Funeral rites, live fire.

1. Iran is burying Ali Khamenei while its negotiators haggle in a separate room. Crowds gathered in Tehran on Sunday for a second day of funeral ceremonies, with President Masoud Pezeshkian attending alongside members of the team currently negotiating the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, according to reporting from the capital. Turkey's Erdogan has meanwhile warned that Israel must not be allowed to "dynamite" the fragile 14-point deal, a caution aimed less at Jerusalem than at Washington's own inability to keep the agreement's signatories reading from the same script. (Sources: lemonde.fr, aljazeera.com) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

2. Putin donned fatigues for a staged front-line visit, vowing to take more of Ukraine. The Kremlin billed it as a show of momentum after Ukrainian drone strikes rattled targets deep inside Russia; the Institute for the Study of War called his claims of advance exaggerated in its latest assessment. Zelensky, for his part, says Ukrainian strikes reached Perm — over 1,500 km from the front — while Trump repositions himself as peacemaker ahead of the NATO summit in Turkey, telling Putin by phone what Zelensky separately called "a real prospect to end this war." (Sources: nytimes.com, theguardian.com, understandingwar.org) · spectacle · Relevant · Not relevant

3. Rats now run through parts of Deir al-Balah where bodies lie unclaimed, months into a Gaza ceasefire that was supposed to have ended this. Fourteen-year-old Karam still dribbles a football down a sandy path there, per CNN's account from the ground, even as Israeli forces killed at least four Palestinians in fresh breaches over the weekend and demolitions continue. The gap between the paper ceasefire and the reality on the ground is now the story, not the ceasefire itself. (Sources: cnn.com, aljazeera.com, imemc.org) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

4. Kevin Warsh was sworn in as Federal Reserve chair on May 22, and he has wasted no time reframing the Fed's mission. He is pressing a case for lower rates built on an AI-driven productivity boom, a wager the Fed's own staff have not fully underwritten, according to reporting on his early posture. The backdrop is unfriendly: June hiring came in markedly weaker than forecast even as inflation stays elevated in the wake of the Iran conflict, leaving Warsh betting on productivity gains that have not yet shown up in the jobs numbers. (Sources: qz.com, abcnews.com, theregreview.org) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

5. OPEC+ is set to approve a modest output increase even as Iraq threatens to walk out of the talks. Brent has drifted toward $70 as easing tension between Washington and Tehran calms markets, but a supply wave is simultaneously reviving fears of a global glut, per trade reporting from Singapore. Opec's dilemma is now inverted from a year ago: the cartel may have to curb supply just to keep prices from falling further, not to stop them rising. (Sources: businesstimes.com.sg, voiceofemirates.com, businessreport.co.za) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

6. Brussels has activated its trade pact with Washington, and the numbers behind it are stranger than the truce implies. EU-US goods trade hit a record €875bn last year despite the tariff standoff, with the EU running a €285bn surplus even as European auto exports slumped sharply, per the joint study reported by Asharq Al-Awsat. Brussels is simultaneously warning Beijing it faces retaliation if trade reforms lag past October — two fronts, one trade policy, and neither settled. (Sources: aawsat.com, democrata.es) · regime-shift · Relevant · Not relevant

7. A Chinese chip startup says it has found a way around US export controls by stacking, not shrinking. Dongfang Suanxin, led by semiconductor-association vice-president Wei Shaojun, has emerged from stealth betting on 3D stacking of existing chips rather than the advanced lithography Washington has cut Beijing off from, according to the South China Morning Post. It is the same logic driving JCET's $1.15bn packaging plant and Beijing's onshore IPO rebound for chip firms: sanctions have not stopped China's AI buildout, they have rerouted it into packaging and stacking rather than raw fabrication. (Sources: scmp.com, interestingengineering.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

8. Fed independence is being tested from a different direction than usual: the courts, not the White House, are now setting the boundary. The Supreme Court's ruling in Trump v. Cook blocked the president's attempt to remove Governor Lisa Cook over mortgage-fraud allegations, leaving open, as a Regulatory Review roundup of scholars notes, whether the central bank can keep monetary policy free of political pressure going forward. The ruling arrives just as Warsh, installed after months of Trump's public attacks on his predecessor, tries to steer the Fed toward the rate cuts the president wanted all along. (Source: theregreview.org) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

9. Trump marked America's 250th with a National Mall address that mixed founding-era rhetoric with attacks on his opponents. The speech, delivered Saturday evening amid record heat, drew coverage noting he "derides his foes" even in a speech meant to be a unifying commemoration, per the New York Times. A same-day Elon University poll found Americans entering the anniversary with distinctly mixed feelings — a split the speech did nothing to close. (Sources: nytimes.com, elonnewsnetwork.com) · spectacle · Relevant · Not relevant

