Hey readers, happy Thursday! Almost there. Today, we’re covering Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral surprise, the fallout in Iran, the NATO summit, Jeff Bezos’ wedding, Chuck Schumer’s hospital visit, RFK’s new vaccine committee, and yet another AI company stealing things.

Here’s the good news: researchers have figured out a way to turn plastic into painkillers – more specifically paracetamol (Tylenol) – using genetically modified E. coli bacteria.

“A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless.” – Charles de Gaulle

Mamdani’s Mayoral Madness

You might not have known the name Zohran Mamdani two days ago, but you’re probably fully familiar with it at this point. Mamdani, a 33 year-old New York state assemblyman, won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday night, upsetting former governor Andrew Cuomo in a massive tone-shift for the Democratic party. 

In the Big Apple’s ranked-choice voting election, Mamdani secured 44% of first-choice ballots – a decent amount more than Cuomo’s 36% – and is projected to carry that lead as losing candidates’ ballots are redistributed to voters’ second-choice candidates. While the election technically isn’t over until one candidate receives 50% of all ballots, Cuomo conceded on Tuesday night.

Mamdani is a vocal democratic socialist, and ran on a platform of left-leaning populist policies. Some highlights include free public buses, city-run grocery stores, a rent freeze, a minimum wage hike, and a streamlined permitting process for small businesses. While the Democratic mayoral nomination is basically a free pass into New York City Hall most years, Mamdani will likely face stiffer than usual competition in November’s election. Incumbent mayor Eric Adams is running as an independent despite his multiple scandals, Cuomo might also run as an independent, and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa might see an outpouring of MAGA support over the next few months. Trump has even chimed in on this mayoral election, calling Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic” in the wake of his triumph. He might actually be funnelling more New Yorkers to Mamdani’s campaign with that comment.

What’s The Forecast For Fordow?

The dust has cleared over Iran, and it’s time to take stock of the U.S.’s bunker-buster strikes on three of the country’s nuclear facilities. Soon after the bombs were dropped, anonymous U.S. intelligence officials leaked information from a preliminary damage report to the media. Despite the fact that American bombers dropped a total of fourteen 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear programs, the officials said that intel indicated that Tehran’s nuclear capabilities were only set back three months by the attacks. The report, they claimed, also showed that most of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles were moved out of the targeted facilities before the bombs were dropped. 

Those assessments understandably angered Trump and his allies, who were hoping to claim a clean and simple win for the White House. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth backed up Trump’s initial claims that the facilities were “obliterated” by the bombs, stating, “Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target and worked perfectly.” The next day, the CIA pushed out a report indicating that U.S. bombs had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program, though it stopped short of claiming that the program was fully destroyed.

The confusion continued during yesterday's NATO summit in the Netherlands. “The intelligence was very inconclusive,” Trump told journalists about the damage from the strikes. “The intelligence says we don’t know. It could’ve been very severe. That’s what the intelligence suggests.” At the same summit, Trump indicated that he would be meeting with Iran next week, saying, “We may sign an agreement. I don't know. To me, I don't think it's that necessary.” Does this man know anything at all?

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No Hanging Out At The Hague

• The annual NATO summit took place in The Hague yesterday. Trump left the meeting early in the day after spending less than 24 hours in the Netherlands. Why the early exit? Unfortunately for anyone hoping for some juicy drama, there wasn’t any – instead, NATO leaders simply folded to Trump’s demands.

• In his short trip to the land of the Dutch, Trump received promises from NATO members that they would all be beefing up their defense spending, something the president has been pushing for since the beginning of his first term. In return, Trump promised to “stand with” Article 5 of the NATO charter, which states that an armed attack against one NATO country constitutes an attack on them all. “They want to protect their country, and they need the United States, and without the United States, it’s not going to be the same,” Trump after leaving the summit. “I left here differently. I left here saying, ‘These people really love their countries. It’s not a rip-off.’ And we are here to help them protect their country.”

Let’s Get Married In Venice

• Money, as they say, can’t buy class. But it can buy the entire city of Venice for a couple of days. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, his filler-faced bride-to-be, are demonstrating both of those ideas for the remainder of this week, by essentially buying out the floating city of Venice for wedding celebrations stretching from today until Sunday. Guests include Ivanka Trump, a few Kardashians, Jay-Z & Beyoncé, and whatever group of tech billionaires that Bezos isn’t enemies with.

• The entire celebration will span multiple Venetian islands over multiple days, and has been kept extremely hush-hush for security reasons. Why? Besides the fact that most normal people aren’t fans of Bezos or his friends on a good day, the billionaire is also catching heat for the over-the-top wedding celebrations. 

