Bernard Lewis, shaper of U.S. stance on Middle East, dies

MAN KNOWS NOT HIS TIME: Bernard Lewis, perhaps the preeminent scholar of the Middle East, has died just two weeks shy of his 102nd birthday. Martin Kramer and Jay Nordlinger have expanded takes on a career that spanned from Lawrence of Arabia to Islamic State threats.

VENEZUELA: The Trump administration is likely to impose new sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry following a sham election that returned President Nicolas Maduro to power. The challenge for policymakers: how to financially throttle the regime yet somehow assist Venezuelans in the midst of a staggering humanitarian crisis.

CONGO: A massive vaccination campaign has begun in the Democratic Republic of Congo in an effort to stem an outbreak of the Ebola virus that has spread for more than a month.

TURKEY: 2 a.m. is a normal time for monks to pray, but not so much for modern postulants. But that’s when the prayer warriors backing imprisoned American pastor Andrew Brunson gathered during his latest courtroom appearance in Izmir—a hearing punctuated by more outrageous charges, seeming U.S. inaction, and some perhaps otherworldly intervention.

GREAT BRITAIN: Survivors of London’s deadly 2017 Grenfell Tower fire wept as they listened to recordings and saw photographs of victims during the opening session of a public inquiry. The investigation into the causes of the disaster that killed 71 people is expected to last months.

You know you want to see the formal photos from Saturday’s royal wedding in Windsor and the homily by the Most Rev. Michael Curry, the presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church in the United States (with good background on Curry here).

UNITED STATES: Refugee admissions stand at 13,501 for the first half of the 2018 fiscal year—on track to be the lowest number admitted since 1980 when the Refugee Act was passed.

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