US Central Command (CENTCOM) executed its sixth consecutive night of airstrikes against Iran, late Thursday to early Friday morning expanding targets to include civilian infrastructure such as six bridges, a railway station, an airport, and a maritime control tower at Chabahar Port.

The strikes, aimed at severing logistical links to the port city of Bandar Abbas and degrading Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz, killed at least seven to eight people and wounded dozens more in southern provinces including Hormozgan.

The American campaign focused on disrupting Iran's ability to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz by targeting highway and railway bridges in Bandar Khamir and collapsing a surveillance tower at the Chah Bahar Shahid Kalantari Port on the Gulf of Oman.

President Donald Trump authorized these strikes on energy sites and transport networks supposedly to pressure Tehran into easing its chokehold on the waterway, which has caused global oil prices to surge above $86 a barrel.

While CENTCOM described the targets as "military logistics infrastructure," Iranian officials condemned the attacks on power facilities and bridges as strikes on civilian infrastructure, with the Energy Ministry reporting power outages during extreme heat.

In retaliation, Iran's Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) launched missile and drone attacks against US-allied nations hosting American forces, striking targets in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, former US base in Syria and sites in Iraq's Kurdish region.

Iran responded by firing missiles at desalination plants in Kuwait, causing fires and damage to vital water infrastructure, and targeting air defenses in Qatar where falling shrapnel injured a child. IRGC claimed it struck the al-Tanf garrison in Syria and US assets in Bahrain and Oman. However the US military and Syrian sources denied that any American troops were present or harmed at the Syrian site, noting US forces had withdrawn months prior.

The escalation has effectively halted commercial traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, with only eight vessels** transiting the waterway on July 16, via the Iranian corridor, as the interim ceasefire between the US and Iran remains collapsed.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the T1TL-E mission from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E), Vandenberg Space Force Base at 2032 UTC on Thursday (July 16) carrying 21 satellites for the U.S. military's Tranche 1 Transport Layer (T1TL) constellation.

The Falcon 9 first stage booster B1103, making its fourth flight, successfully landed on the droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" approximately 8.5 minutes after liftoff, according to SpaceX. The rocket's upper stage continued upwards, hauling the 21 satellites to low earth orbit (LEO).

The T1TL is a critical component of the Space Development Agency's (SDA) Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), designed to provide global communications access and persistent regional encrypted connectivity for warfighters. It aims to deliver assured, resilient, and low-latency data to warfighter platforms worldwide.

The T1TL "will provide global communications access and deliver persistent regional encrypted connectivity in support of warfighter missions around the globe," SDA officials wrote.

The satellites are interconnected via optical crosslinks, offering significantly increased performance over existing radio frequency systems, including stereo coverage and greater bandwidth. The T1TL constellation is intended to be dynamically networked for simpler hand-offs and enhanced fault tolerance, supporting a wide range of military operations.

The PWSA is "a proliferated constellation of hundreds of optically linked small satellites, in low-Earth orbit (LEO), delivering capability at speed to the warfighter," SDA officials wrote in a Tranche 1 fact sheet. "SDA leverages spiral development to deploy and proliferate new capability into a new generation of the PWSA every two years, called a 'tranche,' to continually increase capability used by the warfighter."

This specific batch of 21 satellites, manufactured by York Space Systems, joins the constellation to help build out the planned 126-satellite network in LEO. The T1TL operates over the Ka band to ensure low-latency, resilient military data connectivity.

The T1TL will be built by York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Sixty-three of the spacecraft have now launched to date, on three Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg — one last September, another last October and today.

Vice President JD Vance was unsparing during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience(JRE) podcast published Wednesday, defending Donald Trump administration's negotiations and ceasefire proposal with Iran, and slammed critics who have aggressively attacked his diplomatic efforts. "Many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways... my response to that is, well, go to hell. I'm going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first," he said.

The nearly 3-hour conversation on JRE came at a highly strategic moment as the Trump administration worked to manage divisions in the ruling Republican party over the ongoing war with Iran and lingering public frustration regarding transparency over the Jeffrey Epstein files. Throughout the conversation, Vance delivered some of his most candid and combative remarks to date on foreign influence, the economy, and the administration’s own communication missteps.

Vance cited a Time magazine investigation alleging that a former Trump campaign operative, Brad Parscale had been funded by the Israeli government to orchestrate a covert campaign to derail the Iran peace negotiations. He accused elements within the Jewish state of trying to manipulate U.S. public opinion to keep the war going indefinitely without a clear, defined strategic endpoint.

While the vice president noted that foreign lobbying is simply "the nature of the beast" and expected from countries like Israel, he expressed intense frustration with Americans who allowed foreign interests to dictate their positions.

Addressing another persistent point of criticism from both the left and right of American politics, Vance conceded that the administration severely mishandled the public rollout of federal documents related to Jeffrey Epstein.

Vance admitted, "We absolutely screwed up the comms of the Epstein files. Like, we just did." He pointed to former Attorney General Pam Bondi's handling of the release. Bondi had famously claimed a definitive "client list" was sitting on her desk, and later released "declassified" binders to influencers that mostly contained already public information.

"I think Pam was trying to respond to the political moment," Vance said, arguing there was no malicious cover-up but that she had significantly "overstated what we had."

When Rogan noted that many believe Epstein was connected to Mossad (Israeli intelligence), Vance agreed, saying that Epstein "clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence" and "the highest levels of Israeli intelligence." He claimed that Epstein’s ties in Israel were mostly concentrated within "left of center" elements of the Israeli political establishment.

During a discussion focusing on domestic policy, Rogan expressed his concern about the rising popularity of democratic socialism among young Americans.

Vance blamed four decades of bipartisan economic policies that favored offshoring, outsourcing, and relying on low-wage foreign labor. He argued this turned the U.S. into "a kind of shell corporation" that no longer manufactures its own goods or supports worker bargaining power.

The vice president criticized Wall Street firms for buying up single-family homes and turning them into "investable, 'line goes up' assets," which has locked young people out of homeownership.

Vance warned his conservative colleagues that simply shouting "socialism is bad" is not enough. "I think that unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something, socialism is the inevitable outcome... and if we don't [fix this], we are going to end up with a socialist president in this country."

The vice president's remarks on JRE drew praise from across the political spectrum. Many of the low-propensity voters who were crucial to the Trump's election victory, had grown disillusioned by the administration's active military campaign in Iran and perceived foot-dragging on the Epstein files.

Political analysts noted that by directly addressing Rogan's own criticisms on these fronts, Vance sought to act as the administration's primary diplomat to anti-war and anti-establishment skeptics.

Pro-war commentators, Zionists and neoconservative critics slammed the appearance, branding Vance an "antisemite," with some declaring they will "never" vote for him if he runs for president in 2028.