. Alphabet shares dropped 4% on the news.

Additional Reads

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