President Trump wrote Monday morning on Truth Social that U.S. and Iranian representatives would meet in Doha, Qatar, to continue technical negotiations under the ceasefire framework signed by both governments on June 17. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman told reporters Monday afternoon that no such meeting was planned for the coming days. Al Jazeera reported that U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff had traveled to Doha on Sunday.
The gap between what Trump announced and what Tehran denied may be narrower than it appears. Informal technical sessions that don’t rise to the level of publicly announced meetings are common in negotiations where both sides need room to maneuver without committing to outcomes. The June 17 memorandum of understanding established a 60-day window for negotiating a final settlement and created a joint coordination center in Doha to manage disagreements and keep the Strait of Hormuz open to commercial shipping. Witkoff’s presence in the Qatari capital Sunday suggests some level of contact is underway, whether or not Tehran describes it as a meeting.
Qatar has spent two decades positioning itself as the preferred venue for negotiations that other capitals won’t host. The U.S.-Taliban agreement, signed in Doha in February 2020, was negotiated over more than a year in the Qatari capital. The ceasefire framework between Hamas and Israel has been managed through Qatari intermediaries. Qatar has built this role deliberately: small enough to have no territorial ambitions, wealthy enough to sustain extended talks, and regarded as neutral, or at least acceptable, by parties that won’t acknowledge speaking to each other through any other channel.
What both sides have said publicly is that the Strait is open and ships are moving. That’s the central operational fact. The pattern since April has been: cease, strain, break, patch, repeat. Last Friday’s U.S. airstrikes on Iranian targets in the strait, following an IRGC drone attack on a Singapore-flagged cargo ship, were the most recent test. Both sides described themselves as operating within the ceasefire framework afterward. The question on Monday isn’t whether talks are occurring. It’s whether the pattern continues to hold through the 60-day window that both governments have committed to.
The death toll from Venezuela’s June 24-25 earthquakes passed 1,700 by Sunday, CNN reported, with tens of thousands still unaccounted for. The USS Fort Lauderdale arrived at the port of La Guaira over the weekend carrying U.S. Marines assigned to help reopen port facilities for the movement of aid and heavy equipment. The State Department said it is mobilizing $150 million in assistance, including a $100 million contribution to a United Nations humanitarian fund.
The paired quakes, 7.2 and then 7.5 magnitude thirty-nine seconds apart, struck in the early morning hours of June 24, when most residents of La Guaira and the capital, Caracas, were asleep. The area hardest hit, the narrow coastal strip of La Guaira below the Ávila mountain range, has a record of catastrophic disaster. In December 1999, a week of sustained rain triggered mudslides and flooding along that same coast that killed tens of thousands of people in the worst natural disaster in Venezuela’s modern history. The infrastructure that serves the coast has been rebuilt across two generations, and it’s being destroyed again. What engineers will find when they assess the collapse patterns, and what those patterns say about construction quality through two decades of economic contraction, will take months to document. The count that matters most right now is the one rescue crews are still keeping. On Sunday, teams from the United States, France, and Venezuela pulled an 18-day-old infant from the rubble of a collapsed building after more than thirty hours. Both the baby and the baby’s mother were taken to a hospital and are recovering.
The Supreme Court issued two significant rulings on Sunday.
In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the court voted 5-4 to uphold a Mississippi law allowing election officials to count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days afterward. NPR reported that Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. Barrett’s reasoning was that federal election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on Election Day, which is satisfied by the postmark deadline, but that those statutes don’t separately govern when ballots must arrive at election offices. Eighteen states and territories have similar grace-period laws. Justice Alito wrote the dissent, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Justice Kavanaugh joined most of the dissent.
In a separate order, the court blocked President Trump from removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while her legal challenge works through the lower courts. The Washington Post reported that Chief Justice Roberts wrote the order, finding Cook was entitled to notice of the charges against her and an opportunity to respond before being dismissed. Trump said in August 2025 that he was removing Cook after a Trump-appointed official accused her of mortgage fraud before her appointment to the Board. Cook, the first African American woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, filed suit challenging the dismissal. The Federal Reserve Act provides that Board members may only be removed “for cause,” and Roberts’ order rests on the finding that cause requires process. She remains in her position while the case continues in the lower courts.
