The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced Tuesday that “all trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran have been halted until further notice,” alleging that Iran had fired two ballistic missiles toward it. 

The country’s foreign ministry said the decision comes “in light of regional escalations that undermine regional and international peace and security.”

Earlier Tuesday, the UAE’s Ministry of Defense reported that two missiles launched from Iran toward the country, both of which fell into the sea. The statement said it “affirms its readiness to respond to any threats and to resolutely counter any attempts to undermine the security of the country or the safety of maritime navigation in the region.”

Read More: Trump Again Threatens to Bomb Oman

Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, rejected the Emirati claim on Tuesday, saying that it “undermines ongoing efforts to strengthen trust between countries in the region and prevent the escalation of insecurity,” according to the semi-official Fars news agency. 

“The impact on the Iranian economy could be significant,” Simon Henderson, director of the Bernstein Program on Gulf and Energy Policy at the Washington Institute, tells TIME. “The UAE is one of the top non-oil trading partners with Iran.”

As of April, the UAE accounts for 12.5% of Iran’s exports and 30.43% of its imports, according to Iranian news agency WANA. 

Iran’s dollar currently ranks as the least valuable currency in the world, and its government told a Russian news agency in April that the war has already cost it some $270 billion in direct and indirect damages.

Regional instability amid the war in Iran

Stability in the region is fragile, as a number of incidents have been recently reported in the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, a vessel reported that it had been struck by an unknown projectile, causing damage to the engine room and a crew casualty, according to the U.K. Trade Maritime Operations Centre (UKMTO). Last Thursday, a separate vessel was struck by a drone. 

The UAE has previously reported the detection of missiles coming toward it, most recently on July 12, when it confirmed that a missile fell outside of its borders.  

In May, the defense ministry reported that it had intercepted six unmanned aerial vehicles within 48 hours that “attempted to target civilian and vital areas in the country.”

One drone, launched from the direction of the UAE’s western border, struck an electricity generator near the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant on May 17. Its origin has not been confirmed and is under investigation.

During the first few weeks of the conflict, Iran launched a series of more aggressive strikes on targets in the UAE, hitting military, energy, and civilian infrastructure. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) vowed at the time to “punish aggressors throughout the region,” pointing toward U.S. military assets stationed in the country, as well as other Gulf states. 

Tehran resumed targeting U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain during the return to hostilities in early July, when negotiations based upon a Memorandum of Understanding collapsed. 

Where do peace plans between the U.S. and Iran stand?

Peace talks between the United States and Iran have made little progress in recent weeks.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that “there are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled,” between the U.S. and Iran. He also reaffirmed that the naval blockade on Iranian ports and vessels remains in place, amid ongoing claims that the Strait of Hormuz is “open and operating.”

Marine traffic data suggested Wednesday that some ships were indeed passing through the Strait, but still at significantly lower levels than before the conflict began. 

Earlier this week, the President also threatened to “bomb the s---” of Oman, a U.S. ally and mediator between Washington and Tehran, should it “get in the way” of U.S. attempts to gain  effective international control of the Strait of Hormuz. 

Oman and Iran have reportedly been working toward an agreement to manage traffic through the Strait, which carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply. 

As students go back to school in the midst of record-breaking summer heat, many are returning to overheating classrooms whose aging air conditioning systems can't keep up with extreme heat waves—if they even have air conditioning at all. 

Extreme heat has already caused school closures and disruptions across the country. In July, Milwaukee Public Schools shut down its Summer Academy and other indoor school programs for two days because of extreme heat. One day in May, 57 Philadelphia schools went remote and canceled all in-person activities due to soaring temperatures. That same month, a Washington, D.C. high school carried out a "heat evacuation" as classroom temperatures reached the mid-90s. Eight elementary schools in Doylestown, PA also closed for a day because old buildings couldn’t protect students from the heat. And in recent years, schools in Memphis dismissed students early as temperatures climbed to 110 degrees. 

During the 2024-25 school year alone, more than 9 million students at 10,000 schools nationwide experienced extreme heat- and weather-driven school closures or disruptions. These are not isolated inconveniences. They are warning signs that our school buildings and grounds were not designed for today’s new weather patterns.

It’s important to understand that students struggle to learn in hot, stuffy classrooms. Air quality, temperature, and ventilation can affect how students think, focus, and perform. Poor ventilation can impair cognitive function, while excessive heat diverts the body’s energy from learning, slows reaction time, and weakens attention.

In fact, research has shown that in schools without cooling, each 1° Fahrenheit increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by approximately 1%.

Extreme temperatures (80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and above) are known to exacerbate student absenteeism and disciplinary referrals, while poor indoor environments can also contribute to the spread of illness and exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma, one of the leading causes of missed school days. Younger children, whose bodies and brains are still developing, are especially susceptible.

