Two U.S. troops killed as the war with Iran widens

01The war right now

The U.S. Central Command said its forces struck Iranian air defenses, missile sites and what it called underground weapons storage overnight into Saturday, in strikes it described as reaching farther into Iran's interior than before.[1] The command confirmed the two deaths in Jordan in a written statement and said a third service member remained missing in action.[2] They were the first U.S. combat fatalities since the exchange of fire resumed on July 7.[1]

Iran's health ministry said American strikes had killed at least 38 people and wounded more than 400 by midweek, a figure that could not be independently verified and that the Pentagon has not confirmed.[11] Casualty and damage claims on both sides remain contested, and much of what each government asserts about the other cannot yet be checked against independent evidence.[1]

02How a ceasefire became a war again

The current fighting is the collapse of a diplomatic effort, not its absence. In mid-June the two governments agreed to a memorandum that paused hostilities for sixty days while negotiators met in Doha under Qatari mediation.[4] That truce broke on July 7, when Iran struck commercial shipping near the Strait of Hormuz and the United States answered the same night with strikes on more than eighty targets.[6][5] The next day President Trump declared the June understanding “over,” the Treasury withdrew a waiver that had let Iran sell crude, and the price of oil began to climb.[5]

The pattern since has been nightly. American waves have hit ports and coastal radar at Bushehr, Bandar Abbas and Jask, while Iran has fired back at U.S. bases and allied Gulf states, reaching sites in Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq and Jordan.[3][1] Washington reimposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports in the second week of July, the second such blockade of the conflict.[6]

03The squeeze at Hormuz

The war's clearest global effect runs through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil moves.[7] As the two sides traded strikes over and around the strait, tanker traffic collapsed to a fraction of its normal volume, and analysts warned that a sustained closure could push benchmark Brent crude toward one hundred dollars a barrel.[7][8]

Brent has already made much of that move. It had fallen to about seventy dollars in early July while the truce held, then rose through nearly every day of the renewed fighting to roughly eighty-five dollars by July 17.[12][7][8] The increase is a risk premium more than a supply cut. Little Iranian crude has physically left the market beyond the waiver's reversal, but traders are pricing the chance that the strait closes.[8]

04Washington, divided

The war has opened fault lines in Congress that do not run neatly along party lines. In late June the Senate voted to limit the president's authority to keep waging war on Iran without congressional approval, a rare rebuke of a sitting president over an active conflict.[10] The resolution faces a likely veto, and it has not stopped the strikes.[10]

On July 15 the divisions deepened. The House rejected an amendment from Representative Thomas Massie that would have stripped 3.3 billion dollars in security assistance to Israel, 104 to 314, with Democrats splitting almost evenly and Republicans nearly unanimous against it.[9] The tally measured how far the war has scrambled the usual coalitions, and how little agreement Washington has reached about where it should go next.

What turns next

The pivot points are the strait and the diplomacy. If Iran moves to close Hormuz in fact rather than in threat, the oil market has already named the price: a jump toward one hundred dollars that would reach every fuel pump and every central bank.[8] If the two governments instead return to Doha, the sixty-day framework they abandoned on July 7 is the most plausible text to revive.[4] For now the fighting is widening rather than narrowing, and the burden of proof on every casualty and damage claim stays high.

01The door it came through

A bill becomes law without a signature when the president neither signs nor vetoes it within ten days while Congress remains in session.[2] That is the opposite of a “pocket veto,” which kills a bill when Congress has adjourned and the president simply sits on it. The ROAD Act reached the White House on June 29, and the clock ran out at midnight on July 10.[2] Trump called the bill unimportant and said he was withholding his signature to pressure the Senate over the SAVE America Act, his stalled proposal to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.[9]

The protest obscured how broadly the housing bill had passed. It cleared the Senate 85 to 5 in June and had moved through both chambers for months with lopsided bipartisan majorities, the product of an unusual partnership between Senate Banking chair Tim Scott and the committee's senior Democrat, Elizabeth Warren.[5][4]

02What the law actually does

The ROAD Act is a supply-side bill. It tries to make homes cheaper and faster to build, and it leaves demand-side help such as rental vouchers largely untouched.[8] Its most-discussed provision bars large institutional investors, those owning 350 or more single-family homes, from buying more, with penalties reaching one million dollars or three times a purchase price.[1][3] Such investors control only about three percent of the single-family rental market nationally, so the cap is more a signal than a structural change.[1]

The measures likelier to add supply are smaller and more technical. The law removes a federal rule requiring factory-built homes to keep a permanent steel chassis, a change the industry estimates could cut five to ten thousand dollars from the cost of a manufactured house.[1][3] It exempts certain infill housing, new homes built on empty lots between existing buildings, from federal environmental review.[3] And it funds pre-approved “pattern book” home designs along with a 200-million-dollar-a-year fund for communities that expand housing.[3]

03What it leaves alone

For all its breadth, the law does not touch the biggest levers on housing costs. It does not override local zoning, which cities and towns set and which remains the main constraint on where housing can be built.[1] It does nothing about mortgage rates, which sat near 6.9 percent in June and are set by the bond market and the Federal Reserve.[7] And it adds no new money for the housing-choice vouchers that the lowest-income renters depend on.[8]

Analysts across the spectrum reached a similar verdict, that the relief is real but partial and slow. Housing economists noted that the investor cap frees little inventory and that the supply measures will take years to register.[7] Advocates for low-income tenants warned that a bill aimed at construction does little for the eleven million extremely-low-income renter households who compete for just 3.8 million affordable and available units.[6][8]

