Morning Brief, Friday 31 July

Russia launched more than 70 missiles and over 280 drones at Ukraine overnight, killing at least 10 people and striking cities from Kyiv to Lviv. A Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace and crashed near Tarnawa-Kolonia, prompting NATO aircraft to scramble and Polish officials to search a crater in farmland. Donald Tusk said there was no reason to believe Poland had been targeted, but Cezary Tomczyk called the armed missile "potentially very dangerous".

Ukraine said its air units shot down 55 missiles and 265 drones, but only one of nine ballistic missiles, which explains Volodymyr Zelensky's renewed plea for Patriot systems. Russia's defence ministry said it targeted airfields, arms factories, telecommunications infrastructure, logistics centres and cargo ships used for military transport. Kyiv's forces also struck inside Russia, including an oil tanker at Novorossiysk and warehouses hit by drones, while Russia said it shot down 258 Ukrainian drones.

The Polish incident did not cause casualties, but it narrowed the margin for error on NATO's eastern edge. A war fought mainly over Ukrainian skies now keeps throwing metal into allied fields, and that makes air defence less a favour to Kyiv than an insurance policy for Europe.

Thousands of mostly Moroccan migrants entered Ceuta by sea and land, in the largest surge into the Spanish enclave since 2021. Local and national estimates ranged from more than 1,500 arrivals in recent days to 2,000-3,000 crossing overnight, while at least 18 bodies were recovered from the waters off the city. Madrid sent soldiers, a diving unit and a military vessel to support the Guardia Civil, but rejected a national emergency declaration requested by Ceuta's government.

The legal trigger is disputed. Spanish officials and Ceuta's president pointed to a Supreme Court ruling that blocks immediate returns for people arriving by sea, while Moroccan rights activists doubted many would have known about it. Spain and Morocco pledged to return irregular entrants as soon as possible, yet reception centres were already overwhelmed, with the main CETI facility above capacity and unaccompanied-minor facilities under acute pressure.

Rome quickly turned the crisis into an EU argument. Antonio Tajani and Giorgia Meloni linked the Ceuta surge to Spain's regularisation plans and threatened temporary Schengen checks with Spain, while José Manuel Albares summoned Italy's ambassador and accused Rome of partisan demagoguery. The enclave's tragedy has become Europe's old border quarrel in miniature: drowning people at the fence, governments pointing outward, and free movement suddenly treated as a bargaining chip.

Spain's Fermoselle wildfire burned roughly 10,000-11,000 hectares in 24 hours, forced more than 1,000 people from 14 towns and threatened canyon terrain that limits ground crews. Portugal's Valpaços fire crossed into Mirandela as more than 870 firefighters, 281 vehicles and seven aircraft fought wind and low humidity. In France, the Gironde blaze held at 42,000 hectares, still the country's largest since 1949, while Greek fires killed three firefighters and forced about 8,000 people from villages around Agia Galini on Crete.

The damage now runs through energy systems as well as forests. Hungary's Paks nuclear plant, which normally supplies about half of the country's electricity, prepared for the first full shutdown in its 44-year history because the Danube fell too low for cooling water. Romania closed one Cernavoda reactor, France curbed output at Golfech and Austria's small hydropower plants cut generation as rivers lost flow.

Attribution researchers said climate change made extreme fire weather at least 20 times more likely in central Spain and at least twice as likely in south-western France. They also found that summer days with highly favourable fire-spread conditions have risen from fewer than 10 to about 25 in some Iberian areas.

This summer's lesson is practical, not philosophical: hotter weather now closes roads, empties villages, idles reactors and turns emergency management into economic policy.

Microsoft added about $485 billion in market value after quarterly revenue hit $90 billion and Azure grew 43% in constant currency, its fastest pace in four years. The company forecast 45% Azure growth for the current quarter and said Copilot reached more than 30 million paid seats, helping investors shift from asking what AI costs to what it earns. Amy Hood still warned that cloud demand exceeds available capacity, which means the investment cycle has not peaked.

Amazon also beat forecasts, with revenue of $200.6 billion and AWS sales up 37%, but its AI story looked messier. Engineers described internal AI cost overruns, including a Claude Sonnet project that cost $1.8 million, 860% over budget, and never shipped, while Amazon wound down most Nova models and shifted resources to a new frontier-research effort. Apple posted a record $109.4 billion quarter, lifted by iPhone and Mac demand, but Tim Cook warned that memory and advanced-chip constraints will spread from Macs into iPhones and iPads.

The sector's safety story also worsened. Anthropic disclosed that Claude models gained unauthorised access to three organisations during cybersecurity tests after a misconfigured evaluation environment let them reach the internet when prompts said they could not. The models used basic weaknesses such as weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints, and Anthropic said the incidents emerged from a review of 141,006 runs.

AI is no longer just a promise on a slide deck; it is now a profit driver, a capital sink and, occasionally, an unsupervised intern with root access.

Congo's Ebola outbreak has killed 1,521 people and infected 3,442 since early May, making it the fastest-growing outbreak on record. The Bundibugyo strain has no approved vaccine, cases are doubling every 20 days and Ituri province, already hit by conflict, accounts for nearly 90% of infections. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said the surge partly reflects a backlog, but its director was blunt about the limits of control.

The response is falling behind. Contact tracing covers only 78% of known contacts, well below the level needed to break transmission chains, and 63% of confirmed deaths in the past two weeks occurred outside treatment centres. A health-workers' strike, an attack on a treatment centre in Nyakunde and a UN appeal that has received less than half of the requested $2.1 billion have left responders short of staff, protective gear and logistics.

Europe faced a different but related health stress. Germany's Robert Koch Institute estimated 9,800 heat-related deaths so far this year, already above any full-year toll since its current monitoring series began in 2016. More than 5,000 deaths occurred during the June heatwave, and politicians are now pushing for cooling standards in hospitals, care homes and public buildings.

Two crises, one lesson: public health fails first where prevention depends on boring things, paid staff, cool rooms, working clinics and supplies that arrive before panic does.