Morning Brief, Tuesday 14 July

US forces struck Iranian military targets for a third straight night, and Central Command said the attacks hit air-defence systems, coastal radar, missile and drone capabilities and small boats. Iranian state media and military-linked sources reported explosions near the strait and claimed strikes on American and allied military facilities in the region, accounts Washington did not confirm. Donald Trump chose blunt salesmanship over careful signalling before the operation.

Donald Trump then announced a renewed naval blockade on Iran and said the United States would collect a 20% fee on cargo shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, though he offered few operational details. The International Maritime Organization rejected the idea and said there was no legal basis for mandatory tolls in straits used for international navigation.

The move buried what was left of a June interim agreement that had aimed to reopen the strait and pause hostilities for further talks. Brent crude climbed 4.3% to $79.31 a barrel after the announcements and briefly jumped about 9% intraday, a reminder that even a boast dressed up as policy can travel quickly through petrol pumps and inflation expectations.

A toll booth in Hormuz is not a tariff gimmick; it is a tax on the world's fuel nerves.

Spain's Los Gallardos wildfire was stabilised after killing at least 13 people and burning about 7,000 hectares in Almería, making it the country's deadliest forest fire this century. Authorities said a fallen power cable ignited dry vegetation, and the flames advanced at roughly 100 metres a minute before firefighters controlled the blaze after three days. Pedro Sánchez visited the rescue command centre in Turre and urged Spain to shift from emergency response to prevention.

The fire's human accounting remained grim. Officials had identified only some of the dead by Monday, including British and French victims, and families were still searching for missing relatives. At least 600 evacuated residents returned to burned vehicles, charred scrub and homes that survived largely by luck.

Heat widened the map of danger. Lleida became Spain's hottest city on Monday, with nearby stations passing 39.4C, while Catalonia entered its third heatwave of the year and forecasters warned that parts of the Ebro valley, the south-east and Andalusia could exceed 40C. In France, the Fontainebleau fire south-east of Paris burned up to 1,000 hectares, forced hundreds of homes to evacuate and disrupted motorway and TGV services.

The Mediterranean summer now delivers its bill in several currencies at once: lives, power lines, water, roads and the patience of people told this is still just weather.

Ten European countries and Ukraine announced a new anti-ballistic missile coalition in Paris, with Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom signing up. The plan aims to pool industrial capacity, research and battlefield experience to create a shared defensive architecture that complements Patriot and SAMP-T systems rather than replacing them. Volodymyr Zelensky used the summit to present Ukraine's Freya interceptor project as a possible core contribution.

The announcement landed beside a second European security move. France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom summoned Russian envoys after agencies concluded that Russia's FSB orchestrated a cyber campaign across roughly a dozen countries, targeting government networks, infrastructure, railways and logistics routes connected to Ukraine. The EU sanctioned nine people and four entities, while Britain listed 24 people and entities.

Jean-Noel Barrot said France would publicly condemn a campaign designed for sabotage and spying, and Dutch officials said camera hacks had tracked routes used to move military goods. Moscow answered by summoning Germany's ambassador and denouncing Berlin's support for Ukraine, which neatly proved that diplomatic theatre still has a script even when the fighting has moved into server rooms.

Europe is no longer debating whether the threat is military or hybrid; it is buying interceptors while calling in ambassadors.

Volkswagen's Oliver Blume told staff the group may need to eliminate about 50,000 more jobs worldwide to match rivals' costs. He said administration, infrastructure and support costs run about 20% above comparable companies, and he warned that demand no longer fills European capacity, with Emden, Hannover, Zwickau and Neckarsulm facing uncertain utilisation in the 2030s.

The warning would double Volkswagen's already announced 50,000 cuts due by 2030, though the company still says it prefers conversions to factory closures. Unions have threatened more strikes, and the supervisory board has rejected management's latest restructuring package, so the numbers now operate as both a cost target and a bargaining weapon.

In America, a dozen states led by California sued to block Paramount Skydance's $110bn takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, despite Justice Department clearance. The complaint says the merged group would control about 27% of wide-release theatrical films, 30% of expected blockbusters and more than 50 basic cable channels, giving it too much leverage over cinemas and distributors.

The squeeze looks different in Wolfsburg and Hollywood, but the message is the same: scale has stopped being a comfort and become the case for a fight.

An ICE agent shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man in Biddeford, Maine, during an operation on Monday morning. State officials said the man tried to flee in a vehicle toward an officer, while witnesses described several shots and disputed whether the car appeared to threaten agents. Advocacy groups said the man had a work permit and a Social Security number, and authorities had not publicly named him more than twelve hours later.

The confusion deepened when Senator Angus King said the homeland-security secretary told him the dead man was not the person named in the ICE enforcement order. The FBI opened an investigation, Maine State Police joined the attorney general's inquiry and the agent who fired the shot was placed on administrative leave.

The killing followed the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national, by ICE in Houston six days earlier. Witnesses in that case challenged the official account that an agent fired in self-defence, and immigration advocates now point to a widening record of deadly encounters since Donald Trump returned to office.

Biddeford quickly became political ground. Protesters carried signs reading "ICE out", Democratic Senate hopefuls joined demonstrations and Susan Collins's earlier support for more immigration-enforcement funding drew fresh scrutiny because later funding did not include body-camera and de-escalation requirements. Body cameras are the boring reform until the bullets arrive and everyone asks for the tape.

An EU expert group urged Brussels to restrict social-media access for children under 13 and to move teenagers into platforms only in stages. The report, handed to Ursula von der Leyen, argues that European teenagers spend four to six hours a day on social media and that addictive design harms brain development and personality formation. Its big shift is legal rather than moral: platforms would need to prove their services do no harm before children gain autonomy.

The proposal recommends no screen time up to age three, supervised and limited access from three to 13, and gradual independence after that. It targets recommendation engines, endless scrolling and age-inappropriate design, while pointing to an EU age-verification app as a way to enforce rules without handing platforms more personal data.

The politics will be messy. France wants a ban up to 15, Austria is considering 14, Spain is looking at 16 and Germany already uses 16 as a legal threshold for some data consent, so Brussels wants a common framework before national laws harden into a patchwork. The Commission plans a formal proposal after the summer recess and already has proceedings open against Meta over age checks.

Brussels is trying to turn a parenting argument into a product-safety rule, which is exactly why platforms will fight the boring details.