The Amped Journal

Saturday brought word that ICE had arrested roughly 10,000 people over just five days at the end of June, a sharp escalation in the Trump administration's mass deportation push, according to arrest numbers the AP obtained. The same day, Rep. Sylvia Garcia criticized ICE agents for fatally shooting a man in the country illegally who allegedly tried to run over agents with his car, arguing "you shoot the tires, you don't shoot the driver" - an early sign of the use-of-force debate that would dominate the week.

By Tuesday, Mexico City officials were demanding criminal investigations into the deaths of 17 Mexican nationals in the US since the crackdown began last year, per the Washington Post.

Wednesday brought two more deaths in quick succession: a man in Florida was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer while fleeing an encounter with immigration agents, and security video captured a fatal ICE shooting in Biddeford, Maine - the agency's second deadly shooting in a week and at least the ninth death tied to the crackdown overall. Following protests in Biddeford, the Department of Homeland Security ordered agents to temporarily halt most vehicle stops during deportation operations.

That pause didn't last. On Thursday, President Trump said ICE should keep making traffic stops despite DHS's own order suspending them, an apparent contradiction of his administration's decision that left it unclear how field offices would reconcile the two directives.

Friday added a new wrinkle: the ICE officer who shot the Colombian man in Biddeford has a documented history of threatening behavior and mental illness, according to family members and court records cited by the AP. The disclosure, arriving just as Trump's reversal took hold over DHS's pause, leaves unresolved which directive is actually governing agents in the field - and is likely to intensify scrutiny of how ICE vets its officers and governs use of force.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the senior Republican senator from South Carolina and a leading Iran hawk, died Saturday night, July 11, at age 71. His office said he passed after a "brief and sudden illness" without elaborating. First elected in 2002, Graham had evolved from an early Trump skeptic into one of the president's closest Senate allies, especially on national security and Iran policy. His death prompted reflection in Washington, including from podcaster Jason Calacanis, who used it to renew calls for cognitive testing and term limits for aging political leaders.

By Monday, July 13, the medical examiner's office released preliminary findings: Graham died of a torn aorta caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. His official death certificate remained pending. President Trump also paid tribute that day, calling Graham's defense of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation fight "his finest moment" and "a top ten, maybe top five moment in the history of the Senate."

Two days later, on Wednesday, July 15, Graham's legislative legacy resurfaced: a new Russia sanctions bill he had spearheaded, and which Trump backs, would target the top five buyers of Russian crude oil and natural gas, including China and India.

Saturday 7/11, OpenAI launched its GPT-5.6 lineup, saying the smaller "Luna" variant matched GPT-5.5's top-tier performance at 25 times lower cost and calling it "a major step forward for health intelligence." The same day, CEO Sam Altman announced GPT-5.6 had become the default model inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, putting it in front of the enterprise users already working in Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. Early developer reaction was positive: Snorkel AI's Ankit Aich had the model complete a nearly 1,000-line coding task without repeated prompting, and researcher Simon Willison floated the flagship "Sol" variant at medium reasoning as a new default for coding work.

Sunday 7/12, Altman added a health-specific claim, saying physicians reviewing medical responses found fewer errors in GPT-5.6's answers than in ones written by human doctors. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen echoed the sentiment, writing that "AI is already a better doctor than 99.99% of human doctors." Altman also said AI's employment impact has so far been "net job-creating," though he added he expected some negative effect by now and hasn't seen it - cautioning "it is possible this direction keeps going."

By Wednesday 7/15, the story shifted to strain from demand. Altman said "5.6 sol growth is insane" and warned that despite "heroic work" from OpenAI's inference team, "it is possible there are some hiccups soon," noting usage of its agentic products, Codex and ChatGPT work, had risen 2.5x in a week. OpenAI Developers said Codex had passed 7 million weekly users after more than 150 updates in two months, including GPT-5.6 support, a new "Ultra" tier, parallel task execution, and full pull-request workflows. Altman also claimed Sol beats Anthropic's Claude Fable on price and efficiency, saying it's half the price and roughly twice as token-efficient "for accomplishing the same task."</body> </invoke>

Saturday brought the first big milestone: SpaceX ran a full-duration static fire of all 33 Raptor engines on Booster 20, the next-generation Super Heavy V3 booster, with Elon Musk sharing footage of the test. By Sunday, SpaceX and Musk were both pointing to Thursday, July 16 for Flight 13's launch - though NASASpaceflight reported a broken actuator on Booster 20 at Starbase's Pad 2 had delayed moving the booster back to the production site for final closeout work, pushing the next road closure to Sunday morning.

Monday's update showed the campaign back on track: Booster 20 and Ship 40 were staged at the Production Site awaiting rollout to Pad 2, with July 16 still standing as the earliest launch date.

Tuesday brought a regulatory green light. The FAA closed its investigation into the May 22 Flight 12 failure, in which heat damage to propulsion parts and faulty alarms contributed to the Super Heavy booster's rough splashdown. SpaceX applied four hardware and software fixes, clearing the way for Flight 13, which aims to deploy 20 Starlink V3 satellites, relight a Raptor engine in space, and test reentry maneuvers. On Wednesday, Booster 20 rolled to Pad 2, where the pad's "chopstick" arms placed it on the orbital launch mount, still on track for Thursday.

Thursday, Musk confirmed the mission was "still tracking to fly" after the booster's rollout and static-fire testing. By Friday's report, Starship's 13th flight test had lifted off Thursday evening from Starbase, after the countdown briefly stood down and held at T-60 seconds before resuming. SpaceX said the flight is a key test of vehicle maneuverability while docked, meant to inform how Starship performs the burn to send astronauts to the Moon under NASA's Artemis program. Results of the flight were not yet available.