Previously: Last Tuesday’s roundup covered the Supreme Court’s term-closing rulings, Venezuela’s death toll nearing 2,000, and the Hormuz southern corridor under Iranian fire. Background on the Iran war’s origins: energy crisis post from March and the US–Iran blockade.
Iran: Khamenei State Funeral Draws Tens of Millions; Succession Unresolved
Iran’s multi-day state funeral for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — killed in the February 28 U.S.-Israeli airstrike — entered its third day Monday, with an estimated 15 to 20 million mourners joining a 12-hour procession through Tehran’s streets. If the attendance figures hold, it would rank as the largest state funeral in recorded history, exceeding the roughly 10 million who attended Ayatollah Khomeini’s burial in 1989.
The ceremonies have unfolded against the backdrop of a leadership vacuum that is now among the most consequential political unknowns in the ongoing conflict. Khamenei’s designated successor, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, was reportedly wounded in the same February 28 strike and has made no public appearance since. Three of Khamenei’s other sons were photographed at Sunday’s ceremonies. Iran’s Assembly of Experts, the body constitutionally empowered to select a new Supreme Leader, has held closed-door sessions but has released no decision. The succession crisis adds a layer of institutional paralysis to a country still navigating a ceasefire that — as last week’s roundup documented — remains fragile and actively contested over Hormuz corridor rights.
Sources: CBS News live updates · Washington Post · NPR
Ukraine: Russia Kills 12 in Kyiv on Eve of NATO’s Ankara Summit
Russia launched a coordinated ballistic missile and drone strike on Kyiv in the early hours of Monday, killing at least 12 people in the city and 6 more in surrounding regions, with apartment blocks hit in multiple residential neighborhoods. Ukrainian officials noted the timing — hours before NATO leaders convene in Ankara, Turkey for the alliance’s July 7–8 summit — as a deliberate signal that Russian military pressure would continue regardless of allied diplomatic activity.
President Trump held a 90-minute phone call with President Putin on July 4, offering to help broker a Ukraine settlement, and is due to meet Ukrainian President Zelenskyy face-to-face in Ankara on July 8. NATO’s draft summit declaration commits allied members to €70 billion in military equipment, training, and assistance to Ukraine for 2026; European members and Canada increased defense investment by more than $139 billion in 2025, per summit briefing materials. Ukraine and the ongoing Iran situation are both high on the Ankara agenda.
Sources: CNN — Kyiv strike · CNBC · NBC News — Trump–Putin call · Modern Diplomacy — NATO Ankara summit preview
China Tests Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile in South Pacific
China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy test-fired a long-range ballistic missile from a nuclear-powered submarine into the South Pacific on Monday, in what officials and analysts described as the first time China has conducted an SLBM test in the Pacific Ocean. The missile splashed down in waters designated nuclear-weapons-free under the 1986 Treaty of Rarotonga, drawing immediate formal protests from New Zealand and Australia.
The test landed on the same day Australia and Fiji signed a new mutual defense treaty with explicit references to countering Chinese regional influence — a pairing that will be difficult to read as coincidental. China’s navy offered no public acknowledgment of the launch. The test represents a significant escalation in China’s nuclear posture signaling in a region where Beijing, the United States, Australia, and Pacific island nations have been engaged in intensifying competition for influence and basing access.
Sources: CBS News · CNN · Washington Post · Newsweek
AI: UN Global Governance Dialogue Opens in Geneva
The United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance opened in Geneva today, with member states convening to discuss international frameworks for managing increasingly capable AI systems. The session marks an escalation in multilateral attention to AI governance, as governments across the world work to develop regulatory structures while frontier model capabilities continue advancing faster than most legislatures can track.
The dialogue opened against a backdrop of rapid deployment at scale: California announced what officials described as the largest U.S. state-government AI deployment in history, with every state agency gaining access to Anthropic’s Claude models under a negotiated agreement. Anthropic has covered Claude extensively on this blog — see the Sonnet 5 benchmark analysis from today for the latest on model-level performance.
Sources: UN News — Global Dialogue on AI Governance · White House — Promoting Advanced AI Innovation and Security
Science: Vera C. Rubin Observatory Begins Its 10-Year Sky Survey
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time began full operations on June 30, issuing a live stream of up to 7 million nightly alerts — any brightness change or newly detected object in the southern sky generates a public notification within 60 seconds. The 10-year mission will map the entire southern hemisphere sky repeatedly and is designed to deliver the first high-precision test of whether dark energy is a fixed cosmological constant or has evolved over cosmic time, a question that sits at the center of modern cosmology and touches on the ultimate fate of the universe.
In pre-survey calibration runs alone, the observatory’s 8.4-meter mirror and 3.2-gigapixel camera discovered more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids. At full cadence, Rubin is expected to find tens of millions of new solar system objects, hundreds of thousands of supernovae, and potentially classes of transient phenomena not yet catalogued. All alerts are published as a public data stream, enabling any researcher worldwide to receive and act on detections in near-real time.
Sources: TechTimes · Rubin Observatory official announcement · CNN Science
Typhoon Bavi Batters Guam and the Northern Marianas
Super Typhoon Bavi made landfall across Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands over the weekend, bringing severe winds and flooding to the U.S. Pacific territories. Recovery efforts are underway; detailed damage assessments are still emerging as of Monday.
Source: NPR