Iranian Army spokesperson:

We have serious plans in two areas: domestic production and the procurement of advanced equipment from friendly countries.

We will certainly be equipped with more advanced systems in the coming days.

Haaretz reports that Israeli defense companies sold advanced military systems to Qatar and Saudi Arabia despite the lack of formal diplomatic ties.

Documents and photos indicate Qatar received Elbit's C-MUSIC aircraft defense systems for VIP aircraft, while both Qatar and Saudi Arabia acquired Israeli-made components, combat helmets, and night-vision systems for their F-15 fighter jets through Boeing contracts.

Source: Haaretz

Guest: Make Lebanon Great Again!

Trump: Yes, I will.

Keir Starmer is reportedly eyeing the role of NATO secretary general after leaving Downing Street, when the position is expected to become vacant in 2028.

Source: The Observer

BIG: A Chinese AI model from Z.ai has caught up with its American counterparts in the field of cybersecurity, according to independent benchmarks.

GLM-5.2, released on June 16 under an MIT license by Z.ai — the Tsinghua University spinout formerly known as Zhipu AI — outperformed Anthropic's Claude Code on Semgrep's IDOR vulnerability detection benchmark, scoring roughly 39 percent F1 against Claude's 32 percent.

It did so at approximately one-sixth the cost per vulnerability identified.

The result is notable because cybersecurity has been viewed as a domain where US labs held a clear lead.

GLM-5.2 is freely downloadable from Hugging Face and runs on standard open inference stacks.

France heatwave: ~1,000 excess deaths in four days.

Santé publique France reports roughly 1,000 excess deaths between June 24 and 27 during the country's most intense heatwave since 2003.

Daily tolls exceeded 1,400 on June 25 and 26, with 85% of deaths among people 65 and older.

Home deaths surged sharply, particularly in Île-de-France.

Health Minister Stéphanie Rist said overall mortality is unlikely to approach 2003 levels (~15,000 excess deaths) thanks to improved alert and response systems.

Source: Le Monde

A Saudi Aramco helicopter crashed at approximately 6:00 AM today in Ras Tanura, the kingdom's main oil export hub in the Eastern Province, killing all 14 people on board.

All victims were Saudi nationals.

An investigation is underway in coordination with the relevant authorities.

No preliminary cause has been released.

Bernie Sanders:

After receiving the largest tax break in history from Trump, some 900 billionaires in our country became $2.2 trillion richer.

One man, Elon Musk, a trillionaire... owns three times more wealth than the bottom 50% of American households.

Eleven people were killed after a skydiving plane crashed shortly after takeoff near Tomblaine in eastern France on Sunday.

The victims included the pilot, five student skydivers, and five instructors.

Bernie Sanders:

Six large media conglomerates control about 90% of what the American people see, hear and read.

Trump's supporters have recently bought up CBS and they will soon own CNN.

You run a good campaign, you know what happens to you?

The billionaires and their super PACs will spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat you. That is not democracy.

Bernie Sanders:

No more spending billions of dollars on the genocidal Netanyahu government in Israel.

Zelensky:

For centuries, Russia defamed his name. It wanted Ukrainians to look at their own history through foreign eyes. It convinced our people that Ivan Mazepa was a traitor—but that was a lie. And that lie has been defeated forever.

Today, we honor our outstanding statesman, military leader, patron of the arts, and Hetman of the Cossack state—Ivan Mazepa.

A figure of such historical significance deserves a full monument in the capital of our country.

Where Lenin once fell, Mazepa will stand firmly.

Zelensky:

Thirty years ago, Ukrainians stopped living under the old—and above all, someone else's—law. They began building a new life, their own life, on new foundations and new principles.

The foremost of those principles is Ukraine's right to be itself: sovereign, indivisible, and independent.

These are the fundamental principles of our Constitution.

GCC Secretary General Jasem Al Budaiwi on the rumored $300 billion Iran reconstruction package:

For the 300, I have not seen anything. It was not introduced to me, nor to other GCC countries.

We don't know anything about it.

Interviewer: Didn't you ask him?

Al Budaiwi: Why would I ask him if it's not introduced to me?

We don't know what is the 300, who's going to fund the 300, who's going to be the beneficiary of the 300.

Source: The National

Father Valentyn Horokhovskyi:

Every day I witness the grief and suffering that Russia has brought through its war.

While speaking about "Holy Rus" and the defense of Orthodoxy, the enemy destroys churches and kills people.

I see it with my own eyes. I live among these ruins in Kherson.

Zelensky:

The wounded churches of Ukraine—attacked by evil, scarred by Russian bullets, shattered by guided bombs and missiles.

Great cathedrals in our largest cities, and small churches in our villages. Churches, mosques, synagogues—740 religious sites across Ukraine have been struck by Putin.

That is who we are fighting. That is what our enemy is.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on China:

We should treat them as a potential adversary, not as an adversary.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed and sad and depressed we are so reliant on them for certain of these other things.

China — they are surrounded by Japan, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Russia.

That's a tough part of the world. And they've pissed them all off — and not because of us, all on their own.

Putin:

Russia has encountered an unprecedented kind of pressure from the Western elites.

They wanted to impose a strategic defeat on us on the battlefield. They wanted to destabilize our society.

But they fail at everything.

Putin:

We see Ukrainian forces losing their positions on the frontline.

That's why they resort to terrorism within Russia.

Putin:

We are addressing all the challenges, including the terrorist attacks against our infrastructure.

And we will also address challenges such as demographics, and we will save our traditional values.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Iran:

If they were going to get nuclear weapons, that would have been probably the largest disaster in mankind ever.

And maybe the end of mankind as we know it.