Daily intelligence briefing: 11 August 2026

The strait enters day 163 of closure with both sides raising the price of a deal. President Trump said on Monday that compensation from Iran would be a condition of talks, describing Washington as only semi negotiating with Tehran, while the Revolutionary Guards called the waterway a theatre of war and restated conditions running from an end to hostilities through sanctions relief to war reparations of their own. Brent traded near 88 dollars this morning, its firmest level of the crisis, and prediction markets now put the chance of a reopening this month below 1 per cent. London opens quieter and cooler at around 25 degrees before the heat rebuilds towards the mid thirties by Thursday, with the yellow heat alert due to expire at 21:00 tonight and an extension or escalation likely. New York faces a stormy Tuesday with hundreds of flights already cancelled before dawn. On the digital side the Coldcard loss estimate has been revised up to some 130 million dollars across more than 5,200 addresses, and Google’s full accounting of the telephone extortion crew shows the campaign accelerating rather than fading.

United Kingdom and London

The national terrorism threat level remains at SEVERE, meaning an attack is highly likely. Monday passed quietly: the Metropolitan Police newsroom’s principal release covered the seizure of supercars worth millions in a crackdown on antisocial driving, and nothing in the weekend or Monday output bears on the standing picture. The Palestine Action proscription remains fully in force, no major public events are scheduled in central London today, and the first half of the week continues to look operationally straightforward before the schedule thickens sharply from Friday.

Today is the cool pause in the spell, mostly sunny and around 25 degrees, before the heat rebuilds through roughly 31 on Wednesday to a Thursday peak that forecasts place between 33 and 36 degrees, which would make it the hottest day of the summer so far, easing only slightly on Friday. The UK Health Security Agency’s yellow heat health alert for London runs to 21:00 tonight, and with the hottest days of the week still ahead an extension, and possibly an upgrade to amber, should be anticipated, so the standing guidance on hydration, shade and vehicle cooling holds throughout, with particular care for older family members and staff posted outdoors. The hosepipe bans are unchanged, with Thames Water’s ban still covering London and the Thames Valley, and on the railways the Barons Court westbound District and Piccadilly closure, running to November, remains the standing constraint. The back of the week has now firmed up: Unite has confirmed the Arriva strike dates, with walkouts on Friday and Saturday, from Tuesday to Friday next week, and on eleven dates in all stretching into October, taking out some forty routes including night buses and the SL1 and SL2 Superloops across eight garages in north, east and central London and Essex, with drivers citing cab temperatures above 40 degrees. RMT members at East Midlands Railway strike again on Saturday, and The Weeknd opens five nights at Wembley Stadium on Friday, playing the 14th, 15th and 16th and returning on the 18th and 19th, so movements in north and north west London from Friday onwards should be planned with generous margins.

Travel corridors

The Hormuz diplomacy opened the week by hardening at both ends. President Trump said on Monday that he would require compensation from Iran as a condition for talks, describing the American approach as low key and only semi negotiating, while Tehran continues to rule out direct talks for now and the Revolutionary Guards, calling the strait a theatre of war rather than a commercial passage, restated their conditions in full: an end to hostilities, the lifting of the counterblockade on Iranian ports, sanctions relief, the release of frozen assets and war reparations. Iran’s reported ambition to levy toll fees on transits is opposed outright by Washington, and the 60 day negotiating window attached to the June interim understanding closes within the week. On the water nothing has moved: throughput remains around 3 per cent of normal, war risk premiums hold near thirty times pre crisis levels with cover for a single large tanker near 10 million dollars and six protection and indemnity clubs withdrawn, monitors count more than a dozen tankers running with transponders disabled, and a grounded shadow fleet vessel has left an oil slick of some 390 square kilometres off Oman. Brent firmed to near 88 dollars this morning, roughly a fifth above pre crisis levels, and prediction markets price a reopening this month at under 1 per cent.

