Weekly News Roundup - 6/27/25

Trump on a roll: bombs Iran, goes to NATO, wins at SCOTUS // The first heat wave of the summer // Mamdani wins Dem primary

This is the 26th Weekly News Roundup of 2025. The archive for all weekly news roundups is here.

These weekly dispatches are designed for those who may not have time to do more than glance at the headlines, or those who want to stay informed without becoming obsessed by politics and news. These roundups are a targeted way to get a sense of the shape of the past week on the national level. Without such a map, we can be disoriented, not knowing where we have been over the past several days, or where we may be going.

But by spending concentrated, limited time thinking about the big picture, we can devote more of our time to where “agency and justice begin and end,” as Karen Swallow Prior put it: “on the ground, bodily, in community and real relationships, in flesh and blood.”

Quotes of the Week

One of the neat tricks with ceiling fans is that they work just as well in the winter and the summer, but you have to make sure you change the direction of the fan. - Thom Dunn

A boy’s question of the world is: ‘What have you got for me?’ It’s gratification. ‘What have you got? What have you got for me?’ A man’s question of the world is: ‘What do you need? What do you need?’ - Terry Real

Catholics who were born on the cusp of Vatican II (and older) tend to be uncomfortable with saying words like Jesus and friend in the same sentence. It's too southern, too much like the anti-Papists. God — in the churches of a Northeast rife with Eastern Europeans and Irish — was more father figure than friend, and fathers rarely confused discipline with friendship. In the gulf between heaven and earth, one knew where God sat, powerful and mysterious, perhaps a bit vengeful at times. The Blessed Mother interceded when we needed a hand, and the saints were ever-available for their own community service, but a personal relationship with Jesus was, well, at best the watering down of a powerful mystical theology. Worse, the stuff of hubris. But how would any man or woman wanting to leave the attachments of the world behind and follow Christ be able to do so without recognizing that the apostles themselves .... were 'friends of the Lord'? - Andrew Krivak

Big Stories This Week

• The U.S. military attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities on Saturday, seeking to prevent the Middle Eastern country from obtaining nuclear weapons. It was a shocking move of unilateral aggression that, for the moment, has seemed to cow the regime in Tehran. The bombing came after nearly two weeks of strikes by Israel on Iran, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to expand his state’s zone of aggression beyond Gaza 18 months after the attack on Israel by Hamas. There has been debate over how much damage the U.S. strike inflicted on Iran’s nuclear facilities. President Trump and those in his administration have declared Iran’s nuclear capability to be “obliterated,” but that seems premature. “I think ‘annihilated’ is too much, but it has suffered enormous damage,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Rafael Grossi said.

• The Supreme Court ruled in favor of executive power, limiting the ability of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions. But the future of Trump’s quest to eliminate birthright citizenship remained in limbo.

• NATO countries agreed at a summit to increase spending on defense to at least 5% of their GDP, yielding to pressure from Trump going back to his first presidency. Paired with the strike on Iran, it is a week of significant victories for Trump on the world stage.

• New York Democrats nominated a 33-year old Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani, to be their candidate for governor in the November city elections. The result is interpreted as a step to the left for the national Democratic party, and a boon for Republicans. Mamdani will run against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams.

• Senate Republicans raced to finish its work on a massive spending bill to meet President Trump’s deadline of July 4. But chances of that happening seemed to be diminishing by the end of the week.

Week in Review

Friday, 20

• Republican plans to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are ruled out of the omnibus spending package in the Senate.

Saturday, June 21

• At 6:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, a group of seven U.S. aircraft — B-2 Spirit bombers — drop 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, or MOPs, on two Iranian nuclear weapons production sites at Fordo and Natanz. The first bomb lands at 2:10 a.m. local time and the bombing run lasts for 25 minutes. After that bombing run is finished, more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles that were fired from a U.S. submarine explode at another site in Ifsahan. The B-2 bombers then return to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, an 18-hour flight each way that required multiple mid-air refuelings. More than 125 aircraft — fighter jets, refueling planes and surveillance aircraft — take part in the mission.

• Trump speaks from the White House after the bombing, and says Iran should not retaliate. "There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left," he says. Trump also says that the Iranian weapon production sites "have been completely and totally obliterated."

