Morning Brief, Friday 10 July

The US-Iran ceasefire has broken in the place markets feared most. Iran attacked merchant shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, including a Qatari LNG tanker, and the United States answered with dozens of strikes on Iranian coastal infrastructure, air-defence systems, missile and drone depots and naval sites. Iran then launched drones and rockets at US-linked military infrastructure in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, while Donald Trump declared the interim agreement finished and threatened more action.

Iranian officials said US strikes killed at least 14 people and wounded 78 across five provinces. Washington said it aimed to impose costs for attacks on merchant vessels. Tehran framed its response as deterrence and warned that the strait would reopen only on Iranian terms, not American threats.

The shipping figures tell the story more cleanly than the rhetoric. Before the war, 125 to 140 ships crossed the waterway each day. Recent traffic had already fallen to about 40, and by early Thursday only two tankers were crossing.

Oil moved less dramatically than the military news might suggest, with Brent around $77.53 after an earlier 8% jump, but insurers are telling shipowners to stay away. The strait has become a toll gate where no one knows the price, and that uncertainty now matters as much as any missile.

Southern Spain suffered the sharpest new blow. A wildfire near Los Gallardos in Almería province killed at least 12 people, injured several more and forced evacuations from hamlets around Bédar. Fire crews deployed around 150 firefighters and five water tenders overnight, while Andalusia activated a higher emergency phase and called in Spain’s Military Emergency Unit.

The Spanish fire sits inside a much larger heat map. Copernicus said Western Europe recorded its hottest June, with an average temperature of 20.74°C, 3.05°C above the 1991-2020 baseline. Belgium linked a June 18 to July 1 heatwave to 1,747 excess deaths, and an AFP analysis found that 410 million Europeans endured temperatures above 35°C during the June heatwave.

The pattern kept spreading. In Catalonia, a wildfire around Guimerà reignited after stabilisation and pushed authorities to order roughly 21,000 residents indoors. In Italy, forecasters warned that the country’s third heat wave would last at least until July 20, with 43°C expected in inland Sardinia and red alerts in Florence and Perugia.

Warm nights have made the danger nastier because bodies and buildings get little chance to cool. The Mediterranean and North Atlantic also ran unusually hot, reducing sea-breeze relief and adding fuel to the next round of extremes. Europe is discovering that heat no longer arrives as a forecast; it arrives as a casualty list, a road closure and a phone alert telling people not to open the door.

Volkswagen’s supervisory board met in Wolfsburg and left without the hard decisions investors wanted and workers feared. Oliver Blume presented a 12-point Zukunftsplan that would make the group leaner by 2030, but labour representatives and Lower Saxony’s political appointees resisted binding calls on factory closures and job losses. The board will return to the details after the summer break.

The plan still cuts deep. Volkswagen wants to reduce its model range by up to 50%, slash equipment options by as much as 75% and lower annual production capacity from 12m vehicles to 9m. The group now builds roughly 10m cars a year, so the new target accepts that the old global-market assumptions no longer fit Chinese electric-vehicle competition, US tariffs and weaker demand.

The politics are harder than the arithmetic. German reports say managers have discussed as many as 100,000 job cuts worldwide and four German plant closures, including Zwickau, Emden, Hannover and Audi’s Neckarsulm site. Volkswagen has not confirmed those figures, and works council chairwoman Daniela Cavallo demanded that Blume address staff and limit the damage from the leaks.

The pressure is real: first-quarter profit fell 28% to €1.6bn, sales dipped 2%, and Porsche deliveries dropped 16% in the first half. The boardroom fight will decide whether Germany’s car champion can shrink by design, or whether it shrinks later by panic.

OpenAI took two blows at once, one human and one legal. Fidji Simo, its number-two executive and chief of applications, said she would step down from her full-time role to focus on recovery from a severe flare-up of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. She had been on medical leave since April and will remain a part-time adviser.

Her exit leaves Sam Altman with a gap at a delicate time. OpenAI is weighing a possible IPO, chasing enterprise customers and trying to close a coding-tools gap with Anthropic. The company has already shifted product responsibilities to Greg Brockman and gone through other senior changes, including Brad Lightcap’s move to special projects, Kate Rouch’s health-related departure and Kevin Weil’s exit.

The legal front also tightened. News publishers led by The New York Times and the Daily News asked a Manhattan federal judge to sanction OpenAI, accusing it of hiding evidence, misrepresenting its ability to search training data and deleting billions of ChatGPT outputs after the copyright case began. The filing cites a 78m-conversation database and a later 20m-log sample that the court reportedly called unusable because of redactions.

OpenAI says the publishers are seeking private user logs and that it will defend fair use and privacy. A chatbot company that sold confidence now faces a more old-fashioned test: whether its records, people and courtroom story can all line up.

Andy Burnham is on course to become Britain’s next prime minister after 322 of Labour’s 403 MPs backed him on the first day of nominations. With too few MPs left to nominate a rival, he is expected to be declared party leader on July 17 and to replace Keir Starmer on July 20. Starmer said Burnham would make a good prime minister, while almost every cabinet member, including Rachel Reeves, David Lammy and Yvette Cooper, nominated him.

Burnham immediately signalled a change in tone on Israel and Gaza. He said the UK was too slow to call for a ceasefire after the October 2023 Hamas-led attack and Israel’s campaign in Gaza, and he promised to examine tougher sanctions and measures against trade with illegal settlements.

He also wrapped his pitch in hard power. Writing in The Times, Burnham argued that Britain should rebuild defence industry at home, strengthen ties with France and Germany, and reduce reliance on foreign suppliers after shocks including the Iran war, Russia’s war in Ukraine and a cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover. He said national security adviser Jonathan Powell would stay in place.

The Liberal Democrats tried to puncture the Manchester mystique, warning that Burnham’s proposed “No 10 North” could become another bubble on the Euston to Manchester line. His third act in national politics begins not with a mass vote, but with a parliamentary permission slip and a long list of promises to make it feel bigger.

Mexico is preparing criminal complaints in the United States after an ICE officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican construction worker who had lived in Houston for 35 years. The Department of Homeland Security says Salgado rammed an ICE vehicle and tried to run over an officer during a targeted operation on July 7. His family disputes that account and wants an independent investigation; body-camera footage has not been released.

The shooting shook Magnolia Park, one of Houston’s oldest Hispanic neighbourhoods. More than 1,000 people marched near the scene on Wednesday, and about 100 stayed for a candlelight vigil. Residents described a community suddenly afraid to go to work, a bleak achievement for an immigration operation that was meant to look orderly.

Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco said Mexico would file complaints with state prosecutors and the Department of Justice over deaths of Mexican citizens in ICE custody and during enforcement actions. Mexico says 14 of its citizens have died in ICE custody and three during arrest operations since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025; DHS says there has been no spike in deaths and puts the death rate at 0.008% of the detained population.

Mexico also plans civil lawsuits against private detention-centre operators and will seek protective measures from human-rights bodies. The case will test whether a neighbour’s outrage can pierce America’s immigration machinery, or whether another death becomes one more disputed file in a crowded system.