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TODAY IN HISTORY
June 9, 721: An Aquitanian army under Duke Odo of Aquitaine defeats an invading Arab army under the Umayyad governor of Andalus, al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani, at the Battle of Toulouse.
June 9, 1815: The Congress of Vienna, intended to sort out a new balance of power in Europe following the end of the French Revolution and the downfall of Napoleon, concludes with a “Final Act” establishing the terms of the new continental framework. Among other things, Vienna established the “Congress System” under which the five “Great Powers”—Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—would manage European affairs, and also established the reactionary “Conservative Order” to tamp down revolutionary sentiment. The whole system fell apart under the pressures of nationalism and finally during the Revolutions of 1848.
June 10, 1190: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I drowns in southern Anatolia on his way to join what we now call the Third Crusade. His death contributed heavily to the breakup of the Crusader army and therefore to Richard the Lionheart’s decision to abandon his plans to besiege Jerusalem.
June 10, 1898: US Marines and Cuban forces capture Guantánamo Bay from Spain after a five day battle. The US quickly established a naval base there that proved critical in winning the decisive naval battle and siege of Santiago in July, which essentially ended the Spanish-American war in Cuba. The conflict continued on other fronts until August and Guantánamo remains a US possession to the present day.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The Russian Foreign Ministry is talking about “a possible reformatting of the functionality of Russian military facilities” in Syria, which may explain why it seems like Moscow will be retaining those facilities despite the change in Syria’s government. The ministry didn’t go into detail but Reuters indicated that the Russians may create “a logistics hub” at their naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus that would serve “to distribute goods imported from Russia across Syria.”
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least 16 people across Lebanon on Wednesday, one day after killing at least 17 people there. Israeli officials continue to issue evacuation orders ahead of some of their airstrikes, but Al Jazeera reporter Obaida Hitto argued on Wednesday that these are mainly for show and that the IDF isn’t offering civilians a) enough time to evacuate or b) safe routes out of danger.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Haaretz reported on Wednesday that “IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has, in recent weeks, approved several operational plans presented by the IDF Southern Command as part of discussions on renewing ground operations in the Gaza Strip.” This is apparently due to “assessments that Hamas has used recent months to significantly rebuild its military and organizational capabilities.” These plans won’t be enacted unless/until Zamir gets a green light from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and as busy as he is trying to prevent a US-Iran deal he may not get around to Gaza anytime soon.
In the meantime, Palestinian political factions are still meeting in Egypt to try to figure out a way forward under the second phase of the “ceasefire,” with their discussions possibly focusing on procedural ways that Hamas might fulfill its obligations to stand down/disarm without effectively surrendering to Israel. A framework like that could involve the group transferring its arms to a new Palestinian police/security force rather than to the IDF, though whether that would be acceptable to the Israelis is unclear and at any rate it seems purely theoretical when the first phase of the “ceasefire” still hasn’t been fully realized.
Elsewhere:
A new United Nations human rights report accuses Hamas and its affiliated police units, as well as other armed factions, of committing war crimes against civilians in Gaza, including “executions, kneecapping, bone-breaking with metal pipes or cement bricks and beatings” that “were framed by the perpetrators as punishments for alleged collaboration with Israel, looting humanitarian aid, theft, drug-related offenses or affiliations with internal rivals.” It documented 249 cases, involving 108 deaths, between August 2024 and January 2026.
In the West Bank, a new report from Amnesty International concludes that the Israeli government is pursuing a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing toward Bedouin Arab populations. Bedouin communities are easy targets for the Israelis since their villages often lie in the territory’s “Area C” under full IDF control. The report dismisses arguments that attacks on those communities are the isolated acts of a few violent settlers and argues instead that they reflect systematic government policy. Fortunately the governments of Canada, France, Norway, and the UK stepped in on Wednesday with a number of new sanctions targeting settler-related financial and business networks. This will do nothing to actually stop the violence since it doesn’t tackle the government policy outlined by Amnesty, but at least the leaders of those countries will be able to say that they’re Doing Something.
IRAN
Another major exchange of US-Iranian hostilities has Donald Trump talking as if he’s ready to end the ceasefire and resume his shooting war, at least publicly. It started with the downing of a US Apache helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday. The Apache was participating in what Trump later called a “secret mission” (not anymore, I guess) to guide commercial shipping through the strait, a “Project Freedom 2.0” if you will. According to Trump that effort has gotten “more than 100 MILLION barrels of oil” through the waterway since “last month.” For reference, that’s about five days of the strait’s prewar oil traffic, so even if Trump isn’t lying it’s not an especially impressive achievement.
