The Treasury Department rolled out a second wave of Iran sanctions on Monday under the name “Operation Economic Outcast.” Secretary Scott Bessent announced the package, which targets roughly 60 companies, individuals, and vessels across the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Switzerland, and Europe, all tied to Iran’s oil, shipping, cryptocurrency, and aviation sectors. CNN is tracking developments. Any global company still conducting business with Iran faces being cut off from the U.S. dollar. The Iranian rial fell to a record low of 2.02 million rials to the dollar by midday. China’s Foreign Ministry responded through a spokesperson: “Sanctions and pressure will not resolve disputes.”
Separately on Tuesday, Iran and Oman outlined what diplomats described as a “phased framework” for a joint temporary shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz, with arrangements to clear mines from the waterway. President Trump said the United States would destroy Iranian mine-laying vessels if they continued operations. Al Jazeera has the account of the Hormuz talks.
Two things are worth holding together. Monday’s “economic D-Day” announcement, branded “Operation Economic Outcast,” represents an effort to accomplish in weeks what prior administrations built across decades. The Carter administration froze approximately $12 billion in Iranian assets in November 1979, following the embassy seizure in Tehran, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The Reagan and first Bush administrations expanded that foundation through the 1980s. The Obama administration negotiated a partial easing through the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which unfroze an estimated $100 billion in Iranian assets in exchange for nuclear restrictions. The first Trump administration withdrew from that agreement in 2018. What has accumulated since, across eight years of failed successor negotiations, is now the raw material being deployed in concentrated form. Whether pressure applied faster than any previous version produces results that slower versions couldn’t is the question nobody in Washington or Tehran knows the answer to tonight.
The Supreme Court lifted a lower court injunction on an executive order restricting mail-in voting, in a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines. The decision allows the Department of Homeland Security to compile state citizenship voter lists and advance the administration’s restrictions on absentee balloting while legal proceedings continue. The Court did not settle whether the executive branch has authority to direct state election administration in the way the order attempts. That question will come back. Democratic legal groups announced further challenges before the ink was dry. Democracy Now has the report.
Vote-by-mail has been part of American elections since the Civil War, when Union soldiers voted from the field under laws passed starting in 1862. Oregon moved to an all-mail election system in 1998, the first state to do so, after years of expanding absentee access (source). By the 2020 general election, roughly 46 percent of all ballots cast came by mail, up from about 24 percent in 2016. What the Court left unanswered on Monday is the underlying constitutional framework for how much the federal executive branch can shape state-administered elections. There’s no settled law here because no administration has attempted it in quite this form before. The litigation will be substantial. The calendar it runs on now includes the 2028 cycle.
A heavily armed gang raided Kenscoff, a farming community in the hills above Port-au-Prince, overnight on Monday and killed at least 47 people. It’s among the deadliest single attacks of the current insurgency. The United Nations human rights office has documented more than 16,000 deaths caused by criminal groups in Haiti since early 2022. Democracy Now reported on the attack.
Kenscoff sits at roughly 4,600 feet above sea level, in the cooler hills that have historically been calmer than the capital’s lowland neighborhoods. The community’s produce market supplies much of Port-au-Prince’s fresh vegetables. That a raid of this scale reached Kenscoff is a measure of how far the insurgency has extended beyond its origins. The Gang Suppression Force, authorized by the UN Security Council in 2025 to replace the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission, has roughly 1,000 personnel deployed in country (source). Monday’s raid happened while they were there.
The gang problem in Haiti is not new and it’s not simple. Criminal organizations began filling power vacuums left by the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021 and accelerated through the political collapse that followed. By early 2024, gangs controlled an estimated 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, according to UN estimates. Kenscoff, at elevation, had been harder to reach. It isn’t anymore.
The Pentagon confirmed Tuesday that U.S. Southern Command resumed lethal strikes on vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean after a two-month pause. On Monday, SOUTHCOM carried out what it described as a “lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes” in the Pacific, killing two people. No drug seizure was publicly reported in connection with the strike. Since the administration launched its maritime anti-trafficking campaign roughly a year ago, at least 223 people have reportedly been killed in such strikes. Democracy Now has coverage.
This is the story that got the least coverage Tuesday and may warrant the most scrutiny over time.
The legal authority for lethal strikes on civilian vessels in international waters, without confirmed interdiction or a drug seizure, hasn’t been established by Congress or settled by any court. The administration has cited emergency declarations and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force as the basis. Legal scholars have disputed both applications. No legislation specifically authorizes the campaign. The two-month pause that preceded Monday’s resumption was not publicly explained. Neither was the decision to resume. What the pause accomplished, and why it ended Monday, are questions the Pentagon hasn’t answered publicly. They’re worth asking.
After trade talks collapsed late last week, President Trump on Tuesday threatened 50 percent tariffs on Canadian vehicles and auto parts, on top of the tariffs already in effect on $20 billion in Canadian goods. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada would not return to the negotiating table unless the United States changed its approach. No negotiations are currently scheduled. Democracy Now reported on the exchange.
Monday’s column covered the collapse of the broader trade talks in detail. What Tuesday added is the vehicle sector threat, which goes to the heart of the integrated North American auto supply chain. Cars and trucks built in Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky share parts that cross the border multiple times before a finished vehicle rolls off the line. Tariffs at this scale on that sector don’t just add a cost. They require the supply chain to restructure. That takes years and produces a different industry than the one that currently exists. Auto workers on both sides of the border know this. Most of them aren’t being asked.
And one last thing.
Scientists confirmed this week that a 76-square-kilometer section of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, roughly the area of Manhattan, calved on August 4 and is now moving as a free-floating ice island through the Arctic Ocean. Satellites had tracked spreading cracks in the glacier for weeks before the final break. ScienceDaily has the full account.
Petermann has shed large sections before. A roughly 260-square-kilometer island broke free in 2010. A section of approximately 130 square kilometers followed in 2012. Each event has been monitored more precisely than the last, partly because the science has improved and partly because there have been more events to practice on. What scientists are tracking now is the rate at which warming Arctic seawater thins the remaining ice shelf from below, a process called basal melt. It doesn’t show up in satellite photographs of the surface. It shows up in data from instruments deployed specifically to find it, in water, under ice, in the Arctic Ocean. The oceanographic sensing networks capable of tracking this in near-real time didn’t exist when the 2010 island broke free. They exist now because people built them. That the crack in the August 4 calving was visible for weeks before the break, and that scientific teams were watching it, is not an accident. It is a result. The ground keeps moving. The people watching it keep getting better at watching.
Warren Holt’s piece in Ideas this week, “What Goes Up When the Brain Slows Down,” is about the two things that actually happen to intelligence as we age and why, for sixty years, we’ve been watching the wrong one.
