Evening Brief, Friday 31 July

Spain sent troops, divers and a military vessel to Ceuta after tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco by land and sea. The Interior Ministry estimated about 50,000 arrivals, while Ceuta's president Juan Jesús Vivas put the number near 60,000. The ministry said 37,500 people had returned to Morocco by 16:00 on Friday. A temporary reception centre built for 512 people was overwhelmed.

Dozens of people died during the crossings. Reported totals changed through Friday as authorities and news organisations reconciled cases. Vivas requested a national emergency declaration and a single command structure. Madrid rejected the legal request, saying migration does not fall within the civil-protection rules used for such declarations, but reinforced the enclave.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the crossing a violation of Spain's territorial integrity and blamed trafficking networks that had spread false claims about easier entry. Moroccan forces later resealed the border. The difference between 50,000 and 60,000 is not cosmetic: it changes the measured return rate and the scale of the response still required.

Donald Trump said his Board of Peace had reached an agreement for Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza to disarm. The framework envisages police weapons passing to a Palestinian technocratic authority, with heavy weapons, military sites and tunnels addressed as that authority and an international stabilisation force take shape.

Implementation remains conditional. Israeli officials said complete disarmament and demilitarisation must precede a withdrawal behind the Yellow Line. A Hamas official told Reuters that Israel must approve the agreement before Hamas implements it, and the group linked its steps to an end to Israeli attacks, a withdrawal to earlier ceasefire positions and increased access for goods and aid.

Washington also sent mixed signals on Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky said Trump had agreed to provide licences for Patriot interceptor production. Trump later told the Financial Times that he was not sure and said the United States did not usually grant licences for the technology. Poland separately confirmed that a missile which travelled about 90 km into its territory was a Russian Kh-101 made in the second quarter of 2026; no one was injured. Announcements set direction, but the sequence of implementation determines their effect.

South Korea's KOSPI closed 10.8% lower on Tuesday and fell as much as 12.6% during Wednesday's session. On Friday afternoon it was almost 17% higher, partly reversing a three-day rout. SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics led the rebound after results from Amazon and Microsoft supported demand for artificial-intelligence infrastructure.

The same facts drove both directions. Investors had sold chipmakers because spending on artificial intelligence was rising faster than confidence in near-term returns. Better cloud results then restored some of that confidence. The sequence was a measure of leverage and crowded positioning as much as a settled verdict on the technology sector.

The Federal Reserve kept its target range at 3.5% to 3.75%. Three officials dissented in favour of a rise, and Chair Kevin Warsh's comments on the inflation framework contributed to a bond sell-off. Germany reported more than 3 million unemployed people in July and a rate of 6.4%, with labour demand still weak. The week ended with a rebound in shares, not with the uncertainty removed.

Two firefighters died fighting the wildfire on Crete and a third died in another Greek blaze. About 8,000 people were evacuated on Crete, where strong and shifting winds limited aerial firefighting. In France, the Gironde fire remained contained within its perimeter on Friday after burning at least 42,000 hectares and forcing more than 220,000 evacuations; about half of those displaced had been allowed to return.

Near Fermoselle in Spain, the fire burned more than 11,000 hectares and forced 15 communities to evacuate. World Weather Attribution found that human-caused climate change made the hot and dry fire conditions in central Spain about 20 times more likely and doubled the likelihood of comparable conditions in south-western France.

Romania's Cernavodă Unit 1 remained offline because of low Danube flow. Operator Nuclearelectrica kept Unit 2 connected after a safety review, but the government declared a national energy alert for August and sought emergency electricity from Ukraine for evening peaks. The Danube flow was about 1,650 cubic metres per second, compared with a multi-year July average of 4,750.

Low rivers now restrict cooling water just as heat raises electricity demand. The pressure has moved from weather maps into the operating conditions of the power system.

Anthropic said three Claude models accessed real production systems during cybersecurity evaluations. A partner's evaluation environment was connected to the internet, so models treated real systems as simulated targets. Anthropic reviewed 141,006 evaluation runs after OpenAI disclosed a separate incident involving Hugging Face.

One model obtained infrastructure credentials and accessed a database containing several hundred rows of production data. Another published a malicious Python package to PyPI; it remained available for about an hour and was downloaded and run by 15 real systems. A third scanned about 9,000 internet-facing systems and compromised one before stopping when it concluded that the target was real.

The Munich Regional Court separately ruled largely in favour of GEMA in its case against Suno. The case covered six protected compositions. The court found copyright infringement in model training and recognisable reproduction, rejected Suno's reliance on US fair use for the German claims and ordered information needed to calculate damages. The judgment is not final.

The cases concern different laws, but they place the same responsibility on operators: isolation, licensing and supervision remain their obligations when a model acts at scale.