• Daily Pnut
  • Posts
  • India's "Cockroach" Movement & Massive Wildfires Scorch Europe

India's "Cockroach" Movement & Massive Wildfires Scorch Europe

A Brief Peace In Iran & The Real Impact Of Trump's Boat Strikes

Author

Marcus Gee-Lim
July 28, 2026

Hi readers, happy Tuesday! Today we’re covering a brief peace in Iran, massive wildfires in Spain and France, India’s “cockroach” movement, an attack in Berlin, the results of Trump’s boat strikes, a shooting in Seattle, and why orbital datacenters might be a problem.

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” ― Henry David Thoreau

We’re Just Recycling Headlines At This Point

“U.S. Forces Patrol Arabian Sea near M/V Touska” by U.S. Navy

After almost two weeks of consecutive airstrikes on Iran, the U.S. stopped its bombing campaign in Iran on Friday. The pause came after Trump’s advisors warned the president that the U.S. military was running dangerously low on munitions in the Middle East, which is probably not a good thing for the U.S. Since then, the warzone has quieted down as Iran also stopped launching strikes on nearby countries hosting U.S. military bases. In a statement to Reuters, an anonymous Iranian official clarified that Tehran’s stance in the war “remains ‘attack ​for attack’: if the attacks stop, Iran will also halt its operations. That message has already been conveyed to the United ⁠States.”

Since then, both sides have reportedly engaged in Pakistan-mediated peace talks, though Iran has, as usual, denied involvement in any negotiations. As the peace held over the weekend, oil prices dipped. On Monday they closed down 8.7%, at $88.36 per barrel, down from last week’s peak of $102.

However, the news hasn’t been all good. On Saturday, the Pentagon quietly updated its casualty numbers for Trump’s war with Iran. Last week, that tally included 14 dead and 482 injured, but the numbers were revised upwards to 18 dead and 624 wounded, meaning the government failed to report almost 140 injuries over the past few weeks. When pressed on the lack of transparency, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that the lagging data was caused by “temporary data disruptions” without providing any further explanation.

Bordeaux Is Burning

Since late last week, Spain and France have been burning. The two neighboring countries are experiencing massive wildfires in the wake of a European heatwave that saw temperatures eclipse 104°F (40°C) in many places, turning old apartment buildings into sweatboxes and forests into kindling.

Across both countries, more than 300,000 people have been forced to evacuate in the face of wildfires over the past four days. The most-impacted area is the countryside surrounding the French city of Bordeaux, where over 200,000 people have been forced to flee wildfires that have burned over 162 square miles (420 square kilometers). That’s an area roughly four times the size of Paris that’s been burnt to a crisp in just four days. Meanwhile, in Spain, fires have claimed over 297 square miles (770 square kilometers) outside of Madrid – an area larger than the Spanish capital itself – prompting more than 63,000 evacuations.

For now, temperatures have cooled for a bit, and emergency crews have been able to partially contain the blazes. But they have a deadline: temperatures are expected to rise again starting on Wednesday, and the blazes are creating rare “pyrocumulonimbus” clouds, which create their own winds and whirlwinds that help spread the fires further.

The Cockroach Rises

  • Since early June, something called the “cockroach” movement has been taking over India. The cockroaches in question are actually unemployed Indian youth, who were described as “cockroaches” by India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant in May – though he claims he was misquoted.

  • The cockroach movement started in response to a series of leaks related to national exams, which are used to place millions of students in highly-coveted university seats or government jobs. Those leaks apparently occurred just before the tests were held in May – once the government caught wind of them after the test, results for more than 2 million students were cancelled, which led to at least a dozen suicides by students who felt cornered by having to re-take the life-changing exams.

  • Since then, the cockroach movement has garnered millions of followers, hosting protests in New Delhi calling for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The Modi government’s response to the movement (including police crackdowns and essentially detaining an educator holding a hunger strike) only helped it gain momentum, eventually resulting in Pradhan’s resignation on Saturday. Now, the question is: where does all this momentum go now? The movement’s organizers say they plan to push for more reforms in India’s education system, and some might look to gain power in India’s government.

Blood Spilled In Berlin

  • On Saturday night, a van drove into a crowd gathered for Berlin’s Pride festival. The attack resulted in 1 death and at least 29 injuries, and also led to the cancellation of the celebrations. The next day, German police tracked down the perpetrator, engaging him in a shootout in a Berlin suburb that ended in his death. 

