Iran's Revolutionary Guard CorpsInstitutionIran's parallel military, which controls the ballistic-missile arsenal and the network of regional proxy militias. It answers to the Supreme Leader rather than the elected government. launched several ballistic missiles at about 5:45 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday toward American forces in Jordan, and Jordan's military said all five were intercepted with no casualties. CENTCOMInstitutionUnited States Central Command, the Pentagon combatant command responsible for the Middle East. It has been issuing the daily interception, strike, and blockade-enforcement tallies in this conflict. called it an attempt at a surprise attack and answered with what officials described as a heavy wave of strikes; Iranian state media reported explosions at Bandar AbbasPlaceIran's largest Persian Gulf port and the headquarters of its navy, sitting at the northern mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. Its docks handle the bulk of Iranian container traffic., Kish Island and Qeshm Island, with residents describing injured and trapped people after a missile hit a home on Qeshm. In eastern Iraq, CENTCOM struck Iran-backed militia targets in partnership with Saudi Arabia; the Popular Mobilization Forces put the toll at 20 fighters killed and 32 wounded, and two Iraqi militia officials told the Associated Press six Iranian advisers died as well.

The naval picture hardened alongside the air campaign. CENTCOM said it has now redirected 20 commercial vessels, disabled two and boarded two in the Strait of HormuzPlaceThe chokepoint between Iran and Oman through which roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil passes. A US blockade of Iranian ports and an Iranian closure threat are now colliding in the same 21-mile channel. while enforcing its blockade of Iranian ports, and the Guards declared the strait would "remain closed." The theater kept widening: Houthi forces hit Saudi Red Sea oil installations, a drone fire damaged two vessels at an Egyptian port in the first strike on Egyptian infrastructure, and Tehran accused Ukraine of hitting an Iranian vessel in the Caspian. Oil moved higher, though still short of the level it touched briefly last week. President Trump told Fox News the United States "will be hitting Iran hard" and that it was "our turn."

Microsoft closed its fiscal year Wednesday with revenue up 18 percent to $90 billion against an $87.6 billion consensus and adjusted earnings of $4.74 a share, up 30 percent, and the number that actually moved the stock was AzureInstitutionMicrosoft's cloud platform. Because enterprises buy AI capacity through it, its quarterly growth rate is Wall Street's cleanest real-time read on whether corporate AI demand is still compounding. growth of 43 percent in constant currency, against roughly 40 percent expected. Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats. Capital expenditure and finance leasesConceptLong-term leases accounted for as owned assets and matching debt. Hyperscalers increasingly acquire data-centre capacity this way, which is why the figure is reported alongside outright capex. reached $41 billion for the quarter, up 69 percent, while full-year guidance held near $175 billion after an accounting reclassification from about $190 billion. Chief financial officer Amy HoodPersonMicrosoft's chief financial officer since 2013. Her Azure and capex guidance routinely moves the shares more than the reported earnings number does. guided fiscal first-quarter Azure growth to 45 percent, above the Street's 41 percent. Shares rose roughly 8 percent after hours.

Meta, reporting the same afternoon, raised the floor of its 2026 capital expenditure guidance by $5 billion to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion, leaving the ceiling in place. Both prints landed into a market that has spent the summer testing whether investors still have patience for AI spending that shrinks free cash flow, a question Alphabet answered badly last week when a raised capex guide sent its stock down 5 percent despite a revenue beat. The difference on Wednesday was that the revenue accelerated alongside the spending.

IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach ReportConceptIBM's annual cybersecurity-economics study, produced with the Ponemon Institute. The 2026 edition is the first to break out AI-enabled breaches as a separate and rapidly growing cost category., published Wednesday with the Ponemon InstituteInstitutionThe independent research firm that has run the underlying breach-cost survey methodology for IBM for two decades, which is what gives the series its year-over-year comparability., found that one in four malicious breaches was AI-enabled, a 56 percent jump in a year, and that those breaches cost $6 million on average against a $4.99 million global average. The mechanics are mostly deepfake impersonationConceptSynthetic audio or video of a real person used to authorize a transfer or extract credentials. It defeats voice-verification controls that most treasury functions still rely on. and AI-assisted malware. Sixty-two percent of AI-driven attacks hit critical infrastructure; financial services breaches averaged $6.3 million and energy $5.2 million. More than a fifth of organizations reported a breach aimed specifically at their AI models or applications, with compromised APIs and plug-ins and cloud misconfigurations on AI workloads each accounting for 27 percent of causes. The sample covers 602 organizations and breaches from March 2025 through February 2026.

