Good morning and happy Juneteenth! Today marks 159 years since slavery was finally ended in the United States (better late than never, Texas) and 5 years since everyone started pretending they’d tooootally known what Juneteenth was their entire lives.

WORLD

🌍️ Trump considers jumping into Israel-Iran conflict

Well, there’s nothing like a new war in the Middle East to ruin a good Canadian vacation. Leaders of G7* countries met in Canada for their annual summit on Monday and Tuesday. Before too much could happen, President Trump bailed and headed back to the White House to work on something “much bigger” than a ceasefire.

*The G7 is a friend group consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.

What’s Trump doing? We’re not sure, and neither is he. But he miiiight jump into the fray alongside Israel and attack Iran. The president admitted on Wednesday that “I may do it, I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m gonna do.” Just in case, however, a top general, obviously nicknamed “The Gorilla,” prepared a “wide range” of military options. Trump says he’s not super jazzed about a potential attack, but is very serious about preventing Iran from building a nuke.

• Why would he jump in on this? Some Iranian nuclear facilities are buried deep underground. American bombers might do a better job than Israel at destroying them.

• As to whether he has the power to do that without permission from Congress, well, Congress isn’t sure either.

• But the U.K. government is on alert for a possible U.S. attack on Iran, and U.S. citizens are being evacuated from Israel.

What’s Iran doing? After Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, claimed his country "will never surrender.” His government later summoned Switzerland’s ambassador to Iran to chew the poor guy out for Trump’s comments. Since the U.S. and Iran have no official relationship or ambassadors, Switzerland acts as a go-between.

• On the attack front, Israel is keeping the barrage going, and Iran is trying to fight back. But it’s running low on missiles. And many of its launchers have been destroyed by Israel’s superior air force.

What’s everyone else doing? The Iranian Red Crescent — that’s the Red Cross in Muslim countries — has 2,700 first responders removing debris and looking for survivors across 19 provinces of Iran. Meanwhile, the French are trying to drum up a European "initiative" to negotiate a ceasefire. And Russia is pretending to be neutral even though it buys gobs of Iranian weapons for use in Ukraine.

GOVERNMENT

👨‍⚖️ In a 6-3 ruling on Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee state law banning gender transition procedures for minors. The challengers argued that the law violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, which forbids states from denying "any person" the "equal protection of the laws." Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the court's role isn't "to judge the wisdom, fairness, or logic" of the law. They're only there to say whether it's unconstitutional. And, in the court's opinion, it is not. About half of states have already passed laws similar to Tennessee’s. A lower federal court went other way on this topic on Tuesday and blocked the State Department's policy of preventing transgender people from listing their preferred sex on their passports.

💰️ Congress is hard at work on Trump’s primo legislative priority this year, his One Big Beautiful Bill. The bill is loaded with tax adjustments and spending priorities, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now says will raise the debt by $2.8 trillion over the next decade. The House passed its version on May 22, and the Senate hopes to pass its own by the end of next week before negotiations begin between the two. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, often considered the second most powerful person in Washington, said she wants the completed bill on the president's desk by July 4.

📱 The clock is still ticking on TikTok, but it's moving slower. For the third time since January, President Trump is throwing our national addiction a lifeline and extending the ban-or-sell deadline created by a bipartisan 2024 law. This extension gives China's ByteDance another 90 days to sell its U.S. business or face a ban. Plenty of American tech companies have expressed interest in buying the app. But it's unclear if a deal is in the works or if China's government would even approve a sale.

TRIVIA

Other than maple syrup, the one thing everyone associates with Canada is ice hockey. Sadly, our brothers to the north haven’t seen much NHL success lately. No Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup since 1993, and, to make things more embarrassing, the Florida Panthers just won it for the second time in a row.

Now, politics is seeping in. A debate is raging in the hockey world that teams from states with no state income tax have an advantage in recruiting the best players. Since 2020, 75% of teams that have made it to the Stanley Cup Finals come from states with no income tax. How many of the nine U.S. states with no state income tax can you name?

Hint: There are nine total. Six are west of the Mississippi.

Q&A

🤔 Political arrests and public lands

Q: Was a New York politician arrested by ICE agents?

A: Yes, but he was released a few hours later with no charges filed. New York City Comptroller (finance chief) Brand Lander is running for mayor this year (the primary is next week). On Tuesday, he rolled into a federal courthouse in Manhattan where plainclothes Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were trying to arrest a migrant.

Lander grabbed the migrant they were after and said he wouldn’t let go unless the agents showed him a warrant. So they went ahead and arrested him and the migrant. The feds called his move a political stunt and said he had assaulted and impeded the ICE agents. Lander and his office claimed he was “taken by masked agents” who didn’t have the authority to arrest him.

Q: Is Trump selling off 250 million acres of public land?

A: No. The current Senate version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (see above for more on that) includes a bit that would, over the next five years, force the sale of around 2 million acres of federal land. That’s about 3,100 square miles. The feds own about 640 million acres, mostly in the West, so this is a tiny fraction of that.

But the bill leaves the decision about which land to sell to a few federal agencies, and a conservation group found that 250 million acres fit the criteria for sale. So, if the bill passes with this part intact, the feds will probably sell a bunch of land. But nowhere near 250 million acres.

BRIEFS

● The State Department has begun screening the online presence, including academic writings and social media, of all foreigners applying for student visas. Among the hot topics? “Any indications of hostility” toward the U.S., or “support for foreign terrorists.”

● U.S. Capitol Police are working on a plan to boost security for members of Congress after state-level lawmakers in Minnesota were shot last week. More than 9,400 threats against Congress were investigated in 2024 compared to fewer than 4,000 in 2017.

● Food giants General Mills and Kraft Heinz said they'll remove artificial dyes from their products by 2027 after a push from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After a meeting this week, RFK also said Starbucks pledged to make its menu even healthier.

● Texas will stop building its own border wall after four years of work, with 65 miles completed. Construction began in 2021 over complaints about Biden’s border policy. Officials said they axed the program because they trust Trump to secure the border.

● The Democratic National Committee might have to borrow money to pay the bills this year. Fundraising has slowed to a crawl since the 2024 election, and new party chair Ken Martin has been stuck waging an internal battle against a DNC vice chair.

● The NAACP said it plans to sue Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, for using gas turbines to power its data center in majority-black Memphis. America’s oldest civil rights group says the turbines create smog that violates the Clean Air Act.

QUOTE

ANSWER

The nine states with no state income tax are, from west-ish to east-ish:

1. Alaska

2. Washington

3. Nevada

4. Wyoming

5. Texas

6. South Dakota

7. Tennessee

8. Florida

9. New Hampshire

People who live on the Washington side of Portlandia get a double tax break if they cross the border to shop. Oregon has no sales tax.