Trump Says U.S. Will ‘Take Over’ Strait of Hormuz, and How Russia Made Japan a Den of Spies

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0:29From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, July 14th. Here's what we're covering.

0:40When it comes to Iran, it looks like they're back at their business trying to take over the strait. What's your response? Well, we're taking over the strait. They have nothing. They've got nothing. President Trump laid out a drastic new plan yesterday as the U.S. and Iran effectively returned to war, the fragile ceasefire between them collapsing. In an interview on Fox News, Trump said the U.S. will charge fees to protect ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. Now we're going to guard it and we're going to get paid for guarding it. A lot of money. The decision flies in the face of his administration's own stance on the issue when Iran threatened the same thing.

1:19Secretary of State Marco Rubio came out repeatedly to say no country is allowed to impose fees in international waters. Trump's announcement is a new escalation between the U.S. and Iran. They signed a preliminary peace deal last month, but ultimately, disagreements over who controls the strait doomed it, with Iran firing on commercial ships and the U.S. responding with its own strikes on Iran. The tit-for-tat attacks have ramped up in the last few days, and the Trump administration has now formally sent a letter to Congress stating that the war has resumed. Trump has ordered the U.S. naval blockade on Iran back in place.

1:58And in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, he threatened the country with more strikes. We're going to hit them very hard tonight. And we're going to hit them hard tomorrow. And there's not a damn thing they can do about it. They have nothing. I think we're in the phase of the war where we're trying again things that didn't work the first time. But the administration has not made an argument to us yet that this is going to be any more effective the second time than it was the first. White House correspondent David Sanger has more about what this new phase of the war could mean on today's episode of The Daily.

2:35Meanwhile, while many analysts are skeptical that Trump's plan to charge fees for ships passing through the strait will actually come to fruition, Oil prices surged and stocks fell after news broke about the tolls and the return of the blockade.

2:53Now, three updates on a series of deadly shootings by immigration agents. First, in Maine.

3:04Protesters spilled into the streets yesterday after an ICE agent shot and killed a man who immigrants' rights groups have identified as a 26-year-old from Colombia. No, Justice, no, okay? We want ICE! Lock our streets! The shooting happened early Monday morning in the city of Biddeford, just south of Portland. According to the Department of Homeland Security, agents had tried to stop a car leaving an address that they'd been monitoring. DHS said the driver then tried to get away and, quote, weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement. But some state and local officials say they want more details about what happened.

3:39The shooting in Maine was the second in a week involving immigration agents firing on a driver. It's just, frankly, just disgusting. I mean, their story is just almost like it was a different incident that happened. The first was in Houston, where Representative Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat, is disputing federal authorities' version of events after she spoke with two witnesses. The men who were in the vehicle say ICE agents did not identify themselves after chasing down their van in unmarked SUVs. They say that after the van came to a stop, an agent fired a single shot through the front passenger window, killing the driver.

4:20ICE has said that the driver had tried to run over an officer, but has presented no evidence to back up its claims. The agents were not wearing body cameras. And last update from Minneapolis. I want to thank our federal partners for their willingness to consider changing course to share evidence and promote public trust. A county prosecutor announced yesterday that after months of resistance, the Justice Department has shared evidence related to three shootings by immigration agents there. She said that included the vehicle Renee Good was driving when she was killed by a federal agent and body cam footage from the fatal shooting of Alex Preddy.

5:01The shootings took place during the Trump administration's sweeping immigration crackdown in Minnesota at the beginning of the year. Since then, state and local officials have said their investigations into what happened have been stymied by a lack of cooperation from the federal government. It's refused to provide even basic information like the names of the agents who opened fire. While federal officials have broad immunity from state prosecution under the Constitution, Minnesota officials have said those protections are not absolute and have already brought some charges against officers for their conduct during the crackdown.

5:43A new investigation from the Times has found that over the past few years, a wave of Russian spies has flooded into Japan. Back in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, a lot of Western countries expelled hundreds of Russian intelligence agents. Since then, dozens of those banished spies have turned up in Japan, where they've become a crucial part of Russia's war effort, buying or stealing microchips, transmitters, and other technology that can be used to make weapons. Now, according to one Ukrainian estimate, 90 % of Russian missiles and drones contain Japanese components. My colleagues and I looked at shipping records.

6:24We looked at documents. And when we started interviewing people about this, we heard about this secretive organization called the 20th Directorate within Russian military intelligence, the GRU, with an undercover operative in Tokyo, Japan. And we realized this was the secretive arm of the GRU, which was tasked with finding the parts to make sure that Putin's ballistic missiles and drones could continue to terrorize Ukraine. Adam Goldman is part of the team of Times reporters who've publicly revealed the role of the 20th Directorate for the first time. According to their reporting, based on interviews with current and former intelligence officials, members of the unit pose as diplomats or business people as they work to smuggle battlefield technology into Russia.

7:12For example, the Times found that the head of the 20th Directorate's operations in Tokyo has a cover identity as an employee of the Russian state airline Aeroflot and works out of a nondescript corporate office in the heart of the city. And while Ukrainian officials have previously presented Japan with evidence that its technology is being used in Russia's ongoing deadly attacks, the Japanese government has been slow to act. Japan has actually had a long-standing reputation as a kind of spy paradise, in part because of constraints on the country's intelligence services that were put in place after World War II.

7:50But that could now be changing. The country is currently building a centralized intelligence agency for the first time since the 1940s, as it faces growing threats from Russia and also from China and North Korea. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn't respond to questions from the Times about foreign espionage, but one lawmaker in the governing party said, quote, we have a sense of crisis about the situation.

8:19And finally, scientists have announced that for the first time they've spotted sugar deep in interstellar space. They'd been looking for it because sugar is a crucial building block of life, and there have long been theories about how it got to Earth. Some scientists think it could have been carried by space rocks smashing into the planet, since several kinds of sugars have been found on asteroids and meteorites. But there have still been questions about where sugar came from before that. For the new study, which was published in the journal Nature Astronomy this week, astrochemists used telescopes to look at radio frequencies deep in the center of the Milky Way, since every molecule produces its own unique frequency.

9:02They were able to identify a pattern that exactly matches the kind of sugar that's found on Earth. It was floating among all of the dust and gas between solar systems, a place the researchers said is a, quote, impressive chemical factory. One of them said finding sugar out there in those conditions is meaningful because those same conditions exist across the galaxy. So the sugar isn't just a clue about how life got started on Earth. It also makes it more likely life could have formed somewhere else, too. And the fact that really blew my mind, the sugar they found out in space is the exact same kind that's in raspberries.

9:43Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.