The defensive half of the finding is starker than the offensive half. Companies using AI and automation inside their security operations cut breach costs by nearly $2 million on average, and one in four organizations still has not adopted such tools. A separate Ponemon survey in May found that 85 percent of organizations would raise security spending after simply learning what frontier models can now do offensively, against 64 percent who said the same after suffering an actual breach, which is a striking statement about demonstration outrunning experience.

Reformation priced its initial public offering Wednesday evening at $15.00 a share, the low end of a marketed $15 to $17 range, selling 14,062,500 shares for gross proceeds of about $210.9 million. The split was 9,478,821 primary shares from the company and 4,583,679 secondary sharesConceptExisting shares sold by current holders, whose proceeds go to the seller rather than the company. A large secondary component tells buyers how much of the deal is a sponsor exit. from existing holders including PermiraInstitutionThe London-based private-equity firm that has controlled the Los Angeles womenswear brand Reformation since 2019 and is selling into the offering as a partial monetization., with a thirty-day underwriter option on 2,109,375 more. J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are joint lead bookrunnersConceptThe underwriting banks that build and allocate the order book in an offering. Lead bookrunners set the price and decide which accounts receive stock, which shapes early trading., with Citigroup and RBC as joint bookrunners and Guggenheim, Baird, William Blair and BTIG also on the cover. Trading begins Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker REF, with closing expected Friday.

The company had marketed toward a valuation approaching $1 billion and a raise of up to $239.1 million, so pricing at the floor is a real datapoint about where the book actually cleared. It is not a broken deal, but it is a reminder that consumer names price to demand rather than to the roadshow deck, in a week when the long end of the curve reached its highest level since 2007.

WatscoInstitutionThe Coconut Grove, Miami distributor that is North America's largest wholesaler of heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and refrigeration equipment, and one of South Florida's longest-listed public companies. reported second-quarter earnings of $4.00 a share against a $4.41 consensus, a 9.3 percent miss, on revenue of $2.1 billion that fell roughly $40 million short of the Street. Sales still grew 2 percent year over year; the problem was margin. Gross margin compressed to 27.5 percent from 29.3 percent a year earlier as pricing returned to normal after the refrigerant transitionConceptThe regulatory phase-in of replacement refrigerants for R-410A that began in 2025. It let distributors hold unusually strong pricing on transitional inventory, an advantage that is now unwinding. that had inflated distributor economics through 2025. Shares fell 15.3 percent in premarket trading to $311.42, close to a 52-week low of $309.28.

Chairman and chief executive Albert NahmadPersonWatsco's chairman and chief executive since the 1970s, who built a small Miami manufacturer into the continent's largest HVAC distributor through decades of acquisitions., who has run the company since the 1970s, framed the quarter as a return to conventional operating conditions rather than a demand problem, which is the honest reading: the comparison base was a regulatory windfall, not a normal year. For a local comparable, it is a useful test of whether the Florida construction and replacement cycle holds up on its own.

Judge Zahid QuraishiPersonUnited States District Judge for the District of New Jersey, confirmed in 2021 as the first Muslim American Article III judge. He dismissed the government's voter-roll suit with prejudice on Wednesday. of the District of New Jersey held Wednesday that the state's computerized statewide voter registration list is not a "record or paper" New Jersey must hand over to the federal government under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960ConceptA federal records-retention provision requiring election officials to preserve and produce voting records. Its reach to modern state-built databases is the question courts have now repeatedly answered against the government., reasoning that the statute reaches records officials come into possession of, such as individual registration applications, rather than a database the state itself builds and maintains. He dismissed with prejudiceConceptA dismissal that permanently bars refiling the same claim in that court, as opposed to a dismissal without prejudice that lets a plaintiff try again with a better complaint., which bars the department from refiling the claim; the department says it will appeal.

The ruling drops the government's district-court record in this litigation campaign to nought for eighteen, joining at least sixteen other district courts and one circuit that have read the statute the same way. The department had tried to leverage New Jersey's own disclosure that a motor-vehicle software error registered noncitizens in 2023 and 2024, and Quraishi held that the error, whatever its merits as a policy matter, had no bearing on the federal right to unredacted data.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday on Telegram that Ukrainian forces struck RosneftInstitutionRussia's state-controlled oil major and its largest refiner. The Ryazan plant, roughly 120 kilometres from Moscow, is among the country's biggest and a repeat Ukrainian target.'s Ryazan oil refinery, about 120 kilometres from Moscow, along with a logistics centre in the same region, and Ukraine's General Staff confirmed a fire on the refinery grounds. A separate strike hit LukoilInstitutionRussia's largest privately held oil company. Its Perm refinery sits roughly 1,500 kilometres east of Moscow, near the Urals, well beyond most earlier Ukrainian strike ranges.'s Perm refinery roughly 1,500 kilometres east of Moscow, and further targets included an export terminal and a defence enterprise in Rostov region. A Wildberries logistics warehouse was reportedly hit in the same Ryazan wave. The Moscow Times reported at least three dead across Russia and Crimea from the broader strike series. The attacks came hours after Zelensky's meeting with President Trump.

