About 150 migrants aiming to reach Europe drowned yesterday (NYT) in a shipwreck off the coast of western Libya. The United Nations said it was the deadliest episode in the Mediterranean so far this year.
 
While fewer migrants are attempting the crossing this year, the withdrawal of EU search-and-rescue forces and the obstruction of nongovernmental rescue groups have made such crossings deadlier (Guardian), analysts say. In early June, the United Nations said that the Libyan coast guard has intercepted and detained (Der Spiegel) more than 2,300 people in the Mediterranean this year. Earlier this week, French President Emmanuel Macron said that fourteen EU countries have agreed to a system to quickly allocate migrants (Reuters) across the bloc.

The parliament approved an amnesty (NYT) yesterday for Nuril Maknun, a bookkeeper who was sentenced to six months in jail and a $35,000 fine for recording calls from a boss who sexually harassed her, in a case that has mobilized women’s rights groups. President Joko Widodo is expected to formally issue the amnesty.
 
China: Beijing-based iSpace became the first private Chinese company to put satellites into orbit (FT) yesterday. China removed barriers to private investment in the space sector in 2014.

Protesters across Pakistan marked the first anniversary of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s election yesterday by rallying against (Reuters) his economic stewardship and crackdown on dissidents and the press. The opposition party Muslim League Nawaz said dozens of its activists were arrested (RFE/RL) in Lahore.

India: Parliament approved a change to its right-to-information law (Reuters) over lawmakers’ protests. The revised law gives the government the authority to determine the salaries of officers who determine access to public information. Opposition politicians says this will impinge on the independence of public information officers.
 

President Beji Caid Essebsi, who in 2014 became Tunisia’s first democratically elected leader, has died (Al Jazeera) at the age of 92. A new presidential election (Al Jazeera) is set to be held by October 23.
 
Foreign Affairs describes Essebsi’s role in Tunisia’s transition.

A new Associated Press report details hunger and electricity outages caused by Zimbabwe’s worst currency crisis in a decade. Some 3.5 million people in the countryside are food insecure, according to the World Food Program.
 
DRC: Between January and June, security officials carried out at least 245 extrajudicial killings (AFP) and armed groups carried out at least 418 summary executions, the United Nations reported yesterday. The reporting period immediately followed the Democratic Republic of Congo’s presidential election.

Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands all surpassed their national heat records (Guardian) for the second consecutive day yesterday, with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Paris also had its hottest day on record.
 
Spain: Acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has lost a vote (Politico) to form a government due to the abstention of the leftist party Podemos, with which his Socialist Party had been negotiating a coalition. If Sanchez cannot form a government within two months, Spain will go to new elections in November.

Forest clearance in Brazil’s Amazon this month has already surpassed the previous record (Guardian) for July by one-third, according to a satellite monitoring system implemented in 2015. This will be the third consecutive month that deforestation rose above 2018 levels, a consequence, observers say, of President Jair Bolsonaro’s encouragement of land invasion, logging, and burning.
 
This CFR InfoGuide illustrates the scale and consequences of deforestation in the Amazon.
 
Mexico: President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will meet tomorrow (Reuters) with Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez to discuss the high levels of northward migration from Central America.

This CFR Backgrounder looks at the factors in Central America’s Northern Triangle driving migration.

Russia targeted electoral infrastructure in all fifty U.S. states (NYT) during the 2016 elections, according to a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which found that the 2020 election remains vulnerable. The report concluded that “Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data” in Illinois, but it found no evidence that any votes had been tampered with.