Daily intelligence briefing: 13 August 2026

The strait reaches day 165 with the numbers and the diplomacy pulling in opposite directions. Lloyd’s List Intelligence counts 78 transits last week against 95 the week before, American enforcement figures now stand at 55 merchant ships redirected, three disabled and two boarded, and Brent has slipped back towards 88 dollars, snapping six sessions of gains as the market weighs whether the Omani arrangement can carry a draft that bars American and Israeli vessels past a White House that rejects any impediment. In London today is forecast as the hottest day of the summer at around 35 to 36 degrees under the Met Office amber extreme heat warning, with the amber heat health alert running to 21:00 tomorrow, before Friday stacks the Arriva bus strike, the first Wembley night and the tail of the heat together. Paris remains in its heaviest engineering week with the Assumption holiday reducing the network on Saturday, and the eclipse crowds begin flowing home through Iceland and northern Spain today. On the digital side the Coldcard theft has entered its laundering phase, with the first tranche moving through a mixing service even as the largest holder sits unmoved, and the telephone extortion crew is now tracked operating under four separate brand names, a reminder that the names change and the phone call does not.

United Kingdom and London

The national terrorism threat level remains at SEVERE, meaning an attack is highly likely. The Metropolitan Police newsroom has been quiet since Tuesday morning, when detectives announced an arrest in the murder investigation following the fatal shooting in Clapham; nothing in the last 24 hours bears on the standing picture, the Palestine Action proscription remains fully in force, and no major public events are scheduled in central London today. The operational calendar stays clear until tomorrow evening, when the back of the week arrives all at once.

Today is the peak of the heat. London is forecast at around 35 to 36 degrees, which would make it the hottest day of the summer so far, with the Met Office amber extreme heat warning in force and the UK Health Security Agency’s amber heat health alert running to 21:00 tomorrow, signalling likely significant impacts across health and social care. The standing guidance on hydration, shade and vehicle cooling applies at full weight today, with particular care for older family members and staff posted outdoors, and temperatures ease only slightly tomorrow. The hosepipe bans are unchanged, and the Barons Court westbound District and Piccadilly closure remains the standing rail constraint. The Friday stack is confirmed: Unite’s Arriva North London walkout runs from 04:00 tomorrow to 04:30 on Saturday, taking out 41 routes including night services across the eight garages at Barking, Edmonton, Enfield, Grays, Palmers Green, Stamford Hill, Tottenham and Wood Green, with further blocks from the 18th to the 21st and the 25th to the 28th and dates into October, and TfL warns that planned Piccadilly line closures coincide with some strike dates. RMT members at East Midlands Railway strike again on Saturday, and The Weeknd opens five nights at Wembley Stadium tomorrow, playing the 14th, 15th and 16th and returning on the 18th and 19th. Movements in north and north west London from tomorrow should carry generous margins, and the prudent discretionary journeys this week happen this evening or early tomorrow, before the strike begins and while the heat is breaking.

Travel corridors

Hormuz enters day 165 with the enforcement ledger growing and the shipping numbers moving the wrong way. Lloyd’s List Intelligence counts 78 transits for the week to Sunday against 95 the previous week, with non Iranian linked movements falling from 63 to 45, and Central Command’s cumulative enforcement figures now stand at 55 merchant ships redirected, three vessels disabled, including last week’s Hellfire strike on the steering gear of the Panama flagged blockade runner, and two boarded. War risk insurance runs at roughly thirty times pre crisis rates, six protection and indemnity clubs have withdrawn cover entirely, and marine insurers put claims to date at between 1.5 and 2 billion dollars. The diplomacy holds its shape rather than advancing: the Omani channel remains described as in its final stages, but the Iranian draft bars American and Israeli vessels and levies tolls on the rest, Washington rejects any impediment, President Trump repeated yesterday that the United States is in total control of the waterway, and Tehran answered that it is prepared to prolong the war, with the Supreme National Security Council’s conditions on frozen assets and a regional ceasefire unchanged. Brent eased back towards 88 dollars this morning, down around one per cent and snapping six consecutive sessions of gains, helped by an American inventory build of 17.4 million barrels, the largest weekly rise in over three years. Our test is unchanged and unmet: no verified normalisation of commercial transit has occurred, and all Gulf travel, including Dubai, should remain deferred until an agreement is not only signed but verified at sea.

