Welcome to Stack the Week for Friday, July 17 The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the subscriptions, the feedback, the emails, and the notes. And the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience. Remember, this is a podcast too. Listen while you organize the new bookshelves, weed the garden bed or arrange briquets to get moving on that brisket that everyone loves so. For paid readers, I’ve gone back in and put some thoughts about why I made some of the choices I did. Okay, let’s start. Iran Infrastructure Week The Iran war is an infrastructure story today. U.S. bombing moved deeper into the systems civilians and markets depend on: bridges, ports, shipping routes, energy sites and drinking-water plants. The campaignis aimed at the physical network that lets Iran move troops, supplies and oil. The chronic kink in the Strait of Hormuz is changing corporate behavior: According to the AP, Chevron is investing in Iraqi oil fields and a pipeline route that could bypass Hormuz. Remember the time when people used to talk about this war being over? Now companies are placing bets about a permanent condition where the Strait of Hormuz is up for grabs. Iran answered by widening the target set on its side of the Gulf. One Iranian strike damaged a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant. In a dry Gulf country, desalination is not a side industry; it is the tap. Kuwait gets about 90 percent of its drinking water from desalination. The fire there was contained, but the point was made: modern Gulf water and power systems are now a part of Iran’s target list. Iran also expanded the map, striking eastern Syria in its first attack on Syrian territory in this conflict, saying it aimed at a U.S. special operations command center. The conflict is spreading, which makes it harder to stop and increases the chances that more countries—and their soldiers, supplies, and economies—get pulled in. I was unsatisfied about this Syrian bit. On the one hand, expanding the war and the downsides of that are kind of obvious, but I felt like there was something more to be said about an attack in Syria, but I just couldn’t figure out what that was by the time we got to publication hour. Iranian officials say dozens have been killed and hundreds wounded in recent days. The United States is on its seventh straight day of attacks. ICE Pressure The Associated Press reports that David Brouillette, the ICE agent who killed Johan Guerrero, has a long history of violent, terrifying behavior and serious mental‑health struggles, raising the question of how someone with that record cleared ICE’s vetting, received a gun, and was sent into an armed immigration operation. Johan Guerrero was in the country legally, was not the target, and was shot while his wife watched. I came across this interview while I was looking for how to pronounce David Brouillette’s name and came across this interview with his ex-wife. “How do you keep getting into these jobs when you’re around guns all the time.” It’s an extraordinary interview. AP reports that Brouillette’s relatives warned supervisors about his instability and abuse, that he cycled through law‑enforcement and public‑safety jobs, and that he was removed from a volunteer fire department after disputes and refusal to follow orders—each a red flag that should have mattered in a federal background check. Democrats have called for an investigation. That investigation is really about whether the pressure to deport has hardened into a machine that reliably produces human tragedy. Start with hiring and vetting. If ICE is expanding quickly, are standards slipping? Are background checks catching histories of violence, instability, misconduct, or bad judgment before people are armed and sent into volatile encounters, or has the system accepted risks it once would have rejected to meet the deportation quota? Also training. These operations increasingly look less like civil immigration enforcement and more like fugitive work: vehicle stops, surprise encounters, families nearby, frightened people, split‑second decisions. If officers are not trained for de‑escalation, for mistaken identity and families in the line of fire, the policy is not only aggressive, it is careless. This is mission creep on top of mission creep. Immigration enforcement moved away from focusing on “the worst of the worst,” the phrase that was meant to reassure voters that deportation would focus on the most dangerous people. Now it is shifting toward a more militarized posture in which civil enforcement begins to resemble street policing or tactical arrest work. ICE says it conducts more stops away from homes because agents often cannot enter without a warrant. But that limit is not a loophole to route around; it is the system drawing a line. Slowness, imposed by courts and standards, protects values, including that human life should have some value. Voters wanted deportations, but that signal is not a license to do anything. They expect promises to be fulfilled inside American rules, which is why the language became “the worst of the worst” in the first place. Candidate Trump was pledging restraint. And finally there is a permission structure here. If officials describe immigrants as invaders, praise agents after deaths, attack judges and communities, and raise quotas instead of pausing after tragedy, agents learn something: that force will be defended first and examined later. Maybe. The Burnham Age Begins Andy Burnham was elected leader of Britain’s governing Labour Party on Friday, making him the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade. Though new traditions come slowly to a venerable political system, that pace of turnover almost begs for a new ritual in keeping with Britain’s love of ceremony: something like each time a new occupant checks bags at 10 Downing Street, he should pose for a photo next to the catapult that will eventually eject them from office. At least then the exits would start to match the drama of the arrivals. The previous PM Keir Starmer resigned in June under months of pressure from Labour MPs who feared he would lose the next election to the hard-right Reform UK. Burnham hopes to forestall the fate that met his predecessors by rebalancing power. He earned the nickname “King of the North” as mayor of Greater Manchester, where he became a national figure by arguing that northern England deserved more power, money and respect. In his victory speech, he said Britain took a wrong turn in the 1980s, when political power became centralized and economic power was privatized. His core promise is the biggest rebalancing of power Britain has ever seen: moving control over transport, housing, skills, spending and economic growth away from Whitehall—the shorthand for London’s central government departments—and toward regional leaders. Burnham is trying to answer the same political disease that feeds populism all over the world: voters who think government happens somewhere else, for someone else. His immediate political task is to stop the nationalist Reform UK’s rise by convincing those voters that Labour can still hear them. His governing task is harder: prove that devolution is not a slogan, but a machine that can make life cheaper, fairer and more competent in the places that feel ignored. This preceding paragraph is essentially the kind that I’d like to have in every item in the stack. What happened, why it happened and then this: why it matters beyond the narrow confines of the story. Burnham’s first test is whether “power out of Whitehall” survives Treasury arithmetic. A high-debt, low-growth state can promise regions control over housing, transport, skills and growth, the question is whether it will also let them– or can let them– control enough money to make those promises real. Gaza Funeral Strike People gathered to bury one victim of the war. The war added more. An Israeli strike hit a funeral in Gaza on Friday, killing at least seven people and wounding 22, according to Palestinian officials. The funeral was for a Palestinian killed in an earlier strike the same day. The formal ceasefire agreed in October reduced the heaviest fighting, but it has not stopped killing in Gaza. Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 1,123 people have been killed since the ceasefire took effect. Israel says its continued strikes respond to militant attacks and ceasefire violations; five Israeli soldiers have been killed over the same period. Xi’s AI pitch The next generation of AI will not just live inside chatbots that explain soccer offsides rules. It will make decisions in hospitals, schools, workplaces, police departments, banks, border systems, energy grids and media feeds. It will help decide which job applicants are interviewed, which medical scans get flagged, which neighborhoods get more patrols, which loans are approved and which power plants turn on when the grid is stressed. That is why the real question for humans is not which company has the biggest models—or which company has the largest initial public offering—but who writes the rules that protect ordinary people. Neither the United States nor China, the world’s two biggest AI powers, offers a clear, trusted way to protect everyday rights while this technology spreads. The incentives for dominance and profit often point away from those guardrails rather than toward them. That was the backdrop for Xi Jinping’s speech at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Friday. He cast AI as a “symphony of international cooperation” and used the stage to launch the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, WAICO, an intergovernmental body headquartered in Shanghai and advertised as a way to help poorer and middle‑income countries catch up. In plain language, WAICO is meant to be a club for governments that want help using AI.
