Tehran hasn’t responded to the 10-day ceasefire proposal as of Tuesday morning. The proposal, passed to Iran by Pakistani and Qatari mediators and confirmed by Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday, remains unanswered. US forces conducted additional strikes overnight against Iranian positions along the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps confirmed its own operations. Neither government has announced progress toward an agreement.
The practical situation in the strait hasn’t changed materially since the conflict resumed on July 7, when Washington declared the Islamabad Memorandum over and CENTCOM began its current strike campaign. Al Jazeera has tracked the shipping collapse closely: before the war, roughly 130 vessels crossed through the strait each day. Since fighting resumed, that traffic has been near-zero. The United Nations reported last week that approximately 6,000 seafarers remain stranded aboard hundreds of vessels anchored in the Gulf. The UN story is here.
Washington’s stated terms, set publicly on July 11, require Iran to declare all Hormuz channels open without tolls, halt attacks on shipping, and hand over its highly enriched uranium stockpile. Tehran’s stated terms, articulated since March, require firm guarantees against future aggression, recognition of what Iran calls its legitimate rights, and reparations. The US has rejected the reparations demand. The distance between those two positions is not the kind that closes in a press statement. It closes, if it closes, when one or both sides concludes it can’t sustain what the impasse is costing. As of this morning, both sides appear to be calculating they can.
The confirmed death toll from Venezuela’s June 24 earthquake sequence has risen to 5,346, according to updated figures from Al Jazeera, up from 5,278 on Monday. The International Monetary Fund has released emergency funds as part of the disaster response. An estimated 1.8 million people remain in need of humanitarian aid, including approximately 680,000 children.
The early weeks of the rescue operation were hampered by delayed military deployment orders, shortages of basic rescue equipment, and confusion from overlapping chains of command, according to multiple outlets covering the relief effort. Four weeks after the magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 shocks struck within a minute of each other off Venezuela’s northern coast, search crews still haven’t reached all areas of total structural collapse. The USGS estimated early on that the final toll could exceed 10,000. The 5,346 figure is not close to a final one.
Russian forces struck Kyiv Oblast on Tuesday with a combined ballistic missile and drone attack that killed at least 22 people and injured 56 others, according to Ukrinform. Ukrainian air defense intercepted a portion of the incoming fire. Residential buildings and infrastructure were among the targets struck. Ukraine’s defense ministry has not yet published a full damage assessment.
The attack is consistent with a pattern that has continued through the war’s fourth year. Russia’s net territorial gain over the twelve months ending June 2026 was roughly 1,427 square miles of Ukrainian territory, according to ACLED data, representing about 0.6 percent of Ukraine’s 1991 territory over a year of fighting. Ukraine’s parliament still hasn’t confirmed a permanent defense minister following President Zelenskyy’s dismissal of Mykhailo Fedorov on July 15. Major General Yevhenii Khmara is serving in an acting capacity.
Andy Burnham became Britain’s prime minister on July 20, the seventh person to hold that office in a decade. Burnham, the member of parliament for Makerfield, succeeded Sir Keir Starmer, who resigned as Labour leader in June under internal party pressure. Burnham was the only candidate in the subsequent Labour leadership contest and was acclaimed party leader on July 17, receiving nominations from 379 of the 403 Labour members of parliament, according to CNN.
In his first remarks outside 10 Downing Street, Burnham said Britain must show “that we can regain our stability” and called his appointment a “circuit-breaker.” The seven prime ministers in ten years, running from David Cameron through Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer to Burnham, is a turnover rate without modern precedent in British politics. The last comparable period was the 1880s and early 1890s, when Britain formed six governments in fifteen years. Gladstone alone returned to Downing Street three times. That era’s instability had a single defining fault line: Irish Home Rule. Britain’s current version has had several in succession, starting with Brexit in 2016 and running through pandemic governance and back-to-back economic crises. The Washington Post covered Burnham’s first day.
Trump responded by posting that Britain was a “Poverty Stricken Disaster,” then later said he had spoken with Burnham and it went “very well.” CNBC reported on both. Burnham’s office confirmed the call took place.
Congo’s health ministry reported 2,344 confirmed Ebola cases and at least 930 deaths as of Sunday. Al Jazeera has tracked the outbreak’s progression, which the World Health Organization has called the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record. The WHO, which declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in May, has said 80 percent of new infections are now untraceable.
The federal government issued a new 30-day travel restriction order on July 13, extending entry restrictions on most foreign nationals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda that have been in place since May 18. Arriving travelers covered by the order are routed through one of four designated airports for enhanced public health screening: Washington Dulles, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental, and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The CDC’s current guidance is here.
The heat dome covering the eastern two-thirds of the United States isn’t moving. More than 200 million Americans remain under heat alerts or advisories, per Tech Times tracking of the event. The confirmed heat death toll holds at at least 44. Medical Daily reported on the gap between those deaths and federal disaster law this week.
The Stafford Act story hasn’t changed, but it’s worth stating plainly because the number of people who know it remains smaller than it should be. The law that triggers federal disaster declarations and FEMA resources was built around events that damage property: floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes. Heat kills people, not buildings, and the statute’s definition of “damage” doesn’t reach human mortality. Three gubernatorial requests for Stafford declarations citing extreme heat, in Missouri in 1980, Illinois in 1995, and California in 2022, were all denied. A Congressional Research Service report explains the legal structure. The Extreme Heat Emergency Act, which would change that, hasn’t come to a floor vote. Until it does, the federal government’s formal answer to a heat wave that has killed 44 Americans is: not our category.
My colleague Carol Gifford is in the Health section today with a piece on varicose veins treatment: what works, what doesn’t, and when to have the conversation with a doctor. It’s practical and well-reported. You’ll find it here.
A study published this month in Nature Communications provides the first randomized, placebo-controlled evidence in humans that semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, may slow the rate at which the body accumulates biological markers of aging. Researchers at the University of California San Diego drew on data from a 32-week trial of 108 adults living with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy. Half received weekly semaglutide injections; half received placebo. Those receiving semaglutide showed a 9 percent reduction in biological aging speed as measured by the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, with effects observed across markers associated with blood, brain, heart, liver, kidneys, and metabolic health. The University of California reported on the findings here.
Scientists are clear that larger trials are needed before anyone should conclude the drug slows aging in the general population. The study population was small, specific, and enrolled for a different purpose. What the trial provides is something that didn’t exist before it: controlled evidence in humans that the mechanism is real. That’s a different category than a hypothesis. It’s not a treatment. It’s a signal. And a signal is how all of this tends to start.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
