Morning Brief, Thursday 9 July

Donald Trump declared the Iran ceasefire finished after Washington said Tehran struck three merchant ships near the Strait of Hormuz, and US forces then hit more than 80 targets inside Iran, including air defences, coastal radar, fast boats and the Kharg oil terminal. Tehran said the United States had violated the memorandum and claimed it retaliated against 85 US military installations in Bahrain and Kuwait, while a US official said American forces suffered no casualties and no significant base damage.

Trump used the NATO summit in Ankara to talk over both war and allies, threatening new strikes and railing against governments that denied bases for Iran operations. He also threatened trade action against Spain, reopened the Greenland quarrel with Denmark and left Giorgia Meloni defending her bet on Western unity, which made a summit designed to advertise defence spending look more like a family argument with warplanes nearby.

He framed retaliation in stark terms.

Oil markets reacted as traders priced in fresh risk around Hormuz, with Brent rising 6.6% after hours to $79.06 a barrel and briefly moving above $80. Both sides still call their actions limited, but each round now creates a public test of resolve that narrows the room for back-channel repair. The strait is not just a map line; it is now the pressure gauge for a war both sides still claim they can control.

Venezuela raised the death toll from the twin La Guaira earthquakes to 3,685, with 16,740 injured and 17,907 people homeless in 87 temporary camps. The government said 190 buildings collapsed and 856 were damaged after the June 24 quakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, while rescue teams have pulled 6,462 survivors from the rubble but have not updated the official missing count since June 25.

Authorities built an emergency cemetery outside La Guaira, where rows of coded white crosses link unidentified bodies to registries and photographs. Families cannot visit the burial site, and nearly 300 bodies remain unidentified, a grim bureaucratic answer to a disaster that has already overwhelmed ordinary mourning.

Local volunteers described the work as civic duty.

Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía remains partly open for humanitarian flights, and Delcy Rodríguez announced a plan to resume commercial service on the parallel runway. About 2,000 US troops are helping with disaster relief, air traffic control and repairs, while foreign rescue teams have started to withdraw after finding no signs of life nearly two weeks on. The earthquake has moved from rescue drama to state-capacity test, and Venezuela’s next problem is whether survivors trust the systems built to count, shelter and move them.

Barcelona moved its intense-heat plan into the alert phase after Catalonia’s weather service placed the region at risk level 4 on a 0-6 scale, and the city sent SMS warnings to more than 11,800 vulnerable residents. Meteocat recorded four absolute temperature records on Tuesday, including 43.7C in Vinebre, and warned that Wednesday would bring red alerts across half of Catalonia’s comarques, with Barcelona facing an orange alert and nights staying tropical.

The region’s emergency medical service has treated 89 people for heat-related conditions, and 61% needed ambulance transfer to a health centre. Civil Protection kept the PROCICAT emergency plan active, while town halls opened cool spaces and social teams distributed water, caps, towels and sunscreen to people sleeping rough or living without easy shelter.

The meteorological warning sounded blunt.

Wildfires turned the heatwave into a compound emergency. Firefighters doubled normal crews, contained one flank of the Sentmenat blaze near Barcelona, and stabilised a simultaneous fire in Anoia that had forced 33,000 people to confine indoors.

The debate now moves beyond today’s flames to planning rules, including whether 25-metre clearance strips around forest-side developments still work in hotter, drier summers. Climate adaptation has left the seminar room and arrived at the edge of Catalan suburbs, carrying a hose and checking the wind.

Marine Le Pen launched her 2027 presidential bid hours after the Paris Court of Appeal convicted her and eleven party members of embezzling European Parliament funds over an eleven-year period, with the total prejudice estimated at more than €2.8m. Judges sentenced her to three years in prison, with two suspended and one to be served under house arrest, and cut her ineligibility penalty to 45 months, with 30 suspended, which currently lets her run.

Le Pen immediately appealed to the Court of Cassation, and the high court said it could rule by early April 2027, just as the presidential campaign reaches its decisive stretch. Because the appeal ruling did not include provisional execution, the sentence stays suspended while judges examine the case, giving her both a candidacy and a legal cliff on the same road.

She rejected the idea that the appeal merely buys time.

Her first campaign stop in La Flèche, the only western French municipality governed by Rassemblement National, paired her with Jordan Bardella and tried to display local momentum beyond the party’s northern strongholds. Supporters in Bruay-la-Buissière, where she won more than 69% in the 2022 runoff, showed little sign of deserting her, while rivals such as Bruno Retailleau attacked her programme and dismissed the bracelet question as her problem. The case turns Le Pen’s familiar anti-system pitch into something more literal: her campaign now begins not with a clean launch, but with a court calendar stapled to every poster.