• On Monday, a group of protestors rolled out a massive banner reading, “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax,” in Venice’s iconic St. Mark’s Square. Another group of protestors threatened to fill some canals with inflatable crocodiles in order to block an event at a cultural building in the city center, forcing a last-minute change of venue for the billionaire. Few details of the wedding have surfaced because Bezos has made every wedding worker sign an NDA, but we know that the wedding will likely cost more than $40 million and that the wedding invitation looks like the work of an eighth-grader who just picked up MS Paint.

Additional World News

• Colombia's president bypasses lawmakers and issues decree to let voters decide on labor reform (AP)

• Trump calls for Netanyahu corruption trial to be cancelled (Guardian)

• Iran turns to internal crackdown in wake of 12-day war (Reuters)

• At least 16 people killed and 400 injured in Kenyan protests (Guardian)

  7 Israeli Soldiers Killed in Gaza, Military Says (NYT, $)

• Thailand's 'weed wild west' faces new rules as smuggling to UK rises (BBC)

A Big Hit From The Heat Dome

• The heat dome has taken its highest-ranking victim. Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was rushed to a hospital in Washington after experiencing a dizzy spell in the Senate gym. The 74 year-old senator missed a press conference early in the day but eventually returned to work after being given some fluids at the hospital.

• “Leader Schumer was at the Senate gym this morning and got lightheaded,” a spokesperson for Schumer said. “Out of an abundance of caution, he went to the hospital to be treated for dehydration and is now back at work in the Capitol. He wants to remind everyone to drink some water and stay out of the heat.” How much do we think ol’ Chuck was squatting in the gym? 300?

The Anti-Vaccine Vaccine Committee

• The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is, as its name suggests, a committee that advises the federal government on vaccine policy. A new version of the committee, hand-picked by RFK Jr., met in Washington for the first time yesterday. One of the new ACIP’s biggest priorities is apparently scrutinizing the federal government’s vaccine schedule for children, an agenda that reflects RFK’s very-public anti-vaccine stances. Kennedy believes that vaccines cause autism and a variety of other chronic diseases, opinions not backed by any credible science.

• “The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceed what children in most other developed nations receive and what most of us in this room received when we were children,” said one Kennedy appointee to ACIP. The committee plans to review how the hepatitis B, measles, mumps, and chicken pox vaccines are all administered to children. “They're signaling interest in revisiting long-settled questions around vaccine safety, opening up issues that have been focal points of critics of vaccines for decades and giving them the legitimacy that comes with this previously well-respected government advisory committee,” said one associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health.

Additional USA News

• U.S. Is Creating 2 New Expanded Military Zones Along Border With Mexico (NYT, $) 

• ‘Big Balls’ No Longer Works for the US Government (Wired)

• The Trump Phone no longer promises it’s made in America (Verge)

• Trump administration sues all of Maryland's federal judges over deportation order (NPR)

• White House to limit intelligence sharing, skip Gabbard at Senate Iran briefing (WaPo)

• Trump administration says California must bar trans girls from girls sports (AP)

It’s Like 7 Million Overdue Fines, But Worse

• Anthropic is one of the biggest AI firms in the world. Its Claude LLM is a major competitor to ChatGPT, and the company has received investments from the likes of Amazon ($8 billion), Google ($2 billion), and, interestingly, now-bankrupt crypto-exchange FTX ($500 million). Last year, Anthropic was hit with a class-action lawsuit led by a group of three authors who alleged that the company had committed copyright infringement by training Claude on their works.

• Yesterday, a U.S. judge dismissed those authors’ case against Anthropic, stating that using their works to train the AI was “exceedingly transformative” and therefore allowed under copyright law. However, he blocked Anthropic’s move to fully dismiss the case – this means that the AI firm will have to defend itself in a new trial. Why? It turns out that the multibillion-dollar company pirated copies of millions of books in order to build the “central library of all the books in the world” that it used to train its AI.

• According to the judge, the number of pirated books in the “central library” was somewhere around 7 million, and Anthropic could face fines of up to $150,000 per book. Doing the math, that’s a maximum of $1.05 trillion. Of course, the company will figure out a way to dodge most of those fines, but at least we get to watch them wriggle for a little bit longer.

Additional Reads

• Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers? (New Yorker)

• A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts (New Yorker)

• Here’s a running list of all of Tesla’s robotaxi mishaps so far (Verge)

• Cooper Flagg taken by the Mavericks with the No. 1 pick in NBA draft (AP)

• I covered my body in health trackers for 6 months. It ruined my life. (Vox)

• This Reviled Pest Is the Unsung Hero of Every Major City in the World (NYT, $)

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