Evening Brief, Thursday 2 July

Russian missiles and drones struck Kyiv overnight, Ukrainian authorities said, killing at least 17 people and injuring 86 as fires and collapses spread across several districts. More than 50,000 residents took shelter in the metro, and rescue teams kept digging at a partially collapsed apartment block where six floors gave way after a direct hit.

Vitali Klitschko described the scale bluntly.

Volodymyr Zelensky renewed his plea for air defence, and Kaja Kallas said she would propose more EU sanctions, but the military arithmetic looked just as stark as the political reaction. A CSIS study estimated that combined Russian and Ukrainian losses have exceeded 2m people since February 2022, with Russian monthly losses now running at 30,000-34,000 against about 27,000 new contract recruits.

Ukraine’s wider use of combat drones, including AI-equipped systems, has widened the casualty ratio to about 8:1 this year, according to CSIS. Yet Russia still holds more than 400,000 troops along the front against roughly 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers, so Ukraine’s advantage in attrition has not translated into a clean strategic break.

Kyiv’s shattered apartments show the war’s civilian price, while the casualty figures show why neither army can treat time as a neutral ally.

Rescuers in Catia La Mar pushed closer to Hernán Gil, a 43-year-old security guard trapped for eight days beneath a collapsed nine-storey car park after Venezuela’s twin earthquakes. Teams established visual contact, fed him fluids and tracked his vital signs with heartbeat-detection equipment, but collapsing access tunnels forced them to dig again and again.

Marco Antonio Franco said Gil was helping keep the crews moving.

The wider disaster has already outgrown any single rescue story. Government figures put the death toll at 2,295, with 11,267 injured, while an unofficial missing list stands at 40,567. A UN envoy said the organisation was buying 10,000 body bags, and shelters in La Guaira struggled to house thousands of displaced families as storms hit people sleeping outdoors.

Delcy Rodríguez declared seven days of national mourning and promised a reconstruction commission, but videos appearing to show police taking money from rubble and soldiers sitting on donated clothing fed anger at the state response. Spain evacuated 312 people, including 244 of its own citizens, while European consulates kept emergency lines open.

If Gil emerges alive, Venezuela will gain a miracle; it will still face the much duller, harder task of proving that survivors are not rescued only by chance.

Spain braced for a persistent hot air mass that AEMET expects to push temperatures to 40-42°C in south-western river valleys and as high as 42-43°C around Córdoba. Andalusia placed Córdoba, Seville, Huelva and Jaén under orange alerts, while the Canary Islands prepared for renewed heat and night-time lows that may not drop below 30°C in parts of Gran Canaria.

Portugal entered its fifth heatwave of the year, with 40-43°C forecast in the Tejo Valley and Alentejo, and officials warned of drowning risks as people fled to water. France has already recorded more than 90 drowning deaths since mid-June in one account, while another official count cited 55, mostly in unsupervised or unauthorised bathing areas.

The French damage spread from people to animals, forests and culture. Around three million poultry suffocated in overheated farms, roughly 8,700 hectares burned, and festivals and public events began shifting schedules as organisers decided that old summer calendars no longer matched the climate.

Sébastien Lecornu framed the fire season from Marseille.

Governments can still issue alerts and move concerts, but the bigger adaptation problem now lives in homes, farms, grids and holiday habits. Europe is discovering that a heatwave is not one emergency, but a crowd of small failures arriving at the same time.

Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure showed at least $2.2bn in 2025 income, more than triple the prior year, with roughly $1.4bn coming from cryptocurrency ventures launched after his return to the White House. World Liberty Financial generated more than $500m from token sales, while CIC Digital collected $635m in royalties from a Trump meme coin that later plunged from $74 to $1.60.

The disclosure sharpened a familiar ethical problem because policy and profit now sit uncomfortably close. Donald Trump signed a law promoting stablecoins after a family-backed venture launched its own, and he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder tied to the Trump family’s crypto business. The White House said the president’s assets sit in a trust managed by his sons and denied any conflict of interest.

Gavin Newsom gave the opposition’s charge its sharpest form.

Trump’s older businesses also gained, with golf courses and resorts bringing in more than $500m, and corporate settlements flowing to presidential-library and White House projects. Historians called the scale of self-enrichment without precedent, but the political question is simpler than the legal one: voters can see the till, even if the paperwork says the sons hold the keys.

The Court of Justice of the European Union threw out Google’s final appeal against a €4.125bn Android antitrust fine, making the penalty definitive after eight years of litigation. The court upheld the European Commission’s finding that Google tied access to the Play Store to the pre-installation of Google Search and Chrome, and used payments to keep rival search apps off devices.

Google argued that the ruling failed to recognise its investment in keeping Android open and free, but the legal road inside the bloc has now ended. The decision strengthens Brussels’s claim to be the world’s most muscular technology regulator, especially after Google also lost its appeal against a separate €2.4bn shopping-service fine.

Across the Atlantic, OpenAI floated a very different answer to political pressure: give the US government a 5% stake. The informal proposal would be worth about $42.6bn on the company’s latest $852bn valuation and would, in Sam Altman’s argument, let citizens share in AI wealth through a sovereign-fund model.

The proposal comes as Washington restricts advanced model releases and exports on national-security grounds, while OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for eventual public listings. Any deal would need Congress, and rivals such as Anthropic, Google and Meta have not agreed to join the model.

Europe is disciplining Big Tech after the fact, while OpenAI is trying to pre-pay Washington with equity before the political bill arrives.