World roundup: June 28-29 2025
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Burkina Faso, El Salvador, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
June 28, 1914: A group of six attackers aided by a Serbian irredentist paramilitary group known as the “Black Hand” attack Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife as they’re visiting Sarajavo. Although their initial bombing attempt failed, one of the six attackers, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed both targets after a reception involving the mayor of Sarajevo and the governor of Bosnia. Certainly one of the most consequential acts in world history, within a month the assassination had caused Serbia and Austria-Hungary to declare war on one another, and when their allies jumped into the pool as well the result was World War I.
June 28, 1919: Five years later, the Treaty of Versailles is signed, ending Germany’s involvement in World War I. This is the most important of the multiple World War I peace treaties, which include the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Austria in September 1919, the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary in June 1920, and the Treaty of Sèvres with the rump Ottoman Empire in August 1920. The terms of Sèvres were largely superseded by the July 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Turkish War of Independence.
June 29, 1444: Albanian rebel leader Skanderbeg (George Castriot) defeats a considerably larger Ottoman army at the Battle of Torvioli by outmaneuvering the Ottomans and striking their forces from behind. This was one of the first major engagements in Skanderbeg’s 1443-1468 rebellion and his surprising victory earned him significant support from Hungary and the papacy. He was for a time able to win independence for an Albanian principality under the “Albanian League,” but a few years after his 1468 death the Ottomans were able to reconquer the region.
June 29, 1881: Sudanese religious leader Muhammad Ahmad declares himself to be the Mahdi and begins to establish an independent political entity, kicking off the 18 year long Mahdist War against the British Empire.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least three people in two airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Saturday, according to Lebanese authorities. Israeli officials alleged that one of the deceased was a member of Hezbollah but the identities of the other two are unclear. What is clear is that the definition of “ceasefire” according to the Israeli government—you cease, we fire—remains unchanged.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
While murmurs grow about a potential ceasefire in Gaza, the IDF killed at least 72 people across the territory overnight Friday and through Saturday and at least 63 people on Sunday. At least five of those Sunday killings took place once again near a “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” aid distribution site. Despite the high level of carnage, as I said chatter about a possible ceasefire agreement refuses to dissipate, with Donald Trump having insisted to reporters on Friday that there could be a deal announced within the next week. Trump reiterated his position via social media on Sunday, writing “MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!!” while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters that “many opportunities have opened up” in the wake of Israel’s “victory” over Iran, “first of all, to rescue the hostages.” Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer is scheduled to visit the US in the coming days, presumably to discuss ceasefire scenarios.
Trump has decided to interfere in Israeli affairs by weighing in on Netanyahu’s corruption case. In fact he’s gone so far as to threaten (albeit implicitly) to suspend US military aid to Israel if the prosecution doesn’t drop the case, to which all I can say is that this aggression against Prime Minister Netanyahu must not be allowed to stand and I urge the president to stick by his principles and suspend that aid. He won’t, of course, he just believes that all that aid should buy him influence over the Israeli government. He’s not even wrong, necessarily, it’s just that he’s using that influence to kneecap a criminal case against his buddy instead of, say, to stop the starvation of Palestinian children. We all have our priorities I guess. It seems to be working, too—a Jerusalem district court has now postponed a hearing in which Netanyahu was to have testified as part of the case.
IRAN
There are a few items of note:
International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi argued in a CBS News interview on Saturday that the Iranian government could reconstitute at least a small scale uranium enrichment program “in a matter of months” despite whatever damage Israeli and US airstrikes during the “12 Day War” did (or did not do) to its nuclear facilities. He also made it clear that the IAEA does not have any information as to the status of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile, the continued accessibility of which would matter a great deal in a scenario in which the Iranians decided to reconstitute their enrichment program and make a dash for a bomb. The Iranian government is currently not allowing IAEA inspectors to access nuclear sites.
Adding fuel to the proverbial fire, according to The Washington Post US intelligence has “obtained intercepted communication between senior Iranian officials” in which those officials say that last weekend’s US airstrikes were “less devastating than they had expected.” The White House isn’t disputing the report but has dismissed the idea that those Iranian officials are able to assess the damage at the sites the US attacked as “nonsense.” Of course the Trump administration has spent a week pushing its own assessment of the damage despite having even less insight into the condition of those sites than these Iranian officials presumably do. But let’s not get hung up on details like that. The administration now seems to be basing its assessment largely on the destruction of Iran’s uranium metal conversion facility at Isfahan rather than the damage caused to Iran’s Fordow enrichment facility. Converting enriched uranium gas to metal is essential to weaponization, but whether the Isfahan strike actually eliminated Iran’s conversion capabilities is very much in question, as Jeffrey Lewis argued a couple of days ago.
