World roundup: June 16 2025

Stories from Iran, Ivory Coast, Ukraine, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 16, 632: Yazdegerd III is crowned ruler of the Sasanian Empire. He ruled for 19 years, much of it in a fairly nominal sense, and was the last Sasanian emperor. He fled his capital, Ctesiphon, after the Persians’ catastrophic defeat to the invading Arabs at Qadisiyah in 636 and spent the rest of his life alternately running for his life and raising armies in a futile attempt to hold on to what was left of his empire. A miller assassinated Yazdegerd at Merv (near modern Mary, Turkmenistan) in 651, though it’s unclear whether he did so in an act of simple robbery or at the orders of the regional governor.

June 16, 1407: Ming Chinese forces capture the emperor of Đại Ngu (northern Vietnam today), Hồ Hán Thương, as well as his father and predecessor, “Retired Emperor” Hồ Quý Ly, thus bringing the 1406-1407 Ming-Hồ war close to its end. The conflict’s roots lay in the Hồ dynasty’s overthrow of the Trần dynasty, a Ming vassal, and the breakup of Đại Việt (Vietnam) in 1400. Hồ Quý Ly resisted a Ming demand for the reinstatement of the Trần and the rest, as they say, is history. The Ming annexed northern Vietnam, calling it Jiaozhi province, but that only lasted until 1427, when a rebellion led by Lê Lợi drove the Ming out and reestablished an independent Vietnam.

INTERNATIONAL

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s 2025 yearbook is out, so be sure to pick up a copy and get all your friends to sign it before summer break hits. I kid, of course. The headline takeaway from this year’s report seems to be that humanity is finally shedding its inhibitions about the use of nuclear weapons. Virtually all of the known nuclear states appear to be “modernizing” their arsenals, which is a euphemism for manufacturing new warheads faster than they’re retiring obsolete models. And the country with the largest stockpile of nukes, Russia, has officially lowered its threshold for using them from “existential threat” to “critical threat” or “massive air attack.” I think it’s reasonable to wonder whether any of the others have similarly downgraded their standards and just aren’t publicizing it.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

One of former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s top military commanders, Bassam al-Hassan, has according to the BBC told US interrogators that Assad’s government executed American journalist Austin Tice sometime after taking him into custody in August 2012. Hassan claims that Assad gave him the order to carry out the execution and has reportedly given FBI investigators information as to the location of Tice’s body. Since Assad’s ouster in December the US government has made a priority of trying to locate Tice, operating under the presumption (allegedly backed up by unspecified intelligence) that he was still alive and imprisoned. But Assad’s prisons have by and large been emptied out now and no sign of Tice has emerged.