President Trump formally declared a ceasefire Tuesday in the conflict with Iran, ending what the White House has termed the “12 Day War.” The announcement follows the Versailles Memorandum signed June 17, when Trump, at dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran, separately signed a 60-day framework agreement suspending military operations and establishing terms for further negotiations. Monday, Vice President Vance reported “very, very good” progress from the first round of nuclear talks in Switzerland. Tuesday brought the formal declaration.
The framework’s terms, as NPR has reported, include U.S. sanctions waivers on Iranian oil sales and the unfreezing of Iranian assets abroad. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed some frozen assets have been released. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the administration is waiving oil sanctions as a confidence-building measure during the 60-day window. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil trade moves each day, is to remain open under the agreement’s terms.
August 20, 1988 is the last time a conflict involving the United States and Iran ended by ceasefire. That was the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War, under UN Security Council Resolution 598. That war had run for nearly eight years. Iran resisted the resolution for more than a year after it passed in July 1987, accepting it in July 1988 after sustained losses on both fronts. The ceasefire held, but the two countries never signed a formal peace treaty. The Versailles Memorandum is also a framework, not a final settlement. The 60 days began June 17. There are forty-three left.
France recorded its highest temperature in the country’s history on Monday, with Météo-France measuring 43.3 degrees Celsius (109.9 degrees Fahrenheit) in the village of Chateaumeillant in central France. NPR reported that 49 of France’s departments are under red heat alert, covering roughly 35 million people. The heat is expected to persist through at least the end of the week.
Forty people have drowned in France over the past seven days while seeking relief in rivers and unsupervised bodies of water, according to Al Jazeera, with most deaths involving young people. French authorities banned public alcohol consumption and restricted visiting hours at the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. Spain closed a World Cup fan zone. Britain is bracing for what could be a record June temperature of its own.
The 2003 European heat wave is France’s standard of reference for events like this one. That summer killed approximately 14,800 people in France and an estimated 70,000 across Europe. France responded by building Plan Canicule, a national heat emergency system with cooling centers, check-in protocols for isolated residents, and public health coordination across the country’s departments. Whether a system designed for the temperatures of 2003 holds under temperatures the country has never recorded before is one of the questions the coming days will answer.
The House of Representatives voted 358-32 Tuesday to pass the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, sending the legislation to President Trump’s desk following the Senate’s 85-5 approval on Monday. CNBC reported the House completion. The bill was co-led in the Senate by Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina and Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
What the law does is address housing supply across several fronts: grants to help municipalities develop preapproved home designs that compress permitting timelines, changes to manufactured housing rules that could cut construction costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per unit, and a first-of-its-kind federal restriction on large institutional investors purchasing single-family homes. That last provision addresses a market shift that accelerated after the 2008 housing crash, when private equity firms began buying foreclosed single-family homes at scale, building rental portfolios that now run to tens of thousands of properties per company. No federal law had restricted the practice before this week.
Truman’s Housing Act of 1949 declared as a national goal “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” It built public housing, expanded mortgage insurance, and funded urban renewal. It didn’t close the gap. What this law achieves will depend heavily on whether local governments accept the federal incentives to loosen the zoning and permitting restrictions that have constrained residential construction for most of the postwar era. The supply problem doesn’t live in Washington. Congress can encourage; it can’t compel.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Tuesday in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections that a Rastafarian prisoner cannot sue individual prison guards for money damages under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, even when those guards violated his religious rights. The majority held that RLUIPA’s text doesn’t authorize personal damages lawsuits against individual government employees. CNN reported the details of the case.
Damon Landor had worn knee-length dreadlocks for more than twenty years as a matter of faith. When he was incarcerated in Louisiana in 2020, he sought to keep them. A prison guard discarded the court order he was carrying that allowed him to do so. While two guards restrained him, a third shaved his head to the scalp. He sued under RLUIPA. The six Republican-appointed justices joined the majority. The three Democratic-appointed justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson arguing the majority had misread the statute.
RLUIPA was enacted in 2000 specifically because an earlier religious freedom law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, had been struck down as applied to state governments. Congress passed RLUIPA to fill the gap it left. It’s been the primary legal vehicle for incarcerated people seeking religious accommodation for twenty-six years. Tuesday’s ruling doesn’t erase the law, but it removes the personal damages avenue that gave a plaintiff like Landor a practical remedy when the law’s protections failed him.
China’s Commerce Ministry announced Monday that Chinese companies are barred from exporting dual-use materials and components to ten American companies, including military drone manufacturers and rare earth mining firms, in retaliation for U.S. actions that blocked leading Chinese technology companies from defense contracts. Fortune has the list of targeted firms. China’s Finance Ministry separately prohibited government entities from purchasing products from 46 American defense companies, including units of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics.
This follows a pattern. The 2019 addition of Huawei to the Commerce Department’s Entity List prompted a similar Chinese response targeting American companies. What’s different this time is the specific lever China is pulling. Rare earth materials, where China controls a dominant share of global production, are central to the current restrictions. The U.S. defense and aerospace industries rely on rare earth inputs that are difficult to source outside Chinese supply chains. That dependency has been documented for years. Naming it explicitly in a retaliation package is a different kind of signal than a simple matching of lists.
Over in the Health section this week, Carol Gifford published a piece I want to flag here. It’s called Stroke Recovery Timeline: What the Weeks and Months Actually Look Like, and it does something the medical system rarely does well: explains what happens after the emergency room.
Gifford is a former registered nurse. The piece opens with a patient she calls Thomas, sixty-eight, found in his kitchen on a Tuesday morning in February with his speech gone and one arm hanging wrong. His wife knew what she was seeing. She called 911. He survived. Then came the question nobody prepared his family for: not whether he’d live, but what recovery actually looks like, week by week, for months. Gifford answers it in clinical terms. The 4.5-hour window for clot-dissolving treatment. The distinction between inpatient rehabilitation and a skilled nursing facility, and why it changes outcomes. The post-stroke fatigue that’s different from ordinary tiredness because the brain is doing reconstruction work that doesn’t show on any scan. And the research from the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association that has substantially revised the old belief that recovery plateaus at six months. “Meaningful recovery can and does continue for two years and beyond,” she writes, “in patients who maintain active rehabilitation and consistent home practice.”
Thomas, eighteen months later, has most of his speech back. His right hand won’t do what it once did. He golfs left-handed now, badly and happily. That’s the kind of ending that only holds up because Gifford got the clinical detail right first. It’s the piece to read now, or to send to someone who needs it.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
