July 25, 2026

Tadej Pogacar's Tour de France lead grew rather than shrank through the race's Alps stages, extending from roughly 4 minutes 30 seconds to 7 minutes 11 seconds over Remco Evenepoel by Stage 19. Pogacar won Stage 19 on July 25 with a solo attack on Alpe d'Huez, catching and passing breakaway riders Richard Carapaz and Lenny Martinez in the final 1.5 kilometers to break Marco Pantani's record time on the climb.

The decisive move came after Pogacar had already built his advantage with an earlier stage win before the Alps, and he used the back-to-back mountain stages to further distance his closest rival rather than lose time to attacks. The win positioned him to become just the fifth rider in Tour history to win five titles, joining Eddy Merckx, Miguel Indurain, Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault.

Rather than the competitive tightening some had anticipated heading into the mountains, the Alps stages reinforced Pogacar's dominance of the 2026 race, with the battle for the podium and secondary classifications remaining more open than the race for the yellow jersey.

The community leaned toward expecting the gap to close, with 44% predicting the lead would be cut in half -- moderately overestimating how competitive the Alps stages would be at the top of the standings.

Attorneys for David Hearn, the former Olympian charged with damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool's liner, filed a motion to dismiss the felony indictment on July 16 -- before the end of July as predicted. The motion argued that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia failed to preserve key physical evidence -- the section of pool liner Hearn is accused of damaging -- after the National Park Service drained the pool for planned repairs.

When defense attorneys inspected the drained pool, they found the liner section central to the case was missing, undermining the government's ability to present physical evidence of the alleged damage. D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman declined to dismiss the case outright at a July 20 hearing but pressed prosecutors to account for the evidence's condition and set a trial date of September 28.

Hearn, 67, was indicted July 2 on a charge of vandalizing the pool on June 19 and has pleaded not guilty. The draining of the pool for routine maintenance, rather than any deliberate act, created the evidentiary complication now at the center of the defense's argument.

The community anticipated this correctly, with 74% of predictors expecting the motion to be filed before the end of July.

No fight broke out in a WNBA game before July 26, despite a season marked by heightened on-court tension. The most notable flashpoint came July 22, when Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark and Connecticut Sun guard Saniya Rivers exchanged words and picked up double technical fouls during a lopsided Fever win, with Clark drawing her seventh technical of the season -- one shy of triggering a mandatory one-game suspension.

That incident, along with other chippy exchanges around the league involving Clark and rivals such as Angel Reese, kept storylines about WNBA physicality in the news through the All-Star break, held July 24-25 in Chicago. But none of those confrontations escalated beyond shoving, jawing, or technical fouls into an actual fight requiring ejections or a bench-clearing scrum.

Increased officiating scrutiny and the threat of suspensions for repeat technical fouls appear to have kept flashpoints from boiling over, even as rivalries intensified around Clark's Fever and other marquee matchups.

The community was decisive and correct here: just 11% of predictors expected an actual fight, correctly anticipating that tension would stay below the threshold of a genuine on-court altercation.

No additional individuals had been publicly identified in the White House teleprompter betting investigation as of July 24. Reporting throughout the case continued to center on Gabriel Perez, Trump's longtime teleprompter operator, who was placed on unpaid leave on July 16 after the prediction market Kalshi flagged his trading activity to regulators.

Perez is accused of using advance access to Trump's prepared remarks to bet on "mention markets" -- wagers on specific words or phrases the president would say during speeches -- netting an alleged $90,000-plus in profits before Kalshi froze the account and referred the matter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC's review, along with reported settlement discussions involving Perez, remained the focus of coverage through late July, with no reporting naming additional suspects, co-conspirators, or other implicated staff.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the situation "unfortunate" and "a disgrace" while maintaining the administration holds staff to strict ethical standards, but her comments and subsequent coverage did not expand the roster of people under scrutiny.

The community leaned toward the correct outcome: 43% expected more names to surface by July 24, while the majority anticipated the investigation would stay confined to Perez, matching what happened.

The White House said on July 23 that it would not intervene to block the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to the United Kingdom, where both face rape and sex-trafficking charges. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the administration's position at a briefing, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department saw "no role for us to play at this moment or maybe ever" in the case.

The Tate brothers were arrested in Miami on July 19 on a U.S. extradition warrant tied to the UK charges. Their attorney has argued the arrest was politically motivated and raised a jurisdictional objection tied to pending Romanian proceedings against the brothers, but a magistrate judge scheduled a further extradition hearing for July 27, and the brothers remain in federal detention pending that process.

By declining to intervene, the administration cleared a potential political obstacle to the extradition proceeding through the courts, though the legal process itself will determine the final outcome over the coming weeks.

Only 38% of predictors expected Trump and Rubio to allow the extradition to proceed, so the community underestimated the administration's willingness to stay out of the case.

SpaceX successfully launched Starship Flight 13 on July 24, more than a week after an earlier attempt was scrubbed on July 16 when four Raptor engines failed to meet startup parameters ahead of liftoff. The July 24 flight became the first Starship mission to deploy operational payloads, releasing 20 Starlink satellites into a suborbital trajectory that made contact with ground stations.

The Super Heavy booster and upper-stage Ship both flew their planned profiles, including a controlled splashdown and an in-space engine relight test, key milestones SpaceX needed to verify ahead of an eventual orbital flight. The heat shield performed notably better than in earlier test flights, a persistent trouble spot for the Starship program.

A weather delay pushed the launch from July 23 to July 24, but once underway the flight proceeded through its major test objectives without the kind of failure that scrubbed the July 16 attempt.

Only 42% of predictors expected the mission to go off without a hitch, so the community underestimated SpaceX's ability to recover from the earlier scrub and execute a clean flight.

Maine Democrats selected former state Senate President Troy Jackson, not a woman, as their nominee to face Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November. Roughly 566 delegates gathered at a nominating convention in Bangor on July 25 and picked Jackson in a near-unanimous vote.

The seat opened after Graham Platner withdrew from the race earlier in July following a rape allegation. Maine election law required a replacement nominee to be chosen within two weeks of a withdrawal, forcing an accelerated selection process. About a dozen Democrats entered contention after Platner's exit, but the field narrowed sharply once county-level meetings selected convention delegates; Jackson's supporters won most of those slots, prompting his strongest rivals to drop out before the convention.

Jackson, a longtime state legislator aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders and a veteran of his 2016 presidential campaign, now heads into a roughly 100-day sprint against Collins in one of the cycle's most closely watched Senate races.

The community correctly anticipated this outcome: only 36% of predictors expected a woman to be chosen, matching the eventual result.