In medicine and education alike, we have seen how the environments where people spend their time can directly affect their health, well-being, and ability to thrive. We would never accept these conditions in a hospital. We should not accept them in a classroom.

At the same time, outdated heating and cooling systems are placing a growing financial strain on school districts. Across the country, energy costs are rising and becoming more unstable. For school leaders, that often means tradeoffs: dollars spent on inefficient energy systems are dollars not spent directly on teaching and learning. But there is a better path forward.

Modern HVAC systems, often paired with on-site solar energy, offer schools a way to deliver reliable heating and cooling while reducing exposure to volatile fossil fuel costs. These solutions can stabilize energy budgets over time and are increasingly supported by domestic manufacturing, including the production of heat pumps here in the United States.

Just as important, new federal tools make these upgrades far more accessible than they once were. Through energy tax credits and a mechanism known as Elective Pay, public school districts can receive direct financial support to invest in these improvements. That means lower upfront costs and faster payback, turning what was once out of reach into a practical, near-term option.

We are already seeing what this looks like in practice.

In Indiana, Center Grove Community Schools are demonstrating how modern HVAC upgrades can improve classroom comfort while helping manage energy costs, in part by replacing aging boilers, chillers, and fan coils with a geothermal heat pump system. In Virginia’s Prince William County, at the heart of the nation’s data center corridor, district leaders are acting to shield their budgets from steep projected utility increases. And in Wisconsin, a school in Menasha modernized its facility with a ground-source heat pump system, solar panels, and energy storage to deliver better air quality, lower costs, and create local jobs.

The benefits extend well beyond temperature control. Students are better able to focus and learn. Districts gain predictability in their operating costs. And communities benefit from more resilient, efficient infrastructure that reduces strain on the grid during periods of peak demand.

For school and district leaders, this moment calls for action. Now is the time to explore how these solutions can work in your community.

The environments we live in shape the health within us. Nowhere is that more immediate, or more consequential, than in the classroom.

We can improve student health and learning, strengthen our schools, and protect public resources at the same time. And we have real-world proof from communities across the country that this is not only possible, but doable.

The real risk is not the price of modernization, but the cost of continuing to send students and teachers into unhealthy, inefficient buildings unprepared for the realities ahead.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) said Wednesday that it “deplores” sanctions imposed this week by the U.S. State Department on its president, Judge Tomoko Akane, and Abdoulaye Seye, a Senegalese senior trial lawyer for the Office of the Prosecutor.

The State Department announced the sanctions Tuesday, accusing Akane and Seye of having “directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.” 

The sanctions include the freezing of assets in the country, blocking financial transactions, and prohibiting entry to the U.S. They were imposed under an Executive Order issued by President Donald Trump in February 2025, which reads: “The United States unequivocally opposes and expects our allies to oppose any ICC actions against the United States, Israel, or any other ally of the United States that has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.”

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is a state party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that founded the ICC and went into effect in 2002, and therefore do not recognize the jurisdiction of the court. 

Read More: Trump Administration Vows to Dismantle the International Criminal Court

“These sanctions are a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates pursuant to the mandate conferred by its states parties,” the ICC statement said. “Such measures targeting judges, prosecutors and staff who work towards the fulfilment of the mandate that was conferred to the ICC by states undermine the rule of law.”

The Court further warned that the sanctions put “international legal order” at risk.

In his first term, Trump imposed sanctions on ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and another senior official, Phakiso Mochochoko. These were later lifted under the Biden Administration. 

The ICC says that nine of its 18 judges are now under sanctions from Washington, as well as both deputy prosecutors, a former prosecutor, and one other member of staff. 

Why does the Trump Administration oppose the ICC?

Announcing the sanctions on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court.” He accused it of repeated attempts “to assert authority over nationals of the United States and other countries that have not consented to its jurisdiction or ratified the Rome Statute.”

The Trump Administration has long pushed back against the ICC’s investigations and charges against nationals from both the U.S. and Israel. February’s Executive Order said the ICC’s recent actions against both countries “set a dangerous precedent.”

The State Department also launched a campaign in July to “dismantle” the ICC’s jurisdiction, saying it will “systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.” 

But the tensions trace back to Trump’s first term, when the ICC sought to investigate possible war crimes committed by the CIA and military personnel in Afghanistan. Bensouda requested authorization in 2017 to investigate those allegations. Trump then brought sanctions against her in 2020.

The U.S. has also rebuked its actions in recent years against Israel.

In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the recently dismissed Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Both were accused of “crimes against humanity and war crimes" pertaining to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War, including “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.”

The conflict was ignited by Hamas’s terror attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which left some 1,200 people dead and 250 taken hostage. Since then, over 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza—1,262 of whom have been killed since a cease-fire began last October, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Public Health on Aug. 15. 