First step or ceiling

The ROAD Act tests a specific theory, that the politically achievable path on housing runs through deregulation and preservation rather than large new outlays. Its backers, Scott among them, stress that it carries no new federal spending.[4] That is also its limit. Against a shortage of roughly four million homes, a set of rule changes and a billion dollars over five years is a modest instrument, and whether it becomes a foundation or a ceiling will depend on measures Congress has not yet been willing to pass.[10][8]

01The eight-mile-an-hour problem

The case for the plan is in the numbers the city's own comptroller has published. New York's buses averaged 8.17 miles an hour in 2024, and in Manhattan just 6.3, the slowest of any borough.[2] Buses miss their scheduled times about a third of the time.[2] The system is nonetheless the country's largest by ridership, which is what makes its slowness a citywide problem rather than a niche one.[6]

Speed and ridership feed on each other. Slow, unreliable buses shed riders, and the system carried about 1.1 million riders on an average weekday in 2025, up from 2024 but well below pre-pandemic levels.[7] The plan's premise is that speed is the most direct way to win those riders back.

02What the plan would do

The package works on several fronts at once. It designates 50 priority corridors for a 20 percent speed increase, which the city says would save some riders up to six minutes a trip, and it adds five new rapid routes modeled on bus rapid transit, including lines on Flatbush and Utica avenues in Brooklyn.[1][3] It widens automated enforcement, putting camera-equipped buses on 25 more routes a year and 200 fixed bus-lane cameras in place by 2027, and it extends police enforcement from 14 corridors to 20.[1][5]

Two changes target the seconds that pile up at every stop. All-door boarding, which lets riders tap and enter through any door, begins phasing in during 2027 after being announced and shelved years earlier, and the city estimates it can cut the time buses idle at stops by up to 40 percent.[1][3] The plan also promises roughly 2,500 new buses, about 40 percent of the fleet, drawn from the MTA's capital program.[1]

03Why buses are hard to fix here

The obstacle is not mainly engineering; it is governance. The state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority owns the buses and sets the routes, while the city's Department of Transportation controls the streets, the bus lanes and the paint.[3] Speeding up a bus requires both to move together, and for a decade they often did not: similar “better buses” pledges under Mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams delivered far fewer miles of bus lane than promised.[10]

Advocates called the plan unusually joined-up while withholding judgment on delivery. The Riders Alliance, a transit-rider group, described it as a genuinely integrated city-and-state effort but noted that past mayors made similar promises.[3][10] Enforcement is the clearest caution: the city painted only a few miles of new bus lane in 2024, and cameras and signals mean little without the street redesigns that have repeatedly stalled.[2][3]

04The fare question

Absent from the plan is the idea Mamdani campaigned on most loudly, free buses. The mayor promised fast and free service and delivered only the fast half, with the governor and MTA leadership opposed to eliminating fares.[8] A five-borough fare-free pilot ran from 2023 into 2024 and was not renewed.[8]

The administration expanded a discount instead. On June 30 the city and City Council widened Fair Fares, which halves transit costs for low-income New Yorkers, from 150 to 200 percent of the federal poverty line, adding an estimated 340,000 people at a cost of about 54 million dollars a year.[9] It is a smaller step than free buses, and a more affordable one.

01The vote

On July 16 the Council signed off on seven housing projects at once, the end of a public review that runs from community boards through the borough presidents and City Planning Commission before it reaches the Council.[1][2] Together the projects total about 3,250 homes, and the Council said more than half are affordable, meaning rented at prices tied to a share of area median income rather than set by the market.[1] The two largest, Monitor Point in Brooklyn and Dewitt Clinton Park North in Manhattan, account for roughly 2,400 of the apartments between them.[2][4]

Affordable counts for the three smallest projects were not separately reported (n/r).

02Monitor Point, up close

Monitor Point is the deal that took the most work. The developer, the Gotham Organization, won approval for three towers rising to about 600 feet on a two-acre site along the East River that once held an MTA truck-washing facility.[3][8] The complex will hold 1,324 apartments, 662 of them affordable, along with more than 50,000 square feet of public waterfront open space and a permanent home for the small Greenpoint Monitor Museum.[3]

The affordable share did not begin there. The local council member, Lincoln Restler, pushed it from 40 to 50 percent during negotiations he called the hardest of his Council career, adding roughly 200 income-restricted apartments to the plan.[6] The project had divided Greenpoint. The community board backed it 24 to 9, with opponents worried about the towers' height and whether the “affordable” rents would match neighborhood incomes.[5]

03A study in contrasts

Set beside Monitor Point, the Manhattan project shows how uneven these deals can be. Dewitt Clinton Park North, a cluster of towers in Hell's Kitchen, was approved with 1,094 apartments but only about 287 affordable, roughly a quarter, the minimum the city's Mandatory Inclusionary Housing rule requires.[4][10] Its public benefits reach the waterfront too, including 29 million dollars for the Hudson River Park Trust.[10]

The gap between half affordable and a quarter is not an accident of the market; it is the product of negotiation. Under the Council's tradition of deferring to the local member on land use, how affordable a project ends up depends heavily on who represents it and how hard they press.[4][6]

04The bigger pipeline

These approvals sit inside a larger push to build. In December 2024 the Council passed “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” a citywide rezoning the city projects could add more than 82,000 homes over 15 years, and the inclusionary-housing rule that shaped both projects flows from that framework.[7] Mayor Mamdani has folded the effort into his own housing plan, and the Council is weighing a further measure to unlock up to 35,000 homes on small lots.[9]

Measured against those numbers, a 3,250-home day is incremental. But housing gets built one rezoning at a time, and the votes this week are a fair picture of how the city adds supply, project by project, with the affordability fought out building by building.[1]