10. The Trump administration is rolling back dozens of gun regulations in a single push, reversing rules to where they stood before Biden took office. Critics call it a weakening of public safety; supporters call it a restoration, per the New York Times. It lands the same week an appeals court cleared the administration to reinstall contested slavery-era interpretive panels at George Washington sites — two rollbacks, one week, both framed by the White House as corrections to history rather than changes to it. (Sources: nytimes.com, spectrumlocalnews.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

11. UCLA researchers say they have found the Achilles' heel of some of the deadliest, most treatment-resistant cancers. Small cell neuroendocrine tumors that have lost the RB gene become critically dependent on a protein called E2F3 to survive, and blocking it shut down tumor growth in laboratory models, according to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Discovering a vulnerability like this opens the door to thinking about entirely new treatment strategies," said senior author Dr. Owen N. Witte. "That's especially important because there has not been a major change in how we treat these cancers for decades. When I first encountered these tumors as a medical student more than 50 years ago, the survival statistics were essentially the same as they are today." (Source: sciencedaily.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

12. Meta says its next model, internally named Watermelon, has caught up to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on internal benchmarks. Alexandr Wang, head of Meta Superintelligence Labs, told staff the model closes a gap that had embarrassed Meta for much of the year, per Storyboard18. The claim is unverified outside Meta's own walls, which is precisely the problem with benchmark parity announcements: they arrive before anyone outside the lab can check them. (Source: storyboard18.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

13. Christopher Nolan is betting $250m that audiences want three-millennia-old Homer over another superhero sequel this summer. The Odyssey, his Oppenheimer follow-up, casts Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya and Tom Holland in an IMAX-shot retelling of Odysseus's ten-year voyage home, per the Guardian. "Films always bring people's attention back to the ancient world," said classicist Mary Beard, hoping for what she calls "the Wuthering Heights effect" — a hit epic reigniting interest in the source text. Nolan told the New York Times he was "looking for a gap in the culture"; whether $250m of studio money can manufacture one is the actual experiment. (Source: theguardian.com) · spectacle · Relevant · Not relevant

14. Media & IP: Apple defends scraping public YouTube videos to train AI, citing lack of DMCA-bypass evidence. The company filed a motion to dismiss a class action from three YouTube channels, per reporting on the filing. It is the same fight playing out across the industry — publishers, in parallel, are moving the other direction, with Cloudflare's year-old "Content Independence Day" push now forcing AI crawlers to pay for what they take rather than argue afterward that they were entitled to it. (Sources: hothardware.com, forbes.com) · analysis · Relevant · Not relevant

15. Markets & Startups: Kalshi posted a record $31bn in nominal trading volume in June, up from $17.9bn, as the World Cup pushed prediction markets to new highs. Polymarket also hit record volumes and a new entrant, Rothera, managed $2bn on its own, per CNBC. Regulated sports and event betting is now large enough that a single tournament can move the sector's monthly numbers more than any policy announcement has this year. (Source: cnbc.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

16. Spain: Juanma Moreno began a third term as Junta de Andalucía president, urging fair regional funding. The speech leaned on themes of stability and economic growth rather than confrontation with Madrid, per Democrata. PwC's own economic consensus, released the same week, still backs Spanish growth despite the Iran shock — though 66% of those surveyed criticized the government's handling of the response. (Source: democrata.es) · spectacle · Relevant · Not relevant

17. Canada: The US ambassador to Canada used a Fourth of July party to press Ottawa on two fronts at once. Pete Hoekstra told the crowd in Ottawa he hopes Canadians can soon "take a toast of American bourbon legally in the province of Ontario," referencing provincial bans imposed last year in retaliation for US tariffs, per CBC. He also revealed Canada will receive its first F-35s on October 14 at Luke Air Force Base — the first public confirmation of that date — even as Ottawa and Washington failed this week to agree on renewing USMCA, triggering an annual review process instead. (Source: cbc.ca) · spectacle · Relevant · Not relevant

18. Puerto Rico: A federal audit found only 25% of the $14bn obligated for Puerto Rico's power grid after Hurricane Maria has actually reached the island. The GAO report, released this week and covered by wire reporting, lands almost a decade after the storm razed the grid. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez marked the same week with a statement on the tenth anniversary of PROMESA, the federal oversight law meant to fix exactly this kind of bottleneck — a decade on, the money is still stuck upstream of it. (Sources: rutlandherald.com, vannuysnewspress.com) · catalyst · Relevant · Not relevant

19. Surprise: A Connecticut man fought off a bear with a shovel for 40 minutes to save his pet goat. Joe Reda's bulldog Heavy joined in and his wife fired a rifle into the air as the bear clamped down on the goat, Cole, who survived along with everyone else, per Patch. It is a small data point in a larger trend: Connecticut wildlife officials have logged 110 nuisance-bear calls since January, 96 of them since April, with bears breaking into homes in 20 of those encounters. (Source: patch.com) · spectacle · Interesting · Not interesting