🇸🇾⚡️- Loud explosion heard in Damascus.

🇸🇾⚡️- The explosion happened in a café in the city center. Multiple injuries.

🇸🇾⚡️- A bomb caused the explosion. 4 deaths, at least 10 injured.

🇮🇷🇮🇶⚡- Iranian drone strike on Kurdish separatist positions in Soran, Erbil Governorate, Iraq's Kurdistan region.

🇺🇸🇬🇧🇪🇺⚡- "The United States spends more money on NATO than any other country, by far, to protect them, without getting any benefit from so doing: U.S. 999 Billion Dollars, United Kingdom, 90.5 Billion Dollars, France, 66.5 Billion Dollars, Italy, 48.8 Billion Dollars, Poland, 44.3 Billion Dollars. Others, including Germany, are MUCH LOWER. (2014-2025) Ridiculous!" - President Trump on Truth Social.

🇺🇸 - Trump makes a rare X post.

🇺🇸🇵🇸⚡️- The Washington Post has now laid off all of its full time reporters who covered the Gaza War full time since 2023. The last couple to go, Heba Farouk Mahfouz and Louisa Loveluck, had been caught on multiple occasions brazenly lying about the conflict including lies about President Biden's positions on Gaza and Israel.

🇺🇸⚡️- The US only added 57,000 jobs in June, the unemployment rate fell to 4.2% due to people leaving the workforce. Workforce Participation is now at its lowest levels since March 2021.

47,000 of these jobs were in education and healthcare.

April and May's job growth was also revised down, 74,000 jobs were reported that didnt actually exist.

🇺🇸🇮🇷🇮🇱⚡- "U.S. officials believed that Israel might have been plotting to kill Iran’s top negotiators while Washington was engaged with Tehran in delicate talks this spring to reach an interim peace deal.

Killing senior Iranian leaders had been part of Israel’s strategy from the start of the war. But American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament — spiked during delicate cease-fire negotiations that began in April.

Fearful that an Israeli assassination effort would doom the negotiations, the United States, went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials.

While U.S. strikes focused on Iran’s navy and missile forces, Israel prioritized targeting the leadership in the early phase of the war, intent on killing as many high-ranking officials as it could.

That included killing potentially more pragmatic leaders that the Trump administration had hoped to negotiate with, such as Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, and Kamal Kharazi, a former Iranian foreign minister. Both men were involved in the negotiations with the United States when they were killed in Israeli airstrikes," - The New York Times, citing multiple U.S. officials.

🇷🇺🇺🇦 - Ukrainian civilian death toll from the Russian attack on Ukraine last night rises to 27.

🇲🇱🇧🇫🇳🇪⚡️- Renewed JNIM activity in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Heavy intensity reported in Aguelhoc over the past 3 days, with shelling of the FAMa camp and ambushes on Africa Corps vehicles.
Several outposts and patrols attacked by the JNIM in Burkina Faso.
The JNIM claimed to have wiped out and captured the barracks belonging to Niger's armed forces in Diagourou today.

🇸🇦⚡️- "Saudi Aramco, opens new tab resumed loadings from Ras Tanura, the world's largest oil port, on Friday ​after a halt of nearly four months. The Saudi national oil company is ramping up loadings and shipments ​to Asia, adding to a prompt glut that has depressed Brent crude to about $70 a ⁠barrel from close to $120 in March following the interim U.S.-Iran peace deal.

In addition to using its Bahri tanker fleet to ​deliver the cargoes, the world's top oil exporter offered the crude to its Asian customers on a spot pricing basis ​to attract demand as competition among suppliers heats up, said several trade sources who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

At least five supertankers carrying a total 10 million barrels ‌of Saudi oil loaded from Ras Tanura have exited the Strait of Hormuz [...] Two of the ​five very large crude carriers ⁠that have left the strait are heading to Japan, while another two are making their way to China." - Reuters.

🇷🇺🇸🇪⚡️- "On July 2, 2026, at around 2:00 a.m., the Russian Embassy in Sweden was subjected to yet another attack involving unmanned aerial vehicles. One quadcopter dropped a container of red paint onto the embassy grounds. A second drone, to which a mock homemade explosive device was attached, crashed (apparently not by accident) onto our grounds in the immediate vicinity of the Russian Embassy building." - Russian Embassy in Sweden.

🇺🇸⚡️- A Protester has set themselves on fire outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City, local media report he had a Tibetan flag and a piece of paper that said "China out of Tibet".

🇺🇸🇪🇺⚡️- "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was planning to head to Brussels last month to deliver what would be a bombshell announcement in a meeting with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top military chiefs.

The U.S., he planned to say, was preparing additional cuts to its forces in Europe that would go beyond the canceled deployment of an armored brigade to Poland and the earlier withdrawal of an infantry brigade from Romania, people familiar with the matter said. But Hegseth’s proposal was nixed after it was shared with Marco Rubio—President Trump’s national-security adviser—and other senior officials, the people said.

Instead, Hegseth said the U.S. would conduct a review of its force posture in Europe that could last as long as six months." - The Wall Street Journal.

🇩🇪🇺🇦⚡️- Germany has formally charged Ukrainian national Serhii K., an officer of the Ukrainian army at the time of the incident, with being an accomplice to a war crime over the 2022 Nord Stream Pipeline attack. The attack destroyed 3 of the 4 pipelines that deliver Russian natural gas to Germany. The charges include acting as an accomplice in a war crime by carrying out attacks on civilian energy infrastructure, causing an explosion, destroying infrastructure, and disrupting public utilities.

German prosecutors claim that the officer, along with other military personnel, was "acting on behalf of state bodies in Ukraine" and had created the plan to destroy the Nord Stream Pipelines to prevent Russian gas deliveries. Serhii allegedly led the Ukrainian team of up to 7 people and piloted the sailing yacht, which was used to carry out the attack.

German media say the evidence is "overwhelming" and includes phone calls where he incriminated himself in intercepted phone calls, although Serhii has denied involvement.

Serhii was arrested on August 21, 2025, in Italy, was extradited to Germany in November 2025, and has been in pre-trial detention ever since. This is the first time Germany has brought the Nord Stream case to court.