Morning Brief, Thursday 16 July

The United States launched another wave of strikes at 06:00 local time on July 15, hitting Iranian air defences, coastal radar, missile and drone sites, small boats and other maritime assets, according to US Central Command. Washington said the attacks aimed to weaken forces that it says have struck commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran said recent US strikes in southern Iran killed more than 30 civilians, while Iranian media reported seven military personnel killed in Bampur. US raids also hit Bushehr, Sirik, Bandar Abbas, Qeshm, Hengam, Chabahar, Dehloran, Musian and Ahvaz, though local officials reported no casualties at Bushehr.

The confrontation also moved onto the water. US forces disabled the Curaçao-flagged M/T Belma with Hellfire missiles after CENTCOM said the empty tanker ignored warnings and headed towards Kharg Island, the hub for roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the Strait of Hormuz would stay closed until Washington ended what it called acts of aggression. Donald Trump announced that Iran had allowed an American detainee to leave the country, but he also kept the option of taking Kharg Island open.

Both sides now describe their moves as defensive preparation, which is how wars often climb the ladder without either capital admitting it wants the next rung. A shipping lane that carried routine risk now prices in deliberate escalation, so every tanker becomes a vote on how far both governments will go.

Volodymyr Zelensky removed Mykhailo Fedorov as Ukraine’s defence minister after only six months, turning a wider government reshuffle into a test of wartime trust. Mykhailo Fedorov had pushed procurement reform, drone production and stricter performance measures inside a ministry that soldiers and anti-corruption activists have long viewed as both vital and slow. Supporters said his changes angered traditional power centres in the armed forces, while critics said he had not fixed recruitment fast enough. The backlash came from inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s own camp as well as the opposition, a rare public crack in the wartime political bargain.

The timing was awkward because Ukraine’s allies moved in the opposite direction, from donated kit towards domestic production. Ursula von der Leyen visited Kyiv and signed an EU-Ukraine drone manufacturing accord that pairs Ukrainian battlefield designs with European industrial capacity. Brussels also unlocked an extra €1bn for drone purchases from a €90bn loan programme, while Donald Trump had earlier promised Ukraine a licence to manufacture Patriot missiles on its own territory.

The two stories point in different directions but meet at the same bottleneck: Ukraine needs speed, trust and factories all at once. Its war machine can absorb another reshuffle, but not if politics starts breaking the gears just as allies are finally learning to build around them.

France’s National Assembly approved an assisted-dying law by 291 votes to 241 after years of debate and repeated Senate resistance. The law limits access to French citizens or legal residents with a serious, incurable illness in an advanced or terminal phase, constant suffering and the capacity to make a free and informed choice. A lethal substance may be self-administered or, if the patient cannot do so, administered by a doctor or nurse. Emmanuel Macron called the vote a kept promise, while opponents prepared constitutional challenges and warned that the state had changed the meaning of care.

In the United States, the same day brought a rougher argument about state power. The New York Times asked a federal court to quash Justice Department subpoenas served on journalists who reported security concerns about Donald Trump’s Qatari-donated Air Force One. David McCraw called the subpoenas punitive. Separately, Donald Trump overruled a temporary Department of Homeland Security pause on ICE vehicle stops after agents fatally shot two men within six days in Maine and Texas. Neither officer wore a body camera, despite a directive requiring them.

France framed state action as a controlled expansion of personal choice; Washington framed coercive power as enforcement and leak control. The contrast matters because liberal government depends not only on what powers the state claims, but on whether citizens believe those powers are bounded.

Toronto recorded the worst air quality among major cities on Wednesday as smoke from northwestern Ontario pushed the city into a 10+ Air Quality Health Index reading, the highest risk category used by Environment Canada. The smoke spread through the US Midwest and Northeast, with New York City reaching an unhealthy AQI of 180 and Duluth, Minnesota, climbing above 500, a hazardous level. Heat made the episode nastier: Toronto reached 37.3C downtown, while runway surfaces at Pearson International Airport hit 55C.

The evacuation problem looked more old-fashioned but no less difficult. Officials closed the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness after about 17 lightning-caused fires burned in and around the remote area. Rangers estimated that between 6,000 and 10,000 people remained inside the 445,000-hectare wilderness, much of it reachable mainly by canoe. Canadian aircraft helped rescue two youth-camper groups that had crossed the border, while rangers tried to locate others across a maze of lakes and portages.

The fire damage is already permanent in places. Collins, Ontario, burned to the ground after residents of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation fled with only minutes of warning, though officials said everyone escaped safely. Across Canada, 1.9m hectares have burned so far this year, concentrated in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Smoke used to feel like a regional nuisance; now it travels like an infrastructure failure, closing wilderness, choking cities and reminding governments that climate adaptation starts with lungs.