Evening Brief, Saturday 11 July

Donald Trump raised the temperature with a threat to fire 1,000 missiles at Iran if Tehran attempts to assassinate him, after US and Israeli sources described fresh intelligence about a plot. Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, answered the funeral of his father, Ali Khamenei, with a written vow that revenge would be inevitable. Washington says Iran has threatened commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz; Tehran says the waterway falls under its authority and resisted a US demand for a public assurance that vessels can pass safely.

The rhetoric did not stop diplomats from moving. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to Oman for talks after Qatari mediators visited Tehran, even as Donald Trump declared the ceasefire terminated. The US wants freedom of navigation through Hormuz; Iran wants recognition of control over the passage and has objected to the reimposition of oil sanctions. This is how wars widen: not always by grand strategy, but by a tanker, a rumour and a leader who cannot afford to sound calm.

China moved more than 1.9m people from danger zones as Typhoon Bavi approached Zhejiang after killing 17 people in the Philippines and cutting power in Taiwan and Japan. Wenzhou alone evacuated about 887,800 residents, while Zhejiang lifted its emergency response to the highest level and closed schools, tourist sites and cultural venues. The storm weakened from super-typhoon strength but still carried sustained winds of 144 km/h and rainbands roughly 1,000 km wide, a reminder that a lower category can still move a country.

Europe faced the same lesson in a different form. Paris shut the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay early as temperatures were forecast to reach 36°C, while 24 French departments moved to the highest heat alert and wildfires had already burned more than twice last year’s area at this point. In southern Spain, firefighters gained a better weather window against the Almería blaze after at least 12 people died and about 6,600 hectares burned.

The closures, evacuations and body searches show climate adaptation moving from policy papers into ticket offices, firebreaks and evacuation buses.

The Trump administration subpoenaed four New York Times journalists to appear before a Manhattan grand jury on July 16, after they reported security flaws on a Qatar-gifted Boeing 747-200B now used as a new Air Force One. The stories said the aircraft lacked antimissile systems and other protections fitted to older presidential planes, and that the Secret Service advised Donald Trump to leave Ankara after the NATO summit on the older aircraft. Federal agents delivered some subpoenas at reporters’ homes, and the orders cited an alleged criminal-law violation without spelling it out.

The administration says national security justified its concern, and a senior FBI official had asked Times management to block publication before the articles appeared. The Times and press-freedom groups read the subpoenas differently: as an attempt to identify sources and chill reporting about presidential security, foreign gifts and government spending. Earlier subpoenas aimed at Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters were withdrawn, but this round lands amid lawsuits and licence threats against media outlets Donald Trump dislikes.

The case will define how far a leak investigation can reach before it becomes a warning label on public-interest journalism.

Apple moved its quarrel with OpenAI from product rivalry to the courthouse, filing a trade-secret suit in federal court in San Jose. The complaint names OpenAI, its hardware subsidiary io Products and two former Apple employees, including Tang Yew Tan, now OpenAI’s chief hardware officer. Apple alleges that candidates brought designs, prototypes and actual parts to OpenAI interviews as show-and-tell props, and says more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the AI firm. OpenAI denied any interest in rivals’ trade secrets and said it was still reviewing the complaint.

Meta, meanwhile, killed an Instagram feature after four days of backlash. Muse Image had allowed users to mention a public Instagram account and generate AI images based on that account’s posts, with the tool switched on by default and account owners required to opt out through settings or go private. SAG-AFTRA and Creative Artists Agency pushed back, warning that automatic enrolment ignored well-known risks around digital replicas, sextortion and scams. Meta said the image-from-account feature missed the mark, though the Muse model continues elsewhere.

Together the cases show the two pressure points of consumer AI: companies want data, talent and speed, while workers and users increasingly ask who gave permission. The industry’s next fight is not whether AI can make things, but whether it can prove it had the right to start.

Witnesses disputed the official account of an ICE stop in Houston that ended with the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican construction worker and father of three. The Department of Homeland Security said Salgado refused to comply, rammed a law-enforcement vehicle and tried to run over an officer before being shot. An attorney for the three passengers in the van said they gave a completely different account, including that shots came from the side and that no agent stood in front of the vehicle. The agents wore no body cameras, and no video has emerged.

The government has conceded that Salgado was not the intended target of the operation. A DHS official said agents had seen a white van connected to another person and stopped Salgado’s vehicle because someone inside resembled that target. More than 1,000 people marched through Houston’s East End, while Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum promised legal action and local investigators opened inquiries. The shooting lands during a broader surge in ICE detentions, making one bad stop look less like an isolated tragedy and more like a stress test for the whole enforcement machine.

Venezuela raised the official death toll from the June 24 double earthquake to 4,118, with 16,740 injured and the UN estimating that up to 50,000 people may be missing. La Guaira suffered the worst destruction, with collapsed buildings, damaged hospitals and nearly 18,000 people rendered homeless. The UN has launched a $300m appeal, while Portugal confirmed 107 Portuguese and luso-descendant nationals among the dead and said TAP Air Portugal will resume flights to Venezuela through Valencia.

Vietnam faced a smaller but immediate disaster off Phu Quoc, where a speedboat carrying 32 Indian tourists, three crew members and one attendant capsized in rough conditions. Authorities rescued 21 people and recovered 15 bodies, all Indian nationals, including members of a Lava Mobile group visiting for a company event. Officials cited strong winds and high waves as the likely cause while also examining reports of a technical fault.

The two scenes differ in scale, but not in the lesson: emergency systems fail first at their weakest seam, whether that seam is an old hospital, a crowded boat or a warning that came too late.