Wanna bet?

Because it's a lot more legal now, apparently.

Let’s start today’s newsletter with a few items that might otherwise have found a home in the “7 other things” section:

• A reporter in Israel wrote that he started getting harassing messages and threats after his reporting on an Iranian missile strike—realizing later that it was from people who had bet heavily on prediction markets that no such attack would get through. (Times of Israel)

• Arizona’s attorney general didn’t send a warning letter—she filed criminal charges against Kalshi, accusing it of operating illegal gambling markets. (Reuters)

• And then there’s a bit of a broader pattern: people making hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars betting on the timing of Trump administration actions—things like the attacks on Iran and Venezuela, or tariff announcements—with trades placed just before those decisions became public. (Reuters, AP, Bloomberg)

I’m reminded of an old newsroom idea: one example is interesting, two is a coincidence, three is a trend.

This feels like a trend.

We all have our vices. But here we are in 2026, and gambling isn’t a vice anymore. It’s infrastructure.

Americans bet $166.9 billion on sports in 2025 alone, and the industry generated nearly $17 billion in revenue.

It’s everywhere—especially if you watch sports. Odds are part of the broadcast. Ads are constant. The line between “watching the game” and “having money on the game” has basically disappeared.

How did that happen?

Brief history that happened so fast I think many people didn’t even notice: In 2018, the Supreme Court decided Murphy v. NCAA and struck down the federal law (PASPA) that had kept sports betting mostly illegal outside Nevada.

After that, states could legalize it—and they did. Fast.

Add smartphones, apps, and a lot of tax revenue incentives, and within a few years we went from “you have to go to Vegas” to “you can bet anything, anytime, from your couch.”

Which brings us back to those first bullets.

Because what we’re seeing now isn’t just sports betting. In some cases, it looks like people are making large, precise bets right before government actions become public.

That’s not just a fairness issue; it’s a national security problem.

If people with access to non-public information can legally monetize it in prediction markets, then those markets become a kind of open signal channel. Anyone—including foreign intelligence services—can watch where the money is moving and infer what insiders appear to believe is about to happen.

There’s also a second, weirder issue.

There used to be a line—half joke, half truth—that if something wasn’t in The New York Times, it didn’t happen.

Now we’re drifting toward something stranger:

if something is reported, but enough money is riding on a different version of events, there’s pressure to make reality… negotiable.

That Times of Israel story is the clearest example I’ve seen of that.

I don’t have solutions here—maybe an observation. It’s pretty wild how we go quickly from the law outpacing what people want, to what people apparently want outpacing the law.

With that in mind, let’s do a poll. Am I alone in being kind of freaked out by the speed with which we’ve all supposedly become cool with gambling on everything?

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Other things:

• The head of the Trump administration’s National Counterterrorism Center resigned in protest over the war with Iran. Joe Kent, appoined by Trump last year, said he “cannot in good conscience” support the war because he thinks Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation,” and that Israel pushed the U.S. into the conflict. (NPR; Kent’s statement on Twitter)

• Citizens of Canada, Germany, France and the U.K. have soured on the U.S. and increasingly see China as a more dependable partner, a development that could drastically tip the balance of global power away from the West. The shift, according to recent results from a POLITICO Poll, “appears to be driven by [President] Trump’s disruption, not by a newfound stability in China.” (Politico)

• Applicants to become federal prosecutors no longer need any prior experience past law school, as U.S. attorneys’ offices struggle to find qualified replacements following mass departures. A Justice Department memo reviewed by Bloomberg Law states says lawyers without experience can be hired until the end of February 2027, “due to an exigent hiring need for attorneys across the Department.” (Bloomberg Law)

• A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to restore the government-run Voice of America’s operations after it had effectively been shut down a year ago, putting hundreds of employees who have been on administrative leave back to work. “Defendants have provided nothing approaching a principled basis for their decision,” wrote Judge Royce C. Lamberth. (AP)

• The SEC is preparing a proposal to eliminate required quarterly earnings reports, scaling back the requirement to twice a year. To be clear: there a several steps that would have to happen before this rule can change, but this would be step 1. (WSJ)

• A former Colorado funeral home owner who helped her ex-husband hide nearly 200 decomposing bodies in a building was sentenced Monday to 18 years in prison for cheating customers and defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic small business aid. (Colorado Sun)

• red fox somehow slipped onto a cargo ship that traveled from Southampton, England, to New York, where the animal is now in the Bronx Zoo’s care. “He seems to be settling in well,” Keith Lovett, the zoo’s director of animal programs, said by phone. “It’s gone through a lot.” (AP)

Thanks for reading. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.