What happened
Iran yesterday said it attacked two U.S. ships and eight tankers near the Strait of Hormuz in response to the U.S. sinking five Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday. The Pentagon said the tanker strikes were retaliation for Iran’s first confirmed attacks on U.S. Navy ships during the six-month war. Those attacks “failed,” The Wall Street Journal said, but “officials described some of them as close calls.”

This was the “biggest wave of attacks on shipping by both sides” yet, Reuters said, and it “sent the price of oil surging” above $100 a barrel for the first time since July. U.S. gas prices hit $4.22 a gallon, and diesel rose to a record $5.94 per gallon.

Who said what
The U.S. and Iran “appear to be stuck in a cycle that is draining U.S. air defenses and deepening Iran’s economic crisis,” The New York Times said. Iranian ballistic missiles did “minimal” damage to a U.S. military base in Jordan, officials told the Times, and it may have left some U.S. troops with “traumatic brain injuries.” They also damaged “several fighter jets” at the base, CBS News said.

What next?
“I think war ​is going to end immediately after the election,” sending oil prices “tumbling downward,” because Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” President Donald Trump told reporters yesterday. Top White House advisers have “privately” discussed with Trump “that the Iran war could drag on through the remainder of his term,” the Journal said, citing U.S. officials. 

What happened
Europe’s Copernicus climate service yesterday reported that August was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the U.S. also experienced its hottest summer “in the 132-year record.” The average temperature in the 48 contiguous states was 74.37 degrees Fahrenheit from June to August, 0.4 degrees “hotter than during the peak of the devastating Dust Bowl in 1936” and 3.5 degrees above the 20th-century average, The Associated Press said.

Who said what
The Earth “cooked to its hottest month on record” due to the “dangerous double whammy of human-caused climate change and a supersized El Niño,” the AP said. Those factors also fueled America’s “unhappy trifecta” of “warmest August, warmest summer and warmest calendar year to date,” Yale Climate Connections said. The summer saw a “staggering 1,541 record monthly highs set or tied nationally,” said CNN. The only regions where “normal conditions were observed,” said CBS News, were “isolated to pockets of the Midwest and northern Plains.”

What next?
Highs in September are “favored to be above average” across the lower 48 states, said NOAA. The “Godzilla El Niño” has already boosted the oceans to record temperatures, The New York Times said, and that “extra warmth” will “spread to the rest of the planet in the months ahead, making the globe’s average temperatures likely to break more records through the end of the year and into 2027.” 

Eighteen-year-old student Do Ngoc Phuong Thuy, known as Mina, was killed in Hanoi in May 2025 when the motorbike she was traveling on with her father was hit by a BMW. Tragic as the incident was, few expected it to cause an “eruption of Gen Z outrage and creativity” that thrust Memorial Tree 55 on Nguyen Huy Tu Street into the “local zeitgeist,” said The New York Times.

The subsequent crash investigation yielded little information except that the driver had the initials N.S.C. and was born in 1961. This led to social media speculation that former National Assembly deputy Nguyen Sy Cuong was the motorist responsible. Some felt the incident had been “swept under the rug due to the influence of powerful figures,” said the BBC.

Millions of young people voiced their outrage online, and Tree 55, renamed the Tree of Justice, became ground zero in the growing campaign against a perceived government cover-up. On the evening of Aug. 17, state broadcaster Vietnam Television aired an official statement from the authorities confirming Nguyen Sy Cuong’s involvement in the crash incident, adding that because he had “sincerely confessed and actively and fully remedied the consequences of his actions,” the victim’s family had submitted a petition to exempt him from prosecution.

In the one-party state, the official acknowledgment of responsibility was an “extraordinary concession to public pressure,” said the Times. But in warning against “opportunists exploiting the incident on social media,” the TV report “reflected the government’s deep concerns about an unexpected youth movement pushing for accountability at a time when officials are focused on economic growth.”