• Masked federal agents are videotaped beating a 48-year old Mexican immigrant in Los Angeles who was landscaping outside an IHOP. The migrant, Narciso Barranco, is the father of two active duty U.S. Marines and one former U.S. Marine.

Sunday, June 22

• Pope Leo says that "every member of the international community has a moral responsibility: to stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss ... No armed victory can compensate for the pain of mothers, the fear of children, the stolen future. Let diplomacy silence the weapons, let nations chart their future with peace efforts, not with violence and bloody conflicts."

Monday, June 23

• Iran launches over a dozen missiles at a U.S. military base in Quatar. They inform the U.S. of their plans to do so ahead of time, and the U.S. says that all of the missiles are shot down. Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tells his citizens that Iran has struck a major blow. And Trump declares that a ceasefire has been reached between Israel and Iran, though it is not clear if either side has actually agreed to this.

Tuesday, June 24

• President Trump lashes out against Israel and Iran for continuing to exchange rocket and missile strikes after he had declared hostilities to have ceased. "We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing," he says.

• Conflicting info emerges about the impact of the U.S. attack on Iran. Israeli intelligence reports say there was "significant" damage. A U.S.-produced classified report says that the U.S. bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities set back their ability to produce a nuclear weapon by only a few months and did not completely eliminate it as President Trump and others in his administration have claimed.

• At least 50 U.S. cities break their records for hottest temperature, during a heat wave that hits much of the northeast. Baltimore hits 105 degrees.

• Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assembly member and democratic socialist, wins the New York city Democratic primary for mayor and will run against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams. It's a shocking defeat for former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Wednesday, June 25

• A ceasefire between Israel and Iran appears to be holding, and commercial flights are restarted in Israel after a 12-day pause. Trump says the U.S. will hold talks with Iran the following week over the future of its nuclear program.

• NATO countries vote to increase their defense spending at a summit in the Hague. Trump says he stands with NATO. French President Emmanuel Macron says it’s incongruous to “say to each other, among allies, we need to spend more... and wage trade war against one another, it makes no sense.”

Thursday, June 26

• The Republican push to jam a massive spending package through hits another major roadblock as planned cuts to Medicaid are ruled out of order by the Senate parliamentarian.

• The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, says that Iran’s nuclear facilities have “suffered enormous damage” but says that to say they have been “‘annihilated’ is too much.” Grossi adds: “I know there’s a lot of debate about the degree of annihilation, total destruction, and so on, what I can tell you, and I think everyone agrees on this, is that very considerable damage has been done. Obviously, you have to go to the site and that is not easy, there is debris and it is no longer an operational facility.”

Friday, June 27

• The U.S. Supreme Court limits the power of federal courts to issue injunctions that limit executive power. Justice Amy Coney Barrett writes the majority opinion. Federal courts, Barrett writes, “do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.” Trump says he will take advantage of it by moving forward with initiatives that have been blocked so far by federal judicial rulings. But one of his most audacious ideas, thought by many to be unconstitutional — the revocation of birthright citizenship — is not certain to be approved. "The court left open the possibility that the birthright citizenship changes could remain blocked nationwide. Trump’s order would deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of people who are in the country illegally or temporarily," the AP reports.

Interesting Reads

• Trump’s Iran Strike Was a Mistake. I Hope It Succeeds, by Anthony Blinken for The New York Times

• The judgment of history won’t save Gaza, by David Wallace-Wells for The New York Times

• Niall Ferguson: Israel’s Attack Restores the Credibility of the West, by Niall Ferguson for The Free Press

• After the Strike, Iran Remains Unpredictable, by William Galston for The Wall Street Journal

• Marine Corps veteran says he feels betrayed after his father was arrested by masked federal agents in Southern California, by Zoe Sottile for CNN

• ICE detains Marine Corps veteran’s wife who was still breastfeeding their baby, by Jack Brook for The Associated Press

• Behind the Curtain: An AI Marshall Plan, by Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei for Axios

• A Redemptive Thesis for Artificial Intelligence, by Andy Crouch for Praxis

• An Illustrator Confronts His Fears about AI Art, by Christopher Niemann for The New York Times

• A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You, by Robert Capps for The New York Times

• What to do if you can’t go AI Sober, by Elizabeth Oldfield for Fully Alive

• An Important New Study on Phones and Kids, by Cal Newport

• How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way, by Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times