Michigan primary goes down to the wire

Richard Hall | August 05, 2026

Hey there. Here at The Brief we’re always thinking about how to showcase what TIME does best. I’ll give you one example. Jeffrey Kluger has covered space and science at TIME for three decades, and his book on Apollo 13 served at the basis for the hit 1995 film. So whenever you see his byline on a story about space, as you will today, you’ll want to read it.

We’re also waiting for final results from a crucial Democratic primary race in Michigan that could determine the future direction of the party.

IN TODAY’S BRIEF

Too close to call in Michigan
America’s new mine rush
A rocket crashes into the moon
Why ICE is buying up private detention centers
Trump’s posts for sale
A bumper $5.73 billion profit for big oil
Stickers of shame

READ THIS FIRST

Michigan Democratic primary race too close to call

Sarah Rice—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, holds a narrow lead over Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary as the votes are still being counted on Wednesday morning.

NBC has called the race for El-Sayed, who spoke to TIME in a wide-ranging interview in late May, with approximately 96% of votes counted. But the Associated Press has not, at the time of writing.

A victory for El-Sayed would deliver the party’s insurgent progressive wing a major victory in a contest that became a fierce referendum on whether Democrats need to move further left to fully harness plummeting support for President Donald Trump.

El-Sayed, a non-practicing doctor who previously ran for governor, built his campaign around a sweeping progressive agenda, calling for Medicare for All, a 7% annual tax on the wealth of billionaires, and a broader effort to challenge what he described as an economic system tilted toward the wealthy and powerful.

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PHOTO ESSAY

The new rush to mine America

Ihúnkiya Opá (Craven Canyon), a sacred and culturally significant site near the Dewey-Burdock uranium project. Matt Black for TIME

Across political parties and ideological camps, policymakers agree the U.S. must bring some mining and processing capacity home. But many environmentalists and local communities remain concerned about how it’s happening, with 40 mining projects listed as part of a federal fast-track program and projects moving quickly.

Today’s rapid development, captured in this photo essay featuring up-close images of the new mining boom, will set new precedents for what companies must do—or could get away with—when they want to build megamines.

These images show the people working the mines, the scars they leave on the landscape, and the communities that have been displaced, or suffered from polluted air and water as a result—even long after the mines close.

HAPPENING NOW

A SpaceX rocket just crashed into the moon. Here's everything you need to know

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience lunar landers, lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 15, 2025. Gregg Newton—AFP/Getty Images

Humanity has been putting metal on the moon ever since Sept. 13, 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 spacecraft performed a planned crash landing between the Sea of Rains and the Sea of Serenity on the moon’s near side. Since then, nearly 70 spacecraft and spent boosters have soft landed or crash landed on the moon—including six ships carrying people.

This week one more big hunk of hardware joined them: the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which was subject to an unplanned lunar impact in the early hours of Wednesday morning, after a 19-month journey.

Typically, a Falcon 9’s second stage used for a deep space mission would ultimately be brought down by atmospheric drag for a fiery reentry. But for reasons not quite clear, this stage managed to avoid the atmosphere on its closer approaches to Earth, and persist in an orbit that brought it nearer and nearer the moon.

THE CONTEXT

Why ICE is quietly buying up private detention centers

White House Border Czar Tom Homan speaks to reporters outside of the White House on July 20, 2026 in Washington, DC.Kevin Dietsch–Getty Images

Over the last year and a half, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has veered from planning to reopen more than a dozen shuttered prisons, to housing thousands of migrants in sprawling tent facilities, to retrofitting nearly a dozen commercial warehouses into new detention centers. Despite billions of dollars spent, each strategy has largely fallen by the wayside, stymied by legal and political headwinds.

The latest plan, according to ICE sources and officials with private prison companies, is for ICE to take over private detention facilities while building new ones alongside them.

CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison operators in the country, announced early last month that the U.S. government was buying two of its facilities for $1.5 billion.

Immigration advocates say the effort to buy up private detention centers is motivated by a desire to clamp down on oversight of what goes on inside them.

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IN FOCUS

Trump is selling early access to his social media posts. Is it legal?

Donald Trump's post on Truth Social appears on screen in the Press Briefing Room at the White House, Thursday, May 22, 2025, in Washington. Jacquelyn Martin—Associated Press

Presidents have always had the ability to move markets with their words, but perhaps no one has done so quite as consistently as Donald Trump.

His position in the White House gives him the power to make decisions and access privileged information that shapes the global economy, and he does so several times a month through social media posts and off-the-cuff remarks at press conferences.

Now, he is set to profit from that ability in a way no President before him has, selling quicker access to his social media posts through his Trump Media company.

A new service offered by the company allows financial firms and other organizations to receive alerts about Trump’s posts on Truth Social before the general public, for a hefty price.

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) calls the service “Truth API,” and describes it as giving firms “a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths.”

Many trading firms already closely monitor Trump’s social media posts, but this new service, which is estimated to cost up to $100,000 a month, will give paying customers a crucial edge of milliseconds. It could, for example, allow a firm to make trades or cancel positions before its competitors.

A spokesperson for the company tells TIME: “Truth API closes the latency gap for organizations that seek prompt access publicly available Truth Social posts, and any suggestion that Truth API provides access to non-public information is factually inaccurate."

Renée Jones, a Boston College professor and former official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, tells TIME that the new venture could violate insider trading laws.

The STOCK Act makes it illegal for certain federal officials, including the president, to trade or tip based on their access to non-public information.

“Any information that the president learns or derives as part of his official duties, the statute says it belongs to the United States, and misuse of it could violate the law,” she adds.

Does that mean more legal trouble for Trump?

“If it involves the President, and the President controls both the SEC and the Justice Department,” Jones says, ”I'm not sure then who's going to investigate, if they even feel like it's worthy of investigation.”

ONE NUMBER

$5.73 billion

Oil giant BP announced on Tuesday that its second-quarter profit more than doubled to $5.73 billion, beating forecasts of $5.11 billion. Higher energy prices due to the war in Iran may have hit the wallets of consumers here in the U.S. and around the world, but oil giants have profited greatly from the volatility.

SOURCE: BP

A VIRAL MOMENT

Stickers of shame

New York is trying a new method to make sure residents move their cars for street sweepers: shame. The city council is putting bright green stickers on the rule-breaking cars.