TGIF!

ProPublica cracked open 3,200 financial disclosure records from Trump appointees and found the Pentagon's missile defense chief still financially tied to the private equity firm whose companies are winning his program's contracts. In Libya, Khalifa Haftar controls the country's oil terminals, coastline, and parliament while holding no official government title — and four European officials flew to Benghazi last summer only to be turned away at the airport lounge trying to reach him. A Texas businessman spent $500,000 shipping red heifers to the West Bank because he believes an ancient purification ritual will trigger the Second Coming, and Hamas cited the cattle by name following the October 7 attack. And in the Arkansas Ozarks, the Walton family has been quietly buying land around the Buffalo River while polling locals on a national park upgrade — a question that drew 1,185 people to a high school cafeteria to say no.

Good lunch, good reads.

Brett

Byron Stinson, a 70-year-old Glen Rose businessman, has spent years convinced that God chose him to help trigger the Second Coming of Christ by locating and delivering unblemished red heifers to Israel. The ritual matters because ancient Jewish law requires the ashes of a perfect red heifer as part of a purification ceremony that some believe must precede the construction of the Third Temple in Jerusalem, itself seen as a prerequisite to end-times prophecy. Stinson, tireless and self-funded, recruited ranchers across Texas and eventually sourced cattle from Jerome Urbanosky's 1,500-acre spread northwest of Houston and Ty Davenport's operation east of Dallas. After clearing bureaucratic obstacles involving Belgian airlines, Dutch salmon shipments, and airline temperature rules, five heifers were flown to Israel in September 2022 aboard an American Airlines 777. Hamas cited the heifers by name in a statement following the October 7, 2023, attack. Rabbinical authorities have so far declined to declare any heifer fully kosher, and in the summer of 2025, a disputed ceremony was held using what may have been a disqualified animal. The Temple Institute called it a practice run. Stinson insists it was real, and says the resulting ashes have already healed his wife's memory problems.

Read here.

Khalifa Haftar, 82, holds no official government title in Libya, but he controls the country's oil terminals, coastline, courts, and parliament with the backing of Russia, Egypt, and the UAE. When four senior European officials flew to eastern Libya in July 2025 to negotiate migration policy, Haftar refused to meet them unless they first publicly acknowledged his preferred eastern government, which the EU does not recognize. The delegation never made it past the airport. Anas El Gomati traces Haftar's rise from a trusted Gaddafi general captured in Chad in 1987, where he turned his prison camp into a power base before the CIA recruited him, to his years as an asset in Falls Church, Virginia, to his return to Libya in 2011, when he arrived claiming to lead a revolution that had already largely passed him by. What followed was a decade of patient accumulation: territory, oil revenue, foreign patrons, a compliant parliament. By 2019, backed by Russian mercenaries and a green light from John Bolton, Haftar launched a full assault on Tripoli that ultimately failed. His sons now divide the system between them, with Saddam as the apparent heir. Whether any of them can hold together an empire built entirely around one man's refusal to be accountable remains the central question.

Read here.

ProPublica has released nearly 3,200 financial disclosure records covering more than 1,500 Trump administration appointees, and the picture is about what you would expect: former industry executives now regulate the sectors that made them rich. The most pointed example involves Steve Feinberg, deputy secretary of defense and co-founder of private equity giant Cerberus Capital Management, who oversees the Golden Dome missile defense initiative while Cerberus portfolio companies including Stratolaunch and NetCentrics Corp have already received Golden Dome contracts worth undisclosed amounts. Feinberg says he divested from Cerberus but was granted an indefinite extension to keep paying the firm for tax, accounting, and healthcare services. Marc Berkowitz, the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, holds between $1 million and $5 million in Lockheed Martin stock and receives two monthly pensions from the company, even as Lockheed competes for a major role in the same program. Meanwhile, at least a dozen officials withheld the names of former clients entirely, including U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who kept more than 50 former King & Spalding clients secret. Trump revoked Biden-era ethics pledge requirements on his first day back in office, then fired 17 inspectors general and removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics. The office currently has no director.

Read here.

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The Buffalo River in the Arkansas Ozarks is the country's only national river, a designation Richard Nixon signed into law in 1972 after a prolonged, often violent battle between dam-builders, conservationists, and roughly 2,000 local landowners who mostly just wanted to stay put. Fifty years later, a second battle is underway. Writer Boyce Upholt reports that Runway LLC, a firm run by Tom and Steuart Walton of the Walmart fortune, quietly became one of the largest landowners in Madison County, commissioned a polling survey testing support for upgrading the river to a national park and preserve, and had already been in talks with Rep. Bruce Westerman about enabling legislation. When local newspaper publisher Ellen Kreth traced the shadowy LLCs buying up property to a single Walton Enterprises post office box, she had her story. The October 2023 town hall in Jasper drew 1,185 residents to a high school cafeteria, plus 2,000 more online. Most were opposed. The case against redesignation runs from the practical, the river already struggles with $30 million in deferred maintenance, to the philosophical: the Waltons' vision of an outdoor recreation economy promises a Jackson Hole scenario, where billionaire aesthetics price out the people who actually live there. Runway has since acquired the area's most popular dude ranch.

Read here.

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