World roundup: June 13 2025

This one is mostly about Iran and Israel

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 13, 1971: The New York Times begins publishing excerpts from “The Pentagon Papers,” portions of the Department of Defense’s history of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968 leaked by RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The documents revealed details about US activity in Indochina that were previously unknown to the American public and made it clear that four consecutive presidential administrations—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson—had lied consistently about the scope and nature of that activity.

June 13, 1983: The space probe Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, crosses the orbit of Neptune and becomes the first man-made object to pass the orbits of all the major planets of this solar system. It continued to transmit telemetry data until April 2002 and still sent weak signals back to Earth until January 23, 2003. It’s believed to be further from the sun at this point than any spacecraft save Voyager 1, though it will be surpassed by Voyager 2 sometime in the next few years.

MIDDLE EAST

IRAN

Friday morning’s Israeli attack on Iran appears to have been quite substantial, with the Israeli military (IDF) claiming strikes on more than 100 Iranian targets from more than 200 Israeli aircraft. Those targets included Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow as well as nuclear sites near Isfahan and military sites (primarily air defense systems and missile facilities) across the country.

The primary objective seems to have been Tehran, where the IDF more or less decapitated the Iranian military establishment. Among those reported dead (some of which have been more solidly confirmed than others) are Iranian military chief of staff Mohammed Bagheri, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Hossein Salami, Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, IRGC aerospace commander Amirali Hajizadeh, and Gholam Ali Rashid, the commander of Iran’s Khatam-al Anbiya military command and control center. Many were killed in one strike on an IRGC facility where they were meeting to coordinate a response to the attack—Israeli intelligence apparently knew where that facility was. The Israelis also killed at least five prominent Iranian nuclear scientists, maintaining the pretense that this attack was a self-defensive blow against Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program. They were among at least 78 people killed and 329 wounded in Tehran alone, while the overall death toll reportedly topped 90.