World roundup: July 30 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Ukraine, Brazil, and elsewhere

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Apologies, but after doing a couple of podcasting sessions earlier today my voice is shot. Anyone who needs a voiceover can always use the text-to-voice feature in the Substack app. Thanks for reading!

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 30, 762: Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur founds the city of Baghdad as his new capital. Located near the site of the former Sasanian (Persian) capital Ctesiphon, Baghdad replaced the Umayyad capital Damascus as the center of the caliphal court. Officially the new city was called Medinat al-Salam, or “the City of Peace.” It’s not entirely clear why it took the name Baghdad, but the prevailing theory as far as I know is that a village called “Baghdad” stood near the spot where the city was built, and common usage applied that name to the city. Eventually common usage won out. For several centuries Baghdad was arguably the most important city in the world. At its height it may have been home to more than a million people and was world-renowned as a center of learning and culture. Its decline mirrored the decline of the Abbasid dynasty, and the Mongol sack of the city in 1258 proved especially devastating.

A map of early Baghdad’s “Round City” produced by 19th century Scottish orientalist William Muir (Wikimedia Commons)

July 30, 1619: The Virginia General Assembly meets for the first time in Jamestown. Today the Assembly bills itself as “the first representative government in the New World,” which I guess is true if you ignore the millions of people who were already living there when the first Europeans showed up, many of whom also practiced forms of “representative government.” Anyway this gives the Assembly a claim on being the true forerunner of the modern US government, which must be a source of great pride for everybody involved.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani is apparently scheduled to visit Russia on Thursday, when he’ll meet with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov. This is not exactly groundbreaking news but it is the first time he or anyone else in the Syrian government will travel to Moscow on official business since the ouster of former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad back in December. Assad was a Russian client and relations between the Russian government and the new Syrian administration have been uncertain though not especially poor.