Morning Brief, Friday 26 June

Venezuela counted at least 188 dead after two powerful earthquakes, magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, struck within 39 seconds near the northern coast. Officials reported 1,520 injured and 157 missing, while rescuers in Caracas and La Guaira searched collapsed buildings with too little heavy equipment and hospitals struggled with power cuts and chronic shortages. The US Geological Survey warned that the eventual toll could climb far higher, though local authorities have not confirmed those projections.

The disaster quickly became an international test. Delcy Rodríguez declared a nationwide emergency, Washington pledged $150 million and sent rescue teams, and European and Latin American governments offered search crews, dogs and medical supplies. Flight suspensions and damage at Maiquetia airport slowed some deployments, including a Spanish NGO team that said it was ready but blocked from flying.

The geology explains some of the violence. The quakes hit different fault segments along the Caribbean and South American plate boundary, shallow enough and close enough to Caracas to turn a rare doublet into an urban disaster. The rescue effort now measures not just state capacity, but how much outside help can move through a country already short of medicine, electricity and trust.

Western Europe endured a heatwave that broke records, filled emergency rooms and sent children home. France tied its hottest national day since records began, with 101 million Europeans exposed to temperatures above 35°C and more than 380 million above 30°C. Spain counted an estimated 212 heat-linked deaths between Sunday and Wednesday, more than double the same four days last year, with most victims aged over 65.

France shut or rescheduled thousands of schools, Paris hospitals reported a surge in cardiac arrests, and the city moved to ban public drinking during the hottest hours of the weekend. The heat also attacked the machinery of daily life: EDF halted three nuclear reactors because river temperatures breached environmental limits, while gas plants stepped in to cover supply. Grid operator RTE said France had enough capacity, but the episode showed how a summer reliability problem can arrive even when demand is not at a winter peak.

Forecasters expected some cooler air to arrive from the west, though hot conditions were shifting east towards Germany, Poland and Central Europe. Europe has treated extreme heat as weather; this week it behaved more like infrastructure failure with a body count.

A projectile struck a Taiwan-operated, Singapore-flagged container ship near Oman, damaging its bridge but causing no injuries or spill. US officials said Iran fired on the vessel; Iranian commanders had warned that ships outside Tehran-designated corridors would not receive safe-passage guarantees. The ship was not part of the UN-backed evacuation scheme, but the strike forced the International Maritime Organization to pause the plan after 57 ships carrying about 1,100 seafarers had moved through the strait.

The timing hurt the peace process. Washington and Tehran signed a preliminary 60-day framework last week, and shipping had begun to recover after months of disruption. Brent traded at $72.24 a barrel and WTI at $69, with the war premium mostly gone before the latest strike lifted crude by more than 2% and reminded traders that roughly one-fifth of global oil flows still depends on a narrow waterway and wider nerves.

Marco Rubio used a Gulf tour to reassure Arab partners that any final accord would protect their security and keep Hormuz open. Iran, for its part, is asserting that passage must run through channels it controls. The ceasefire can lower oil prices, but ships will decide whether the diplomacy has actually touched water.

The European Union transferred the first €3.2 billion of a €90 billion macro-financial assistance loan to Ukraine as leaders opened a recovery conference in Gdańsk. Ursula von der Leyen said the money would cover immediate budget needs, while officials prepared a €6 billion package for drone production and earmarked €60 billion of the wider loan for defence. EU support for Ukraine has now topped €211 billion since Russia’s 2022 invasion (53c3091f2de1).

The conference tried to turn wartime aid into an investment pipeline. Organisers expected roughly €10 billion in agreements, including financing for small businesses, strategic sectors, municipalities, social housing, renewable energy and defence technology. Poland used the stage to push its companies into reconstruction supply chains, while Ukrainian leaders urged partners to treat rebuilding as part of security policy rather than charity.

The politics were less tidy. Volodymyr Zelensky stayed away as Warsaw and Kyiv argued over Ukrainian nationalist memory and the naming of a special forces unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Donald Tusk pressed reconciliation, but the quarrel showed how quickly history can elbow its way into strategy. Europe can fund Ukraine’s state; keeping Poland fully aligned will require repairing memories that money cannot settle.

The US Supreme Court cleared the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, ruling that the Department of Homeland Security, not judges, holds the authority to terminate the programme. The conservative majority rejected claims that racial bias drove the decision, even as the State Department warned of violence and crime in both countries. Lawyers said the ruling could affect nearly 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries whose protections have ended or may soon expire.

In a separate 6-3 decision, the court revived the government’s ability to use “metering”, a border practice that turns away asylum seekers when official crossings are deemed overloaded. The majority accepted the administration’s view that migrants stopped on the Mexican side have not legally arrived in the United States. That gives the White House another tool to slow claims before they enter the asylum system.

The rulings do not deport anyone by themselves, but they shift leverage sharply towards the executive branch. For immigrant families in South Florida and elsewhere, a temporary label that lasted years has become temporary again, and the court has given the president the eraser.

The European Commission said Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, even though neither service automatically meets the law’s size thresholds. Brussels used a qualitative route after a seven-month investigation, arguing that the two cloud platforms form an important gateway between European businesses and end users. If the view becomes final, AWS and Azure would face duties on interoperability, data portability and self-preferencing, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover for breaches and 20% for repeat offences.

AI made the case more urgent. More than half of EU businesses now use cloud services, and regulators fear that demand for artificial intelligence will deepen lock-in inside American-owned ecosystems. Amazon said the finding ignored the breadth of cloud options, while Microsoft argued that excluding Google Cloud and Gemini could distort the market. Both companies can respond before a final decision expected by December 2026.

The fight is not just about servers. Europe missed much of the consumer internet; in cloud and AI, it is trying to regulate the pipes before others own the water.