Good morning. It has been a wet, disruptive few days across the country, with Mumbai under a red alert and rivers in the Northeast running well over danger marks. Sunday feels like a good day to slow down, so alongside the news we have a few things worth your downtime too.
In today's newsletter: Mumbai's monsoon turns disruptive, Iran begins a historic state funeral for Ali Khamenei, and Parliament's monsoon session gets its dates.
Something for the couch, since it's raining anyway
Streaming pick. Ab Hoga Hisaab Season 2, the Shaheer Sheikh and Mouni Roy revenge thriller, returned this weekend on Amazon MX Player if you want something binge-able for a rainy afternoon. |
Watching live. India's T20I series in England continues this week after Saturday's loss in Manchester, with the third match up next on July 7. |
Mumbai grinds to a halt as the monsoon turns destructive across India
Mumbai and Thane spent Saturday under a red alert as the IMD warned of rainfall exceeding 200mm in isolated pockets, forcing civic authorities to shut schools and colleges across the city. High tide coinciding with the downpour left chronic waterlogging spots like Sion, Kurla and the Andheri Subway flooded, delaying trains and diverting flights.
The story is bigger than one city. In the Northeast, nearly 48,500 people across four Assam districts are now affected, with 179 villages inundated and over 2,100 hectares of cropland damaged, prompting Union minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to promise central assistance. Neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh has villages cut off entirely, reachable only by helicopter after landslides took out roads and bridges.
This is the pattern India's cities and hill states now live with every monsoon: a normal season, but concentrated into shorter, more violent bursts that overwhelm drainage and roads built for gentler decades. Mumbai's flooding and Assam's crop damage are not separate stories, they are the same infrastructure gap showing up in different terrain.
Compensation announcements move fast, but the isolated Arunachal villages show the harder problem: when roads and bridges wash out in the hills, aid promised in Delhi can take days to physically arrive, no matter how quickly it is approved.
Iran begins a dayslong state funeral for its slain supreme leader
Tehran's Imam Khomeini Mosalla opened Saturday for the start of a continuous 24-hour farewell for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, four months after he was killed in the opening strike of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Iranian officials expect between 15 and 20 million mourners across the coming week, which would make it the largest state funeral in the country's history.
The ceremonies will move through Qom and Najaf before Khamenei is buried on July 9 at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, with representatives from more than 100 countries expected to attend. Washington has paused its nuclear talks with Tehran for the mourning period, a reminder that the fragile 60-day ceasefire underpinning those negotiations still has a long way to go before it becomes a lasting settlement.
Parliament's monsoon session gets its dates, and a fight over the 130th Amendment
Union minister Kiren Rijiju announced Saturday that the Monsoon Session will run from July 20 to August 13, a four-week, nineteen-sitting stretch approved by President Droupadi Murmu on the government's recommendation.
The session's centrepiece will be the 130th Constitution Amendment Bill, which would remove a prime minister, chief minister or minister from office if they are detained for 30 days on charges carrying a sentence of five years or more. A Joint Parliamentary Committee examining the bill is due to finalise its report on July 17, just before sittings begin, setting up a heated debate over how far Parliament should go in policing its own.
Breaking.exe
IT's AI reckoning. The combined market value of TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Tech and Tech Mahindra has slipped below Reliance Industries alone, as investors bet AI-driven automation will keep squeezing the sector's growth ahead of TCS's results on July 9. |
Chip plant goes live. Prime Minister Modi inaugurated CG Semi's ₹7,600 crore chip assembly plant in Sanand, Gujarat, adding a fifth node to India's semiconductor manufacturing push and creating an estimated 5,000 jobs at the site. |
Pangaea Revisited
Gaza settlement plans. Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said his ministry has prepared plans for three new settlements in northern Gaza and is now waiting on Prime Minister Netanyahu's approval, the clearest signal yet that settlement construction is being seriously considered. |
Hormuz fees threat. Iran said it will "definitely" begin charging ships transit fees through the Strait of Hormuz, though it signalled friendly nations could get preferential treatment, a shipping-lane move worth watching given how much of India's crude passes through it. |
Also, Also, Also
T20I heartbreak. India fell just short in Manchester as England chased down 191 with four wickets and six balls to spare in the second T20I, with Jacob Bethell's unbeaten 76 sealing it. |
Rajasthan gets new infrastructure. PM Modi inaugurated Jodhpur airport's new terminal and dedicated the Pachpadra refinery to the nation, while also laying the foundation for Jaipur Metro's second phase. |