Five Things to Know, June 5, 2023

1.   The U.S. Navy said Monday its sailors and the United Kingdom Royal Navy came to the aid of a ship in the crucial Strait of Hormuz after Iran's Revolutionary Guard “harassed” it. Three fast-attack Guard vessels with armed troops aboard approached the merchant ship at a close distance Sunday afternoon, the U.S. Navy said in a statement. It offered black-and-white images it said came from a U.S. Navy Boeing P-8 Poseidon overhead, which showed three small ships close to the commercial ship.

2.   The United States military released video Monday of what it called an “unsafe” Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait on the weekend, in which a Chinese navy ship cut sharply across the path of an American destroyer, forcing the U.S. vessel to slow to avoid a collision. The incident occurred Saturday as the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon and Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal were conducting a so-called “freedom of navigation” transit of the strait between Taiwan and mainland China.

3.   Moscow officials claimed that Ukrainian forces were making a major effort to punch through Russian defensive lines in southeast Ukraine for a second day Monday. Kyiv authorities didn’t confirm the attacks and suggested the claim was a Russian misinformation ruse.

4.   With the debt limit crisis settled, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are expected to move quickly this month on overdue work on the fiscal 2024 defense budget and annual defense authorization bill, in hopes of finishing that work by summer’s end. Markups of the respective House and Senate versions of the authorization bill were set to take place last month, but ended up delayed because of the debt ceiling uncertainty. The chambers’ armed services committees are expected to reschedule them in the next few weeks.

5.   Looking at the vastness of Utah Beach, its sand blowing in strong wind and bright sunshine, made Robert Gibson's memory of D-Day even more vivid. "It was tough," the 99-year-old veteran said of the moment when he landed there on June 6, 1944 alongside more than 150,000 other Allied troops. Gibson was among dozens of World War II veterans, mostly Americans and British, who traveled to Normandy this week to mark the 79th anniversary of D-Day, commemorating the decisive assault that led to the liberation of France and Western Europe from Nazi control.