Evening Brief, Friday 7 August

Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz into a pressure valve. IMF PortWatch data showed average daily ship passages falling to about four in the seven days ending August 2, down from about 90 in the corresponding week of 2025, while estimated daily transit volume fell from 3.5 million metric tonnes to about 143,000. Donald Trump cancelled planned strikes on Iran and demanded the immediate opening of the strait, while talks involving Iran and Oman explored a route that could leave Tehran controlling ships entering the Gulf.

The blockade cuts both ways. Washington has restricted Iranian ports, Kharg Island has fallen idle, and analysts say few laden tankers have successfully left the Gulf since mid-July. Iran appears willing to absorb that damage while it tests how much pain global shipping, insurers and Asian oil buyers can take before they press harder for a deal.

Yemen supplied the next warning. Houthi forces launched drones and ballistic missiles at Yemeni government military camps in Marib and Hadramaut, killing at least 38 troops according to medical sources, while the Houthis said they had responded to Saudi-backed military mobilisations. The attacks followed the collapse of a ceasefire that had held since 2022 and linked Yemen’s civil war more tightly to the wider US-Iran confrontation. A narrow strait is now pricing the war, and every ship that stays away gives diplomacy less room and generals more.

A 14-year-old student opened fire at Debsirin Nonthaburi School in Bang Kruai district, northwest of Bangkok, after police said he first fatally shot his grandparents at home. At the school, three teachers and three students were killed, at least 15 people were injured, and the suspected shooter was later found dead. Police said he used a gun belonging to his grandfather, fired at least 26 rounds and left another 34 rounds at the scene.

Emergency workers described a scene that moved from confusion to panic. Students first mistook the gunfire for firecrackers, while rescuers treated wounds to backs, chests and arms and found teachers dead or badly injured inside the building. Kiatikhun Verapongpradith said his team reached the teenage gunman after hearing a final shot.

Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul promised new firearms legislation within hours. Thailand already has the highest civilian gun-ownership rate in South-East Asia, with an estimated 10.3 million firearms in civilian hands in 2017, including about 4 million unregistered weapons. Anutin had tightened some rules after a Bangkok mall shooting in 2023, but specialists say licensing still lacks mental-health screening and periodic reassessment. Thailand can mourn the children, but its larger test is whether grief finally dislodges a gun culture that law has barely touched.

Ceuta has become both a humanitarian emergency and a European argument. Spanish officials said roughly 72,000 people entered the enclave from Morocco on July 30, while Moroccan authorities gave a lower figure of about 40,000. Most have returned, but the death toll remains contested and Spain has registered 1,342 unaccompanied minors, far beyond Ceuta’s ordinary capacity of fewer than 100 places.

Spain plans transfers to the mainland within weeks and has set aside 25 million euros for care, but several regional governments signalled they may fight relocation orders. Morocco said it would cooperate on identifying minors for possible return, though Spanish law requires individual assessment and a child’s best interests. EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner warned that reliance on a neighbour’s goodwill leaves Europe exposed.

Italy then turned a Spanish border shock into a Schengen dispute. Giorgia Meloni’s government reintroduced selective checks on people arriving from Spain by air and sea, citing security risks and a possible new migrant surge around August 15. Madrid set an August 9 deadline for Rome to lift the measures, while Italy rejected what it called an ultimatum and said the checks would stay at least until August 15. Ceuta has made Schengen look less like a border-free club than a chain that tightens at its weakest political link.

Donald Trump signed two executive orders that try to restrict birthright citizenship through narrower channels after the Supreme Court rejected his first effort on June 30. One order targets children of foreign diplomatic staff acting for another government, children of enemy aliens tied to federally declared terrorist groups, and children of mothers who enter the United States deceptively and solely to give birth. The second directs the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to write rules curbing birth tourism by allowing officials to deny entry to pregnant foreign nationals when they suspect that purpose.

Donald Trump framed the orders as a response to organised birth-tourism networks.

The legal road remains steep. The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to people born on US soil except in narrow cases, and the Supreme Court majority reaffirmed that children born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily are citizens from birth. Civil-rights groups immediately challenged the orders, arguing that a president cannot rewrite constitutional citizenship by administrative categories. The case will decide whether a president can narrow citizenship by enforcement order after courts have refused him the constitutional door.

Congo’s Ebola outbreak has passed 4,000 cases and has killed more than 1,800 people, making it the fastest-growing outbreak on record by official accounts. Africa CDC Director General Jean Kaseya said 3,973 cases and 1,801 deaths had been confirmed as of Tuesday, and authorities estimated the case count had since moved above 4,000. Cases have spread through 51 health zones, up from nine in May, and 60% to 70% of new infections are appearing outside monitored contacts.

The strain adds to the difficulty. The outbreak is linked to the Bundibugyo virus species, for which no approved vaccine or treatment exists, so authorities plan wider use of a Zaire ebolavirus vaccine after early signs of partial protection. They also plan to expand use of remdesivir and investigate whether mutation or another abnormality explains the speed of transmission.

The response is also stumbling over money. Hundreds of front-line workers, including burial teams, drivers and infection-control staff, say they have worked without promised salaries since the outbreak was declared in mid-May. Some protested in Bunia and disrupted care, while authorities screened passengers on a river boat near Kinshasa after a suspected Ebola death more than 1,000 kilometres from the capital.

Congo’s responders are fighting a virus and a payroll failure at once, a pairing that lets infection outrun trust.

Researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute used generative AI models called Evo1 and Evo2 to design complete, functional virus genomes that do not exist in nature. The 16 working viruses are bacteriophages, which infect only bacteria and pose no threat to humans, but the experiment marks the first time AI has designed an entire replicating genome. The models learned DNA patterns from roughly two million bacteriophages while human, animal and plant viruses were deliberately excluded from training data.

The laboratory funnel was severe. The AI generated about 700,000 candidate genomes from a fragment of the well-studied phage ΦX174, researchers selected 302 for synthesis, and only 16 functioned after being placed into E. coli bacteria. A cocktail of the new phages overcame E. coli strains resistant to natural phages, suggesting a possible route to therapies against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Brian Hie, the Stanford professor leading the work, described the step as a jump in complexity.

The safeguards were real but not final. The team excluded dangerous viruses, worked with harmless phages and ran the experiments in a secure lab, while biosecurity specialists warned that public methods can travel faster than rules. A bacteriophage breakthrough has put AI in biology’s engine room, where the prize is medicine and the risk is instructions that travel too easily.