  • “Around 6 p.m. (1600 GMT), the suspect involved in yesterday's attack in Tiergarten was located at an allotment garden ​complex in Spandau,” Berlin’s police department wrote on Twitter yesterday, referring to one of the city’s western suburbs. “According to initial findings, he ran towards officers ​while armed with a bladed weapon; police... subsequently opened fire. Despite immediate resuscitation efforts by the Berlin Fire Department, he died at the scene.”

  • The suspect was identified as Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen with Lebanese roots. In 2025, he apparently traveled to Syria with the goal of joining the Islamic State, but was arrested for that effort before he was able to actually contact the organization. He served a three-month prison term in Lebanon before returning to Germany, where he was arrested again and was handed a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months in youth custody. “We will defend the freedom, openness, and liberal ​spirit of our lives and our society with everything we can do,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz ahead of a memorial service on Sunday.

Additional World News

Overpaying for car insurance? Find out.

Find out if you have the best deal. Compare multiple car insurance quotes on LendingTree.

So Many Boat Strikes, So Few Results

“Coast Guard Cutter Tahoma busts cocaine ‘triple threat’” by U.S. Coast Guard

  • Since last September, the U.S. has been semi-discriminately launching strikes on alleged “drug boats” traveling through international waters. Across those 67 boat strikes, the military has killed 221 people, but according to both the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Pentagon, the campaign hasn’t actually slowed the flow of cocaine into the U.S.

  • The Washington Post recently acquired a DEA assessment of the boat strikes – according to DEA analysts, the military’s attacks haven’t affected the supply or price of cocaine over the past months; instead, the alleged traffickers are supposedly using larger, slower boats and traveling closer to coastlines, where the Pentagon is less likely to authorize strikes.

  • In April, the president claimed that in the wake of his boat attacks, “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” That claim was directly contradicted by his own DEA, which stated that “Price and availability have not been noticeably affected.” A Pentagon report also noted that the attacks haven’t even pressured dealers to start cutting their product, stating that purity has remained consistent compared to 2025. Other data shows that the Coast Guard is still seizing massive amounts of cocaine moving around inside the U.S., and the price of a kilo has dropped 50% over the past five years, indicating that supply is only increasing.

A Shootout In Seattle

  • Over the weekend, Seattle’s iconic Space Needle hosted the Bite of Seattle food festival, an annual fair that draws roughly 350,000 every year. Unfortunately, the event was interrupted by a deadly shooting on Sunday which ended with three deaths and several injuries. According to local police, this wasn’t a mass shooting attempt – instead, they say that the incident involved three suspects shooting at each other. 

  • One of the suspects, a 15-year-old, was taken into police custody alive. “Based on the evidence at the scene, investigators believe” the 15-year-old suspect “and one of the deceased engaged in a gunfight with at least one other unknown suspect,” The other shooter is still at large, but authorities have stated that they’re likely not a threat to public safety. The three dead were two men, ages 19 and 44, and a 56-year-old woman; the four injured included three adults who were discharged from the hospital on Sunday and a 2-year-old boy, who was in satisfactory condition on Monday.

Additional USA News

 

The Impact Of Orbital Datacenters

  • According to experts, the space-based datacenters being pushed by tech oligarchs including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could be “catastrophic” for life on Earth. In a petition submitted to the FCC earlier this month, a group of space industry experts and environmentalists argue that orbital datacenters could “violate federal law” by causing pollution in the upper atmosphere, destroying the ozone layer, or even blocking out light in some areas of the Earth. 

  • The multiple environmental groups which have signed on to the petition claim that orbital datacenters should be regulated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which provides mechanisms for the federal government to “assess impacts, propose alternatives, examine mitigation, and disclose risks that would help inform whether such proposals are in the public interest.”

  • Orbital datacenter evangelists “describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms,” the petition goes on. “But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values.” Those impacts include the particulates generated when defunct satellites are sent to burn up in the atmosphere. “There is a lot of complex material in these things, and even if they do burn up, you do not want to be filling up the atmosphere with refuse from these any more than you would want it coming from a smoke stack,” said one former leader at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Additional Reads

Peanut For Your Thoughts

These Iran war headlines are like a horror movie where the cast just keeps walking in circles in the forest. “Wait, have we been here before?”

Editor + Writer: Marcus Gee-Lim

Designer: Joe Stella