Evening Brief, Wednesday 29 July

A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto prefecture on Kyushu late Tuesday, killed at least 18 people and injured more than 100, while a tsunami advisory for Ariake bay was lifted after no significant wave appeared. Authorities reported collapsed buildings, a damaged bridge, broken roads and heavy harm to landmarks including Kumamoto Castle and Yatsushiro Shrine, a grim echo of the prefecture's 2016 quakes.

• Deaths18
• Injured, over100
• Evacuation instructions260,000
• Households without power50,000
• Households without water140,000

Rescuers focused on the Aeon mall in Kashima after an explosion and partial collapse trapped people inside, and on a Nippon Paper Industries factory where a chimney collapse killed five workers and left four more trapped. Nearly 50,000 households lost power, 140,000 had no water, about 15,000 of them still dry on Wednesday and roughly 260,000 people received evacuation instructions, so the disaster quickly became a logistics test as much as a search operation.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi deployed more than 4,500 military personnel and framed the rescue as urgent.

“Even now, there are people waiting to be rescued, and this is a race against time. We will marshal all available resources on the ground to save and rescue as many people as possible.”

Japan builds for earthquakes better than almost anywhere, but this one shows how secondary failures, from gas leaks to water cuts, can turn engineering resilience into a race against the clock.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched ballistic missiles at US forces in the Middle East late Tuesday, while US Central Command said all incoming missiles were intercepted and a US official identified the target as a base in Jordan. Jordan's military said it intercepted five rockets from Iran, and the IRGC described the strike as a response to American actions, which kept both sides' claims locked in the same cycle of retaliation and denial.

Donald Trump promised a response before US and Saudi aircraft struck logistics and weapons sites used by Iran-aligned militias in eastern Iraq. The Popular Mobilisation Forces said at least 20 members were killed and 32 wounded, while Iraq's government convened an emergency security session, an awkward reminder that militia targets can also sit inside a state's formal security architecture.

Trump reduced the diplomacy to a threat.

“We will hit them hard.”

Saudi Arabia's open participation marked its first public entry into US strikes against Iranian proxies since the war began in February, after US officials said militias had tried more than 30 drone attacks against Saudi oil installations and American forces. Brent crude jumped toward $90 as the Strait of Hormuz stayed largely blocked, so each sortie now carries a price tag for commuters and treasuries far from the launch sites.

France stabilised the Gironde wildfire after two calmer nights, but officials stressed that stabilised did not mean controlled. The blaze has burned 42,000 hectares of pine forest since July 22, destroyed at least 240 homes, injured 126 firefighters and forced about 220,000 people from 23 communes, making it France's largest wildfire since 1949.

• Gironde, France42,000
• Ávila, Spain50,000
• Madrid-Ávila-Toledo77,000
• Spain 2026 year to date172,000

Spain gained a narrow pause as firefighters stabilised the Madrid region's largest recorded blaze and allowed thousands to return, yet the wider burn scar across Ávila, Madrid and Toledo reached 77,000 hectares. The Ávila fire alone scorched about 50,000 hectares, while Spain's total burned area this year reached 172,000 hectares, six times the comparable 2025 figure.

Heat now threatens to undo the progress. Météo-France placed Gironde and Landes under an orange heatwave warning, with inland temperatures forecast at 38 to 41°C and local peaks of 42°C, while Spain entered its fourth heatwave of the summer with several inland cities forecast to reach 42°C.

EU crisis commissioner Hadja Lahbib pushed governments to move beyond emergency response.

“Climate change is accelerating. So our response must evolve just as quickly.”

The practical lesson is less poetic: Europe can buy planes and hire crews, but it cannot water yesterday's forest back into tomorrow's firebreak.

Seoul turned into the centre of the AI sell-off after SK Hynix reported record operating profit that still missed investors' inflated hopes. Its shares fell as much as 16%, Samsung Electronics dropped almost 10%, and the Kospi slid as much as 12.6% on Wednesday after a 10.8% fall the previous day, putting a crowded trade through a very public margin call.

• Kospi Tuesday close10.8
• Kospi Wednesday intraday12.6
• MSCI World Semiconductor month16
• Korean market from peak40

The selling spread because the story had already moved beyond one earnings miss. Reports of Chinese progress in deep ultraviolet lithography hit ASML and European chip peers, while investors questioned whether hundreds of billions of dollars of AI infrastructure spending will earn enough cash to justify the valuations attached to Nvidia suppliers and memory makers.

Analyst Violeta Todorova described the mechanism neatly.

“When one trade becomes this crowded, investors don't wait for bad news, they simply need a reason to take profits. After an extraordinary rally, expectations had become almost flawless. When valuations leave no room for disappointment, even small changes in sentiment can trigger deep corrections.”

BMW, meanwhile, prepared to cut around 8,000 jobs worldwide by the end of 2027 and offer voluntary redundancy to about 40,000 German staff outside production, after Chinese deliveries fell 30% year on year in the second quarter and margins came under pressure.

German industry and Korean chips now tell the same uncomfortable story from different ends of the supply chain: China has stopped being just a growth engine and has become the competitor that resets everyone else's cost base.

Keiko Fujimori was sworn in as Peru's president on July 28, becoming the country's first woman elected by popular vote and ending a long climb that followed three failed presidential bids. She beat leftist Roberto Sánchez by fewer than 50,000 votes, a thin victory for a politician whose name still carries both party discipline and the heavy shadow of her father, Alberto Fujimori.

Her inaugural address put security first. Fujimori said the Armed Forces would temporarily lead operations and internal-order control in areas under states of emergency, and promised to recover territory from organised crime, drug trafficking and illegal mining, prompting leftist lawmakers to walk out or turn their backs during the ceremony.

She made the pledge plainly.

“During states of emergency, the Armed Forces will temporarily assume leadership of security operations and control of internal order.”

Fujimori also announced a 15% minimum-wage increase to 1,300 soles and named citizen security and El Niño as national emergency fronts, while bringing several veterans of her father's 1990s circle into her orbit. The appointments signal a return to a tough, pragmatic style in a country that has cycled through ten heads of state since 2016.

Her presidency begins not with a sweeping mandate, but with a borrowed family brand, a narrow count and an unusually loud stopwatch.