There’s some question as to whether or not the Iranians intended to bring the Apache down—particularly if, as has been reported, it crashed after colliding with a Shahed drone (Shaheds are not anti-aircraft weapons). Iranian officials suggested that it had been “caught in crossfire” and at any rate flying over a country’s territorial waters at a time of war, or semi-war in this case, carries with it a significant level of risk. The pilots were rescued but Trump was intent on retaliating, so the US military struck targets in southern Iran and on Qeshm island, including (according to Iranian officials) a desalination plant and two reservoirs. The Iranians responded with attacks on US military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait, and in a new twist Jordan as well, but did not strike water infrastructure in the Gulf Arab states despite having threatened to do so. There doesn’t seem to be any indication of casualties and each side is making very divergent claims as to damage.
That Iranian response led into Trump’s angry outburst on Wednesday, in which he said that Tehran will “have to pay the price” and complained that Iranian leaders have “taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them.” It seems pretty clear that his anger is borne as much out of frustration that the Iranians haven’t done him the favor of surrendering yet as it is out of the Apache incident and its aftermath. The strikes began on Wednesday evening (in the eastern US) and at time of writing it was too soon to assess whether they were another tit-for-tat response or something more intense than that. This was after the Trump administration announced new sanctions targeting Iranian weapons acquisition efforts. The Iranian government declared the strait fully closed in response to the new US strikes.
Whatever these new attacks may entail—and Trump has been threatening to revert to destroying Iran’s civilian infrastructure as he was supposedly planning to do before the ceasefire—between this dustup and the Iran-Israel clash earlier this week I think it’s reasonable to conclude that things are beyond “ceasefire” at this point even if they’re not quite back to full-scale war yet.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
The Pakistani military carried out a new round of strikes on eastern Afghanistan’s Khost, Kunar, and Paktika provinces on Wednesday morning, killing at least 13 people including 11 children according to Afghan officials. This is the first major Pakistani attack on Afghanistan in about a month and came one day after militants attacked a border police outpost in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, killing at least six officers. Pakistani officials claimed that their strikes “targeted militant hideouts and infrastructure” and killed at least “26 militants.”
On Tuesday, dozens of people protested in the western Afghan city of Herat in opposition to what The Guardian called “a wave of arrests in recent days targeting women and young girls accused of ‘improper hijab.’” Security forces apparently opened fire on the demonstrators, killing at least two of them.
INDIA
The Indian Foreign Ministry summoned a senior US diplomat on Wednesday over a blockade enforcement action that may have gone a bit awry. The US military opened fire on an oil tanker that was allegedly carrying Iranian oil and attempting to run the blockade in the Gulf of Oman on Tuesday evening. Three members of its 24 member Indian crew are now missing.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Rapid Support Forces officials accused the Sudanese military of destroying a major bridge in Geneina, the capital of Sudan’s West Darfur province, on Tuesday. That bridge is/was a main throughway for humanitarian aid entering Darfur from Chad and so the RSF called on the UN and other international agencies to condemn its destruction and ensure the continued delivery of aid. On Wednesday, RSF drone strikes killed at least five people in El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state.
NIGERIA
Unspecified gunmen attacked a school in central Nigeria’s Kogi state on Wednesday, killing at least three people. The attackers were probably bandits and this was likely an attempted mass abduction, but authorities have not yet been able to ascertain whether anyone was abducted.
KENYA
Police shot and may have killed at least one person in another protest outside the proposed US Ebola quarantine facility in central Kenya on Wednesday. There’s no confirmation that the protester was killed but Reuters reported that he “lay motionless with a large wound to the head in the back of a police van.”
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Russian authorities say they’ve arrested two people in connection with a car bombing that reportedly targeted “an employee of a scientific production enterprise” in southwestern Moscow on Wednesday. There were no casualties reported. That was just one of two car bombings that hit the city—the other killed a senior Russian military officer who was in charge of its “artillery and missile ammunition supply directorate.” There does not seem to be a suspect yet in that bombing but it would be surprising if there weren’t some Ukrainian involvement in that incident if not both of them.
The Ukrainian military also reportedly hit a military manufacturing facility in Russia’s Chuvash Republic overnight. This strike is noteworthy in that the target was over 900 kilometers east of the Ukrainian front line and the attack employed Ukraine’s homemade long-range FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile. The Flamingo theoretically has a maximum range of 3000 kilometers. The Ukrainians have been relying on drones to carry out attacks deep inside Russia but this gives them another option in that regard.
UKRAINE
Russian drone strikes killed at least five people in Ukraine on Tuesday.