The Perm distance is the news. A campaign that began as border-adjacent harassment now reaches the Urals, and the cumulative effect on Russian refining capacityConceptRussia's ability to turn crude into usable fuel. Industry trackers put current output at a 21-year low after Ukrainian strikes disabled an estimated 700,000 barrels a day across 16 facilities early in 2026. has pushed it, by industry trackers' count, to a 21-year low, after roughly 700,000 barrels a day were disabled across sixteen facilities between January and May.

YES Network and MSG NetworksInstitutionThe regional sports broadcaster carrying the Knicks, Rangers, Devils, Islanders and Sabres, spun out of Madison Square Garden Sports and long one of the most valuable RSNs in the country. are winding down Gotham Sports, the joint streaming app they launched in October 2024 at $34.99 a month, and handing exclusive direct-to-consumer rights for the 2026-27 NBA and NHL seasons to DAZNInstitutionThe global sports-streaming platform backed by Leonard Blavatnik's Access Industries, which has invested more than $7 billion in it since its 2018 US launch.. The teams affected are the Yankees, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Devils, Islanders and Sabres. Legacy Gotham subscribers move to DAZN at no extra cost, and authenticated pay-television subscribers keep access. Terms were not disclosed. The detail that makes it interesting: Gotham's viewership was up nearly 30 percent year over year this spring. The two regional sports networksConceptCable or streaming channels carrying a local team's games. The RSN model, long the most reliable cash flow in sports media, is being unbundled faster than its owners can rebuild it. shut it down anyway.

The economics explain the decision better than the ratings do. Sportico set the move against Comcast's Peacock, which just posted its first quarterly profit, $189 million, against cumulative losses above $11 billion since 2020. If the Yankees and the Knicks cannot carry the fixed cost of a direct-to-consumer platform in the largest media market in the country, very few rights holders can, and the answer is to rent someone else's.

Tim SchaferPersonDouble Fine's founder and studio head, the designer behind Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. He confirmed the 23-person layoff publicly on Bluesky rather than through a corporate statement. confirmed on Bluesky Wednesday that Double Fine has laid off 23 people, days after Microsoft cut the studio loose. Double Fine and Compulsion Games were both returned to independence in July, keeping their intellectual property and catalogues with transitional funding from Xbox, and Schafer said the cuts were about reaching a size the studio can sustain on its own. Microsoft acquired Double Fine in 2019; it shipped Psychonauts 2, Keeper and Kiln under the first-party label. The divestitureConceptA publisher spinning a studio back to independence, sometimes with retained IP and bridge funding. It converts a fixed corporate cost into someone else's payroll problem. sits inside what Microsoft has called the most significant restructuring in Xbox history, roughly 3,200 division roles going by the end of fiscal 2027, with cuts at id Software, ZeniMax Online and Obsidian.

Ninja Theory and Undead Labs were sold to undisclosed buyers, and Arkane StudiosInstitutionThe Dishonored and Deathloop developer, Xbox-owned and headquartered in Lyon. Its fate is unresolved pending mandatory works-council consultation under French labour law.' fate remains open pending mandatory consultation under French labour law. The restructuring drew union rallies outside several Xbox studios on July 15, and Microsoft now faces labour-union legal action in the United States and Canada over how the cuts were handled, which is where the games-industry story becomes an employment-law story.

Glen Hansard died early Wednesday in a single-vehicle motorcycle crash on the outskirts of Dublin, reported to emergency services around 4:30 a.m. local time. He was 56. Hansard fronted the Irish band The FramesInstitutionThe Dublin rock band Hansard formed in 1990 and fronted for three decades, the group that made him a fixture of the Irish music scene long before any film work. for three decades, and won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Falling Slowly" from OnceConceptJohn Carney's 2007 Irish film, shot for a reported $150,000, in which Hansard starred and whose songs he wrote. It was later adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical., John Carney's shoestring 2007 film, sharing it with his co-star and songwriting partner Markéta IrglováPersonThe Czech musician who co-starred in Once and shared the 2008 Best Original Song Oscar with Hansard. She was 19 at the ceremony and famously returned to the stage to finish her speech.. His first screen credit came sixteen years earlier, as a band member in Alan Parker's The Commitments.

The arc was unusual in the direction it ran. Most Oscar-winning songs are written for films by people who work in films; "Falling Slowly" was written by a busker who was cast because he could already play it, and the film's success sent it onward to a Tony-winning Broadway adaptation. He is survived by his partner, the poet Máire Saaritsa, and their three-year-old son.