Two outlets, CNN and NBC News, have reported in recent days that the Trump administration is considering a package of incentives to convince the Iranian government to abandon the nuclear program that US officials insist they’ve obliterated. Again, it’s best not to get too hung up on details. Anyway, the main proposal now under consideration is supposedly a ~$30 billion project to stand up an Iranian civilian nuclear power program that would not require enriched uranium for reactor fuel. If this sounds familiar it’s because it seems in many respects to copy from the “Agreed Framework,” a deal the Clinton administration reached with North Korea in 1994 under which the US would support a civilian nuclear power program for Pyongyang in return for the North Korean government giving up the program it had at the time, which was a proliferation risk. That process ended with the Bush administration repudiating the Agreed Framework and North Korea testing a nuclear bomb. At any rate, Trump has rejected these reports, for whatever that’s worth.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
The United Nations Refugee Agency estimated on Saturday that “at least 1.2 million” Afghan nationals have returned home this year amid ongoing mass deportation efforts by the governments of Iran and Pakistan. The “12 Day War” also contributed to a spike in arrivals from Iran in recent days. Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government has promised amnesty and humanitarian support for the returnees, but these people are returning to a country whose economy remains largely in tatters and may actually be deteriorating as the foreign aid on which it relies is diminishing. Any women or girls who are among the returnees will find themselves living under a government that has largely banned women from public spaces and has snuffed out girls’ education.
PAKISTAN
A suicide bomber killed at least 14 soldiers and wounded 25 other people in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Saturday. The Hafiz Gul Bahadur Group, a Pakistani Taliban (TTP) faction/splinter group, claimed responsibility.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration’s humanitarian aid cuts have landed especially hard on Sudan:
After more than two years of ferocious civil war, Sudan is home to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, the United Nations says. Both sides have attacked hospitals. The military often delays or denies aid access; the paramilitary it is fighting has kidnapped relief workers and looted aid facilities.
Disease and famine are spreading unchecked. More than half the population, some 30 million people, need aid. More than 12 million have fled their homes. For so many families barely hanging on, programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were a lifeline — providing food to the hungry and medical care for the sick.
While the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID this year have been felt deeply across the world, their impact in Sudan was especially deadly, according to more than two dozen Washington Post interviews with civilians, clinicians and aid officials in the capital, Khartoum, and surrounding villages.
When U.S.-supported soup kitchens were forced to close, babies starved quietly, their mothers said, while older siblings died begging for food. Funding stoppages meant that critical medical supplies were never delivered, doctors said. The lack of U.S.-funded disease response teams has made it harder to contain cholera outbreaks, which are claiming the lives of those already weakened by hunger.
BURKINA FASO
In Burkina Faso, meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that junta leader Ibrahim Traoré is beginning to amass a considerable following:
Since toppling the West African country’s previous military leader in 2022 and making himself president, Traoré has won the kind of glowing admiration from people across the continent that has eluded African leaders since the days of antiapartheid icon Nelson Mandela and the generation that led the independence struggles.
“Many Africans are disillusioned with the West,” said Ayotunde Abiodun, an analyst with SBM Intelligence, a Nigeria-based geopolitical research consulting firm. Traoré, he said, has become the anti-imperialist face of that sentiment.
Russia has tried to court him, seeing him as a way to accelerate the decline of France’s influence across the arid countries of the Sahel, the wide band of land bordering the southern reaches of the Sahara.
But Traoré has his own agenda of reviving the Pan-African movements of the past. Whether he succeeds in putting Burkina Faso on a stronger footing and pushing back a long-running Islamist insurgency could influence what happens elsewhere across the region.
Traoré has consciously modeled himself on Thomas Sankara, the pan-African, anti-imperialist socialist who rose to power in a 1983 coup in what was then the “Republic of Upper Volta” and governed Burkina Faso (he renamed the country) until his assassination in a French- and US-backed (uh, allegedly of course) coup in 1987. He’s often referred to as “Africa’s Che Guevara” so that should give you some idea as to how he’s both celebrated and denigrated in various quarters.
