Morning Brief, Wednesday 1 July

The US Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship, ruling that his executive order could not override the 14th Amendment’s guarantee for almost all people born on American soil. Chief Justice John Roberts grounded the opinion in constitutional text and the 1898 Wong Kim Ark precedent, while lower courts had already stopped the order from taking effect after legal challenges began on Donald Trump’s first day back in office.

Donald Trump vowed to seek legislation, though any bill would face the same constitutional wall and an awkward Senate count. The decision gave him a sharp defeat on immigration, but not a uniformly bad final day at the court: the justices also upheld state bans on transgender girls and women competing on female school and university teams, a 6-3 ruling that supports similar laws in Republican-led states.

The combined message was not judicial moderation so much as judicial selectivity. The court blocked executive overreach where the text was blunt, then accepted state power where conservative legislatures framed sex and sport as fairness questions. A court that stopped Donald Trump at the nursery door still widened the battlefield for culture-war lawmaking in the school gym.

Venezuela’s twin earthquakes have killed at least 1,943 people and injured 10,571, while estimates of the missing range from 43,000 to more than 60,000. Rescue crews still found rare miracles, including a three-year-old boy pulled alive from rubble in La Guaira six days after the disaster, but official figures show the pace of rescues collapsing from thousands on day one to one survivor on day six.

Foreign help has grown quickly. US Southern Command said more than 900 personnel are inside Venezuela, with another 800 in Puerto Rico and Curaçao, while MQ-9 Reaper drones mapped damage and US rescue teams helped reopen the airport. British charities launched an appeal as aid workers warned that ruined water and sewage systems could turn the earthquake into a public-health emergency.

The disaster has also exposed a state with little spare capacity. Residents dug with bare hands in the first critical hours, and rescuers reported shortages of cameras, sound-detection equipment and hydraulic lifters. The next phase will test whether outside aid can work through Venezuela’s political wreckage as well as its physical one.

Ukraine has intensified long-range drone strikes on Russian refineries, oil depots and gas infrastructure, forcing Moscow to consider gasoline imports for the first time and pushing parts of the country into rationing. Strikes hit sites from Yaroslavl to Krasnodar, while the Norsi refinery near Nizhny Novgorod suspended operations and Crimea stopped gasoline sales to private buyers after declaring an emergency.

Vladimir Putin acknowledged queues at petrol stations but called the situation not critical, and officials are weighing lower fuel-quality standards, diesel-export bans and emergency import talks. The campaign does not decide the front line by itself, but it moves the cost of war into Russian cities and supply chains, where inconvenience can become political noise.

In Doha, meanwhile, US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met Qatari mediators while Iran denied Donald Trump’s claim that direct talks were imminent. Qatar said the Americans were not there to negotiate face to face with Iranians, and Tehran sent technical officials to discuss frozen assets, not a final agreement. Oil ticked higher as the Strait of Hormuz dispute lingered, with roughly 20% of global oil and gas moving through the waterway.

Fuel queues in Russia and choreography in Qatar point to the same awkward fact: wars now travel through pumps, ports and payment channels long before diplomats admit they are bargaining.

Spain’s extraordinary regularisation scheme closed with more than one million applications, roughly twice the government’s original forecast, and another report put the figure above 1.3 million. Pedro Sánchez cast the programme as both a labour-market fix and a liberal statement, arguing that migrants fill gaps in agriculture, tourism and care work in a country where deaths have exceeded births among resident mothers since 2015.

The legal risk has not vanished. Spain’s Supreme Court is weighing whether to ask the Court of Justice of the European Union if the decree conflicts with EU migration, return and Schengen rules, while the government is racing to issue provisional permits before any possible suspension. Opposition-led Valencia and Aragón want the scheme halted, and Alberto Núñez Feijóo called it unsafe and unsustainable.

South Africa showed the darker side of the same argument. Johannesburg and Durban partly shut down after anti-migrant groups set a June 30 deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave, and around 25,000 foreign nationals had already departed in recent weeks. Police and soldiers deployed after reports of intimidation and killings of Mozambicans, while Cyril Ramaphosa said immigration concerns could not justify threats or violence.

Spain is trying to turn irregular migrants into workers on paper; South Africa is watching fear turn workers into targets on the pavement.

A heat dome over the central and eastern United States is pushing temperatures towards 100°F and beyond, with New York City forecast to hit that mark for the first time since 2012 and Washington potentially enduring three straight days at or above it. NOAA expects 205 million people to face major or extreme heat risk through Monday, while humidity will make the air feel far hotter across much of the country.

Cities moved from warning to intervention. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared an emergency heat plan, opened cooling centres and ordered measures for an estimated 93,000 outdoor workers, while Chicago opened cooling centres and began wellness checks. Officials warned that warm nights are especially dangerous because the body cannot recover before the next day’s heat.

The timing is poor, naturally. The heat wave peaks around the 250th Independence Day celebrations, including a giant fireworks display in Washington, and it is already weighing on 2026 World Cup fixtures in the New York area and elsewhere. Heat is dull until it is deadly, which makes it the weather risk most likely to be underestimated by people who would never ignore a siren.

The European Commission has adopted a tougher steel-import regime, cutting annual duty-free volumes to 18.3 million tonnes from nearly 35 million and doubling the tariff on excess imports to 50%. The rules apply from July 1 across 26 product categories and add traceability requirements for where steel is melted and cast, as Brussels tries to lift mill utilisation from today’s weak levels.

The measure gives allies pain as well as China. Thirteen trading partners, including the UK, Turkey, South Korea, Brazil, Ukraine and India, accepted country-specific allocations after WTO talks, but their duty-free volumes still fall by about one-third. China’s tariff-free allocation drops from 2.4 million tonnes to 800,000 tonnes, a two-thirds cut, and Eurofer thinks the package may lift EU capacity use only to 73-75%, below the Commission’s 80% ambition.

At the same time, the EU is eliminating customs duties on most US industrial and agricultural goods under the Turnberry deal with Donald Trump. The bargain caps US tariffs on EU imports at 15%, includes a 2029 sunset clause and lets Brussels suspend concessions if Washington fails to remove steel and aluminium surtaxes by year-end.

Europe is lowering the drawbridge for America while raising it for steel. That is not free trade so much as managed exposure, with Brussels deciding which industries can face the wind and which need a wall.