For a seventh consecutive night, US forces struck targets inside Iran, and Iran’s retaliation spread across the Gulf into the hours before dawn Friday, hitting Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. In Qatar, a child was wounded by shrapnel from an intercepted missile. CNN’s live coverage tracks the overnight exchanges.
Qatar’s position in this conflict has become particularly strained. For weeks, Qatari officials have hosted negotiations between American and Iranian representatives, describing that role publicly as a path toward restoring the ceasefire. On Thursday night, Iranian fire also landed in Qatar’s direction. Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Friday it was reviewing its participation in any further mediation. Qatar hosts both Al Udeid Air Base, the largest US air installation in the region, and the diplomats who have been shuttling between Washington and Tehran. It has been, simultaneously, a military platform and a conversation partner. Thursday night, it was a target.
Commercial shipping has nearly stopped. Between 6 p.m. Thursday and 6 a.m. Friday, tracking services recorded six vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz, against a baseline of 18 to 22 daily crossings earlier this month, according to shipping monitors. The strait handles roughly 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply. Brent crude stood at $78.82 a barrel Friday morning, about nine percent above pre-conflict levels. Al Jazeera has tracked the oil price trajectory.
A diplomatic structure meant to contain this conflict has now effectively dissolved. The United States and Iran signed the Islamabad Memorandum on June 17, a formal framework intended to produce a final agreement within 60 days. That framework collapsed July 8 after Iranian attacks on shipping in the strait. President Trump declared the ceasefire “over” at the NATO summit in Turkey, and successive rounds of US strikes have followed. Iranian military advisers warned Friday that continued strikes through the weekend could trigger what they described as a “full-scale offensive” in response, according to NBC News and CBS News.
Islamabad was supposed to be the de-escalation moment. Six weeks after it was signed, it doesn’t exist. The parties are now further apart, militarily, than they were before the ink dried.
Congo’s health ministry reported 2,181 confirmed Ebola cases and 864 deaths on Friday, up from 2,011 cases and 754 deaths reported Thursday, according to CGTN’s July 18 bulletin. The World Health Organization, in a statement Thursday, described this outbreak as “the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded.”
That phrase carries weight when placed against the record. The 2018-2020 epidemic in northeastern DRC, which killed more than 2,200 people over 22 months, required more than ten months to reach 2,000 confirmed cases. This outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo strain, crossed that mark in roughly two months, according to the WHO’s outbreak assessment. Ninety-five percent of active cases remain in Ituri Province, but the virus has now been confirmed in two additional provinces, Haut-Uele and Tshopo. WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in May. The response infrastructure built during the 2018-2020 crisis, tested once already, is being tested again at a faster pace.
From Uganda, better news. The Ministry of Health in Kampala announced Friday that Uganda’s last Ebola patient was discharged on July 16, starting the mandatory 42-day countdown required before Uganda can officially declare its outbreak over. Twenty confirmed cases and two deaths were recorded within Uganda’s borders, all in the capital. No community transmission was documented, and no new case has been reported since June 21. Al Jazeera covered Uganda’s progress on July 16. One country is holding. The other isn’t.
Rescue operations in Venezuela entered their fourth week Friday. The confirmed death toll from the June 24 earthquake sequence has reached at least 4,900, with 16,700 injured and tens of thousands still unaccounted for, according to the United Nations. The first shock struck at magnitude 7.2 off Venezuela’s northern coast, the second at roughly 7.5, thirty-nine seconds later. In the state of La Guaira, where 80 percent of buildings collapsed, crews are still working multiple sites. As of July 13, more than 2,400 foreign rescuers remained on the ground alongside 31,800 Venezuelan government personnel and 30,500 volunteers, according to the State Department’s response summary. The USGS estimates the final toll could range from 10,000 to 100,000, depending on what recovery teams find in areas of total structural collapse.
One rescue has stayed with the coverage. Hernán Gil, a guard, was pulled from rubble on July 12 after eight days trapped, after crews from seven countries spent more than three days excavating a tunnel that collapsed multiple times during the effort. He survived. In our letters section, Lorraine Kessler writes about grief and what the loss of a parent takes with it, not just the person but the particular shape of yourself that existed alongside them. Her piece, “How to Grieve a Parent,” is worth reading this week.
Street protests continued in Ukraine on Friday, a day after demonstrations followed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Crowds gathered in Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, and Dnipro; the Kyiv demonstration, held near the Ivan Franko National Theatre, included protesters carrying signs reading “The Russians are celebrating.” NBC News covered the protests.
Fedorov, 35, had served as defense minister since January, after a longer tenure at the Ministry of Digital Transformation where he built Ukraine’s drone warfare program. His six months at the Defense Ministry coincided with a significant expansion of drone production and a series of long-range strikes against targets inside Russia. He said publicly after his dismissal that Army Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi had delivered Zelenskyy an ultimatum after months of conflict between the two over drone strategy and conscription priorities. Zelenskyy’s office hasn’t addressed that account. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, a former police general, is expected to be nominated as replacement, according to Defense News. What changes in the drone program under new leadership is the question the next several weeks will answer.
More than 200 million Americans were under heat alerts Friday as a second heat dome settled across the eastern two-thirds of the country, with heat indices climbing above 110 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the Midwest and South. TechTimes reported on the dome’s geographic scope. Overnight lows in dense urban areas have stayed above 75 degrees for a second consecutive week. That’s the number that matters. Heat deaths don’t come only from daytime peaks. They come from bodies that don’t recover overnight. The first wave of this summer’s heat, centered over the Northeast around the Fourth of July, killed at least 44 people, most in homes without air conditioning.
The Extreme Heat Emergency Act, introduced with bipartisan sponsors in both chambers last October, would amend the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act to classify extreme heat as a triggering category for federal disaster declarations, enabling FEMA-administered assistance for affected communities. It hasn’t come to a floor vote. No president has ever issued a major disaster declaration solely for extreme heat. In July 1995, a heat wave in Chicago killed more than 700 people over five days and produced no federal declaration under the Stafford Act. That was thirty-one years ago. The statute is the same.
Data centers in several northeastern states shifted to diesel backup generators this week as air conditioning loads pushed electrical grids toward capacity, according to TechTimes. Wildfire smoke from a separate event grounded flights at multiple northeastern airports. CDC’s HeatRisk surveillance system has shown heat-related emergency department visits in the South running at near-record rates for a third consecutive week.
Spain and Argentina will meet Sunday at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in the first World Cup final ever contested between the two countries. Kickoff is at 3 p.m. Eastern. Argentina is chasing its fourth title, having won in 1978, 1986, and 2022. Spain won its only World Cup in 2010.
Spain’s 19-year-old forward Lamine Yamal, who trained separately from the full squad Thursday with a protective bandage on his left thigh, is expected to start, according to team representatives who described the modified session as precautionary management after a minor knock in the semifinal. Yahoo Sports covered the training situation. Argentina’s Lionel Messi, 39, has scored five goals in the tournament and has had no reported fitness concerns. If Argentina wins, it would be the first country since Brazil in 1958 and 1962 to claim back-to-back World Cup titles.
Yamal was born July 13, 2007. He turned 19 five days ago. Messi made his World Cup debut in June 2006, roughly thirteen months before Yamal was born, and turned 39 last month. In most sports, the distance between those two ages belongs to a single career. On Sunday afternoon in New Jersey, they’ll line up on opposite sides of the same field. That’s a genuinely rare thing to be able to watch. The stadium holds 82,500. It will be full.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
