A summit, two shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman city buried for two thousand years

We lead with the European Council because it is where several threads intertwine today at once: energy, Ukraine, the EU budget. Our lead article follows Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in her address to Parliament on the eve of the summit, amid calls for fiscal flexibility and domestic jabs. We pair it, in the Europe section, with a separate analysis on the thorniest item on Brussels’ agenda: the U.S. proposal, reported by the Financial Times, to unfreeze frozen Russian sovereign assets and transfer them under Washington’s supervision, a point on which the United States and Europe find themselves on opposite sides.

On the same day the Washington Post reports, citing internal sources, confidential meetings between American envoys Witkoff and Kushner and officials from France, Germany and the United Kingdom on a four-point peace plan for Ukraine. Moscow denies it. We cover this in the World Roundup section precisely because our charter asks us to note the divergence, not to adjudicate it: the American account goes into operational detail, the Russian denial remains more generic. These are two sources of state or governmental origin recounting incompatible versions, and readers deserve to see them placed side by side as they are, without the paper choosing for them who is right.

On the Middle East front, a new Houthi attack on Aramco facilities and Riyadh airport confirms a strategy of repeated strikes on Saudi infrastructure, with direct claims of responsibility from the Yemeni group’s military spokesman.

In economic news, higher-than-expected U.S. inflation data has reignited selling of artificial intelligence stocks, with repercussions on Asian markets: we report this with the most recent verifiable figures at the time of publication.

In the rest of the edition, two stories of lasting significance in the proper sense: the WHO’s Global Health Estimates show global life expectancy back to pre-pandemic levels, but with non-communicable diseases now responsible for three out of four deaths worldwide — a structural shift rather than an isolated piece of news. And at Akragas, in the Valley of the Temples, a district destroyed by the Carthaginian siege of 406 BC has resurfaced, unknown until this excavation campaign.

Rounding out the picture are the Rome Film Fest, Jasmine Paolini’s victory in Wuhan — reported so far from a single source, as we state — and the opening of OpenAI’s Decisions API, a paradigm shift in interaction with artificial intelligence systems that arrives just days after similar moves by Cloudflare and Amazon.

A collapsed balcony in Santa Maria la Carità injured four people from the same family: we report this only for the established fact, without the judicial reporting that the editorial suspension excludes.

Today’s edition covers all ten planned sections: no gaps to report. The next update, should there be developments on Brussels or on the peace plan disputed between Washington and Moscow, arrives with the 4:30 PM edition.