What happened
Abelardo de la Espriella, a right-wing lawyer with no political experience, was poised to win Colombia’s presidency, holding a narrow lead in yesterday’s runoff vote. With nearly all votes counted, de la Espriella (pictured above) had 49.66% to 48.7% for leftist Sen. Iván Cepeda.

Who said what
A victory by de la Espriella, a dual Colombian-U.S. citizen who “transformed himself from sharply dressed Miami lawyer to populist in a soccer jersey and a straw hat,” would “return Colombia to conservative rule after four years under Gustavo Petro, the country’s first leftist president,” The New York Times said. It would also “advance Latin America’s broader shift to the right” in recent years. De la Espriella, actively backed by President Donald Trump, “promised a heavy-handed approach to crime-fighting, including drug trafficking,” The Associated Press said. He vowed to end Petro’s peace negotiations with armed groups and “build mega-prisons.” 

What next?
The winner, to be announced after a “final verified count, overseen by notaries and judges,” will begin a four-year term on Aug. 7, Reuters said. De la Espriella would likely have to “water down some of his proposals” due to the “closeness of the race” and the “divided Congress” in which Cepeda’s Historic Pact party has a plurality of seats in both chambers. 

What happened
President Donald Trump over the weekend claimed that “terrible Vandals” had sabotaged his new $14.7 million rehabilitation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leading to “multiple” arrests and likely requiring contractors to “drain much of the water” again for “necessary repairs.” Administration officials said at least five people have been arrested on vandalism charges. apparently for reaching into the algae-filled pool and touching or removing “American Flag blue” coating that has peeled up from the bottom. 

Who said what
Trump said on social media Saturday night that his renovation had “worked perfectly” before people cut a “250 foot long gash” into the coating and “poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.” He provided no evidence, and it “wasn’t immediately clear” how anyone could cut the new coating, which is “like a coarse coat of paint,” The Wall Street Journal said. But hydrogen peroxide, which National Park Service workers have been dumping into the pool to kill the algae, “can also be used as a paint remover,” and painting the bottom of the “warm, shallow” pool navy blue “may have had the unintended effect of making the water warmer, which can further spur algae growth.” 

What next?
Trump posted yesterday that he had “inspected” the pool and “work will begin immediately.”

While the world’s oceans have been heating up, one patch of the Atlantic located south of Greenland has been dropping in temperature. The “cold blob” has cooled by nearly 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1900, making it the “only part of the world” that has “cooled significantly since the 19th century,” said a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

Scientists believe this anomaly is happening because of shifts in a network of ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. They found that the “largest drop in heat content” has been in the “top 1,000 meters” of the blob, “coinciding with the AMOC’s location,” said Science News. 

The AMOC “works like a vast ocean conveyor belt, pulling warm water from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools, sinks and flows back south,” said CNN. Over time, the system has been “weakening as human-driven global warming melts ice and causes a surge of freshwater into the ocean, disrupting the AMOC’s delicate balance of heat and salinity.” 

Eventually, the system may “become so weak” that it can “no longer distribute heat around the world,” said USA Today. The AMOC’s collapse has been deemed a climate tipping point after which there will be irreversible ecological damage.

India’s summer monsoon rainfall pattern has already “shifted dramatically” as a result of the disruption, said a study published in the journal AGU Advances. An AMOC collapse could also “trigger dramatically cold winters in northern Europe” and cause sea levels on the U.S. East Coast to “rise rapidly,” said Euronews.