Let’s get you up to speed.

NEWS NEWS.

Iran has attached seven demands to restoring normal traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. It says the United States must never threaten Iran again; permanently end the war with Iran and its armed allies; lift the blockade of Iranian ports; withdraw U.S. forces from the area; compensate Iran for war damage; lift sanctions; and release frozen Iranian assets without conditions. Oman says talks are constructive, but the list has not been accepted and a temporary navigation plan is unfinished. The route near Oman remains passable, yet AP counted only eighty-four transits in the latest week, versus more than seven hundred in a typical week before the crisis. Because roughly one-fifth of traded oil and gas used the strait before the war, passable is not the same as normal.

Next, Trump’s voting push stalled before the Senate left for five weeks. His broader SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship at registration. A separate, narrower bill would require photo identification when casting a federal ballot. Cloture on that narrower bill failed fifty-two to forty-six, eight votes short of sixty. Every voting Republican supported proceeding, every voting Democrat and independent opposed it, and Mitch McConnell and Peter Welch did not vote. The Red argument is that citizenship documentation and free, flexible ways to prove it protect accurate rolls. The Blue argument is that paperwork mismatches can block eligible citizens and that voting restrictions should not be attached to war and Pentagon funding. Three Republican senators say they will try again in September.

Next, Italy and Spain are checking each other’s air and sea arrivals after roughly seventy-two thousand migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on North Africa’s coast. Most later returned, and more than eighty people died. Schengen normally removes checks between member countries, so this shifts the response from Europe’s external edge to normally check-free travel inside the zone. Italy notified controls through September first. Spain’s reciprocal checks run through September seventh. These are screenings, not border closures, and Italy’s notification is not European Commission approval.

The Senate also passed a stopgap funding bill ninety to six. It would generally keep federal agencies funded through December eleventh, moving the next deadline beyond the midterms. But the government is not funded yet. The House must accept the Senate-amended bill after its August recess, and the president must sign it before current funding expires September thirtieth.

NOT NEWS NEWS.

A Pennsylvania trial tested whether child-protection supervisors could see an algorithm’s five-level summary of information already in the case file. The humans retained discretion; the score did not make decisions. For every one thousand child-referral observations, the estimates imply that repeat reports within three months fell from about two hundred fifty-eight to two hundred twenty, while foster placements rose from about thirteen to twenty-five. That is the tradeoff: fewer cases came back as new reports, but more ended in family separation. One county cannot tell us whether the added intervention helped more than it harmed, and repeat reports are only a proxy for child safety.

Finally, a trial at one hundred forty Kenyan pharmacies tested incentives for malaria diagnosis. Only seven-point-nine percent of control transactions included a rapid test. Discounts for patients raised testing to thirty-one-point-eight percent; provider incentives raised it to twenty-six-point-seven; and combined incentives to thirty-point-three. Unnecessary antimalarial purchases also fell. A claimed fourfold welfare gain for an optimized contract came from a model, not a trial arm, so the portable lesson is narrower: changing patient prices and pharmacist counseling changed who tested before treatment.

You’re caught up.