Today's five.

Iran fired ballistic missiles at a US aircraft carrier and destroyer. Both ships evaded the attack. Nobody was hurt. Then the US destroyed three Iranian oil tankers — two permanently disabled, one sunk after the crew was told to leave. CENTCOM posted the footage. Axios noted this is a formalized policy, approved by Trump, now past the six-month mark of back-and-forth exchanges. The Hill led with "unprovoked." Axios led with "tit-for-tat." The admiral's quote did the most work: "If you shoot at two of our ships, we will take out three of yours."

Mike Huckabee — Trump's ambassador to Israel — just called West Bank settler attacks "an act of terror," which is not the sentence anyone had on their bingo card. He said it during a visit to Turmus Ayya, where Palestinian American residents have spent months dealing with car burnings, mosque torchings, and home vandalism. This is apparently not his first time saying it. The Times framed it as a systemic Israeli government failure; the Examiner and The Hill covered it as a straightforward condemnation. The word "terror" carries specific legal and diplomatic weight in U.S. policy — Huckabee used it anyway.

Flock cameras are already in thousands of American towns, and the guy who used to oversee AI for the Pentagon thinks that's worth paying attention to. Mark Beall — former Pentagon AI Policy Director — warned this week that without judicial oversight and clear guardrails, AI-powered surveillance tools like Flock could quietly build out a surveillance architecture that looks a lot like China's. He's not against the cameras; he's against the cameras with no rules. Both Fox News and the New York Post ran the same quote, the same framing, and somehow that bipartisan alarm is the most interesting part of the story.

Ten days after catastrophic floods buried parts of Nepal, rescuers found two people who should not have been findable. A Chinese man was pulled from 740 feet inside a hydropower tunnel. A 60-year-old Nepalese woman was found alive in a four-story building downriver — her family had already started funeral preparations. NBC News led with the tunnel rescue; the Times led with the woman in the buried house, which is frankly the better story. Thousands are still missing. The survival window for disaster rescues is typically 72 hours. Nepal is now at 240.

Charging a former Olympian with felony vandalism is bold. Doing it after the president publicly called for prosecution is the part that got a D.C. judge's attention. Judge Todd Edelman signaled he may block new felony charges against David Hearn — a Maryland man accused of damaging part of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — citing concerns about Trump's public pressure on prosecutors. The argument isn't that nothing happened at the reflecting pool. It's that executive influence over charging decisions is the kind of thing courts tend to notice, and occasionally punish.