Evening Brief, Wednesday 1 July

Venezuela’s twin earthquakes have killed at least 1,943 people, injured 10,571 and left tens of thousands unaccounted for, according to official figures and international estimates. Rescue teams have still pulled out occasional survivors, including a three-year-old boy after nearly six days, but the pace has slowed from thousands on the first day to single digits by day six. The UN is procuring 10,000 body bags, while NASA analysis indicates that roughly 59,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed.

The relief effort has also redrawn geopolitics, briefly. More than 900 American troops are operating inside Venezuela, with hundreds more staged in Puerto Rico and Curaçao, a striking turn after the United States captured Nicolás Maduro in January. US Marines, Jordanian rescuers, British firefighters and regional teams have joined Venezuelan crews, but families in La Guaira accuse the state of moving too slowly and guarding rubble more eagerly than clearing it.

Anger now mixes with grief. Reports of bribery at aid crossings and arrests of officers accused of stealing cash from rubble have deepened suspicion of an already brittle state. One trapped man’s father gave the charge its human form.

The quake has exposed not only broken concrete, but broken capacity, and every hour without order turns a natural disaster into a political indictment.

American and Iranian negotiators returned to indirect technical talks in Doha after a week of renewed strikes and counter-strikes strained their 14-point interim accord. Qatar and Pakistan are mediating, while Iran’s delegation is led by Deputy Foreign Minister Kasem Gharibabadi and Washington’s groundwork was laid by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Tehran publicly denies any direct negotiation, which is diplomacy’s way of entering a room while insisting it has not opened the door.

The fight centres on the Strait of Hormuz, once the route for about one-fifth of global oil and LNG trade. Iran wants recognition of control over the chokepoint, the right to levy fees on shipping and the release of $6 billion in frozen assets. The United States wants free passage and rejects tolls. JD Vance stated Washington’s line plainly.

Markets are listening because ships are moving again, but not smoothly. Brent suffered its largest quarterly fall since 2008 as de-escalation hopes spread, yet crude ticked higher as traders watched the Doha process and patchy tanker traffic. A foreign container ship also ran aground after straying from Iran’s designated route, a small mishap with large symbolic value.

Hormuz is a narrow waterway, but it now carries a broad question: whether enemies can turn an improvised pause into rules that tankers, insurers and commanders actually trust.

Spain reported at least 1,028 excess deaths linked to June heat, the highest June figure since its MoMo monitoring system began in 2015. The month ranked as Spain’s second-hottest June since records began in 1961, with average temperatures 3.2°C above the 1991-2020 norm. On June 23, 35.7 million people, about 73% of the population, faced health risks from heat, and most deaths came through worsening existing illnesses rather than classic heat stroke.

Europe’s next heat episode is already forming. A stationary ridge over Iberia could push Spain toward 42-44°C in central, western and southern areas, while Portugal expects 40-43°C in the Tejo Valley and Alentejo and France has linked dozens of drownings to people seeking relief in unsafe water. The pattern is no longer just a summer inconvenience; it is a public-health system arriving in waves.

The sea is adding force beneath the air. Global sea surface temperature averaged 20.98°C in June, above the previous June record of 20.89°C in 2024, and 82% of the world’s oceans have experienced marine heatwaves since the start of 2026.

Carlo Buontempo warned that the signal may not be a blip.

Hotter seas lengthen heat, feed storms and squeeze marine ecosystems, so Europe’s latest heatwave looks less like an episode than a rehearsal with the thermostat stuck.

Donald Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in income from family cryptocurrency ventures in 2025, according to a financial disclosure filed with the US Office of Government Ethics. World Liberty Financial generated nearly $800 million for Trump companies, while sales of the $TRUMP meme coin brought in $635 million. The filing also listed media settlements, overseas licensing and branded merchandise, but crypto now dwarfs the old property-and-name business.

The scale matters because the presidency sits beside the cash register. The White House rejects conflict claims and says Donald Trump’s adult sons oversee the businesses, but historians said the income has no close precedent for a sitting president. The disclosure arrived in the same week that the Supreme Court both checked several Trump policies and expanded the architecture of executive control.

The court struck down sweeping tariffs, rejected the attempt to end birthright citizenship and blocked the immediate firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa D. Cook. Yet the conservative majority also overruled a 90-year-old precedent and let presidents fire leaders of many independent agencies over policy disagreements. Deepak Gupta captured the split judgment.

The combination is awkward: judges trimmed some of Donald Trump’s sharpest moves while sharpening the office he holds. America is watching not just what this president does with power, but what future presidents inherit after the guardrails have been moved.

The European Union has imposed a flat €3 customs charge per tariff classification on parcels worth less than €150 entering from outside the bloc. The fee lands hardest on platforms such as Shein, Temu and AliExpress, whose direct-to-consumer model grew around the old de minimis exemption. Brussels says low-value e-commerce parcels surged from 1.4 billion in 2022 to 5.8 billion in 2025, with more than 90% originating in China.

The parcel flow explains why Brussels moved now.

Dirk Gotink, a European lawmaker, framed the measure as overdue enforcement rather than protectionism.

Consumers may not see a customs bill at the door because the declarant must pay, but platforms and shippers can pass the cost through prices, checkout fees or supplier pressure. Logistics firms expect EU-bound shipments to fall in the coming weeks, and the charge will remain until a new customs data hub starts in 2028. That makes the fee both a stopgap and a warning that the old bargain of frictionless cheap imports has ended.

Sweden added a second blow to platform power. A Stockholm court ordered Google to pay €1.3 billion to PriceRunner, owned by Klarna, for favouring its own shopping service in search results across several markets. Google disagrees and may appeal, but the ruling turns old antitrust fines into private damages with real teeth.

Europe is no longer just writing rules for digital commerce; it is attaching invoices to the business models that ignored them.