Hi, everybody. Welcome to Scoop where you get the scoop on this week's news. I'm so glad you're

here today. We have a sampling of a whole bunch of different news items, a summer smorgas board,

if you will. I love that word. I don't always know if I'm saying it correctly. I did check it

before I jumped on here. A smorgas board of a lot of different stories. And that's kind of fun. It's nice to have a newsday where we do have a lead story, which I'll get to in just a second, but we do have a lot of different things that are just interesting in their own right. And just learning and reporting a little bit on each of them has taught me something that I'm excited to share with you. So I'm really glad that you're here. We got a great reminder today about why we wait a little bit to deliver scoop. I was talking to my little brother. By the way, a scoop listener. Hey, Zach, thank you so much for your support. It's nice to have family support. My little brother, who's not so little, much taller than me, by the way. But he was asking me one day, he said, well, I really like scoop to be out early, like right away in the morning on Monday.

And I said, listen, I would too at times.

And by the way, if we ever need to do that, we will.

But when you look at the news cycle, the hours between 5 o'clock and 10 o'clock Eastern time are really fertile ground for stories to develop or to break.

And so when often news organizations are preparing for you that Monday report, they're not guessing because there's definitely some news items that they'll know about.

But they're missing that period of time where you may get something new that could

change the news cycle for the week.

And one of the reasons why that's such fertile ground is that it's a great time to announce

stories that you want to drive the news cycle.

So it's a good place to announce a good time to announce a new project, a company to announce

something new.

It's not a time like

Friday afternoon where you're looking to bury news or so the traditional thinking is on that.

It's not always the case, but that it could be a strategy that is used. So Monday, oftentimes people

use Monday morning to drive the news cycle. And I always want to pay attention to that because I

want you to be

able to get a really good scoop of news in a single sitting or a single walk or a single drive.

I don't want you to have to hop around all the time to try to piece it together, find out what

happened next. So we got a great reminder of that today because we knew that Secretary of State

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