🇮🇷🇺🇸⚡️ — WATCH: A massive Lego Trump set was set on fire in Mashhad, northeastern Iran, during the funeral procession of Iran's late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

🇸🇩🇺🇸🇸🇩 — The Sudanese Armed Forces have conditioned broad acceptance of a U.S. proposal to end the country's three-year civil war on the full withdrawal of the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces from all cities they have occupied, according to documents seen by Reuters.

➡️ The U.S. proposal calls for an immediate 90-day humanitarian truce, followed by negotiations on a permanent ceasefire and a civilian-led transition to elections. It also proposes a UN-led mechanism to oversee limited RSF withdrawals, initially focusing on North Darfur and North Kordofan.

➡️ While Sudan's army-backed government accepted most of the proposal, it rejected the idea of only partial withdrawals, insisting the agreement must require the RSF to withdraw "from all the cities it has occupied since May 11, 2023."

🗳 🇪🇺 📵 Hyperdemocratic European Parliament reimposes mass electronic surveillance regulation after a majority votes it down three times

An extension of the European Union’s mass surveillance regulation known as Chat Control 1.0 failed to make it out of the European Parliament twice in March. Unable to summon a clear parliamentary majority, advocates (mostly in the centre-right European People’s Party [EPP]) turned to the European Council, which adopted the failed Chat Control 1.0 renewal on 2 July.

The Council’s position hardens automatically into law unless the European Parliament can summon an absolute majority to stop it. To forestall any such majority from forming, the EPP on Tuesday moved with member state backing for urgent procedure, angling to force their scheme through in the last days before the summer holiday, after many MEP’s had already left. The parliament narrowly approved the urgent procedure, and in consequence there were not enough votes to stop Chat Control 1.0 when it came for a vote today. Hours ago, a majority of 314 MEPs voted to stop Chat Control against the wishes of the Council, while a minority of 276 voted to let it happen. Because 314 is less than the absolute majority of 361, Chat Control 1.0 passed even though most MEPs present didn’t want it to.

It was a sleazy vote, not least because it’s far from clear this procedural manoeuvre was even appropriate in this case. Also, electronic surveillance is bad, but if we are honest with ourselves this battle was already lost.

Chat Control 1.0 was first instated in 2021 as a temporary exemption to the ePrivacy Directive of the EU, allowing messaging services and online platforms to scan chats and other electronic communications for child sexual abuse material. The exemption expired in April, but various platforms have continued their surveillance with no legal basis in the intervening months. Now their formal permission to scan our private communications has been restored and extended through April 2028. We are, in other words, merely returning to the prior regime.

Chat Control 1.0 is a temporary stopgap while the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council try to negotiate their Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, or Chat Control 2.0. As envisioned by the Commission, this permanent law would not merely allow platforms to scan private communications for child sex abuse material, but require them to do so; require additional AI-assisted automated scanning not only for known child pornography but also for such vaguely defined activities as “grooming”; and extend scanning to end-to-end encrypted services like Signal via mandatory monitoring on the client side. This insane proposal has been watered down over the years, in large part because of parliamentary opposition, but it’s coming in some form. We’re getting Chat Control 2.0 before Chat Control 1.0 expires, and Chat Control 2.0 will be at least somewhat worse.

What’s amazing to me about all of this is this man:

His name is Manfred Weber, and he’s a Bavarian politician (CSU) who also happens to be president of the pro-surveillance EPP and leader of the EPP faction in the European Parliament. Weber loves electronic surveillance and he has been the driving force behind Chat Control from the beginning. Naturally, Chat Control is something that Weber would have a lot of trouble imposing in Germany, where surveillance is widely deplored and where our Basic Law guarantees as “inviolable” the so-called Briefgeheimnis – “the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications.”

From his perch in the European Parliament, however, he has been able to hollow out this core constitutional principle of the Federal Republic from a procedurally rigged vote in Strasbourg, without any domestic debate or anybody in the Bundestag having a single thing to say about it.

This is a very advanced novel form of democracy that we have achieved here in the European Union.

🔗 https://www.eugyppius.com/p/hyperdemocratic-european-parliament

🚀 🇨🇳 🚢 China has become the second country in the world with an orbital-class launcher system with first-stage booster recovery through controlled reentry and propelled landing.

After delivering its payload to low Earth orbit, The Long March 10B had its booster landing on a recovery ship in the South China Sea with a net-and-hook system.

📎 Visegrad24

🚀 🇨🇳 🚢 Long March 10B became the fifth orbital rocket class to propulsivly land and be recovered! China Rocket Co. becomes the third company, along with SpaceX and Blue Origin, to recover their booster.

📎 Chandler G

🗳 🇺🇸 🌐 Young MAGA voters don’t want America to pull back from the world; they want to lead it.

Bottom line: The isolationists are out of step with Trump and the “America First” movement writ large — and there is no help on the way from the Gen Z right.

Young MAGA voters support the “Donroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere: 64 percent agree with Trump’s decision to remove Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, and 60 percent would support using military force to remove the current Cuban government from power.

And they are significantly more supportive of the NATO alliance than older MAGA voters are: 62 percent of MAGA voters under 30 have a favorable view of NATO, compared with just 47 percent of those over 30. And 65 percent of both older and younger MAGA voters said they would be more likely to support continued U.S. participation in NATO after learning that “NATO members have recently increased their own defense spending in response to U.S. insistence.”

📝 Sunrise: "I think this poll is correct, however the idea that young right wingers loved the Iran war is almost certainly not true. They want America to lead, they don’t want useless foreign wars for Israel."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/09/young-maga-voters-support-trump-active-us-military-foreign-policy/

📎 Marc A. Thiessen