South of the strait the Jazan attack has settled into aftermath rather than sequel: no further strikes on Saudi soil were reported on Monday, though the Houthis’ stated intention to extend attacks into the northern Red Sea stands, and the Pentagon’s memo pressing American arms manufacturers to accelerate production underlines how far the conflict has drawn down munitions stocks. Our travel advice does not move: all Gulf travel, including Dubai, should remain deferred until an agreement is not only signed but verified at sea, and any carrier restart should be treated as reversible at short notice. The carrier picture is unchanged from the weekend: Emirates has yet to restore Bahrain or Kuwait, Etihad is operating its daily Kuwait rotation and four weekly Bahrain services, Qatar Airways has restored Bahrain, Kuwait and Erbil, and flydubai and Air Arabia continue to operate with individual cancellations, so specific flights should be confirmed before any movement is built around them. The long suspensions hold: British Airways away from Dubai, Bahrain, Amman and Tel Aviv until 25 October, Lufthansa and SWISS away from Dubai until 13 September, which continues to bear on the Zurich corridor, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific until 24 October, and Air Canada until the middle of January 2027.

In Europe the Barcelona ground handling strike is into its second week with no settlement in sight: the action remains formally indefinite, minimum service requirements are holding operations together, and the most recent day of Groundforce action cancelled around twenty flights, so routings through Barcelona should continue to be avoided where practical. Paris is in the heaviest week of its August engineering programme, and the Assumption holiday falls on Saturday: the RER B is interrupted between Gare du Nord and La Croix de Berny and Robinson until Saturday with the airport branch reduced to a train roughly every seven minutes, the RER D still runs no trains between Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon until Saturday, the RER C west of Austerlitz is disrupted until 22 August with Orly Ville unserved from the Paris direction, Nation on the RER A is closed until 30 August with the Vincennes to Noisy le Grand section suspended until 23 August, and metro Line 13 is cut between Saint Denis Universite and La Fourche until 17 August, so airport transfers by road with generous margins remain firmly preferable to rail, and Saturday’s holiday will put the network on a reduced service. Geneva and Zurich are steady, with no strike action listed and the corridor’s main constraint still the Lufthansa and SWISS suspension from Dubai. In Monaco the position is as last reported, with the Prosecutor General’s cooperation with the Ukrainian authorities confirmed but a joint investigation team not yet formalised, and the Var forest closures west of the principality continue amid heat and wind. New York takes the week’s weather hit today: a flood watch is in force with two to five inches of rain expected and heavy rain running into Wednesday morning, and the airlines cancelled pre emptively overnight, 117 flights at Kennedy, 109 at LaGuardia and 61 at Newark by early morning with more than 600 further cancellations anticipated through the day, so the rebooking waivers issued by American, Delta, United and JetBlue should be used pre emptively and no tight transatlantic connections planned through today or tomorrow morning.

Digital and privacy exposure

The Coldcard picture has grown in scale rather than in movement. On chain researchers now put the theft at around 2,000 Bitcoin, some 130 million dollars, drained from more than 5,200 addresses, and the root cause is confirmed as a firmware version shipped in March 2021 that silently skipped the device’s hardware randomness chip, leaving weak keys exposed on the public chain for five years before anyone noticed. The attackers themselves have been quiet since Friday’s transfer of just over 30 Bitcoin, with roughly nine tenths of the stolen coin still unmoved, but the second order effects are now visible across the market: analysts tracked some 210,000 Bitcoin leaving long dormant wallets in the week after disclosure as holders rotated keys, new wallet creation has hit a 2026 high, and Bitcoin exchange traded funds took in 850 million dollars in a day as some holders abandoned self custody altogether. The guidance holds without change: 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 following Coinkite’s policy reversal, and any unsolicited offer to recover stolen Bitcoin is hostile, whatever channel it arrives through.

Google’s full accounting of the telephone extortion crew, published last week and now widely reported, confirms the campaign is accelerating. The group tracked as UNC6671 runs at least four active brands, REDACT, PINK, HELIX and FALCON, after retiring the BlackFile name, and its pretexts have kept pace with defences: alongside the familiar helpdesk call and multi factor reset, targets are now talked through fake FIDO2 passkey enrolments on lookalike domains built for the purpose, with credentials and session cookies harvested in real time and security notifications deleted inside Microsoft 365 and Okta as the attackers go. The tracked payments, 141 Bitcoin or some 10.7 million dollars to the middle of May, resolve to a typical settlement near three quarters of a million dollars, and the operational tempo has risen from a new phishing domain every 2.2 days in the spring to one every 1.6 days, with seven registered in a single 72 hour spell in late July. The target set has widened through hedge funds and private equity to law firms and rating agencies, with Blackstone, KKR and CME among the names in recent reporting. For family offices the defences remain procedural: phishing resistant authentication where systems allow it, callback verification through known channels for every credential, code and payment instruction, and, with August the peak month for burglary, no real time holiday posting from any family account.