Montreal, Israel, Volkswagen: what has changed since this morning

Seven pieces in this afternoon edition, plus the Briefs. They do not replace the morning edition: they update it where there were developments, and leave it unchanged where there were none.

The lead story remains the EU-Canada summit in Montreal, but with a detail that changes the substance of the news: the “associate member” status for Canada, present in the drafts circulated in recent days, has disappeared from the text following the German veto. An alliance for the future, as its promoters call it, arrives at the table scaled back from expectations.

Two stories emerged after 6:30am. The first concerns transport: the general strike called by Usb for tomorrow has been placed under compulsory order by the ministry, and the rail mobilization — which was due to start this evening at 9pm — has been postponed to a date yet to be set. Those who were due to travel tomorrow will find regular trains. The second comes from Israel: the elections for the Knesset closed without a majority, 53 seats for Netanyahu’s bloc and 48 for Eisenkot’s. We say this with the caution the news requires: the figure comes for now from a single source, the Central Elections Committee, without independent confirmation.

On the scientific front, the Lancet Countdown updates a structural figure — over 700,000 heat-related deaths in 2023, 36% more than ten years ago — while from Chile comes the discovery of a candidate dwarf planet beyond Pluto’s orbit, identified by the Vera Rubin Observatory as part of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time campaign.

In Economy, Volkswagen’s accounts are reported with a piece different from the one discarded in production this morning: an operating loss of 5.9 billion, more than quadrupled compared with a year ago, weighed down above all by the 6.4 billion writedown of Porsche goodwill. In Culture, an excavation by the University of Milan has brought to light in Agrigento a district of Akragas destroyed in the Carthaginian siege of 406 BC.

For everything else — Chronicles, Europe, Italy, Health, Sport, Cinema & Entertainment, Tech & AI beyond the pieces mentioned here — what was published this morning at 6:30 stands: no section is left uncovered, no morning story has been withdrawn. This includes the toll of the rail crash in Spain, which the morning edition already covered and which has no developments to add today.

Tomorrow at 6:30am the next edition, with full coverage of all ten sections.