Morning Brief, Sunday 26 July

A white van drove into crowds at high speed on the Ahornsteig path in Berlin’s Tiergarten, near the Brandenburg Gate, shortly before 22:00 on Saturday during Christopher Street Day. A woman was killed and 16 people were injured, three of them with life-threatening injuries and eight severely. The van struck a tree, the driver fled on foot, organisers called off the event around 22:15, and police cordoned off the area and opened a hotline for relatives.

Berlin police and the General Public Prosecutor’s Office said on Sunday that they had identified a suspect, named under German convention as Abdul B., 21, but had not arrested him, and warned that he might be armed and dangerous. Special units raided an apartment in Schöneberg after midnight and withdrew without finding him, while officers examined whether the rented vehicle was linked to him. Investigators said they had no settled account of his motive or of the exact sequence of events.

Berlin’s mayor framed the attack as a blow against a city that sells itself, not always cheaply, as tolerant and open. Witness accounts also prompted police to examine whether injuries from a stabbing weapon occurred after the crash, an allegation that has not been settled.

The case will test whether Berlin can reassure a shaken public without turning a Pride attack into another round of performative security politics.

Wildfires pushed deep into western France and central Spain on Saturday, forcing large evacuations, closing Bordeaux airport and pulling soldiers into firefighting work. In the Gironde the main fire had burned about 32,700 hectares since Wednesday and destroyed roughly 140 homes, while some 44,000 people fled the Cap Ferret peninsula, part of them by boat, after flames threatened its only road. More than 50 houses were destroyed there.

Spain faced its own emergency west of Madrid and in Ávila, where the fires had burned about 45,000 hectares between them, crossed into Toledo and pushed the central government to extend emergency control. Twenty-three towns across the Madrid region and Ávila have been evacuated since the fires began, with about 70,000 people evacuated or told to stay indoors. Across both countries more than 267,000 people have left their homes, and Spain has recorded one death.

Political quarrels briefly cooled as Pedro Sánchez and Isabel Díaz Ayuso met at a command post in Cenicientos, which officials then evacuated when flames drew too close. Spain deployed 2,737 personnel, 426 ground vehicles and 21 aircraft, and received water-bombing planes from Italy and Greece through the EU response system. France put 1,000 soldiers into the fire zone, with about 500 more announced, and used an A400M military transport, which carries up to 20,000 litres, to drop 20 tonnes of retardant over Lacanau.

The fires turned climate change from a policy argument into a logistics problem, with governments shifting police, soldiers, trains and hospitals around weather that now moves faster than their plans.

India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resigned on Saturday after weeks of student protests over leaked medical entrance exam papers, forced retakes and deaths linked by families and campaigners to the pressure on candidates. More than 2m students sat the NEET medical exam in May, before evidence of leaked papers pushed the government to cancel the results, order a retake on 21 June and restrict Telegram until 22 June, saying cheating rackets used it to circulate fake papers. Many students said the block damaged their preparation.

The protests grew through the satirical Cockroach Janta Party, an online movement founded by Abhijit Dipke that mobilised young Indians on Instagram and filled New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar site despite police pressure. Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a rare selfie video saying he was pained by students’ suffering, but demonstrators kept demanding Pradhan’s exit, compensation for families of suicide victims and protection from prosecution.

President Droupadi Murmu accepted the resignation on the prime minister’s advice and assigned the education ministry to Pralhad Joshi in addition to his existing portfolio. Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda confirmed compensation for bereaved families, while the government promised a written guarantee that violence charges against protesters would be dropped.

For Narendra Modi, the resignation breaks a long habit of riding out outrage and shows that India’s young voters can still make the world’s most disciplined political machine blink.

Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, used the 22nd Russia-Kazakhstan interregional forum in Omsk, seated beside Vladimir Putin, to call publicly for a freeze in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The appeal marked Astana’s sharpest public break with Moscow’s script since the full-scale invasion began, even though Kazakhstan remains one of Russia’s closest partners in Central Asia.

Tokayev presented the proposal as his personal opinion and said he had been asked to mediate but had declined the role. He also repeated, by implication, Kazakhstan’s long refusal to recognise territorial changes imposed by force, a stance first made clear when Astana rejected recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway claims.

Putin did not answer the substance of the proposal on camera and said only that he would brief Tokayev privately on the war. Moscow still says it wants to seize more territory in eastern Ukraine, while talks remain largely frozen and Washington’s attention has shifted heavily toward the Middle East.

Tokayev did not force a peace track open, but he made the costs of silence visible inside Russia’s own diplomatic space.

The Middle East’s maritime crisis widened on Saturday as Iran accused Ukraine of striking an Iranian merchant vessel in the Caspian Sea, killing one sailor and wounding another, and summoned Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in Tehran over what it called a hostile and criminal act. Ukraine acknowledged the strikes: Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his forces had achieved strong results against vessels used for military cargo involving Iran, and the SBU said drones had hit sanctioned ships carrying military freight between Iran and Russia.

Saudi Arabia also launched airstrikes on Houthi targets in Hodeidah and Kamaran island, its first acknowledged coalition strikes since the 2022 truce. The coalition said it hit military targets used to threaten shipping, while Houthi media reported injuries and damage to telecommunications facilities and called the raids a dangerous escalation.

The Houthis then said they had struck facilities linked to Saudi Aramco at Jizan and Yanbu with dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones. Houthi-run outlets reported a fire at the Jizan refinery, and Saudi civil defence sounded alerts in both cities before saying the danger had passed. In the Gulf of Oman the United States disabled a merchant tanker it said had repeatedly tried to evade its blockade of Iranian ports. Brent crude broke $100 a barrel on 23 July and has stayed above it, a rise of about 40 percent over the month.

The danger is no longer one chokepoint, but a chain of them, where each retaliation nudges oil, shipping and diplomacy closer to the same flame.