The prosecutor also pursued arrest warrants for Hamas leaders Mohammed Deif, Ismail Haniyeh, and Yahya Sinwar, all of whom have since been killed. 

During Rubio’s Senate confirmation hearing in 2025, he addressed the warrant for Netanyahu. “This is a test run. This is a trial run to see, ‘Can we go after a head of state from a nation that’s not a member?’” he said, adding: “If we can go after them and we can get it done with regards to Israel, they will apply that to the United States at some point.”

Israel has denied the ICC’s war crimes accusations and challenged its jurisdiction. The Pre-Trial Chamber initially rejected that challenge, but in April 2025 the Appeals Chamber sent it back for reconsideration. The arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant remain in effect.

Netanyahu commended Rubio’s sanctions announcement on Tuesday, describing the ICC as “a kangaroo court that cloaks its abuse of power in the language of international law while undermining the very principles of justice.” 

In late July, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received reports of cyberattacks on water facilities from utility companies in at least seven states in the United States.

One of those attacks, in Braham, Minnesota, a city of around 1,800 people, affected the functioning of a pump at a water treatment plant and threatened the water supply. Public works crews in the city quickly and impressively isolated the system, restored a backup, and had the water plant back up and running in around 90 minutes, according to Nate George, the mayor of Braham.

While this ad hoc response worked this time, much more is needed to make America truly resilient to hybrid attacks by malicious actors on the critical infrastructure that Americans depend on every day for water, power, healthcare, and financial transactions.

In April, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning saying that Iranian-backed groups are targeting America’s critical infrastructure, including water systems. More capable adversaries of America, China and Russia, are also actively targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, according to U.S. officials. 

President Donald Trump said he does not believe that Iran is behind these most recent cyberattacks. Unnamed U.S. officials reportedly believe that Iran-backed groups are the likely culprits but also caution that the findings are preliminary and that there is a chance that the attackers may be impersonating Iran to stoke tensions.

Meanwhile. the Trump Administration has been gutting U.S. cybersecurity capabilities, cutting roughly a third of the federal cyber agency’s workforce at exactly the moment small utilities need it most. A new approach is needed. Washington needs a whole-of-society, resilience-based approach to deter and defend against these increasing hybrid threats to the American homeland.

Washington can learn a lot from its European allies. Europe has spent decades hardening its systems through a whole-of-society effort it calls “total defense.” Finland and Estonia are especially instructive examples. Finland runs a national supply agency that holds reserves of fuel, grain, and medicine and rehearses shortages alongside the private companies that would actually have to manage them.

Estonia fields a volunteer cyber unit within its Defense League, a militia under the command of its defense ministry. The volunteers are civilians with day jobs who train with the state and show up when attackers strike. They run exercise programs built around cyber resilience, information sharing, and public-private partnerships.

So what does Washington need to do to harden America’s water systems and other critical infrastructure? First, America needs to broadly embrace a whole-of-society “total defense” approach to homeland security, adopting and adapting innovative ideas from partners and allies.

More specifically, policymakers can take three specific steps now that will help prepare for, and perhaps deter, the next attack. First, they should renew the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, a small grants program for states that helps build state and local level cyber defenses. The program has already lapsed once and now runs on year-to-year extensions, which is no way to fund a defense. Make it permanent and carve out a sizable share for water.

Second, Washington should set a response floor for water municipalities and measure it in hours. Electric utilities operate under binding federal cyber standards backed by real financial penalties. Water utilities have no equivalent, and the Environmental Protection Agency currently has no authority to impose one. Congress should give it a narrow version: every system above a modest size must be able to run manually for 72 hours and must prove it in an annual drill. This is not a technology mandate; it is a time standard, and it is the only number that matters once the pumps stop. Braham did it in 90 minutes. That should be the benchmark.

Finally, the U.S. needs to build the bench. There are roughly 50,000 small water systems in this country, and most have no dedicated IT staff at all. No grant program can hire its way out of that. Governors can act tomorrow with authorities they already have: cyber teams in the National Guard on standing state active duty orders, tied to a water mutual aid compact modeled on the one power companies use to restore each other’s lines after hurricanes. When a plant serving 1,800 people gets hit at two in the morning, somebody should already have the phone number.

A country that can afford 11 aircraft carriers can afford to teach 50,000 water operators to turn a valve by hand. Resilience is not a consolation prize for failed deterrence. By forcing an adversary to think twice about whether an operation will succeed, resilience is deterrence.

The Trump Administration ordered 30 universities to audit their foreign research partnerships or risk losing funding.

The order, issued Monday by the Defense Department, instructs universities to review their ties to 130 foreign institutions, mainly Chinese, that “engage in activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated.” Schools that fail to terminate any “problematic” partnerships within two weeks may lose their eligibility for future federal research funding.