The carrier calendar reaches its first genuine signal tomorrow, when Air France is due to restore Riyadh, with Dubai and Beirut to follow on Monday the 18th; these would be the first meaningful European re entries of the crisis and should be treated as reversible until flown. The rest of the picture is unchanged from the latest consolidated reporting: British Airways remains away from Dubai, Tel Aviv, Bahrain and Amman until 25 October with Jeddah dropped permanently and Doha and Riyadh reduced to daily; Lufthansa and SWISS remain away from Dubai until 13 September, which continues to bear on the Zurich corridor, with the wider group’s regional suspensions running to 24 October; Singapore Airlines is away until 24 October and Cathay Pacific until the 25th and 26th; Scoot stays off Jeddah until 12 September; and Air Canada holds to the middle of January 2027. Specific flights should be confirmed before any movement is built around them.

In Europe the eclipse traffic reverses today: the totality crowds that filled western Iceland and northern Spain yesterday evening begin flowing home, and roads, regional airports and private aviation slots in both areas should be treated as congested today and into the weekend, with Madrid Barajas still carrying its minor baggage system stoppages on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays through September. Paris remains in the heaviest week of its August engineering programme: the RER B is suspended between Gare du Nord and La Croix de Berny with the CDG branch reduced to a train roughly every seven minutes and evening interruptions from about 22:45, the RER D is disrupted between Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon, the RER C evening cuts run to 21 August, the RER A is closed between Vincennes and Noisy le Grand to the 23rd and metro Line 13 is cut until the 17th, and the Assumption holiday on Saturday puts the network on a reduced service, so airport transfers by road with generous margins remain firmly preferable to rail through the weekend. Geneva and Zurich are steady with no strike action listed, and the corridor’s main constraint is still the SWISS suspension from Dubai. Monaco is quiet at around 33 degrees, with the principality’s attention on the August season and the announcement that La Vuelta will start from Monaco, and no new security developments reported; the Var forest closures west of the principality continue amid the heat. New York carries a chance of morning showers and thunderstorms today with a high around 30 degrees, then clears into a settled, mostly sunny Friday and weekend in the low 80s Fahrenheit, and the three airports are operating normally, so transatlantic planning through Kennedy and Newark holds its usual shape.

Digital and privacy exposure

The Coldcard theft has entered its laundering phase. One of the attackers has begun pushing funds through a mixing service, sending an initial tranche of 64 Bitcoin towards the mixer with roughly 10 Bitcoin processed so far in slices of about 7, a pattern investigators describe as traceable, while the largest single holder sits unmoved on 1,159 Bitcoin, around 72 million dollars, spread across seven addresses. Galaxy Research puts the confirmed theft at 1,596 Bitcoin with a possible fourth wave taking the total to some 2,055, around 130 million dollars from more than 5,000 addresses, and roughly 600 attacker addresses have been flagged and shared with exchanges and law enforcement. The onset of mixing is the signal that mattered: it confirms the intent to cash out and it starts the clock on any recovery leverage. The guidance holds without change and with more urgency: assets on an affected Coldcard device should move to a fresh seed generated on updated firmware without delay, ownership of these devices should be treated as a matter of record, and any unsolicited offer to recover stolen Bitcoin is hostile, whatever channel it arrives through.

The telephone extortion crew tracked as UNC6671 is now confirmed to be operating under at least four brand names. The group that began as BlackFile has since May presented itself variously as Redact, Pink, Helix and Falcon, with the underlying tradecraft identical across all of them: first contact on personal mobile numbers from callers posing as helpdesk staff, spoofed helpdesk numbers, adversary in the middle pages that harvest credentials and multi factor tokens in real time, attacker devices registered for future access, and confirmation messages deleted inside Microsoft 365 and Okta as they go, with compromised mailboxes used to reset passwords on applications outside single sign on. Tracked payments exceed 10 million dollars across 18 wallets for the year to mid May, with settlements clustering around three quarters of a million, and the target set spans finance, private equity and professional services across North America, Australia and the United Kingdom. For family offices the lesson of the rebranding is simple: screening by name is worthless, and the defences that hold are structural: phishing resistant authentication where systems allow it, callback verification through known channels for every credential, code and payment instruction, and access restricted to managed devices. With the Assumption weekend drawing families abroad in peak burglary month, the standing rule against real time holiday posting from any family account applies with particular force through the weekend.