America Top Stories

Walmart finally accepts Apple Pay, ending a decade-long holdout Published: August 22, 2026 On August 21, 2026, Walmart issued a press release from its Bentonville headquarters with a headline that would have seemed unlikely a year ago: "More Ways to Pay: Tap to Pay Is Coming to Walmart and Sam's Club." Starting August 24, the nation's largest retailer will begin accepting Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and other contactless payment methods at its U.S. stores, with full nationwide coverage planned by the end of the year. The announcement ends more than a decade of resistance that made Walmart one of the last major U.S. retailers to reject tap-to-pay technology. But the story goes beyond a retailer adopting a payment method. It is about the collapse of a deliberate, expensive, multi-year strategy to control the payment relationship with customers, and what that collapse says about the limits of platform control in consumer retail. What Walmart is actually...

Amazon's book-destruction operation and the AI industry's data problem Published: August 22, 2026 In August 2026, investigative reporter Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media planted a $29 Apple AirTag inside a shipment of approximately 1,000 rare books and tracked it as it traveled through Milwaukee and Kenosha, Wisconsin, across Colorado, and finally to the north end of an Amazon warehouse complex in Las Vegas designated LAS8. There, in a unit Amazon internally calls VGT3, employees cut the spines off books, feed the loose pages through high-speed scanners, and discard the physical copies. According to Amazon worker accounts, the scanned text is used to develop and train AI models, though Amazon's official statement does not confirm this directly. The investigation documented at least one large-scale instance of what booksellers had suspected for months: that Amazon is purchasing rare and out-of-print books in bulk, digitizing them through destructive scanning, and discardin...

The Unraveling of a 70-Year Alliance: Why Trump Is Pivoting From South Korea to North Korea   On the evening of August 16, 2026, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that he had instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to "substantially reduce" joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises, hours before Ulchi Freedom Shield 2026 was to begin. He offered two reasons: his "very good relationship" with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Seoul's refusal to join the American war against Iran. A seven-decade commitment to the U.S. position in East Asia fell to the president's personal diplomacy and his grievances with an ally, all in one social media post. The Announcement: An Order Too Late to Cancel The order could not be implemented as written. The exercises began on August 17 as scheduled, with about 18,000 South Korean troops taking part in Ulchi Freedom Shield, an 11-day exercise through August 27. Washington and Seoul have held joint exercis...

Powerball Jackpot Hits $1 Billion: How a Single Illinois Ticket Won the Biggest Prize of 2026 — and What Happens Next   Somewhere in Illinois, there is a slip of paper worth $1.040 billion. Nobody has come forward to claim it yet, and the person holding it may not even know it yet. But after 43 consecutive drawings without a jackpot winner, the longest drought of the year finally ended Wednesday night when a single ticket sold in the state matched every number drawn. The prize is the biggest Powerball jackpot of 2026, the eighth-largest in the history of the game, and the 15th U.S. lottery jackpot across Powerball and Mega Millions combined to cross the billion-dollar line. It also nudged past the $980 million Mega Millions prize won by a ticket sold in Georgia last fall. For the tens of millions of people who bought tickets as the pot swelled, the anticipation is over. For the one person holding the winning numbers, an entirely different set of questions is just beginning ...

Oil Price Rises as Iran-Oman Hormuz Deal Nears but Reopening Remains Uncertain   Oil prices edged higher on Monday as uncertainty persisted over the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran saying a deal with Oman defining new shipping lanes was in its final stages but insisting the United States must still meet additional conditions before the strategically vital waterway could fully resume operations. Brent crude futures rose 91 cents, or 1.09%, to $84.46 a barrel by 0056 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures gained 61 cents, or 0.78%, to $78.79 a barrel. The modest recovery came after both benchmarks had fallen more than 7% last week on hopes that Iran and Oman were close to reaching a deal that would lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which carried a fifth of the world's crude oil before the war. The Diplomatic Standoff: What Iran Actually Said Iran's messaging over the weekend was carefully calibrated to project progress while pres...

August 2026 opened with a lot happening at once. Foreign policy, domestic political fights, economic jitters, and a set of primaries that could reshape the Democratic Party — it's all colliding at the same time, and honestly, it's a lot to keep track of. Iran and the Strait of Hormuz: From War to "Imminent" Deal The biggest story right now is the U.S.-Iran conflict, and specifically the wild swing from escalation to diplomacy over the weekend. Back on February 28, President Trump announced what he called "major combat operations" against Iran. Joint U.S.-Israeli strikes hit military, government, and infrastructure sites across the country. The fight has centered on the Strait of Hormuz — that chokepoint through which a huge share of the world's oil passes. Then, on August 3, Trump did something unexpected. Speaking from the Oval Office, he said he was halting planned attacks because "the perimeters of a deal" had been reached. He call...