Morning Brief, Saturday 12 September

Houthi forces captured Mayun Island, also known as Perim, after taking Mokha, Dhubab and parts of Yemen’s western coast, giving the movement positions beside the 28-kilometre Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Saudi aircraft struck Mokha airport after the advance, while Houthi officials said commercial shipping could continue except for Saudi-linked vessels. Yemeni government-aligned units withdrew from the island and coastal positions, and a government representative told AFP that the remaining western coastal corridor had been lost.

The military shift hit energy markets because Saudi Arabia had already leaned on the East-West pipeline to move crude to Yanbu and bypass trouble near the Strait of Hormuz. Drone strikes damaged the 1,200-kilometre line, which can carry 7 million barrels a day, and Riyadh halted operations while crews inspected pumping stations and fires. Brent rose to $108.68, and the combined pressure on sea lanes and pipelines gave traders a neat but nasty arithmetic problem.

Chatham House researcher Farea al-Muslimi argued that the latest gains changed the regional map of leverage, not merely the front line.

Saudi restraint toward Iraq, after Baghdad requested time to investigate the drones’ origin, bought diplomacy a little space. The hard part is that the Houthis now hold ground that analysts say will be costly to retake. Chokepoints rarely stay local once insurers, refiners and navies start doing the sums.

Anthropic published a threat-intelligence report saying it blocked attempts to use Claude models for biological-weapons research, conventional weapons software and state-linked cyber operations. One case involved a researcher tied to a military institute drafting work to modify the Chikungunya virus through gain-of-function research, while other cases covered avian influenza experiments, venom cataloguing, drone and missile software, and Russian-linked operations targeting Ukrainian military, diplomatic and government personnel.

The company also reported illicit distillation attempts by seven Chinese laboratories and said actors in China, Russia and North Korea had bypassed geographic restrictions. Jacob Klein, Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, framed the danger as a problem of capability and ambiguity, since vaccine work and weapons work can share many laboratory steps. The report landed just after Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and warned that frontier laboratories had entered a race they did not fully control.

Washington responded with proposals that would have sounded theatrical a few years ago and now sound like draft legislation. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar called for a moratorium on superintelligence development and a federal oversight agency, while Representative Ted Lieu pushed for emergency kill switches in high-capacity models. Donald Trump rejected limits in competitive terms, saying the United States had to win the AI race.

The immediate risk looks less like a rogue machine and more like clever people using powerful tools for ugly work. A chatbot that can speed medicine can also speed malice, so the old technology question returns in sharper form: who noticed the danger, and who could still pull the plug.

Gonzalo Sanz, chief of staff to Spain’s government delegate in Ceuta, resigned after declassified intelligence showed that the National Intelligence Centre warned him on 29 July about online channels urging a coordinated border entry. Those channels had more than 180,000 followers, and the warning arrived the day before the 30 July crossing that overwhelmed the Spanish enclave. Government Delegate Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano first denied receiving formal alerts, then acknowledged an 11-minute call with Sanz on the evening before the surge.

Sanz defended himself by drawing a line between an official intelligence report and a warning passed through informal channels. That distinction may satisfy bureaucrats more than judges, since magistrate María Tardón is examining whether Spanish authorities reacted properly to advance notice and whether networks operating in Morocco helped drive the crossing.

The numbers turned the administrative dispute into a national one. Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said 72,000 irregular entries occurred, with about 70,000 returns to Morocco and 2,000 people left in Ceuta, while local president Juan Jesús Vivas estimated about 6,000 remained. The forensic institute had received 79 bodies by 4 August, and only two victims had been formally identified.

Diplomacy with Morocco now carries more static. José Manuel Albares summoned Morocco’s ambassador after Moroccan comments on Ceuta and Melilla, while the opposition Partido Popular accused Rabat of responsibility by action or omission. Border management is usually sold as a question of control; here it has become a test of candour.

American consumer prices rose 0.4% in August after a 0.1% increase in July, while annual inflation held at 3.4%. Core prices rose 0.3% on the month and 2.4% from a year earlier. The data arrived as oil prices jumped above $100 a barrel and diesel moved past $6 a gallon in the United States, pushing futures markets to price a 71.3% chance of a 25-basis-point Federal Reserve rate rise at the meeting ending on 16 September.

France delivered the European version of the same squeeze, with less inflation drama but more fiscal discomfort. Economy and Finance Minister Roland Lescure cut the government’s 2026 growth forecast to 0.5% from 0.7% and said the public deficit would exceed 5% of output. Insee put growth even lower at 0.4%, after output contracted 0.2% in the first quarter and stagnated in the second, while Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain all expanded over the same period.

The two stories meet in the bond market. Higher energy costs make central banks less forgiving, and weaker growth makes governments less convincing when they promise painless consolidation. The European Central Bank has already raised rates twice this year, and JPMorgan expects eight of nine developed-market central banks it tracks to raise rates before year-end.

France now prepares a 2027 budget on the assumption that growth will rebound to 1.0% and maritime transit will normalize. That is not a plan so much as a narrow bridge, and every extra dollar on oil makes it wobble.