Pakistani security forces struck targets in the Afghan provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Kunar overnight, targeting what Pakistan described as militant hideouts for the Jamat ul-Ahrar group. Pakistan’s information minister said the strikes killed twenty-five fighters. Afghan officials disputed that account. NPR reported that Afghan government figures put the toll at thirty-six civilians killed and more than 160 wounded. Pakistan called Kabul’s envoy in for a protest Monday morning, citing a June 27 attack on a Sindh Rangers compound in Karachi that killed three paramilitary personnel.
The pattern has been this: Pakistan says it’s targeting militants using Afghan territory as a staging area; Afghanistan says Pakistani strikes are killing civilians in villages. Both claims have supporting evidence. The cycle has produced hundreds of deaths since February and hasn’t been broken by four rounds of diplomatic talks. Al Jazeera reported that analysts tracking the conflict say the strikes have historically generated local grievances that armed groups can use for recruitment, which means the security problem the strikes are intended to solve is being partly sustained by the method chosen to solve it. Pakistan’s position is that it has no clean options. That may be accurate. What Monday’s strikes did with the options available is a separate question.
A heat dome has settled over the eastern two-thirds of the United States heading into the July 4 holiday week. AccuWeather estimated that roughly 200 million Americans will see temperatures of 90 degrees or higher through the holiday weekend, with “feels like” readings above 110 degrees in parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. CNN reported that daily record highs could fall in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Charlotte, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh between Tuesday and Saturday.
The timing is the part that matters most. In July 1995, more than 700 people died in Chicago over five days during a heat wave that struck over a holiday weekend. Most of the dead were elderly, living alone, without air conditioning, in neighborhoods where the informal monitoring networks, the neighbors who knock on doors and check in, were thinner than usual because it was a holiday and people were elsewhere. Public health departments across the Northeast and Midwest have opened cooling centers this week. The National Weather Service has issued excessive heat warnings across multiple states. The infrastructure to respond exists. Whether it reaches the people who need it most depends partly on those same informal networks, and on whether anyone thinks to knock.
It is Monday, June 30. Trump said U.S. and Iranian representatives are meeting in Doha today; Tehran said no such meeting is planned; the Strait of Hormuz is open and the June 17 ceasefire framework is holding through its technical talks phase. Venezuela’s earthquake death toll passed 1,700, with U.S. Marines and $150 million in aid now on the coast, and an 18-day-old infant was pulled from the rubble alive. The Supreme Court upheld mail-in ballot grace periods 5-4 and blocked Trump from removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Pakistan struck three Afghan provinces overnight, with Pakistan saying twenty-five fighters were killed and Afghanistan saying thirty-six civilians died. A heat dome is building over 200 million Americans for the July 4 week, with cooling centers open across the Northeast and Midwest. That’s the day.
Glenn Suttner writes about money and estate planning in our Money section. Last Tuesday, he published “What Is a Power of Attorney (and Why You Probably Don’t Have One)” in the Money section, and it opens the way Glenn’s best pieces always do: with a real situation that makes clear why the topic isn’t abstract. A woman named Barbara called him from the parking lot of a rehabilitation facility eleven days after her husband Martin had a stroke at sixty-nine. Martin was alive and expected to recover. But he hadn’t signed a durable power of attorney, and without one, Barbara had no legal authority to manage the brokerage account in his name, stop the automatic payments draining his individual checking account, or act on the investment property they’d been trying to sell since August. What followed took eight months and nearly $9,000 in legal fees before a court-supervised arrangement gave her what a signed piece of paper would have provided in an afternoon.
Glenn walks through what a power of attorney actually is, the difference between durable and non-durable, what a healthcare power of attorney covers versus a financial one, and what a springing variant does if you want someone to step in only when a specific condition is met. He’s thorough in the way good financial writing always is: practical, without jargon, built on decades of those conversations. “We should have done this years ago,” Martin told Barbara from his recliner the week after the court process closed. He was right. Most people reading this know someone with the same unfinished business. The piece is in the Money section.
