A death toll that keeps rising, a continent on fire

We open with the earthquake in Colombia because the death toll keeps rising — 181 dead, nearly 2,600 injured — and because the gap between official figures and those kept by civil organizations on the missing is itself news: it reveals how difficult it is, in the department of Chocó, even just to count. We say this in the piece because it must be said: the news currently comes from a single source, a dispatch from Pereira, without independent confirmation.

Wildfires in Europe take second place for a simple reason: 2026 is, at mid-season, outpacing 2025, which was already the worst year on record. This is not an alarm we are raising ourselves, it is what the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre says, with partial but already telling data. In the Briefs, the same phenomenon takes on a face: 330,000 people displaced across Spain and France.

We chose to give space to two Rome-based dossiers — prisons and agrivoltaics with the Holy See — because both are being followed directly by Palazzo Chigi, even though the available information comes from a single institutional statement, without independent confirmation: we state this, as required, and leave it to the reader to weigh the significance of a single source on a matter of public policy.

On the international front, the release of former U.S. Marine Robert Gilman after more than four years of detention in Russia is included for its diplomatic significance, with the same caveat on the single source. The global economy is moving on two parallel tracks: U.S. inflation in line with expectations, which reassured Asian markets, and half a trillion dollars moving through artificial intelligence infrastructure — the latter a figure we report while stating that we currently have no independent confirmation of the exact scale of the phenomenon.

In Health, the EMA’s positive opinion on twelve new medicines stays within the paper’s stricter remit: we list the therapeutic areas, we make no assessment of efficacy.

Film and sport close the edition with a look beyond Italy’s borders: two independent festivals, Milan and Treviso, the Venice Film Festival’s program, and Demi Vollering’s victory at the Tour de France Femmes in Nice, with a margin that speaks for itself about her superiority on the road.

Today’s Giro del mondo compares the accounts surrounding the letter from 22 European leaders on Ceuta: not to establish who is right, but to show what each version leaves out.

We did not drop any pieces in progress today: the inventory we publish is the one that came in whole to the newsroom. The biggest open question remains the Colombian death toll, still provisional and from a single source: we will follow it in upcoming editions.