Today’s edition of quick hits.

* In the Strait of Hormuz: “An Iranian cargo vessel was struck early Sunday off Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian state media said, and Tehran postponed a plan to brief neighboring countries on its contested efforts to manage shipping in the strait.”

* The latest government figures, released Friday, pointed to 7,022 cases and 3,398 deaths: “The Ebola outbreak in Congo, the world’s fastest-growing outbreak of the disease on record, has now spread to seven provinces in the African country, local authorities said. And it’s showing no signs of slowing down.”

* Fortunately, no one was injured in this attack: “Russian drones attacked a crossing point on the Polish-Ukrainian border on Sunday morning, hitting a passenger train two kilometers from the frontier in Volyn Oblast. Ukraine’s state rail operator confirmed that a strike hit the locomotive of a passenger train bound for Warsaw.”

* Trump’s weakness toward Beijing continues to be an underappreciated story: “Before Iran carried out its attack that killed three U.S. troops in July, Tehran acquired high-resolution satellite images of the base in Jordan from Chinese entities, according to U.S. officials familiar with details of the incident. It is the clearest evidence so far that Chinese support for Iran during the war has had lethal consequences for U.S. forces, according to the officials, who say the U.S. has connected the imagery to the attack.”

* Ottawa’s bold strategy: “Shortly after Canada and America became embroiled in the worst bilateral trade war in their modern history, the secure phones of Europe’s top leaders lit up with a trans-Atlantic call. Mark Carney was pushing to take Canada’s relationship with the EU to the next level—a bold gambit to rewire the economic cabling of the Western alliance.”

* A critically important case: President Donald Trump and his administration have cited the need to prevent voter fraud as a justification for their desired mail ballot restrictions for the midterm elections. But in a new ruling blocking those restrictions, a Trump-appointed judge became the latest jurist to highlight a lack of proven fraud and question how the administration’s efforts would help combat such fraud if it existed.

* Illegal deportations: “Once exceedingly rare, illegal deportations have become a routine part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push — the most extreme consequences of the administration’s incursion on the due process rights of its deportation targets. Since last year, judges have ruled that the Trump administration has deported more than 170 people in in violation of court orders, in defiance of legally mandated due process protections, or to countries from which they had sought or received protection from torture and persecution.”

* FEMA ruling of note: “A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it ordered that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s work force be cut in half.”

* Trump Tower Tbilisi? “U.S. relations with the Caucasus country of Georgia have gone from warm to frigid in recent years, as the former Soviet republic has cracked down on dissent and swung closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. One U.S. business undeterred by the shift: the Trump Organization.”

* No president should ever think this much about decorating: “President Donald Trump called Friday for the Smithsonian Institution to honor George Washington with a 30-foot statue outside the National Museum of American History, replacing the modernist ‘Infinity’ sculpture which has been there since 1967.”

See you tomorrow.

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