Türkiye
Party lawmaker Özgür Ceylan said on July 31 that 85,975 people had given a total of 182,068,243 lira, about 3.8 million dollars, since leader Özgür Özel launched the appeal on Wednesday; the first 24 hours brought 113.8 million lira from 31,934 donors. Several of the party's deputies have pledged a month's parliamentary salary to the campaign. Because the New Party has not yet contested a general election it draws no Treasury funding, while the AKP is allocated 2.55 billion lira and the CHP 1.82 billion lira for 2026, which makes the appeal a rough measure of how broadly the new opposition party is actually rooted.
Figures from the statistics agency TurkStat show Türkiye's tourism revenue fell 2.6 percent year on year to 15.87 billion dollars between April and June, while the first half was broadly flat, down 0.1 percent at 25.75 billion dollars. Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek said on July 31 that resilient services exports had limited the Iran war's effect on the external balance, and that revenue on a twelve-month basis held at 65.2 billion dollars. Average spending per visitor rose 2.5 percent to 1,005 dollars, and Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the hardest quarter of the year was behind them; Şimşek himself tied the figures to the current account, the channel through which a weak season shows up in foreign currency flows.
Europe
Between 50,000 and 60,000 people crossed by land and sea from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on July 30, and the death toll rose to 67, most of them drownings. In a letter widely quoted in European media, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez condemned the "selfish, polarising and unlawful reaction" of other EU states, after Italy placed temporary controls on travel from Spain, Giorgia Meloni called for Spain's Schengen membership to be suspended and French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez ordered extra checks on the shared border. The crossings followed a Spanish Supreme Court ruling that migrants arriving by sea cannot be summarily expelled, a decision experts describe as very narrow and probably misread.
Source:
CNN · Friday, 31 July 2026
Eurostat's flash estimate of July 31 puts euro area annual inflation at an expected 2.9 percent in July, up from 2.8 percent in June. Energy had by far the highest annual rate, 10.0 percent against 8.5 percent in June, followed by services at 3.3 percent, while food, alcohol and tobacco slowed to 1.2 percent. Core inflation excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco rose at the same time to 2.5 percent from 2.4, which means the pickup is not an energy effect alone.
The Paks nuclear plant, which supplies almost half of Hungary's electricity, was taken offline after record-low water levels in the Danube knocked out its cooling, the first complete shutdown in the plant's 42 years. Commission spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen said on July 31 that the Commission stands ready to convene an ad hoc meeting of the Electricity Coordination Group, since an event of this kind could further strain the regional electricity balance. Prime Minister Péter Magyar warned of an energy crisis as early as next week, said 2,000 megawatts would be lost from Monday, and asked households and businesses to cut consumption between 5pm and 10pm.
The World
President Donald Trump said late on July 30 that his Board of Peace had reached an agreement on the "complete disarmament" of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza, with Israeli forces withdrawing as disarmament proceeds, alongside an International Stabilization Force and a new Palestinian police service. A senior Hamas official told NPR that Israel must first meet its obligations under the first phase of the ceasefire, withdrawal included. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not react immediately; Trump said Türkiye, Egypt and Qatar had mediated the agreement.
Source:
NPR · Friday, 31 July 2026
Iran's army said on July 31 that it had used drones against aircraft shelters, satellite communications and storage buildings at the US Ahmad al-Jaber Air Base in Kuwait, and the day before against US facilities at Sheikh Isa Air Base in Bahrain. The strikes followed a "heavy wave" of US attacks on Revolutionary Guard targets across Iran, completed on Wednesday. Egypt said in the same period that a drone had hit two ships at its Mediterranean port of Damietta, the first attack on Egyptian soil since the US-Iran war began in late February, which Verisk Maplecroft analyst Hamish Kinnear said shows the Suez Canal is a plausible target too.
Source:
CNBC · Friday, 31 July 2026
The Senate advanced the "Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026" this week by 86 votes to 12, sending it to the House of Representatives, which is in summer recess. The bill would let the president use the IEEPA statute to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on imports from the five largest purchasers of Russian energy and up to 500 percent on imports directly from Russia, while sanctioning Vladimir Putin, more than twenty senior officials and Russia's shadow fleet of oil tankers. China, India and Türkiye are among the biggest buyers of Russian energy according to data compiled by the research centre CREA, and Trump has demanded that the bill also cover tariffs tied to Iran, which analysts think could delay it.