Evening Brief, Saturday 4 July

Iran began a six-day funeral for Ali Khamenei in Tehran, filling the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla with black-clad mourners, red flags and chants calling for revenge. Officials displayed Khamenei’s coffin beside four coffins of relatives killed in the same February 28 strike, while foreign delegations from Iraq, Pakistan, Russia and China attended earlier ceremonies. Mojtaba Khamenei, selected as supreme leader in March, did not appear publicly, which turned a funeral about continuity into another exercise in controlled uncertainty.

Russia told Vladimir Putin that its forces had taken Kostiantynivka, a strategic city on the road to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Ukraine rejected the claim, said its troops still held positions, and described a difficult fight against small Russian infantry groups inside the city. Independent confirmation remains impossible, which makes the contest as much about morale and maps as about streets and trenches.

Ukraine also struck Russian oil infrastructure near St Petersburg, according to Russian officials, who said air defences intercepted dozens of drones and no casualties followed. Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, said a Russian glide bomb killed four people in Sumy, including a child, while wider strikes killed civilians in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia. In Mali, coordinated attacks hit five locations, including a prison south of Bamako, as Tuareg separatists and jihadist-linked forces kept pressure on the junta and its Russian allies.

The day’s pattern is plain: each conflict now reaches beyond its formal front line, into funerals, fuel terminals, prisons and cities that thought distance still offered protection.

Portugal entered its fifth heatwave of the year, with forecasters warning of 40 to 43°C in the Tejo Valley and Alentejo. France kept dozens of departments under heat alerts after a June that broke national records, while officials counted 55 drownings since the heatwave began on June 18. Authorities in both countries urged people toward supervised bathing areas and warned that hot nights would leave homes, forests and power equipment with little chance to cool.

Washington cancelled its Independence Day parade as temperatures were forecast to exceed 38°C and humidity pushed the heat index toward 43°C. The Great American State Fair on the National Mall temporarily shut after visitors collapsed, at least eleven people went to hospital, and President Donald Trump still planned an evening speech. The heat also strained the electricity system: PJM asked customers in emergency programmes to cut use, Con Edison reported about 17,000 households without power, and wholesale prices in northern Virginia jumped from about $40 to more than $2,000 per megawatt-hour.

Southern Europe faced the sharper edge of the same risk. In Catalonia, a wildfire that began near La Bisbal d’Empordà burned roughly 2,200 to 2,400 hectares, forced about 12,000 people into confinement, and sent smoke as far as the Balearic Islands. Firefighters warned that shifting winds could push the blaze deeper into Les Gavarres, while a coming heatwave threatened to widen the danger zone.

The bill for heat no longer arrives only as discomfort; it now lands in hospital wards, blackout maps, empty parade routes and burning hillsides.

Tens of thousands of protesters converged on Erfurt to disrupt the Alternative for Germany congress, blocking roads, the A71 motorway and public transport routes. Police estimated 15,000 to 31,000 participants, while organisers claimed up to 50,000. Yet the party had moved early: hundreds of delegates boarded buses before 4:00 a.m. and reached the convention centre in time for the two-day meeting to open as planned.

Inside, delegates re-elected Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla as co-leaders, with Weidel taking 81% and Chrupalla 70%. That result kept the leadership team in place but showed some erosion in Chrupalla’s support. Weidel attacked Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives and promised a hard line on deportations, while national polls put the AfD at roughly 27 to 29%, ahead of the CDU/CSU at about 22%.

The setting sharpened the symbolism. The congress took place in Thuringia, where Björn Höcke’s radical branch dominates, and coincided with the 100th anniversary of a Nazi Party meeting in nearby Weimar. Mainstream parties still maintain a firewall against cooperation, but the AfD hopes to enter state government after elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The protests proved Germany’s anti-far-right networks can still mobilise huge crowds; the punctual congress proved the AfD can use those crowds as proof of persecution. Street pressure shook the city, but it did not shake the party’s calendar.

Pope Leo XIV travelled to Lampedusa, the Italian island that has become shorthand for Europe’s migration argument, and prayed at graves holding the remains of unidentified migrants. He laid a wreath at the tomb of Yusuf, a six-month-old baby who died of hypothermia after being rescued off Libya in 2020, then crossed the Gate of Europe alone before looking out over the Mediterranean. The visit followed new EU migration measures, including plans for detention centres outside the bloc.

The pope’s message reached beyond Italy. Speaking from the Vatican to Philadelphia as the United States opened its 250th anniversary celebrations, he praised America as a country shaped by successive waves of immigrants and said national greatness depends on protecting the vulnerable. He did not name Donald Trump, but the contrast with the president’s immigration politics and anti-communist anniversary rhetoric was hard to miss.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani echoed the point in a video with newly naturalised citizens, rejecting the idea that America belongs only to people with the right accent or skin. In Lampedusa, Leo called for rescue, welcome, protection, promotion and integration, while also urging development so people are not forced to leave home. For Europe and America alike, migration has become the simplest hard question: whether their founding stories still apply when the stranger arrives at the door.

Venezuela raised the official death toll from the June 24 twin earthquakes to 2,645, with 12,666 injured and 15,050 displaced. The quakes, measured at magnitudes 7.2 and 7.3 and only 38 seconds apart, devastated La Guaira and Caracas, damaging 885 buildings and collapsing 189. Officials said more than 29,500 rescue workers, including 3,305 international responders, were involved, while a non-governmental database listed more than 38,000 people as missing.

Acting President Delcy Rodríguez held her first news conference on the disaster eight days after the quakes and rejected complaints that residents had dug through rubble without help in the first 48 hours. She said search and rescue would continue as long as possible, citing active sites where crews still believed survivors might remain. The rescue of Hernán Gil Flores from a collapsed mall basement after nearly eight days kept that hope alive, even as some foreign teams began packing up.

The politics now sits on top of the rubble. Rodríguez blamed criticism on propaganda, while families searching hotels and apartment blocks measured the state by shovels, dogs and hours lost. A disaster of this scale tests engineering and emergency planning, but in Venezuela it also tests something scarcer: public trust in official time.