Reuters Daily Briefing.

"Ukraine sees drones as key to limit Russia."

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Daily Briefing

By Judith Langowski

Hello. Syria's interim President promised to protect Druze minority rights after Israel's attack on Damascus, Ukraine sees drones as key to slowing Russian advances, and Donald Trump says he is not planning to fire Fed chief Jerome Powell. Plus, Europe's oldest lake settlement has been uncovered in Albania.

Today's Top News   Syrian security forces with a military vehicle in Sweida. REUTERS/Karam al-Masri Syria's government troops withdrew from the predominantly Druze city of Sweida, as a ceasefire in the country's south kicks in, following US intervention to end fighting between the government and Druze fighters. Timour Azhari joins the Reuters World News podcast with latest developments from Damascus, after Israeli airstrikes on the capital marked a significant escalation.  "Drones, drones, drones": Cheap and deadly, they are among the main reasons Ukraine believes it can hold out against advancing Russian forces this year and beyond, according to a dozen Ukrainian commanders, officials and arms manufacturers. Preparations are underway to quickly transfer additional Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine, NATO's top military commander Alexus Grynkewich said, working very closely with Germany. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele's drive to consolidate his grip on power and crack down on critics and humanitarian organizations has forced a leading human rights organization to suspend operations in the country and go into exile, the group told Reuters. The deadly Air India crash last month has renewed a decades-old debate in the aviation industry over installing video cameras monitoring airline pilot actions to complement the cockpit voice and flight data recorders already used by accident investigators. European champions Arsenal shattered the women's transfer record by signing Canadian forward Olivia Smith from Liverpool, for a fee of one million pounds ($1.34 million), making the 20-year-old the first female player to break the seven-figure barrier. US news Trump said he is not planning to fire Fed chief Jerome Powell, denying an earlier report by Bloomberg. Markets briefly gyrated, but the reaction was limited, showing that investors have learned from experience about potential actions of the Trump administration. Approval of Trump's immigration policies fell to 41%, the lowest since his return to the White House, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found. Another finding: Most Americans believe the federal government is hiding details about Jeffrey Epstein's clients. Find recent polling here.

Business & Markets   Graphic by Marie Mannes and Alessandro Parodi. Sources: company reports. The chief executive of Volvo in an interview with Reuters urged the EU to cut its 10% tariff on American-made cars, arguing that European automakers do not need protection from US competitors. The Swedish carmaker has been pulling sedans and station wagons from its US portfolio, as interest has waned. Chinese ByteDance has quietly become the world’s largest social media company by revenue in the first quarter of this year, sources told Reuters correspondents Krystal Hu and Kane Wu. The TikTok parent company has surpassed Meta. Read more in the latest installment of the Artificial Intelligencer newsletter. A Canadian convenience store giant scrapped its $46 billon bid to buy Japan’s Seven & i Holdings, the company behind 7-Eleven. It would have been Japan’s biggest ever foreign buyout. An analyst calls it a "ceasefire". Increasingly, economists link extreme heat to economic losses visible from falling agricultural yields to lower worker productivity or even shuttering of all business activity. But these risks are difficult to translate into financial losses, making them easy to ignore by banks.

Beneath China's resilient economy, a life of pay cuts and side hustles   A delivery driver looks at this phone as he rests on his electric bike in Beijing, January 2020. REUTERS/Thomas Peter Chinese state firm employee Zhang Jinming makes up for a 24% cut to his salary by delivering food for three hours every night after work and on weekends – and hopes he can avoid awkward encounters with colleagues. "Being a part-time delivery person while working for a state-owned enterprise isn't exactly considered respectable," said Zhang, whose real estate firm pays him 4,200 yuan ($585) per month. While China has supported economic growth by keeping its ports and factories humming, the lack of real demand has hit profits, in turn squeezing workers like Zhang through wage cuts and forcing them to moonlight. Our report shows how beneath the headline resilience, cracks are widening.  Read the full story

And Finally... Archaeologists dive in the lake of Ohrid to uncover objects, in the village of Lin, Albania. LIN3/Kristi Anastasi/Handout via REUTERS Archaeologists working on the shores of Ohrid Lake in Albania are convinced they have uncovered the oldest human settlement built on a European lake, finding evidence of an organized hunting and farming community living up to 8,000 years ago. The team, from Switzerland and Albania, spends hours each day about three meters (9.8 feet) underwater, painstakingly retrieving wooden stilts that supported houses. Multiple studies show that Lake Ohrid, shared by North Macedonia and Albania, is the oldest lake in Europe, at over one million years. Read more

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