The afternoon of August 16: a rising toll, a Palio postponed

We open the afternoon with the heaviest figure of the day: at least 51 dead and around 5,000 people evacuated after the magnitude-7.7 earthquake that struck the island of Flores, Indonesia, on Saturday. This is the verifiable figure as we write, and it is provisional: in the first hours after an earthquake, tolls almost always move upward, because rescue teams reach inland villages with hours of delay. We write this before it happens, so that readers know how to interpret the next update. And should a figure be revised downward, we will state it as a revision, not as growth.

What’s new as of 4:30 PM. News with the Indonesian earthquake. Italy with the 2027 budget law: 1.2 billion to extend the 33% tax rate to the 50,000-60,000 euro bracket, 1.1 billion to freeze the retirement age for one month. These are figures from proposals in circulation, not from a filed text, and the piece states this. Tech with the shift in competition among language model developers from test scores to inference pricing — with DeepSeek, bucking the trend, raising the price list for V4 Flash by 93% on August 14. Sport with the green flag displayed at 3:43 PM in Piazza del Campo: the Palio dell’Assunta will be run on Monday, August 17. Europe with the French budget and the 124 billion euros estimated to be recovered by 2030. Foreign Affairs and Geopolitics with the Kurils. Economy and Markets with the weekly close of the exchanges. Plus the Briefs.

On the Kurils, a clarification that stands as a matter of method: the Russian president’s visit to the archipelago and the Japanese reaction reach us for now from a single source, the Russian press. We have not read a statement from Tokyo. The piece states this upfront and treats the phrase attributed to the Japanese prime minister as a reported attribution, not a verified fact. If an independent source emerges tomorrow, we will report it.

For everything else, the 6:30 edition remains valid, published and accessible: Cinema & Entertainment, Culture, Health, and the morning pieces on Italy, Foreign Affairs, News, Economy and Sport. The afternoon updates part of it, never all of it. Sport, in particular, has two articles today: the morning one and the Siena postponement.

No corrections to report on the previous edition. The next verifiable milestone is Monday’s race in Siena and the Indonesian toll at the conclusion of the surveys in Flores’s inland areas.