Evening Brief, Thursday 25 June

Two earthquakes struck Venezuela just after 6pm local time on 24 June, first at magnitude 7.2 and then at 7.5 less than a minute later. The shaking closed the country’s main international airport, suspended metro and gas services, and sent aftershocks through Caracas, La Guaira and towns as far away as the Brazilian Amazon.

Officials confirmed 32 deaths and 700 injuries by early Thursday, but citizen reporting sites logged more than 10,000 missing reports as communication blackouts slowed the count. Rescue crews pulled survivors from collapsed buildings, while the US Geological Survey model warned that fatalities could rise sharply as teams reach buried neighbourhoods.

Foreign governments moved quickly. The European Union offered its Civil Protection Mechanism and activated Copernicus satellite mapping, Donald Trump offered American help, and Giorgia Meloni said Italy was preparing humanitarian aid. Delcy Rodriguez declared a state of emergency and called La Guaira a disaster zone, which now puts the test on a weakened state that must coordinate relief faster than rumours, rubble and fear can spread.

Western Europe baked under an Omega block that pushed temperatures far beyond late-June norms. France recorded its hottest June day, Paris hit 40.9°C, Spain reached 45.1°C in Andújar, the UK logged 36.1°C in southern England, Luxembourg set a June record at 38.3°C, and Germany matched its warmest night on record when Bad Bergzabern did not fall below 26.2°C.

The human toll rose fastest in places people use to escape the heat. France reported at least 48 drownings, two young children died in a hot car, and Spain’s mortality monitor linked 212 excess deaths between Sunday and Wednesday to extreme heat. France closed or shortened schedules at thousands of schools, Italy put 17 large cities under red alert, and Germany’s rail operator offered heat-related refunds for the first time.

Health officials tried to change behaviour, not just issue alerts. Diana Gómez, who manages Spain’s mortality monitor, said early heatwaves hit harder because people and services have less time to adapt.

Infrastructure also bent. French nuclear plants went offline, Italian cities suffered blackouts, museums adjusted hours, and Formula 1 invoked a heat-hazard protocol for Austria. Europe has treated heat as weather for too long; this week it behaved more like a slow-moving emergency system with classrooms, power grids and hospitals all on the same circuit.

Europe wrote cheques in Gdańsk and sent boarding parties off Sicily. At the Ukraine Recovery Conference, the EU transferred the first €3.2bn tranche of a €90bn loan package for Kyiv and said a €6bn payment for drone production would follow soon. A separate reconstruction fund reached about €260m in a first closing round, with Poland, Germany, Italy, France and the European Investment Bank backing investment in energy, transport, digital infrastructure and small firms.

Friedrich Merz tried to give the gathering a practical tone.

France then showed another kind of action. Emmanuel Macron said French forces boarded the Cameroon-flagged tanker Deliver off Sicily, accusing it of breaching the law of the sea and helping Russia’s shadow fleet move crude despite sanctions. The EU lists roughly 590 such vessels, and Paris has now carried out five shadow-fleet interceptions since September 2025.

The unity looked less neat in Washington. Mark Rutte praised Donald Trump, displayed defence-spending charts, and tried to calm anger over European reluctance to join the US-Israeli war with Iran. Trump still singled out Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Britain for disappointment, while Rutte argued that 4,000 to 5,000 American military aircraft had used European bases during the conflict.

The lesson is awkward but clear: Europe can mobilise money and maritime power, yet its security policy still has to pass through the narrow gate of American presidential mood.

The US Supreme Court let the Department of Homeland Security end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, ruling that the decision cannot be reviewed by courts. The decision exposes about 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians to possible removal, despite US travel warnings for Haiti and Syria’s long civil war and fragile post-Assad transition.

Justice Samuel Alito also wrote for the court as it revived metering, a border practice that lets officials turn asylum seekers away when ports of entry say they cannot process more claims. The court read the phrase arrives in the United States to mean physical entry, not merely reaching a port, which could again leave people waiting in dangerous Mexican border camps.

Sonia Sotomayor warned that the court had changed incentives on the ground.

The rulings give Donald Trump a legal win for a campaign promise to expel more migrants and tighten access to asylum. They also shift risk from courtrooms to border crossings, where legal definitions can quickly become choices about rivers, deserts and smugglers.

The AI trade regained its swagger after Micron Technology forecast earnings above expectations and said customers had committed $22bn to secure memory supplies. Qualcomm added fuel by projecting $15bn in data-centre sales by 2029. Chip stocks surged across Asia, Europe and the United States, adding about $400bn in market value, while South Korea’s KOSPI jumped 5.5% and Nasdaq futures rose 2% in pre-market trade.

Apple showed the other side of that rally. It raised prices across MacBooks and iPads after DRAM and NAND costs spiked, with the entry-level MacBook Neo rising $100, a 1TB MacBook Pro rising $300 and the Mac Studio rising $500. iPhones, Apple Watches and AirPods escaped for now, but Apple said the component surge had become too large to absorb.

Tim Cook had already warned that price increases were unavoidable.

IBM tried to answer the power problem at the research frontier. It unveiled a 0.7-nanometre transistor architecture, called nanostack, that stacks and staggers transistors vertically and could pack nearly 100bn transistors onto a fingernail-sized surface. IBM claims gains of up to 50% in performance or 70% in energy efficiency versus its 2nm generation, though production may still be five years away and depends on partners such as Samsung or Rapidus.

Jay Gambetta framed the advance as a redesign, not a simple shrink.

AI is making chips more valuable and computers more expensive at the same time, a neat little paradox with a very large electricity bill.