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US Central Command said it hit roughly 90 more targets overnight after Trump declared the ceasefire "over" from the NATO summit stage in Ankara, following Iranian attacks on Gulf shipping. Iran retaliated by striking US-linked bases in Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, triggering alerts across all three states; the UN's maritime agency says roughly 6,000 seafarers remain trapped around the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was buried on day 132 of the war, closing the funeral procession even as the separate shooting war escalates. Per NBC News and The Washington Post.
At Tyler Robinson's preliminary hearing, a state investigator read texts in which Robinson's roommate asked "You weren't the one who did it, right?" and Robinson replied "I am. I'm sorry." Prosecutors also cited a handwritten note ("I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it") and video testimony in which the roommate said Robinson later said he "wishes he hadn't done it." Per Fox News and ABC News.
The outbreak that began in May has infected more than 1,700 people; exhausted frontline health workers have walked off the job over wages unpaid since the outbreak started, slowing the response further. No market angle — you should just know this.
Graham Platner dropped out of the race against GOP Sen. Susan Collins following a sexual assault allegation, leaving state Democrats racing to settle on a replacement before the fall campaign. Per CBS News.
OpenAI took GPT-5.6 (three tiers: Sol, Terra, Luna) to general availability on July 9 across ChatGPT, Codex and the API, after the Trump administration signed off on wider release following added safety testing. The same day, xAI's Grok 4.5 went public to SuperGrok Heavy and Premium+ subscribers — an Opus-class model xAI says is faster and cheaper to run. Meta Superintelligence Labs simultaneously shipped Muse Spark 1.1, a multimodal reasoning model for agentic tasks, alongside a public preview of its new Model API. Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 (default since June 30) and Claude Fable 5 (restored July 1) round out a genuinely crowded frontier right now. Per TechCrunch and Engadget.
The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) rose 2.5% Thursday, clawing back part of the prior session's slide that had knocked Intel and Applied Materials down 10% and AMD down 8% on fears AI-hardware margins can't keep beating already-elevated expectations. ▲ Micron gained 4.5% and ▲ SanDisk popped 7.6% on the bounce. Intel's two-session washout still totals roughly 21% over the past week — the bounce is a relief rally, not yet a reversal of the underlying margin debate.
Steel Partners Holdings, already a major InMode shareholder, offered $16.75/share cash for the rest of the company. Prologis pushed for talks on a $16.9B bid for UK warehouse REIT Segro. Kroger agreed to acquire regional grocer Giant Eagle. Per Benzinga and Businesswire deal trackers.
Asia closed firm — Nikkei +1.8%, Hang Seng +0.8% — tracking a Wall Street session where the Nasdaq rose 1.3% Thursday on the AI-model news and the semis bounce, even as the Iran war escalated in the background. Oil's round trip (spike past $75, settle $73.52) is doing the real signaling: the market is treating the Gulf strikes as a contained, not systemic, shock, which is why equities haven't cracked. Dollar firm near 101 on safe-haven demand; gold actually softer, an odd-couple pairing worth watching if Hormuz risk escalates further.
What's new: the war escalated rather than resolved — a second consecutive day of US strikes (~90 targets, ~170 over 48 hours) followed Iranian attacks on shipping; Iran retaliated directly against Gulf-state bases (Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait) for the first time in this cycle, a real widening beyond the prior Iran-vs-US-and-Israel frame. Khamenei's burial completed on schedule. Oil's round trip ($75+ intraday, $73.52 close) suggests markets aren't yet pricing sustained Hormuz disruption despite ~6,000 seafarers reportedly stranded.
What's new: yields ticked modestly higher after Wednesday's FOMC minutes (2Y 4.19%→4.21%, 10Y 4.55%→4.56%, 7/7→7/8 prints) — a small but real confirmation that the hawkish 9-9 hike-split minutes and Warsh's own withheld dot moved the market, not just the headline. Nothing further scheduled until the July 28-29 meeting.
What's new: the theme's stress test partially resolved in the bulls' favor — Tuesday/Wednesday's Samsung-triggered chip rout reversed hard Thursday (SMH +2.5%, Micron +4.5%, SanDisk +7.6%), and the same day brought a historic three-lab model-launch cluster (GPT-5.6 GA, Grok 4.5, Meta Muse Spark 1.1) that reads as evidence demand for AI compute isn't slowing. Intel's underlying 21% one-week drawdown hasn't fully unwound — the margin-sustainability debate is calmed, not settled.
Risk tone is resiliently mixed: an active, widening war (now hitting Gulf-state bases directly) hasn't cracked equities, and the Nasdaq extended gains Thursday on AI-launch euphoria and a semis relief rally. Oil's intraday spike-then-fade to $73.52 is the cleanest tell that markets see Hormuz risk as contained rather than a supply shock — the transmission channel remains oil → inflation expectations → yields, not a direct equity risk-premium hit, at least until a headline says otherwise. With a bare data calendar today, the one exogenous thing that flips the session is a fresh Gulf escalation overnight or at the open; absent that, Thursday's AI-driven, semis-led tape has more room to extend.
Astronomers released the largest gravitational-wave catalog ever assembled, adding 161 newly confirmed black hole collisions and pushing the all-time detection count to 390. A decade ago we'd detected zero; now it's a big enough sample to start doing real population statistics on how black holes pair up and merge across cosmic time — turning "we heard spacetime ring" from a headline into an actuarial table.
A New Zealand great-grandfather was officially certified as the world's oldest competitive water skier, a month and a half shy of his 95th birthday. No further comment necessary — go find out what you'll be doing at 94.