Morning Brief, Sunday 28 June

US forces struck Iranian military targets for a second night, hitting air-defence sites, surveillance systems, drone storage facilities, communications nodes and mine-laying equipment along and near the Strait of Hormuz. Washington said the strikes answered Iranian attacks on commercial shipping, including a drone strike on the M/T Kiku tanker carrying more than two million barrels of crude oil. Iran, for its part, said it had acted after US attacks and accused Washington of breaking the June 17 ceasefire framework.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced missile and drone operations against eight US-linked military infrastructure targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. Kuwait said its air defences engaged hostile missiles and drones, while Bahrain sounded air-raid sirens and told residents to take shelter. A US official said no American casualties or significant damage had been reported, though the situation was still moving quickly.

Donald Trump turned the warning into a threat.

The immediate danger is not just another exchange of fire. The Strait of Hormuz carries a large share of the world’s traded oil, and a cycle of tanker strikes, air raids and regional reprisals can pull Gulf allies into a conflict they cannot easily control. Castles rarely decide modern wars, but chokepoints do, and Hormuz now tests how much discipline is left in a ceasefire that had little to spare.

Venezuela’s twin earthquakes have become a national catastrophe. Authorities now put the death toll at 1,430, with 3,238 people injured and tens of thousands still missing after magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 quakes hit the northern coast on June 24. La Guaira, north of Caracas, took the worst blow, while seven states reported severe damage and thousands of families moved into shelters.

Rescue teams pulled survivors from rubble even days after the tremors. Spain’s military emergency unit released footage of a man emerging alive in Maiquetia, and rescuers also found an 18-day-old baby and later his mother. Yet the physical response still lags the scale of the disaster: people dug by hand, the road between Caracas and La Guaira collapsed, and aftershocks kept shaking damaged buildings.

Jorge Rodríguez tried to give the rescue effort a human frame.

Foreign help is arriving, but logistics now decide lives. Seventeen flights brought more than 1,600 foreign rescue workers, with 25 more flights expected, while the United States, Italy, Spain and European civil-protection teams joined the response. The UNDP estimated preliminary damage at $6.7bn, before counting wider infrastructure loss and long-term disruption (3b4e3c-b867-a1c1b78cddb9). Venezuela’s disaster is therefore both humanitarian and institutional: a quake has exposed a state that must rescue citizens while proving it can still move machinery, food and trust.

Europe’s heatwave kept shifting from weather story to public-health emergency. France registered its hottest day since records began, Paris reached a June record of 40.9°C, and Germany set a provisional all-time high of 41.5°C at Möckern-Drewitz. The Czech Republic, Denmark and Switzerland also broke major records, while forecasters warned of severe thunderstorms, hail and violent wind gusts as the heat mass began to destabilise.

The toll widened beyond discomfort. Paris emergency services recorded 109 deaths in 24 hours across the capital and inner suburbs, far above the usual seasonal level, while emergency calls jumped 80%. France also counted 74 drownings since the start of the heatwave as people sought relief in rivers, canals, ponds and private pools.

Laurent Nuñez warned that the search for cool water had become lethal.

Infrastructure creaked as the mercury rose. German autobahns buckled, Deutsche Bahn urged passengers to avoid non-essential travel, and Hungary’s Paks nuclear plant cut output from one reactor after Danube cooling water exceeded its regulatory limit. In France and Britain, hospitals struggled with higher admissions and failing cooling systems, while residents without air conditioning booked hotels just to sleep. Europe has treated heat as an inconvenience for too long; this week it behaved like hard infrastructure stress, with bodies, roads and power plants all reaching their design limits.

Aleksandar Vucic said he will resign within weeks and call early presidential and parliamentary elections, a dramatic move after 18 months of student-led protests. His second presidential term was due to run until mid-2027, but he told a pro-government rally in Belgrade that he would soon step aside. He also said he would help his Serbian Progressive Party campaign under a proposed “United Serbia” list, leaving open the widely expected path from presidency to premiership.

The protest movement began after a canopy collapsed at Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, killing 16 people. Students turned that disaster into a national anti-corruption campaign, accusing the authorities of graft, mismanagement and impunity in public works. Vucic and his allies deny opposition claims of violence, media pressure and links to organised crime, but polls now suggest a student-backed list could seriously challenge the ruling party if it forms in time.

Opposition figures read the announcement as manoeuvre, not surrender.

Serbia has held five snap elections under Vucic, and early votes have often refreshed his mandate without changing who really commands the state. Brussels will watch the mechanics closely, because Serbia’s EU path depends on rule-of-law reforms, cleaner elections and alignment with EU foreign policy. His promised exit may therefore become a revolving door rather than a departure.

The Trump administration allowed Anthropic to restore Mythos 5 to a limited set of trusted partners, two weeks after export controls forced the company to disable both Mythos 5 and Fable 5 worldwide. Anthropic said the model would return to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers operating critical US systems. A source said more than 100 companies and institutions, including many Fortune 500 firms, will regain access, while foreign cybersecurity agencies in Europe and Asia remain excluded for now.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick cast the reversal as proof that pressure had worked.

Fable 5, the public-facing version of the same underlying system, remains blocked, though reports say limits could lift as soon as next week if the Pentagon and National Security Agency agree. Anthropic had pulled global access because it could not reliably separate domestic from foreign users in real time, a blunt shutdown that angered customers and sharpened debate over whether US officials can use export powers to ration live software rather than hardware.

OpenAI disclosed a similar demand for restricted access to new GPT-5.6 models, with only vetted US partners allowed at first. Sam Altman accepted safety testing in principle but objected to the state choosing who may use a model.

The immediate compromise gives Washington a way to claim both security caution and industrial leadership. The deeper precedent is sharper: frontier AI releases now look less like product launches and more like export licences with a chat window.