Evening Brief, Friday 3 July

Russian forces bombarded Kyiv for 11 hours with 74 missiles and 496 drones, according to Ukraine’s air force, killing at least 30 people and injuring nearly 100 in the deadliest strike on the capital this year. More than 50,000 people sheltered in metro stations as apartment blocks and civilian infrastructure burned. Moscow said the barrage answered Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian oil refineries and supply routes; Kyiv said the damage to homes and humanitarian stores showed civilians were again paying the price. Volodymyr Zelenskyy cut short a visit to Ireland and pressed allies for faster air-defence deliveries.

Iran staged a different kind of wartime theatre. The coffins of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and four relatives lay in state in Tehran as authorities opened a week-long procession through Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Kerbala and Mashhad, more than four months after he was killed in the opening US-Israeli strikes of the war. Iranian officials projected unity, tightened security and said delegations from nearly 100 countries would attend, while the absence of Mojtaba Khamenei kept succession speculation alive.

The two scenes share a harder message than either capital would prefer: missiles can batter cities, but funerals and air raids also measure whether allies, publics and successors still believe the state can protect them.

France counted 2,025 excess deaths during the week of June 22-28 after recording its hottest June on record, with the national average temperature reaching 22.7°C, 3.8°C above normal. Santé publique France warned the tally probably understates the toll because electronic certificates capture only about 60% of national mortality. Deaths rose sharply at home, in nursing homes and in health facilities, and officials ordered 30,000 extra air-conditioning units for hospitals before the next hot spell.

The United States faced its own holiday-weekend furnace. A heat dome put 130 million people under extreme heat warnings, threatened July 4 events and World Cup matches, and pushed electricity prices sharply higher as air-conditioning demand surged. World Weather Attribution said the episode would have been virtually impossible without human-caused warming, while more than 150,000 households lost power across several regions.

The World Meteorological Organization added the next warning by saying El Niño had emerged and should strengthen rapidly to strong intensity between July and September, raising the odds of drought, heavy rainfall and land and marine heatwaves. Spain also braced for a second summer heatwave, with local highs forecast above 42°C and fire danger rising.

The climate story has moved past abstractions: the forecast now arrives with hospital invoices, blackout maps and funeral-service bottlenecks.

Venezuela’s earthquake disaster kept producing improbable rescues and grim arithmetic. Eight days after twin quakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 struck the north of the country, teams pulled a 44-year-old security guard alive from the rubble of a La Guaira shopping centre. Officials reported conflicting tolls, with one update citing 2,595 deaths and more than 11,000 wounded, while tens of thousands remained unaccounted for. Acting president Delcy Rodríguez defended the state response and announced a $200m reconstruction fund, but residents and reporters described shortages of aid, medical supplies and identification capacity.

Congo fought a slower emergency. The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak, declared in May, has killed 438 people among 1,406 confirmed cases, with Ituri province still the centre but imported cases now raising alarm as far away as Kisangani. Because no approved vaccine or treatment exists for this rare strain, the World Health Organization launched a trial of two experimental therapies, tested separately and together.

Both crises reward speed, trust and boring competence, the very things that earthquakes, armed conflict and frightened communities tend to destroy first.

Donald Trump set the tone for next week’s NATO summit in Ankara by attacking allies over defence spending and calling the relationship one-way. Diplomats still raced to finish a declaration that would include a two-year, €70bn military assistance package for Ukraine and language on fairer burden-sharing. The argument is not new, but the setting makes it sharper: allies want to show Donald Trump that Europe can carry more of the regional security load while keeping the United States tied to the alliance.

Poland tried to turn that pressure into opportunity. Bartosz Grodecki, head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, said a suspended US troop rotation would be completed once planning finished, and he described a permanent US base as firmly on the agenda. He also said Washington showed strong openness toward bringing Poland into NATO’s Nuclear Sharing programme, though no formal step followed.

Europe’s leaders will arrive in Ankara selling resolve, contracts and higher budgets; Donald Trump will arrive measuring whether those promises look like cash, troops and factories rather than communiqués. The alliance can survive another quarrel, but the price of admission is rising.