Evening Brief, Tuesday 28 July

Kumamoto Prefecture shook hard at 16:27 local time when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck near Uki at a shallow depth of 10 kilometres, with Japan’s domestic intensity scale registering the maximum Shindo 7. Authorities confirmed at least one death and more than 100 injuries, while two hospitals each took in more than 50 people, some in serious condition, after the main shock and a strong aftershock hit Kyushu.

Rescuers concentrated on the Aeon Mall in Kashima, where a second floor collapsed after witnesses heard an explosion. Fire services said many people were trapped, while police lost contact with 20 to 30 employees, and officials also checked missing people after a chimney collapsed at a Nippon Paper plant. The government instructed about 300,000 residents to move to shelters, suspended bullet trains, closed major roads, and shut Kumamoto Airport’s runway with no timetable for reopening, while JAL and ANA cancelled every Kumamoto flight from 5 p.m. onward.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi moved cautiously as damage reports arrived from hospitals, transport operators and emergency crews.

The tsunami advisory for Ariake Bay lifted without reported damage, and nuclear regulators reported no abnormalities at three nearby plants. Kumamoto endured deadly earthquakes in 2016, so this disaster will test not just rescue capacity, but whether rebuilt towns and public confidence can survive a second great shock in a decade.

France and Spain fought wildfires that have already pushed more than 330,000 people from homes, campsites and holiday towns. In Gironde, a blaze near Bordeaux burned 42,000 hectares in six days, destroyed 240 houses and forced 220,000 evacuations, while a smaller fire in Landes drove another 30,000 people out before authorities declared it contained. Spain faced active fires west of Madrid, where the Ávila blaze has burned 50,000 hectares to become the country’s largest on record, and in Valencia, with around 116,000 people ordered to leave or shelter in place.

The weather now threatens to undo hard-won containment. Météo-France forecast temperatures near 40°C from Tuesday, while Spain’s AEMET expected 42°C in the northeast from Wednesday, and officials warned that dry winds could spark new runs through already brittle forests. Fire crews carved breaks with earth movers, farmers hauled water, and the EU sent aircraft and firefighters as national fleets stretched across several fronts.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez linked the fires directly to hotter conditions and a longer danger season.

The human cost spreads beyond the fire line, as evacuees sleep in sports halls, campsites turn to ash and the August tourism season loses bookings. Europe built summer economies around predictable heat; this week shows how quickly heat can become an operating risk for governments, insurers and anyone with a forest nearby.

Donald Trump suspended 13 consecutive nights of US airstrikes on Iran and said mediators had opened a narrow diplomatic window. He framed the pause as conditional, not permanent, and warned that Washington would resume military action if talks failed. Iran, meanwhile, denied that direct negotiations were under way, and Iran-linked groups launched drones toward Saudi Arabia, Jordan and northern Iraq, testing the lull without formally ending it.

Donald Trump sold the pause as a bargain that could vanish quickly.

Tehran answered with its own boundary. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said mediators could carry messages, but Iran was not sitting across from the United States, while Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pressed demands over the Strait of Hormuz. Oman floated a regional management mechanism for the waterway, modelled on the Strait of Malacca, that would fund navigation and safety through voluntary user fees while limiting Iran’s sole control.

Esmail Baghaei rejected the White House account of active talks.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Washington visit adds another pressure point, since Israel wants Washington to maintain a hard line while Trump wants a way out of a war that has grown harder to package politically. The pause is less a ceasefire than a stress test for all sides: the first one to blink may discover that the Strait of Hormuz has become the negotiating table.

Chip investors sold first and argued later. South Korea’s KOSPI closed down 10.8%, its worst level in three months, as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix closed down 13.4% and 14.7% respectively, while Japan’s Nikkei lost 3.9%, Taiwan’s Taiex fell 4.7% and ASML slid 8.5% in Europe. The immediate spark was a report that Shanghai Yuliangsheng, a Chinese state-backed company, had begun mass-producing immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines, a tool class that can still make near-frontier chips even though it trails ASML’s extreme ultraviolet systems.

The news landed on a market already fretting about the financing behind AI infrastructure. Nvidia had reportedly discussed roughly $250 billion in guarantees for an OpenAI data centre, plus another $350 billion in chip financing, reinforcing fears that the AI boom increasingly funds itself by selling equipment to companies financed by the equipment sellers. Nvidia shares had fallen 5% overnight, and the cost of insuring its debt against default jumped by a record amount.

Angela Harmantas described the Chinese equipment story as the sharper immediate blow.

The selloff does not prove the AI trade has broken, and earnings from Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon will soon show whether hyperscalers still plan to spend freely. It does show that investors now have two worries instead of one: China may need fewer Western tools, and Western AI may need more creative accounting than patience can bear.

Anthropic scrambled to contain a privacy breach after Reddit users found that searches for shared Claude links exposed private conversations and Artifacts through Google, Bing and other engines. The shared pages included health records, legal questions, resumes, business plans, corporate files and even primary-school children’s phone numbers, according to reports that reviewed the exposed material. The pages Reddit users turned up covered more than 200 conversations across at least 25 pages of results, the BBC reported, while another outlet put the total in the thousands.

The failure appears to have sat in the gap between user warning and web plumbing. Claude’s share button told users that anyone with the link could view a conversation, but it did not clearly say that search engines might index the page if people posted the link on Reddit, X or forums. Anthropic’s robots.txt file had told crawlers to avoid shared chat URLs, yet sampled pages lacked a noindex tag, and Google and Bing both advise developers to use that tag when they want pages kept out of results.

Amie Rotherham said Anthropic had not invited search engines into the directory.

By Monday afternoon, Google searches tested by TechCrunch returned no results, but many logs had already been saved and spread online. The episode joins Meta’s earlier public-feed lapse as a reminder that AI companies are not merely building clever chat boxes; they are building publishing systems, and publishing systems obey the old internet rule that a link can become a leak.