Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did Trump Just Get Outplayed By Iran?
Trump kept telling everybody a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was imminent. Iran had other plans. On Saturday, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council laid out its price, and it’s steep. The United States has to permanently end the war, lift the naval blockade, pull its military out of the region, lift sanctions, unfreeze Iranian assets, and fully compensate Iran for war damage. And never threaten Iran again. Council secretary Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr put it plainly. “Until America corrects its behavior, the Strait of Hormuz will not open.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says there aren’t even negotiations happening with Washington right now. Iran’s betting Trump needs this more than they do. Oil prices, food prices, everything you buy moves through that water. Will America now pay reparations to Iran for the Trump’s war?
Netanyahu Just Told Trump To Get Lost
Benjamin Netanyahu went in front of his cabinet Sunday and rejected the 15-point Gaza peace plan Trump’s been bragging about for weeks. His words. “Israel rejects the 15-point document.” He said the Israeli military won’t pull back one inch until Hamas is completely disarmed, heavy weapons, light weapons, all of it. Trump announced on July 30 that Hamas had agreed to lay down its arms and called it a monumental step toward peace. His Board of Peace built a phased plan around it. Netanyahu just torched it. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich cheered him on. Hamas says it’s still committed to the deal. Netanyahu faces an election on October 27 and needs his far right more than he needs Trump. Meanwhile the killing pauses only when Washington leans hard, and Israel decides how hard is hard enough. Well...it looks like the guy who takes our money and our weapons doesn’t take orders from Trump.
Why Are Billionaires Screaming About A Tax They Can Easily Afford?
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax took effect July 1, and the super-rich are melting down. The tax hits second homes that aren’t anybody’s primary residence. One- to three-family homes over $5 million pay 0.8% to 1.3%. Condos and co-ops over $1 million pay more. The city says it’ll raise about $500 million a year. Comptroller Mark Levine figures $340 to $380 million. Either way it’s real money for housing. Citadel’s Ken Griffin saw his Manhattan bill go from $858,000 to about $1.9 million on a penthouse he bought for $238 million. Griffin called the video creepy and threatened to move jobs to Miami. Mamdani’s line was simple. “Well, today we’re taxing the rich.” Are the billionaires scared of the bill or are they scared somebody finally sent one?
Has Trump’s Invasion Of Greenland Already Started?
A Texas oil company called Greenland Energy hauled drilling equipment ashore in Greenland’s Jameson Land without permission. Greenland’s government issued what it called a strong warning and said the company didn’t have the necessary approvals. Greenland stopped issuing oil licenses back in 2021. The company’s chairman, Larry Swets, has ties to Trump’s inner circle. It claims $1 trillion of crude sits under Jameson Land and plans to spend $60 million drilling two wells, with 300 containers of gear shipping from Canada next month. Two days after the rebuke, Trump posted an AI image of himself towering over a Greenlandic village. One professor of European politics put it this way. “Let nobody think Trump has given up on taking Greenland.” An American company drilling on foreign soil without a permit is breathtaking. Does it sound like a business venture or a flag planting to you?
Who Pays To Kill Clean Energy? You Do.
The Trump administration just handed German utility RWE $1.22 billion of your money to walk away from offshore wind leases off New York, California, and Louisiana. Those projects would have generated about seven gigawatts, enough to power more than five million homes. RWE said there’s no path forward to permit these projects for the foreseeable future. Then it turned around and put $900 million into a Louisiana liquefied natural gas project and $300 million into gas turbines. This is the fifth buyback this year. The total’s near $3.9 billion. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse calls it bribing companies to abandon clean energy, and one climate campaigner said reinvesting in fossil fuels is “a disastrous mistake.” States are suing. California says it will too. This is your tax dollars, buying more expensive power and a hotter planet.
Are Birds Talking To Each Other just like humans?
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Hebrew University, and Teikyo University in Japan studied Bengalese finches and found something remarkable. The birds organize their songs using the same mathematical pattern found in human speech. The notes come in coherent chunks, basically avian words, and a few get used constantly while most get used rarely. That’s a Zipfian distribution, the same shape human languages take. And the chicks learn it the way your baby did, by listening for which sounds keep showing up together. The team found the same structure in humpback whale song. Professor Simon Kirby said this “may make us more similar to one another than we previously thought.” It’s published in Science Advances. A good day to feel less lonely in the universe. Maybe we’re not the only ones with something to say.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, August 10, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann
