Wednesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Dies Gibbosus” in Latin): June 17, 2026, and National Apple Strudel Day. Here’s a great snack: an apple strudel and an Einspänner (coffee) at a famous cafe in Vienna. Eaten and photographed in October, 2012.  Lots of Schlag here!

It’s also the Islamic New Year, National Eat Your Vegetables Day (no, thank you), and World Croc Day. Here’s a giant crocodile I photographed in 2016 at a field station in eastern India. We were not allowed to leave our huts at night because these things roamed the grounds.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Footie News.  Argentina defeated Algeria 3-0 in the World Cup, with all three goals scored by perhaps the greatest soccer player ever, Lionel Messi. He also tied the record for goals by an individual in a World Cup:  16.

Lionel Messi made history Tuesday night by tying Miroslav Klose’s record for most men’s World Cup goals at 16 after scoring a hat trick to lead Argentina to a 3-0 win over Algeria.

The hat trick was the 11th of Messi’s international career but first at the World Cup. At 38, he became the oldest player to score three goals in a game at the tournament. He came off late in the second half to a rousing ovation from the partisan Argentina crowd at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.

“It’s an honor being up there for what it means, being alongside Klose and [Brazil’s] Ronaldo, who is there also. But it doesn’t mean anything,” Messi said after the game. “[Kylian] Mbappé is there, too, he scored twice today. At the end of the day, they are stats and nothing more.

“It’s an honor to compete with them, but it doesn’t mean anything. For me, Ronaldo, who I watched and is one of the greats, is not at the top. So, it’s just stats.”

When Messi took the field for defending champion Argentina’s first group stage match — his 200th with the national team — he also became the first player to feature in six World Cups.

Messi broke the record of five World Cups held by Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal); Antonio Carbajal, Andrés Guardado and Rafael Márquez (all Mexico); and Lothar Matthäus (Germany). (Ronaldo should equal the mark in Portugal’s opener against Congo on Wednesday.)

Messi’s comment about Ronaldo is quite uncivil, and I have no idea what he’s on about. Anyway, here are the highlights with Messi’s three goals. At 38, he’s still got it, and he’ll undoubtedly score at least one more goal to set the record. I note, however, that some observers are saying that Messi should have been given a red card and sent out of the game for stomping on an Algerian player’s calf—a foul for which he didn’t even get a yellow card (see photos here).

*The NYT reports that further talks between the U.S. and Iran on their peace deal will begin Friday when the “permanent agreement” is signed. Trump also gave assurances that the preliminary agreement (which none of us have seen) prevents Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon. For more on the memorandum of agreement, which seems to be circulating in various versions, see the next post. 

Iran said on Tuesday that talks on a permanent peace deal with the United States would begin immediately after the countries signed a preliminary agreement on Friday, as President Trump reiterated his claim that it prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. It says it loud and clear,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday at the Group of 7 summit in France.

Under the preliminary agreement, the United States and Iran agreed to a new 60-day cease-fire and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But the text has not been publicly released and the thorniest differences between the two sides, including the future of Iran’s nuclear program, have been deferred to the next round of negotiations.

Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said on Tuesday that he also expected Israeli forces to immediately withdraw from Lebanon and halt their attacks in the country. Israel has said its military would remain in Lebanon, where they have been targeting the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia, and it has continued to launch strikes since the U.S.-Iran deal was announced over the weekend.

Mr. Trump urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday to “be more responsible with respect to Lebanon,” and suggested that Syria would be more effective at dealing with the threat from Hezbollah. There is no indication that Syria is willing to involve itself militarily in that long-running conflict.

Mr. Trump has said that the Strait of Hormuz would fully reopen starting Friday. But shipping companies have responded cautiously to the preliminary agreement, and traffic through the waterway, a crucial transit route for oil and gas supplies, remained minimal on Tuesday. Some companies have warned that they would need more details and security guarantees before resuming operations there.

*From It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal gives another pessimistic assessment of the sketchy peace deal:

It’s Tuesday, June 16, and “what we know is this agreement is going to make Israel safer, it’s going to make the entire region safer,” Vice President JD Vance told NBC News, adding that he “feels confident” Israel will join the U.S.-Iran deal “further down the road.” It is difficult to share Vance’s confidence when the rest of the cabinet has remained entirely silent on the matter.

Though that isn’t entirely true. According to Axios’s Barak Ravid, CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Donald Trump and other senior officials that evidence gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies raises serious doubts about Iran’s willingness to make the nuclear concessions the U.S. is seeking in any final deal. He was joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, both of whom expressed concerns and raised questions about the memorandum of understanding—while Vance and the White House’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, advocated for it.

I’ll try to sprinkle in some optimism and sweeten this bitter pill. But first, we should go through the details as they appear so far. Vance says the deal runs “about a page and a half.” That’s not a lot of room for an American victory—especially once you fit in all those Iranian concessions. Let’s look at what has been conceded so far:

Just a week ago, Trump declared there was absolutely no way he would release frozen assets before a comprehensive peace deal was signed. Yet by Iran’s account, the regime gets a significant signing bonus the moment the ink is dry. “The agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money,” Vance insisted on Fox—reassuring, I’m sure, for American taxpayers, but a strange thing to stress, since he’s calming a concern no one raised. The money in question was never America’s; it’s Iran’s own frozen assets. The administration insists they’ll be released only as Iran complies with the deal, but given how compliant the U.S. has been to Tehran’s demands so far, I don’t see it holding the line on a few billion the moment Iran threatens to walk.

Trump also stated he would not agree to any arrangement that doesn’t include dismantling Iran’s proxies and halting their terrorism. No such language seems to appear anywhere in the MOU. In place of any written commitment to dismember the Axis of Resistance, the Americans simply claim the funds headed to the regime will be kept strictly out of terrorist hands. After all, the White House assured everyone, the bulk of the money is expected “to go into spending that improves the economy” they are under “intense pressure to deliver results at home”—whoops, that was Obama in 2015. Silly me. But we needn’t reach back that far: this is the oldest trick in the Hamas playbook—insisting Qatari or humanitarian aid serves purely legitimate, benevolent civilian needs, when in reality it just frees up other capital for far more nefarious ends.

Trump also once insisted on the destruction of all Iranian nuclear facilities and zero uranium enrichment. Now he has told The New York Times that Iran would be permitted low-level enrichment—meaning “zero enrichment” won’t even make it to the negotiating table.

The agreement reportedly requires Iran to “open” the strait. Vice President JD Vance asserts this means open and “toll-free” for the long term. Iranian officials and state media, however, claim they will merely pause fees for sixty days, but plan to resume charging “service fees” after that period, and maintain that keeping the strait “open” implies keeping it under Iranian and Omani management.

Israel is far from thrilled with this deal—just ask the markets. On Wall Street, the signs of peace sent the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite up about 795 points, a three percent jump and its best day in months. In Tel Aviv, the mood was the opposite: as global markets rallied, the benchmark TA-35 slid roughly 1.3 percent, with banks and insurers falling harder still—local investors reading the agreement as more likely to bring war than peace.

*And, finally, the NYT editorial board’s op-ed is definitive: “President Trump lost this war.” I agree, but they also said that he never should have started this war, and I’m not so sure I agree there—as that judgement comes from the benefit of hindsight (op-ed archived here).

The preliminary deal ending President Trump’s four-month war with Iran is welcome but brings with it hard truths. Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war. He prosecuted it recklessly and in open defiance of the law. The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come.

The details of the deal are unclear, but the announced framework suggests that Mr. Trump has won few of the terms he insisted that he would. It is a humiliating comedown for him and the nation he leads.

Since the war began, he has said the United States would achieve “total and complete victory” and that Iran must agree to “unconditional surrender.” He suggested that regime change would occur. He said that Iran would be permitted “no enrichment” of uranium and that “the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried” near-bomb-grade nuclear material that it already holds.

None of this appears to be true. Iran’s hard-line government remains in place. The specifics of the nuclear agreement will apparently be negotiated over the next two months, but the terms seem likely to resemble those of a 2015 deal that President Barack Obama negotiated and that Mr. Trump canceled in 2018. He described the Obama agreement as the “worst deal ever” and said it put Iran on “a route to a nuclear weapon.” He criticized it for failing to force Iran to stop supporting terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and for loosening economic sanctions. Yet his destructive war seems likely to leave him with a similar deal.

His biggest achievement in the cease-fire framework is the expected reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to global shipping traffic, which will eventually reduce the prices of energy and other goods. That, of course, is merely a reversion to the prewar status quo.

Yep, yep, yep, and yep.  If you ask me what he could have done differently, well, I wouldn’t accept all of these conditions, and would keep attacking until Iran cries “uncle” about nuclear weapon cessation, getting rid of its enriched uranium, opening the Strait of Hormuz, and leaving Lebanon out of the deal. Of course Iran wouldn’t agree to that now, but perhaps it would had if we’d  bombed its oil-delivery facilities on Kharg Island. I don’t think that Obama’s nuclear agreement was so great: how else would Iran have so much uranium enriched to 60%—far above what is needed for peaceful uses? Iran has lied about its goals and amount of enriched uranium, and it will lie again.

*Reader Frau Katze pointed out in a comment yesterday that Nicholas Kristof is behaving badly again, this time breaking a promise he made to his readers.

When The New York Times announced that columnist Nick Kristof would return following a scuttled 2021 bid for governor of Oregon, the paper made a promise to readers.

In a response to questions about Kristof’s return from Rolling Stone in 2022, the Times said that Kristof would refrain from writing about the financial supporters of his campaign, or would disclose those connections in his journalism.

But in at least a dozen instances since then, Kristof failed to make those disclosures. And after an inquiry from Semafor, the Times is reviewing his work.

“Previous political donations made by some people Nick Kristof mentioned in his columns should have been made more clear to readers,” Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said in an email. “Editors from Times Opinion are reviewing these articles to determine further clarifications for readers.”

In a series of pieces between 2022 and 2025, Kristof wrote favorably about Bill Gates and his nonprofit. In one case, he touted Gates’ plan for fighting global hunger. In others he cited statistics from Gates’ foundation, as well as his predictions on gene editing and his recommendation of an author. Kristof made no mention of the fact that Bill and Melinda French Gates had donated a combined $100,000 to his campaign for governor.

When Kristof mentioned Council on Foreign Relations member Deborah Fikes in a 2024 column about North Korea, he did not say that she had donated $10,000 to his political campaign.

In a 2023 column about India’s economic growth, Kristof quoted McKinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels without noting that Sternfels and his wife both donated a combined $5,000 to his campaign. And when he quoted the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye in two separate columns, in 2023 and 2024, he failed to note that Nye had donated $1,000.

When he decided to run for governor in 2021, Kristof put the Times in a somewhat unique position. It was uncommon, but not unheard of, for writers to leave mainstream journalism to pursue politics. It was more unusual for someone to try and return to the paper.

But Kristof’s path is an increasingly common one, as news media continues to polarize into political and ideological camps and as modern campaigns favor candidates skilled in capturing and maintaining attention.

But the site, Semafor, which looks pretty good vis-à-vis journalistic rigor, also looked for dissent and has editorial comments after it:

In an email to Semafor, Patrick Lee Plaisance, a professor in ethics at Penn State, told Semafor that Kristof’s quotes of various campaign donors did not necessitate disclosure, noting that there was no quid pro quo for coverage, regardless of the Times’ disclosure promise. He noted that in many of the examples reported here, Kristof was quoting high-profile public figures or subject matter experts who were “simply allowed to comment on the topic that [Kristof] is addressing.”

“While quoting a donor five years after your campaign ended may be grist for the conspiracy-minded, it is hard for me to see the substantive interests that are in conflict here,” Plaisance said. “Unless there is other evidence … that would revive a conflict concern.”

Still, if this was no big deal, why did the NYT spokesperson say that the paper should have admitted the connections and why is it reviewing his other articles? Anyway, I still think they should dump the guy, for his transgressions were far more serious than those of, say, James Bennet.

*Although I have a love/hate relationship with The Free Press (too little news, and a slight right-wing slant), it does seem to be getting better in that it’s covering the important stories more regularly.  And it’s improving more now as they’ve just taken on Douglas Murray as a regular columnist (he’s previously published the “Things Worth Remembering” column from time to time.  Murray is a conservative, but he’s also smart, well-read, eloquent and pro-Israel (his Munk debate with Natasha Hausdorff is a classic), and one of the few journalists willing to publicly bring up the possibility of high immigration to Europe eroding Western culture. At any rate, I look forward to reading him and here’s some of his self-introduction:

. . . four years ago I was already writing several political columns a week for other publications and wasn’t sure I had another one in me. Bari suggested I write one on topics far afield of politics. She proposed the idea of the Things Worth Remembering column—a series of short essays, each on a single text, that capture eternal values and insights.

Of all the columns I have written in the past 25 years, few have given me greater pleasure to write. The response of Free Press readers moved me deeply and—not for the first time—proved that Bari was onto something. For the two years that I wrote that column, I felt like I was in a wonderful, enthusiastic, deep dialogue with readers.

But then other things—principally wars—got in the way. I remained a very occasional contributor to The Free Press. Yet I remained an avid reader and admirer of this amazing, growing publication. And I never drifted far from the FP family. One of the highlights of my past year was coming onstage in New York at a live event to introduce Coleman Hughes (who was on the trombone) and Justice Amy Coney Barrett (who was not).

Now I find myself in the very happy position of being asked to return to The Free Press as a regular columnist on the broadest possible range of topics. Nothing could excite me more.

That’s because the assault on Western values has become even more withering in the past several years. Internal critics in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and across Europe threaten to dismantle the systems that created mass prosperity, and suppress the teaching of history in favor of new ideological fashions. External enemies in the Middle East, Asia, and around the world seek to wear down opposition to their oppressive social systems, and expand their own influence throughout the free world.

The breadth and depth of issues that The Free Press covers is something that most writers dream of being a part of. And so I am thrilled to rejoin the growing bank of writers who include many—even most—of the writers that I most admire. Back here, I hope to inform readers about world events and stay in the fight for the values we share.

A lot is going to happen in the coming years. I couldn’t be happier to be back at The Free Press and am ready to go through them with all of you.

Yep, he’s a conservative, but where would we be if we read only those writerad and those arguments were already congenial to our views and those of our tribe?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are lost in memory, for it was a year ago today that Malgorzata died.

Hili: The roses were blooming a year ago, too.
Andrzej: Yes, I was thinking about that today as well.

In Polish:

Hili: Rok temu też kwitły róże.
Ja: Tak też o tym dziś myślałem.

*******************

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices, with the caption that Yoda must have written this sign:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Stacy:

Masih is quiet; I expect she’s stunned at the U.S. peace deal with Iran, which leaves the Iranian people out in the cold.  So here’s one from Luana:

“I’m gonna be the dirtiest doctor ever. I’m gonna poison them slowly.” – Ahmet Kerem Korkaya, a Turkish medical student who researched breast cancer and immunology.

Korkaya is one of the 8 indicted last week by the Feds for terrorizing the University of Michigan & surrounding… https://t.co/X0mUxbsQKr pic.twitter.com/3kBnVhGZLY

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) June 15, 2026

From the Number Ten Cat, no fan of Trump (he’s right in this tweet, too):

How Iran sees Trump: pic.twitter.com/4O8HjoB3BD

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) June 14, 2026

Ricky Gervais has a new comedy:

Picture a sitcom about cats written by a comedy legend and starring some of funniest people in entertainment.

That’s @rickygervais‘ ALLEY CATS! 😸

Set to premiere on Netflix on Friday, August 7, 2026. pic.twitter.com/Epr7wOVOJe

— After Life 🐕‍🦺 (@ForAntilly) June 15, 2026

Two from my feed.  First, “Beat it” played on medieval instruments. I’ll give the English translation:

🇫🇷🎻🏰 INSOLITE | Ce groupe normand de musique médiévale reprend « Beat It » de Michael Jackson avec des instruments d’époque. Le résultat est bluffant : on a l’impression d’entendre un tube joué dans une taverne du XIVe siècle. 😂

(Insta : @coursevalbardcore) pic.twitter.com/rrsBLAkdmB

— Cerfia (@CerfiaFR) June 16, 2026

The English translation: “A bird that skillfully strips the main veins from leaves needed for nest-building and stores them in its tail to carry them back.”  I love the tail tucking!

巣作りに必要な葉の主脈を上手に剥ぎ取り、持ち帰るために尻尾に収納する鳥 pic.twitter.com/7CqC2PYdDN

— まだ面白い (@madaomoshiroi) June 16, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Italian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was ten years old. https://t.co/y8PSTjFzsz

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 17, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb, heading to France from Switzerland. First, his pics from Zermatt:

More Matterhorn and adjacent pics

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-13T14:01:13.756Z

And a walk down the mountain (there are three other posts linked to this one):

We got the funicular up to Sunnegga from Zermatt then walked for around 4 hours and eventually descended to Riffelalp railway station. Here are the trains, with pics of walk in linked posts.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-15T13:32:30.282Z