Morning Brief, Saturday 11 July

Donald Trump accepted more contact with Iran, but he declared the ceasefire finished after Washington accused Tehran of attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran denied asking for negotiations in one account and said the US had violated earlier terms, while Qatari and Pakistani mediators tried to pull the two sides back from a wider Gulf fight.

Trump also sharpened the personal edge of the confrontation. He told the New York Post that he had left orders for a huge US response if an Iranian plot killed him, after reports that Israeli intelligence had warned Washington of a specific threat.

The market signal came from ships, not speeches. Strait traffic dropped from a pre-war daily average above 130 vessels to 49 on Tuesday and 22 on Thursday, while Brent hovered near $76 a barrel and the International Energy Agency warned that renewed fighting could wreck its forecast of a 2027 oil surplus.

Iran buried Ali Khamenei in Mashhad after funeral processions that Fars put at 41 million to 43 million people, even as the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, stayed out of sight and factional anger surfaced around President Masoud Pezeshkian. US Central Command said it struck about 90 Iranian targets, while Iran said it hit American infrastructure in Gulf states and reported 14 killed across two days of US strikes.

Castles rarely decide modern wars. Hormuz may still decide how much trust is left in a truce that had little to spare.

A wildfire that began near Los Gallardos in Almería killed at least 12 people, left 23 missing and injured eight after a fallen electricity pole sparked flames that raced through scattered settlements. Andalusian officials said the blaze burned between 3,200 and 4,000 hectares, while more than 150 firefighters and the military worked in difficult terrain with temperatures forecast above 40°C.

The cruel detail was the route. Officials said some residents fled through a dry riverbed after being advised to take another way out, and rescuers later found victims in cars and on foot.

France faced its own warning lights. Civil security officials said more than 8,000 fire starts had burned 25,000 hectares this season, double the area recorded by the same date last year, and Météo France put 63 departments at high wildfire risk. In Italy, forecasters said a third heatwave would pin much of the centre and south between 36°C and 39°C, with interior Sardinia expected to reach 43°C on Monday.

Typhoon Bavi added the Pacific reminder, killing five people in a Philippine landslide and forcing evacuations, school closures and a market shutdown in Taiwan. Disaster planning now has to assume not one emergency at a time, but several arriving on the same hot, windy afternoon.

The White House dismissed the two Democratic commissioners at the US Election Assistance Commission and accepted the resignation of its only Republican commissioner, leaving the four-seat body with no members and no quorum. The agency certifies voting systems, accredits testing labs, maintains the national mail voter registration form and distributes federal election money to states, so the vacancies matter even if the office usually operates far from cable news.

Democrats called the removals a power grab four months before the midterms. The White House cited a recent Supreme Court ruling that expanded presidential removal powers over independent agencies, and an official said Donald Trump wanted people aligned with his drive to secure elections and count every legal vote.

The firings fit a wider pattern of pressure on election oversight. Earlier moves cut Election Assistance Commission staff before a court reinstated them, dissolved an FBI foreign-interference unit and pushed proof-of-citizenship rules that Congress has not passed. Whatever the legal theory, an agency built after the 2000 election dispute now sits leaderless before another national vote.

Berlin offered a smaller but telling democratic mess. Kai Wegner quit as the CDU's lead candidate after false accounts of his conduct during a January blackout, leaving his party scrambling just ten weeks before the city election. The American case will define whether election administration can stay dull when the presidency wants it political.

Apple sued OpenAI, its io Products subsidiary and two former Apple employees in California, alleging a coordinated theft of trade secrets for an artificial-intelligence hardware device. The complaint says OpenAI used hiring as a pipeline for confidential designs, supply-chain knowledge and manufacturing files, while OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri denied any interest in other companies' secrets.

The lawsuit lands as AI hardware turns from a slide-deck promise into a brutal supply-chain race. SK Hynix priced its US-listed depositary shares at $149, raised about $26.5 billion and overtook Alibaba's 2014 debut as the largest US listing by a non-American company. Chief executive Kwak Noh-jung warned that memory demand would stay above capacity even beyond 2030, a blunt message from a supplier of high-bandwidth memory for Nvidia's AI chips.

Old industrial companies also felt investors' impatience. Volkswagen's supervisory board ended a restructuring meeting without decisions on job cuts or plant closures, despite plans to halve its model range and cut management posts, while Xavier Niel agreed to buy e&'s Vodafone stake for about £4.4 billion and become the British telecoms group's largest shareholder.

AI has not made physical business disappear. It has made factories, clean rooms, lawyers and nervous works councils more important than ever.

Mexico said it would file criminal complaints with US state prosecutors and the Department of Justice after an ICE officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived in Houston for 35 years. The Department of Homeland Security said Salgado rammed an ICE vehicle and tried to run over an officer; his family disputes that account and has asked for an independent investigation.

The shooting shook Magnolia Park, one of Houston's oldest Hispanic neighbourhoods. More than 1,000 people marched near the site, and relatives said Salgado was a construction worker, a father of three and in the process of getting a work permit. Mexico has already sent 11 diplomatic protest notes to Washington over deaths of its citizens in ICE custody or during enforcement operations.

The numbers now drive the dispute. Mexico says 14 of its citizens have died in ICE custody and three during arrest operations since Donald Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025; Detention Watch Network data reviewed by Axios counted 19 immigrant deaths in ICE custody in 2026 and 31 in 2025. DHS said there had been no spike and put the death rate at 0.008% of the detained population.

The legal turn gives Claudia Sheinbaum a harder tool than a protest note. It also turns each raid, detention contract and unreleased body-camera file into a potential bilateral case.