U S housing bill passes without Trump s signature 2

Hi, I'm Christopher Waljasper in Chicago. It's Saturday, July 11th. Today. Trump says the U.S. and Iran have agreed to keep talking. That's despite continued hostilities. A bipartisan housing bill becomes law in the U.S., without Trump's signature. And in Ukraine, birds on the front lines are building nests out of fiber-optic drone cables. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, seven days a week. President Donald Trump says the U.S. and Iran have agreed to continue talking, even as hostilities ramped back up this week. And that's despite a ceasefire that he's now declaring over. Friday saw a relative calm, with no new attacks reported. For more on the toll that this conflict is taking on Iran's cultural heritage, listen to the latest episode of On Assignment. Our Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Michael Pell explains how Reuters combined eyewitness reporting, satellite imagery, and forensic analysis to uncover what's happening. The link is in today's show notes. North Korea is condemning this week's NATO summit, accusing the alliance of fueling military confrontation and arms buildup. Pyongyang says denuclearization shouldn't start with North Korea, but with South Korea, Japan, and NATO members. State media is reporting that Kim Jong-un has ordered North Korea's nuclear forces to be strengthened, both in quantity and in quality. In the U.S., a sweeping housing affordability bill has become law. It's one of the few bipartisan achievements of this Congress. But President Trump is refusing to sign the bill, unless his Save America Act, which tightens voting access, is passed. To me, compared to the Save America Act, just about everything is a big yawn. The housing measure would expedite or waive some environmental reviews for new housing projects and limit how many single-family homes large Wall Street investors can own. One move by the president that is not symbolic? Trump has removed the final three members of a small but critical federal election agency, leaving it with no sitting commissioners just months before the midterms. The White House says the move is to ensure election security, but critics say it raises concerns about political interference. The move comes just after a recent Supreme Court ruling that grants the president more powers to fire members of independent agencies. Our reporter Beau Erickson is in Washington, D.C. This little-known commission is called the Election Assistance Commission, and it was started by Congress in 2002 to be this bipartisan commission, kind of in the aftermath of that very consequential 2000 U.S. presidential election, which was quite controversial, if people remember. And since this time, there has been two Democrats and two Republicans on this commission. The path forward for this commission is very unclear at the moment. The White House is not saying what the president's plan is. So we keep asking, well, what can the president and the White House and the administration do without these commissioners? And there's actually rules built in that says they really can't change a lot of the guidelines and the voting systems that they weigh in upon without these commissioners. This commission certifies election systems throughout the country, and that is just very important because it comes at a time when the president and his top allies are questioning the 2020 election result, which, of course, he lost to former President Joe Biden. And, of course, this decision comes just months before that crucial November election, which will decide who controls Congress. China is evacuating more than 600,000 people ahead of Typhoon Bavi. The storm has already battered Japan's Sakishima Islands and brushed past northern Taiwan. To follow the latest on the typhoon, head to Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Firefighters in southern Spain are trying to control a fast-moving wildfire. A dozen people have died so far, and more than 20 others are still missing. Authorities say many of the victims died while trying to flee by car or on foot, despite instruction to shelter in place. The mayor of Los Gallardos, Francisco Reyes, says high winds are causing the fire to spread quickly during what's been an intense wildfire season fueled by heatwaves and drought conditions. Aislinn Lange is in Madrid with the latest. What we're hearing from fire experts and from the local authorities is effectively that there had been a very kind of rainy spring. So that meant that lots and lots of vegetation grew. But we have had an extremely hot June and so that really dried everything out and made an absolute tinderbox. That was compounded by really high winds. And the regional president said that the fire at one point swept 15 kilometers in two hours, which is pretty extraordinary. So the absolute power of this. He said they've never actually seen anything like it. But unfortunately, with the hot, dry summers, we will be seeing more. Aislinn says forensic services are working to recover and identify bodies in hard to reach areas of the mountainous region. It's likely that a significant number of those fatalities are foreigners, people who are probably living here but may not have had a command of the language. And that might have been a factor in what caused it. So I think the key message that everybody is transmitting at the moment here in Spain is it is really important to make sure that you understand the areas you're going to, whether they are a fire risk, you really have to listen to the authorities. You know, unfortunately, it looks like these fatalities were people who either didn't want to evacuate when they were asked to or they left their homes when they'd asked to be sheltering in place. And therefore, they followed tracks that they thought were safe. But fires can change direction very quickly. Anti-immigration protesters march through the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa, carrying sticks and machetes. Some break into homes and forcibly remove foreigners to hand them over to police. The door-to-door raids follow a June 30th deadline that protesters set for undocumented immigrants to leave. South Africa, where millions of people are unemployed, has seen a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment in recent months. And that's triggered a mass exodus of tens of thousands of migrants from Malawi and Zimbabwe in recent weeks. Our reporter Nellie Payton is in Johannesburg. One of the leaders of the movement has announced that they would hold marches now every Thursday. And so this Thursday was the first of the weekly marches. And what we saw in at least one part of Johannesburg was that people were not only marching, they were actually going door-to-door and basically dragging people out of their houses who they suspect to be undocumented immigrants and taking them to the police. And one person told us that he actually was documented. I mean, that's been kind of part of the story of this whole movement is that the protesters say they're only against illegal immigration, but they're really kind of targeting people indiscriminately. Now, Nellie says the tensions fueling these protests are about more than immigration. The president Ramaphosa said in a speech that these are deeply rooted problems, which are South Africa's problems, and that immigrants shouldn't be scapegoated for them. But there's a feeling that the government hasn't quite come down strongly enough on that point because people still feel that they have license to go and attack people and chase them out of their homes. So even though the government has said, you know, we don't condone this, they haven't exactly tried hard to make it stop. South Africans do have a lot of things to be frustrated about. The country is not in great shape, but I think that, you know, you can blame a lot of it on poor governance, on, you know, poor economic growth. You could blame a lot of it on the legacy of apartheid, which is still very much a factor. But objectively, undocumented immigrants are not really causing these problems. In Ukraine, nature has a way of adapting, even to war. Ultra-thin fiber-optic cables, miles long, are tangling up in trees, draping across rooftops and stretching across fields along Ukraine's front lines. They're used by Ukrainian and Russian troops to fly attack drones. The cables prevent enemy forces from jamming signals sent to those drones. But now, birds have found the cables and are using them to build their nests. Researcher Jana Hrynko is studying two nests made out of grass and fiber-optic cables that were sent in by soldiers. They've been finding them across Donetsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhia. Those nests will stay at the Kyiv War Museum, while another is on its way to a lab in the Netherlands. And by documenting this nest, we're also documenting the impact of war on nature in Ukraine. That's Dutch biologist Alkflorian Heemstra, who's trying to determine exactly which birds built these nests. For more on any of the stories you heard today, check out reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. If you're listening on a smart speaker, just ask for the latest news from Reuters seven days a week. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.