Morning Brief, Tuesday 28 July

Donald Trump halted US strikes on Iran after nearly two weeks of exchanges, and markets immediately traded the pause as if it were a small ceasefire dividend. Brent fell sharply and West Texas Intermediate dropped too, while equities and airline shares gained as traders unwound some of the war premium built around the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping through the waterway stayed depressed, and Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan still reported drone incidents in the wider region.

Washington and Tehran offered clashing accounts of what the pause means. Donald Trump said Iran had sought a meeting and warned he would resume force if diplomacy failed. Iran’s foreign ministry rejected that version, saying mediators could pass messages but that direct talks with Washington were not happening.

The next pressure point sits in Washington, where Benjamin Netanyahu is due to meet Donald Trump and is expected to press for a broader campaign against Iran, while Pakistani intelligence services reportedly assess that a limited US ground move against Iranian coastal areas is increasingly likely. The pause has cut the market temperature, but it has not settled the political question of who controls navigation, escalation and the tempo of any next strike. Cheaper oil buys governments time; it does not buy them a strategy for a strait through which one-fifth of the world’s oil normally moves.

France fought a Gironde wildfire that had burned 42,000 hectares and pushed to within 15 km of Bordeaux, forcing evacuations on a scale rarely seen in living memory. Emmanuel Macron chaired a crisis meeting and travelled to Bordeaux to meet the mobilised crews, while 2,500 firefighters, backed by 1,500 soldiers, 1,200 police and EU aircraft, tried to hold lines before another blast of heat. Fire officers said the overnight situation had stabilised, not been controlled.

Spain faced its own widening emergency. More than 90,000 people remained evacuated or confined as fires burned across Madrid, Ávila, Toledo and Castellón, and forecasters warned a fourth summer heatwave could push temperatures to 44C around Córdoba. Spain has just recorded its second-warmest June since measurements began in 1961, according to AEMET, and fire-risk warnings now cover much of the country. France, Spain and Germany are all moving from heat alert into fire politics, where evacuation orders, farm restrictions and emergency funds arrive faster than prevention plans.

The most alarming sign over Bordeaux was not only flame, but weather made by flame. A pyrocumulonimbus cloud rose from the fire plume, a thunderstorm engine that can throw lightning, downdrafts and embers beyond the main front. The Gironde fire service has confirmed it as the first ever recorded in France, a marker of how Mediterranean fire behaviour is creeping north and west. Europe is no longer fighting only fires on hot days; it is fighting fires that start making their own weather.

Berlin’s Pride attack now drives Germany’s argument over known threats and court restraint. A 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese descent, previously convicted in a terrorism-related case and released under probation, drove a rented van into a Christopher Street Day crowd, then attacked passers-by with a machete, according to officials. A 65-year-old Polish woman died and 29 people were injured before police later shot the suspect dead when he threatened officers with a blade.

Seattle faced a different horror, with gunfire at the Bite of Seattle food festival killing three people and injuring four; investigators initially said two people appeared to shoot at each other near the Seattle Center Armory, and court documents now describe at least three shooters. Police arrested a 15-year-old on firearms and assault allegations, recovered two weapons and asked the public for video as they searched for a second shooter. In Paris, an off-duty officer and passers-by stopped a man with two kitchen knives after three women were stabbed near Porte de Clichy.

The cases differ in motive, weapons and legal setting, so governments should resist one-size-fits-all answers. Yet each attack struck an ordinary public place, a parade, a food festival, a pavement, where people assume the state has already done the quiet work of risk management. Public safety fails first as shock, then as paperwork.

CXMT’s Shanghai debut gave Beijing a semiconductor victory with a retail-investor aftertaste. The Chinese memory-chip maker finished 466% above its issue price, briefly reached a market value of about $547bn, momentarily overtaking Tencent as China’s most valuable listed company, and raised about $9.8bn in the country’s second-largest domestic IPO. Demand from individual buyers reportedly reached roughly $1tn, even though CXMT still trails Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron technologically and holds about 8% of the global DRAM market.

Founder Zhu Yiming also pledged 767.9m shares, worth about $5.6bn at the closing price, to employee incentive schemes that vest after three years and pay out over a decade. The gesture speaks to a hard constraint in China’s chip push: engineers, not slogans, close technology gaps, says Meng Shen, a director at investment bank Chanson & Co.

Nvidia is meanwhile discussing a roughly $250bn guarantee to back OpenAI’s proposed 10-gigawatt data-centre campus in southern Ohio, plus separate financing for up to $350bn of chip purchases. The guarantee would wrap the project’s lease and construction debt rather than hand OpenAI cash, but it would still tie Nvidia’s balance-sheet strength to years of demand for its processors. The total cost of the Ohio build-out, including chips, could exceed $500bn.

These deals reveal the AI supply chain’s new shape. China channels household savings and state ambition into domestic chips, while America’s AI leaders stitch together power rights, debt guarantees and processor commitments on a scale once reserved for national infrastructure. The chip cycle has become an arms race with prospectuses.

India’s Cockroach Janta Party began as satire after the chief justice used the word cockroaches for jobless young people and activists, then grew into a real movement after the NEET medical entrance paper leaked. More than 2m students took the exam on May 3, officials scrapped it nine days later and a retest followed in June. Protests spread from Jantar Mantar in New Delhi after founder Abhijeet Dipke demanded Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation.

The government first used force, then yielded. Police removed Sonam Wangchuk to hospital during his hunger strike, acting on a court order, officers used tear gas and batons when crowds tried to march on parliament, and at least 100 people were arrested nationally, according to the movement’s own tally. Pradhan resigned on July 25 after negotiations, and the government promised compensation for families of students who died by suicide after the leak, withdrawal of cases and talks on exam reform.

The struggle has now moved from the street to the Delhi High Court. Former JNU students’ union president Aishe Ghosh wants mass surveillance of protesters declared unconstitutional, personal data destroyed and rules written for police use of cameras, including mobile vans with mast-mounted systems. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta defended the police, saying checks served a legitimate state interest. The case will decide whether a government can concede to a protest while keeping the data trail that protest left behind.