Morning Brief, Sunday 12 July

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard declared the Strait of Hormuz closed after its forces confronted the Cyprus-flagged GFS Galaxy, which US Central Command said suffered a fire, engine-room damage and a missing civilian crew member. Tehran said the vessel had endangered maritime security by using an unauthorised route, while Washington said Iran attacked a merchant ship and then ordered another round of strikes, the third this week, at the direction of President Donald Trump.

The military clash landed on top of a political one. Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not appeared in public since becoming Iran’s supreme leader, issued a written vow to avenge the killing of his father, Ali Khamenei, and said retaliation would not depend on whether he or other officials survived. The United States accused Iran of plotting against Donald Trump and reimposed oil sanctions that Tehran called a breach of the truce.

Roughly a fifth of global oil flows through Hormuz, so even a short closure threatens prices, shipping insurance and Gulf diplomacy. This is no longer just another exchange in a fraying ceasefire; it is a test of whether the world’s most important energy chokepoint can stay open when both sides profit politically from sounding uncompromising.

France widened its highest heat alert from 24 departments on Saturday to 37 on Sunday, covering about 26m people, with forecasts reaching 38C to 41C in red-alert areas. Paris shut the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre early, Tour de France organisers cut a stage by 30km, and rail operator SNCF cancelled one in three Intercités trains during the hottest hours while 3,700 TGVs were still scheduled for the Bastille Day weekend.

The pressure did not stop at France. Typhoon Bavi struck eastern China after authorities evacuated nearly 2m people, including more than 1.7m in Zhejiang, while Taiwan reported 134 injuries and the Philippines counted at least 17 deaths from monsoon flooding linked to the storm. In southern Spain, the Los Gallardos wildfire killed at least 12 people, left 23 missing and burned more than 6,000 hectares as crews searched burned homes and roads.

The pattern is becoming familiar and expensive. Governments still describe each emergency as exceptional, but museums, sports organisers, rail operators and rescue services now spend the summer rewriting ordinary schedules around extraordinary weather.

The Justice Department subpoenaed four New York Times journalists to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan after the newspaper reported that Donald Trump left the NATO summit in Ankara on an older presidential jet because the newer Qatar-donated Air Force One lacked some defensive systems. Federal agents delivered some subpoenas to reporters’ homes, and prosecutors said they were pursuing officials who leaked classified information rather than the journalists themselves.

The administration denied that security worries drove the aircraft switch, while the Times said its stories concerned how the government operates and how a presidential aircraft was judged for risk. Press-freedom groups called the subpoenas a severe escalation because American prosecutors have long treated compulsory testimony from reporters as a last resort. The move also comes after earlier attempts to compel testimony from Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters were withdrawn in June.

The practical question is whether courts narrow the subpoenas; the larger one is whether leak investigations become a routine way to make national-security reporting feel personally costly. A president who attacks the press daily now has prosecutors knocking on doors, which changes the temperature even before any witness takes an oath.

Volkswagen’s supervisory board rejected Oliver Blume’s restructuring plan after employee representatives and Lower Saxony voted it down, according to people familiar with the deliberations. The proposal would cut annual production capacity by 1m vehicles to 9m by 2030 and could make four German plants surplus, including Zwickau, Emden, Neckarsulm and Hannover, which together employ about 40,000 people.

The works council accused Blume of withholding information from affected employees after a Friday deadline passed without a workforce address. Daniela Cavallo’s council now plans to summon him to town-hall meetings after the summer break, while IG Metall has already organised protests across eastern and western German sites. Reports differ sharply on the possible global job toll, from a previously planned 50,000 to figures as high as 100,000 or 120,000, but the direction is plain: fewer plants, fewer models and fewer options.

Blume argues that factory costs in Germany improved by an average of 20% last year and says there are smarter answers than closures. Yet electric-vehicle competition, trade barriers and regulation are tightening at the same time. Germany’s old bargain, high wages, regional jobs and export might, is being renegotiated on the shop floor, not in a glossy strategy deck.

Venezuela raised the confirmed death toll from the June 24 twin earthquakes to 4,333, up by 215 in a day, while the official injury count stayed at 16,740. National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez said 315 victims remain unidentified, and Portugal confirmed 110 Portuguese citizens or descendants among the dead, including 20 children.

The government still has not released an official missing-persons figure, despite UN and independent estimates that run into the tens of thousands. Rodríguez defended slower debris removal as necessary to protect possible survivors and recover bodies, while rescue teams reported that 6,462 people had been pulled alive from the rubble and more than 1,200 aftershocks had followed the two main quakes, which struck 39 seconds apart.

Housing is now the second emergency. More than 19,000 people live in temporary sites, many in schools that must reopen by September, and authorities estimate that about 25,000 housing units will be needed. The first 200 prefabricated homes are due next week, a small start against a disaster that punished years of rebuilding and settlement in risky zones. The rubble will eventually clear; the harder work is proving that reconstruction will not rebuild the same danger in sturdier concrete.