The Roastie Digest

Month six of the war we've tracked all week, and it's gone maritime. A Navy helicopter fired two Hellfires into the engine room of the container ship Vela Nova, the blockade's third crippled vessel since July; all 17 crew walked off fine. Self-appointed harbormaster Donald Trump declared "total control" of the Strait of Hormuz — yeah, right, from a Pentagon the Times now calls "dangerously low" on the interceptors it keeps firing. Iran says the strait stays shut, thanks. 🦆

COLOMBIA: The magnitude 7.4 quake we covered Tuesday at 132 dead has only kept climbing. New president Abelardo de la Espriella had broken precedent to hold his inauguration in Cali — the first ever staged outside the capital; three days later, Cali was the epicenter. In Pereira, rescuers pulled 32-year-old Daniela Largo Sánchez out alive after 36 hours under the rubble. Some weeks the only good news is one name. 🦆

EUROPE: A fifth heat wave since May, for anyone keeping the tally we've kept all summer. Right on schedule, the annual State of the Climate report confirmed 2025 set records for greenhouse gases, sea level, and ocean heat. The twist: it wasn't even the hottest year on record, only top three, because the air cooled a hair off its peak while the ocean quietly pocketed the heat instead. The sky clocked out early; the sea pulled a double. 🦆

BEIRUT: Parliament scrapped capital punishment Tuesday — the first in the region to do it — swapping death sentences for life at hard labor. Lebanon hadn't executed anyone since 2004, so this mostly makes the paperwork match the practice, but a first is a first and this one's real. The lone holdout was Hezbollah's bloc, which looked at "we no longer kill prisoners" and voted no — get outta here. When you can't clear that bar, the bar isn't the problem. 🦆

BEIJING: Zhu ran China's economy from 1998 to 2003 and turned it into the world's factory floor. He restructured bankrupt state industries at the cost of millions of jobs and won the 2001 WTO seat that made the country everyone's supplier. He was blunt about corruption to the end: "I have prepared 100 coffins — 99 for corrupt officials and one for myself." They don't write farewell lines like that anymore. 🦆

TEXAS: Only about six states have heat rules for workers, and Texas went the other way in 2023 — a law barring its own cities from mandating water breaks. Legislating against water, in Texas, on purpose. Eugene Gates Jr., a 66-year-old Dallas letter carrier, collapsed when the heat index hit 113. OSHA fined the Postal Service $15,625 — the going rate for a man who'd texted his wife a heat warning before his last shift. 🦆

CALIFORNIA: Thieves chasing GPUs have gotten physical: one rear-ended an escort, another forced one into a PIT spin — the cop move that whips a car sideways — and both loads vanished. Reported thefts actually fell 26% last quarter, yet the value stolen more than doubled, because the pros quit boosting volume and went boutique. One June recovery turned up $2.2 million in gear, including $550,000 in Meta switches — the one time all year Meta hardware gained value in someone's hands. 🦆

The paper pinned 3,098,456 excess deaths on the vaccines and lockdowns; BMJ Public Health retracted it for "misinformation" — read: the math was cosplay. A data scientist caught the authors laundering their prose through a thesaurus, so "compromise between flexibility and simplicity" became "trade-off between suppleness and chasteness." Not a research paper — a hostage note written by a synonym. And Wisconsin's tinfoil laureate Ron Johnson had gaveled a June Senate hearing to order over it, titled "Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer." 🦆

A study of 53,000 diabetics with heart disease found tirzepatide — sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound — had far fewer heart attacks than the older pill's crowd. Fine, expected; the shot's a workhorse. The part that made researchers squint: the same patients were also hospitalized with serious infections about 36% less often, a perk they flat-out can't explain. The wonder drug is doing favors it didn't RSVP for. 🦆

A study of 259,388 people found where your fat sits beats what you weigh: a big waist flagged heart-attack and stroke risk even when BMI looked perfectly fine. Normal number on the chart, trouble on the tape measure — 15% to 50% more risk, hiding in plain sight. So the useful move is dull and free: wrap a tape measure around your middle and believe it over the scale. The scale's been grading you on a curve. 🦆

"Scromiting" — violent, screaming bouts of vomiting from years of heavy cannabis use — sent ER visits to about 3.7 times the old baseline. Terrifying number, dull cause: the syndrome got its own diagnostic code last October, so hospitals could finally count what was already walking in. The CDC calls it better bookkeeping, not a new epidemic. The visits skew hard toward ages 15 to 24 — the demographic most confident it can handle its edibles. 🦆

The James Webb telescope found three feeding supermassive black holes crammed into one early galaxy, its light 1.2 billion years post-Big-Bang. Two of them sit just 620 light-years apart and should merge within a few hundred million years — cosmic patience, book the venue now. The odd part: the littlest, at 600,000 suns, eats faster than theory allows, while the 80-million-sun heavyweight barely touches its food. Even black holes have a skinny friend with a monster metabolism. 🦆

Their slow "clangs" top 200 decibels and carry 70 kilometers, which one outlet described as a jail door slamming — the loudest communication noise any animal makes. The lead researcher says no one knows what it's for; the whales just keep near-perfect time and shorten their range when ships get close. One theory: they bounce the echo off the seabed and use it as a built-in metronome. The ocean's loudest animal is out there keeping better time than my last three drummers. 🦆

UTAH: Andy Green, the 64-year-old ex-RAF pilot who's still the only human to go supersonic on the ground, drove a hydrogen car to an FIA-verified 406 mph on the Bonneville salt. JCB — yes, the British digger company — built it, and it beat the old hydrogen mark of 185 by over 220 mph, less a record than a mugging. Retirement looks different for some people. 🦆

ALGERIA: Yes, the Algerian Mars meteorite again — the one from Monday's good column, now with the fuller readout. NWA 13441 crystallized 1.273 billion years ago and fills a nearly 1.8-billion-year hole in the dated Martian record, and its chemistry matches the primordial solar system. Translation: it's a sealed sample of Mars's insides, untouched since the planet formed. Baxter called it "entirely surprising," which is scientist for holy hell. 🦆

DAMASCUS: Assad and eight officials got death sentences for murder and torture — war crimes tried in a courtroom where only his cousin Atef Najib actually stood. The rest were tried in absentia — Assad from Russian asylum — and Moscow has zero intention of mailing him back to hear it — fuhgeddaboudit. Justice on paper, which for a man who ran what he ran is still less than nothing, and still more than the silence before it. 🦆

Culture-war quartermaster Donald Trump locked in a rule blocking Medicaid and other federal funds from covering transition care for minors, and advocates are already loading the lawsuits. It's the kind of policy that governs a tiny number of families while polling to a much larger crowd — the whole return on investment. Courts will decide whether it stands. Somewhere a fundraising email wrote itself before the ink dried. 🦆

Meet Demogorgonichthys arcanus, named for the Demogorgon of Dungeons & Dragons and Stranger Things, a colorless cavefish so translucent you can watch its brain through its skin. Its entire known range on Earth is one flooded cave beneath Redstone Arsenal, an Army base built on a former chemical-weapons site. It shares the water with a second blind cavefish that lost its eyes separately, millions of years apart. Two species evolved "no thanks" to eyes in the same dark puddle under the bomb factory. 🦆