Morning Brief, Saturday 25 July

France and Spain fought expanding wildfires that turned tourist zones, inland towns and suburbs into evacuation corridors. In southwestern France, fires in Gironde and Landes burned up to 22,000 hectares, destroyed at least 100 buildings and forced more than 141,000 people to leave, while President Emmanuel Macron ordered military reinforcement for civil-security forces. In Spain, merged fires around Madrid and Ávila pushed the government into a national emergency, with 25,000 people evacuated and 20,000 confined in the Madrid region alone.

Officials described the fire behaviour in language that sounded less like weather reporting than battlefield triage. Madrid’s regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso called the blaze the worst in the region’s history, while crews worked to defend towns rather than attack the front directly. The Madrid fire also threatened the Robledo de Chavela deep-space communications complex, one of NASA’s three global gateways for talking to distant spacecraft, after roughly 90 workers were evacuated from the site.

The EU sent aircraft as national resources stretched. France sought Canadairs, Air Tractors and helicopters, while Spain requested aerial help from the European civil protection mechanism. Heat, drought and wind did the rest: flames advanced through dry pine forests and scrub faster than crews could safely meet them. The fires are turning climate adaptation from a planning phrase into a nightly logistics problem, with buses, masks, aircraft and evacuation orders now part of Europe’s summer kit.

Donald Trump imposed new duties of 10% or 12.5% on goods from 60 trading partners, replacing a temporary 10% global levy that expired on Friday. The White House anchored the new tariff floor in forced-labour allegations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, after courts struck down earlier tariff tools and forced the administration to seek sturdier legal ground. Oil, gas, fertiliser and some food items won exemptions, but the measure still covers almost all American imports.

The same legal weapon now points at Europe. Trump threatened a fresh Section 301 investigation after the European Commission fined Google €890m, or about $1bn, under the Digital Markets Act for favouring its own services in search and restricting app developers from steering users to cheaper offers outside Google Play. Google has 60 days to comply or face periodic penalties, while Washington framed the case as discrimination against American firms.

Small American businesses quickly attacked the tariff programme in court. Burlap and Barrel, a New York spice retailer, and Collective Horology, a California watch seller, argued that Section 301 requires country-specific investigations and cannot simply recreate duties that judges already rejected. Brussels, Ottawa, Canberra and Brasília all pushed back, saying the tariffs looked less like labour policy than trade leverage. The fight converts moral language about forced labour and digital fairness into the old hard currency of tariffs, prices and courtroom risk.

A clash near the Palestinian village of Tell, close to Nablus, killed four Palestinians and two Israelis, according to accounts from the Israeli military and Palestinian authorities. The sequence remains contested: the Israeli army said Israelis were attacked during a confrontation and that gunfire came from both sides, while Palestinian witnesses and local officials said settlers entered the village and fired alongside soldiers. The Palestinian Health Ministry reported four dead and four wounded, and Israeli emergency services reported wounded Israelis evacuated by helicopter.

Walid Zidan, head of the Tell village council, described the settlers as entering with violent intent. Israeli officials cast the incident as a deadly attack requiring a broader military answer.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered more troops, home demolitions for accused individuals, weapon seizures and the revocation of work permits for the village, according to reports. He also moved to accelerate the legalisation of settler outposts, a step that links security policy directly to settlement expansion in occupied territory. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for an “iron fist”, while the army cancelled leave and prepared what it called a large counter-terror operation.

The West Bank has grown more combustible since the Gaza war began after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel. More than 500,000 Israeli settlers now live there, excluding East Jerusalem, alongside roughly three million Palestinians. This clash matters because it pushes a disputed local killing into a national policy response, where grief, land and force now reinforce one another.

Member states of the International Criminal Court voted to remove chief prosecutor Karim Khan after sexual misconduct allegations that he denies. The Assembly of States Parties met at UN headquarters in New York and voted 82 in favour, 13 against and 15 abstentions, clearing the absolute majority required under the Rome Statute. The assembly said Khan had committed a serious breach of duty, ending a two-year scandal around one of the world’s most politically exposed legal offices.

Khan’s lawyers attacked the process and said he was denied a fair chance to respond. The allegations involved a former female colleague and alleged non-consensual sexual contact during official travel and in premises linked to the prosecutor’s office. Khan stepped aside temporarily in 2025, and the assembly suspended him in June before Friday’s vote.

The case unfolded while the court faced unusually open pressure from powerful states. Khan had sought warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, drawing praise from some governments and fierce retaliation from others. The United States sanctioned ICC staff, while Russia convicted Khan in absentia over the Putin warrant, showing how quickly legal accountability collides with great-power politics.

The court must now elect a successor while keeping investigations alive and repairing internal credibility. That is a hard double act: an institution built to judge the gravest crimes now has to prove it can police itself without becoming a trophy in other people’s geopolitical fights.