Ukrainian drones struck the Russian-occupied port city of Mariupol on Wednesday, reportedly causing blackouts. Mariupol is a logistical hub for the Russian military and this attack reflects a new Ukrainian focus on striking tactically important infrastructure in Russian-occupied parts of the country. Earlier this week Ukrainian forces attacked a bridge linking southern Kherson oblast to Crimea and they’ve been striking Crimean oil facilities to the point where provincial authorities have had to implement fuel rationing (and even that may no longer be tenable).
ALBANIA
Thousands of people protested again in Tirana on Wednesday in opposition to Jared Kushner’s proposed island resort. Jacobin’s Matt Broomfield offers more context for their grievances:
On Albania’s Adriatic coastline, demonstrators clashing with police and private security forces are waving cutout pink flamingos. The bird has become the emblem of protests against the planned tarmacking of a protected nature reserve in the Vjosa-Narta Delta in a multibillion-dollar luxury development project backed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
The struggle is linked to the Trump administration in more ways than one. On the other side of the Mediterranean, Albanian forces are preparing to enter the Gaza Strip, as one of four states potentially committing boots on the ground via Donald Trump’s widely reviled Board of Peace. These developments are deeply connected. The Albanian government under right-populist Edi Rama, whose nominally socialist party has been loyal to Washington ever since 1991, is forging ever-deeper ties with Tel Aviv. In Tirana, Israel has found a loyal, Muslim-state partner willing to provide ideological cover and material support in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide.
The proposed Vjosa-Narta megadevelopment is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Local villagers, bird-watchers, and ecological activists have a common fight to save the unspoiled delta from rapacious investors seemingly linked to the Rama administration through a shady network of shell companies. In so doing, they find themselves in an unexpected confrontation with a global constellation of Trump-aligned financial interests and Israeli-linked power brokers.
GERMANY
The German government officially pulled the plug on Europe’s Future Combat Air System program earlier this week. FCAS was a €100 billion effort that was supposed to see France, Germany, and Spain collaborating on a new sixth-generation fighter jet that would work in conjunction with swarms of drone “wingmen.” It collapsed amid a turf war between the French firm Dassault Aviation and the pan-European firm Airbus, the companies that were supposed to be the main collaborators, as well as disagreements around the needs of each country’s armed forces (even though the project was intended to advance the cause of European military integration). They may try to continue working on the drone component but the fighter in particular appears to be kaput.
It is debatable whether Europe really needs a manned sixth-generation fighter, but as a purely symbolic matter this failure doesn’t speak highly of Europe’s ability to work as a whole to build up its defense capacity. Even though European leaders increasingly seem to be coming around to the idea that they cannot continue depending on the United States for protection, they’re still not really capable of collaboration.
AMERICAS
PERU
Vote counting seems to have slowed down following Sunday’s Peruvian presidential runoff, leaving leftist Roberto Sánchez with a narrow 50.025 percent to 49.975 percent lead over right-winger Keiko Fujimori with 97.9 percent of the tally completed. A portion of the remaining votes are from abroad, which should favor Fujimori, but a much larger portion consists of contested ballots that need to be reviewed and could go either way.
UNITED STATES
In US news:
Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he’s “not looking to renew” the US-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement. He added that “we don't need anything that Canada has. We don't need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have,” a statement that’s so stupid I have a hard time imagining that even he believes it, but I guess anything is possible. All three governments need to declare their intention to renew the pact by July 1 or else trigger their withdrawal. But even if Trump opts for withdrawal the process by law takes ten years and can be halted in the event of a new agreement. It’s likely that a future administration would reverse course.
Trump took to social media on Wednesday to say that he’s tasking incoming (acting) Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte “to execute the immediate and needed downsizing of the office, reverting staff to their home agencies.” This would explain the decision to appoint someone with no discernible relevant experience to the job. Trump isn’t getting rid of the DNI post and even said he’s already considering candidates with an intelligence background to take the job on a non-interim basis, but even so Pulte’s appointment has ruffled enough feathers in Congress (both because of his inexperience and the fact that he’s a Trump sycophant) that it could complicate efforts to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the part that allows warrantless wiretapping of communications involving foreigners.
Finally, The Intercept’s Nick Turse reports that the US military’s very first “drug boat” attack may have missed the mark:
Nine months into the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against so-called drug boats, there is a pattern to the strikes. And a glaring anomaly.
The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.
Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?
“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”
One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.
In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.
The admission highlights above all the basic fact that the US military didn’t know who it was killing that night and probably hasn’t known who it was killing in any of its other boat strikes. In remarks to members of Congress, military officials have even reportedly said that they don’t need to identify their victims before they kill them. As precedent they cite methods of targeting employed in the War on Terror, in which the US military has also famously killed many civilians because it didn’t know who it was attacking.