The order is intended to protect taxpayer-funded research from “unauthorized technology transfer, intellectual property theft and adversarial exploitation,” the Pentagon said in the announcement.

“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering, said.

The announcement did not identify which schools had received the order or how they were selected, but a U.S. official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that they include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Johns Hopkins University.

The order is the latest effort to clamp down on alleged Chinese influence in the U.S., including in higher education. The Trump Administration and several lawmakers from both parties have argued that China exploits U.S.-funded research to obtain sensitive technology and intellectual property.

U.S. concerns about Chinese intellectual property theft and espionage have grown in recent years. Last year, a federal jury convicted former Corning scientist Ji Wang of stealing files containing trade secrets from a Pentagon-funded project. Prosecutors said he planned to use the technology in a Chinese business backed by government entities. In May, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, Calif., resigned after admitting to acting as an unregistered Chinese government agent before taking office.

But some observers have warned that the crackdown unfairly politicizes academic collaboration, stigmatizes Chinese academics, and could weaken American scientific competitiveness.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said in a statement to news outlets that it opposed “the overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicisation or instrumentalisation of normal scientific, educational and academic exchanges.”

“The U.S. side should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States,” it added.

Here’s what to know about the raft of policies aimed at curbing institutional ties to China.

Order targets primarily Chinese institutions

The foreign institutions the U.S. seeks to blacklist were identified by the Pentagon last month. Eighty-eight of the 130 institutions are in mainland China, while the remaining institutions are in Russia and Iran. The list has been updated annually since an earlier version was first released in 2023. It was established under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which was enacted during President Donald Trump’s first term.

While some Chinese universities on the list have more explicit ties to the military, others are prominent civilian institutions with extensive international research partnerships. These include Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The updated list also added a number of other Chinese institutions with varying links to China’s defense and security establishment, including Shandong University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Shenyang Aerospace University, and the University of International Relations.

People familiar with Chinese academic institutions previously told TIME that Chinese Communist Party structures are embedded throughout the country’s universities, making institutional links to the government common, even though individual students or researchers may not be engaged in political or military work.

The Pentagon also instructed universities to audit collaborations with organizations associated with “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Confucius Institutes are non-profit language and cultural programs funded by the Chinese government and hosted in universities around the world. Launched in 2004, there were at one time more than 100 Confucius Institutes operating on U.S. college campuses. But most U.S. programs closed after 2019 amid congressional scrutiny and federal funding restrictions. By late 2023, there were fewer than five active Confucius Institutes in the U.S.

Many universities, however, retained partnerships with their former Chinese partner institutions or established successor language and cultural programs under different names. Critics characterized some of these arrangements, particularly those that continued to receive Chinese funding or instructors, as “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Of 74 former Confucius Institute hosts surveyed by the Government Accountability Office in 2023, 43 said they maintained ties to their former Chinese partner institutions. Nine reported receiving continued funding or other support for programming from those institutions, although eight of the nine said the partnerships predated their Confucius Institutes.

Crackdown on broader Chinese ties

The Trump Administration has pursued a slate of policies that build on Trump’s first-term “China Initiative.” These have included tighter scrutiny of universities’ foreign funding and research partnerships and restrictions on collaborations with blacklisted Chinese institutions. The Trump Administration has also increased vetting of Chinese student visa applicants, threatened visa revocations for some students, and renewed investigations of China-linked researchers.

Since last year, the Pentagon has prohibited funding fundamental research projects conducted in collaboration with a listed foreign institution or its employees. The policy was expanded in March to bar the use of equipment from listed entities in certain Pentagon-funded projects.

Meanwhile, China has sought to bring in more foreign talent and investment, including by seeking to attract more international students to its universities and exchange programs, and by introducing a K visa for young foreign STEM professionals.

Dozens of Chinese tenure-track scholars have left U.S. universities for China over the past year.

Days before the latest announcement, the Republican-led House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Education and Workforce Committee released a report accusing Harvard of failing to adequately screen its relationships with Chinese institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army and China’s defense industry. The investigation said it identified more than 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and scholars at certain Chinese defense-linked civilian universities.

Harvard disputed the report’s “mischaracterizations,” and said it follows federal national security standards.

The changes also come as the U.S. seeks to maintain its lead over China in the global AI race. A 2025 report warned that major AI data centers in the U.S. were vulnerable to Chinese espionage, sabotage, and intellectual property theft.

In July, the Administration recommended redirecting potentially billions of dollars of federal research funding from universities toward individual scientists and AI-focused projects as part of an effort to counter Chinese scientific advances.

Last week, Reuters also reported that the Administration was preparing to tell 35 partner countries that participation in Pax Silica—a U.S.-led initiative to strengthen supply chains for semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure—was conditioned on their refusal to join China’s rival AI framework. The reported demand appeared in an internal draft and has not been formally issued.