Morning Brief, Friday 14 August

Europe’s heatwave moved from unpleasant to operational. The UK recorded 38.1C at Kew Gardens, its hottest day of 2026 and provisionally the fifth hottest on record, while France’s heatwave reached a 17th day and beat the duration of the 2003 episode. France kept 80 departments on orange alert and recorded 42.5C in Châteaumeillant, as fires, ozone pollution and water cuts spread across the country.

The Danube then turned heat into an energy problem. Romania disconnected Unit 2 at the Cernavoda nuclear plant after record-low river levels starved the station of cooling water, with Unit 1 already down since late July. Cernavoda normally supplies about a fifth of Romania’s electricity, and Hungary’s Paks plant has also cut output as the river dropped.

Governments patched the gaps with lignite, imports, voluntary cuts and industrial slowdowns, including production suspensions at Dacia and Ford in Romania. France estimated this summer’s repeated heatwaves could cost 10 billion to 15 billion euros, while EDF’s nuclear fleet hit record environmental unavailability linked to high temperatures. The old bargain, cheap power cooled by reliable rivers, looks less reliable when the rivers themselves become part of the crisis.

Spain’s Ceuta crisis has become a fight over both border control and arithmetic. Madrid now estimates that about 80,000 migrants crossed from Morocco on July 30, with roughly 70,000 returning, while at least 83 people died. Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said about 5,000 people remain in the enclave, half of them unaccompanied minors and half potential asylum seekers, but Ceuta’s president Juan Jesús Vivas put the figure at 9,000.

Vivas demanded immediate returns, a halt to asylum processing in the city and faster legal routes for removals. Madrid instead sent 45 more police officers and promised that relocation of unaccompanied minors would begin within 15 days, backed by an extraordinary 25 million euro transfer for care. Ceuta has identified 1,898 unaccompanied minors, a legal and practical load far beyond its normal capacity.

Italy kept its temporary Schengen suspension with Spain, saying national security risks had not faded, and Spain answered with checks on Italian travellers. Rome said its restored controls produced three arrests and 21 refusals of entry, though it could not say whether the six Moroccans stopped had come from Ceuta. A local border shock has become a European habit test: solidarity when convenient, sovereignty when nervous.

Vladimir Putin made his first in-person visit to Iturup, one of the Kuril Islands claimed by both Russia and Japan, and turned a territorial dispute into a televised message from Russia’s far east. He inspected a fish-processing plant, visited a school and chaired security discussions after overseeing naval drills in the region. Japan summoned Russia’s ambassador and called the trip an affront to its claim over the islands it calls the Northern Territories.

Russia rejected Tokyo’s protest and accused Japan of revisionism, deepening a dispute that has blocked a formal peace treaty since the Soviet seizure of the islands in 1945. The visit landed at a time when Japan has joined Western sanctions over Ukraine, and Moscow has already frozen peace talks and expanded military activity on the islands.

In Warsaw, Donald Tusk said Polish services had arrested a 29-year-old Russian citizen recruited by Russian intelligence to kill a Ukrainian-American arms entrepreneur supplying Ukraine’s military. Polish authorities framed the case as the first known Russian-ordered plot against a US citizen on the territory of another NATO state, and tied it to a broader pattern of sabotage, espionage and intimidation across Europe.

Together the two stories show Russia working different levers: maps in the Pacific, covert violence in Europe and the constant suggestion that borders are negotiable if Moscow applies enough pressure.

Taiwan confirmed what may be the first publicly documented autonomous AI-agent cyberattack on government networks. Its digital ministry said July’s incident bore the marks of an overseas source and combined manual hacking with AI agent-assisted tools such as OpenClaw. Researchers said the attackers used open-source agents to map government systems, run 12 attack waves, compromise 85 accounts and extract more than 2,500 justice-ministry personnel records before probing nuclear-safety and energy targets.

Poland faced a different sort of breach, but on a larger human scale. A cyberattack on MyDr, a private medical-software provider used by about 12,000 health facilities, exposed data of nearly 19 million people, including national identification numbers, medication records and prescriptions. France confirmed a breach of its tax portal after identity theft, with specialist trackers reporting data on 678,437 people for sale and a second claimed leak involving nearly 2 million property owners.

The pattern is awkward for governments. Taiwan points to AI-enabled intrusion that can improvise, Poland shows the danger of outsourcing sensitive health data to private processors, and France shows how long a public breach can sit before disclosure. Cybersecurity is no longer just a technical department’s headache; it is becoming the place where state capacity, private incentives and public trust collide.

Colombia’s strongest earthquake in half a century has left the country counting losses rather than finding survivors. The 7.4-magnitude quake struck near San José del Palmar in Chocó on August 10, and by Thursday officials reported 273 dead, 3,824 injured and 377 missing. The disaster affected 403 municipalities across 14 departments, destroyed 12,584 homes and damaged nearly 75,000 more.

Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, suffered at least 96 deaths and declared a hospital red alert after public facilities reached capacity. Four hospitals and six clinics were forced out of operation, while doctors worked around damaged walls and ceilings. In poorer Chocó, landslides cut off roads around the epicentre, making helicopters the main aid route and pushing complex patients toward Medellín by air.

President Abelardo De La Espriella, only days into office, said he would declare an economic emergency and create a reconstruction fund. Business groups at a national congress in Cartagena shifted their agenda toward donations, food, medicine and construction supplies. The immediate rescue window has largely closed, but the political one has opened: a president elected on spending restraint now has to prove that austerity can survive first contact with rubble.