World roundup: June 3 2024

Stories from Iran, Myanmar, Russia, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 3, 1940: World War II’s Battle of Dunkirk ends with the last British soldiers evacuating that French city and leaving the Nazis victorious. At Winston Churchill’s order, the Royal Navy returned to Dunkirk the following day to evacuate roughly 26,000 French soldiers, so the full evacuation wasn’t completed until June 4. In all the British military (aided by dozens of small civilian vessels) evacuated 338,226 soldiers from Dunkirk, along with another roughly 192,000 evacuated from other parts of France over the ensuing three weeks. The Nazis rolled into Paris on June 14, completing their conquest of France. Britain left a considerable quantity of materiel behind but the successful rescue of most of the personnel who were trapped at Dunkirk prevented a major defeat from reaching catastrophic levels.

June 3, 1965: Gemini 4, officially the tenth crewed US spaceflight, takes off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral base (which was called “Cape Kennedy” at the time). This mission had a couple of important objectives. It was the first multi-day US space mission, with astronauts James McDivitt and Ed White spending four days in orbit. This was intended to show that human beings could survive lengthy spaceflights such as would be required for a moon mission, and to show that the US space program was catching up to the Soviet program, which had done a nearly five day mission with Vostok 5 in June 1963. Additionally, White became the first American to perform a spacewalk, again catching up to the Soviets who had done their first spacewalk on Voskhod 2 in March 1965.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Joe Biden’s ceasefire proposal—er, sorry, I mean Israel’s ceasefire proposal of course—continued to languish on Monday while the Israeli military (IDF) evinced no indication that it’s preparing to stop pulverizing Gaza. The Israeli government is now characterizing that proposal as “partial,” suggesting that it could agree to at least an initial temporary ceasefire and prisoner exchange but that it will not end the carnage completely until its “goals are achieved.” There has been a subtle shift in the way the Israelis are describing those goals, from the destruction of Hamas full stop to the destruction of Hamas’s “military and governing capabilities.” Whether that’s enough to create space for a ceasefire or not remains to be seen. There has been some hinting from the Israeli side that they feel they could achieve this objective through negotiated rather than military means. At this point I would guess that the likelihood of a deal is less than 50/50 but what do I know?