July 16 2026 News

Iran’s army says it will “undoubtedly resist until the end and will neutralize American interventions in the region. ”Iranian army spokesman Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia says the only way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is for the US to comply with the 14-point memorandum of understanding that the two sides signed in June and the implementation of “Iranian regulations” regarding ship traffic in the strait. Akraminia says that if US President Donald Trump carries out his threat to attack Iran’s infrastructure, Iran’s armed forces would strike “all remaining infrastructure” across the region, and the response would be more severe, wider in scope and more destructive than previous attacks.

U.S. Central Command announced it had completed an evening wave of strikes against Iran, hitting Iranian command centers, air defense sites, missile and drone capabilities, and coastal surveillance facilities “to further degrade Iran’s ability to threaten innocent mariners crewing commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. ”CENTCOM said it used “precision munitions to hit targets in multiple locations, including Bandar Abbas.” “Earlier this morning, American forces struck coastal defense and cruise missile sites on Greater Tunb Island during a 90-minute wave,” CENTCOM said on X. “The U.S. military is holding Iran accountable at the Commander-in-Chief’s direction,” the post added.

B’nai Brith Canada said on Wednesday that its preliminary data for 2026 suggests a year with an “alarming” rise in violent Jew-hatred and the second most volume of such incidents after 2023, during which the Oct. 7 attacks took place. Since Jan. 1, the nonprofit has recorded 27 violent instances of Jew-hatred in the country—more than double the 10 such incidents in all of 2025.

The future of military artificial intelligence may not be a single all-knowing machine directing a battlefield from a distant command center. Instead, DARPA is preparing to explore enormous collectives of AI agents capable of organizing themselves, dividing up missions, adapting to chaos, and continuing to operate even when some members of the group fail, disappear, or go rogue. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has formally launched a new effort called Decentralized Artificial Intelligence by Controlled Emergence, or DICE, aimed at developing AI collectives that can operate in contested environments without requiring a human or central AI planner to explicitly direct every action. By the program’s final phase, DARPA wants researchers to test simulated collectives involving as many as 100,000 AI agents exchanging up to 1 million messages as they work toward shared objectives. A recently released solicitation notice describes DICE as a 36-month effort divided between decentralization, adversarial robustness, and large-scale testing.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law on July 13 that plugs California’s driver records into a national identity network, quadruples the reach of the state’s phone-based ID, and clears the way for a camera enforcement grid across Los Angeles during the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The Salamanca City Central School District, located on the Seneca Nation reservation, will become one of the first in the nation to use the advanced technology as a learning support tool alongside human educators. The district approved the purchase of the robot, named Sally, from the tech company Realbotix at a recent board meeting, along with an accompanying artificial intelligence teacher’s assistant program.

French lawmakers voted on July 15, 2026, to approve a bill creating a ‘legal right to assisted dying for adults with incurable ​illnesses.’ The order is intended to give lawmakers in the state time to “build a nation-leading regulatory framework” to rein in data center development, which Hochul says “threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers.”

Former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel says his speech at Tel Aviv University was more than criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he “laid out a plan that gets Israel out of being a pariah.” Emanuel added, “It went from technological prowess to a territorial pariah. And for a small nation, that’s not survivable. In 22 years, it will be 100 years old. You cannot survive like this.”

Illumination, an animation studio owned by Universal Pictures, is pushing sorcery on families, particularly children, in the new animated movie Minions & Monsters. As the third installment in the Minions prequel series and the seventh overall film in the combined Despicable Me franchise, this newest addition moves away from its usual storyline of odd, adventurous minions into a dark and strange world filled with occult-like themes. In an attempt to represent mini-conjurers as cute characters filled with mischief, Minions & Monsters is advertised as “family-friendly fun.” That fun includes a spellbook, drawing a pentagram, magic, dark rituals, and a former warlock boss to summon monsters.