Traoré exhibits a populist streak, for example in his decision to kick the French military out of the country and in some of the economic policies he’s adopted, and he seems to have fairly widespread support. He’s also been more hesitant to accept Russian military aid than his junta compatriots in Mali and Niger, fearing the ramifications for Burkinabè sovereignty. All of this is interesting, but the rationale behind Traoré’s 2022 coup was security amid Burkina Faso’s ongoing war with jihadist militants, and his administration has so far failed to improve that situation in any meaningful way while his security forces have been credibly accused of numerous human rights violations (this is a long-term problem in Burkina Faso, but Traoré doesn’t seem to have done much to remedy it). Whatever legacy he’s intending to build will start and possibly end with the jihadist challenge.
EUROPE
UKRAINE
The Russian military launched what the Ukrainian government called its largest overnight bombardment since the 2022 invasion overnight Saturday into Sunday, involving “477 drones and decoys and 60 missiles” according to the AP. Most of the drones appear either to have been intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses or successfully jammed, but there were at least three deaths (including one F-16 pilot) and several other casualties and targets were hit even in far western Ukraine. Also on Sunday, the Russian government claimed the capture of another village in Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast while Ukrainian military commander Oleksander Syrskyi reported a new Russian offensive targeting the city of Kostiantynivka.
SERBIA
A crowd that by one estimate numbered around 140,000 people turned out in Belgrade on Saturday to demand snap elections, as Al Jazeera reports:
These demonstrations have been continuing for months, going back to November’s deadly collapse of a train station in the city of Novi Sad, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s refusal to engage with the protesters on any level seems to have only hardened their resolve and focused their demands on his removal from office.
AMERICAS
EL SALVADOR
The New York Times reports that Salvadoran police officers are acknowledging that President Nayib Bukele’s glorious crackdown on crime has been enabled largely through the mechanism of mass arbitrary arrests:
The police arrested men based on neighborhood gossip or innocent tattoos, the families of those swept up in El Salvador’s mass arrests have long claimed.
Now, some police officers who were part of President Nayib Bukele’s sweeping crackdown on gangs are saying the same thing.
Nearly a dozen officers from El Salvador’s national police described facing intense pressure to meet arrest quotas, according to a Human Rights Watch report released this week, as well as three officers from that group who spoke directly to The New York Times, and the leader of the country’s main group advocating for police officers.
The quotas were imposed after Mr. Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022, which remains in effect today, and oversaw a campaign of mass arrests, the officers and report said.
In my opinion this is unfair to Bukele, who has also achieved his reduction in criminal activity by bribing (with US money) Salvadoran gangs to go easy on him. Allegedly, I mean.
HAITI
The US Department of Homeland Security announced on Friday that it is rescinding Temporary Protected Status for some 500,000 Haitians currently in the United States, having concluded that it is “safe for Haitian citizens to return home.” Plainly this is a load of bullshit but that’s what happens when you start from the desired conclusion (kicking Haitians out of the US) and work your way back to a legal justification. The TPS program allows nationals of designated countries to remain in the US without visas due to “extraordinary conditions” back home like natural disasters and armed conflict. The Trump administration has rescinded it for several other countries to date including Afghanistan, Cameroon, and Venezuela.
UNITED STATES
Finally, TomDispatch’s Rebecca Gordon considers the state of government surveillance under the second Trump administration:
I have no idea whether the TV version is what real facial recognition software actually looks like. What I do know is that it’s already being used by federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI, under the auspices of a company called Clearview, which is presently led by Hal Lambert, a big Trump fundraiser. As Mother Jones magazine reports, Clearview has “compiled a massive biometric database” containing “billions of images the company scraped off the Internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users.” The system is now used by law enforcement agencies around the country, despite its well-documented inability to accurately recognize the faces of people with dark skin.
The old-fashioned art of tailing suspects on foot is rapidly giving way to surveillance by drone, while a multitude of cameras at intersections capture vehicle license plates. Fingerprinting has been around for well over a century, although it doesn’t actually work on everyone. Old people tend to lose the ridges that identify our unique prints, which explains why I can’t reliably use mine to open my phone or wake my computer. Maybe now’s my moment to embark on a life of crime? Probably not, though, as my face is still pretty recognizable, and that’s what the Transportation Safety Administration uses to make sure I’m really the person in the photo on my Real ID.
The second Trump administration is deploying all of these surveillance methods and more, as it seeks to extend its authoritarian power. And one key aspect of that project is the consolidation of the personal information of millions of people in a single place.