Reuters World News - U.S. housing bill, Spain wildfire and Ukraine front-line nests

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

A bipartisan housing affordability bill has become law without U.S. President Donald Trump's signature. Firefighters in southern Spain battle a fast-moving wildfire that has killed at least a dozen people. And along Ukraine's front lines, birds are building nests from fibre-optic drone cables used to guide attack drones. Watch the latest On Assignment: Collateral damage: The war comes for Iran’s ancient past Listen to the Morning Bid podcast ⁠⁠here⁠⁠. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.  Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast ⁠⁠here⁠⁠. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices.  You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm Christopher Waljasper in Chicago. It's Saturday, July 11th. Today. Trump says the U.S. and Iran have agreed to keep talking, that's despite continued hostilities. A bipartisan housing bill becomes law in the U.S., without Trump's signature. And in Ukraine, birds on the front lines are building nests out of fiber optic drone cables. This is Reuters' world news, bringing you everything, need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, seven days a week.

My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This July, we're faced with a threat. I can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing. That's my responsibility.

Dr. Banner? I didn't know you could get that big. Spider-Man, brand-new day. in theaters July 31st. President Donald Trump says the U.S. and Iran have agreed to continue talking, even as hostilities ramped back up this week. And that's despite a ceasefire that he's now declaring over. Friday saw a relative calm with no new attacks reported.

For more on the toll that this conflict is taking on Iran's cultural heritage, listen to the latest episode of On Assignment. Our Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Michael Pell explains how Reuters combined eyewitness reporting, satellite imagery, and forensic analysis to uncover what's happening. The link is in today's show notes. North Korea is condemning this week's NATO summit, accusing the alliance of fueling military confrontation and arms buildup. Pyongyang says denuclearization shouldn't start with North Korea, but, but

with South Korea, Japan, and NATO members. The state media is reporting that Kim Jong-un has ordered North Korea's nuclear forces to be strengthened, both in quantity and in quality. In the U.S., a sweeping housing affordability bill has become law. It's one of the few bipartisan achievements of this Congress, but President Trump is refusing to sign the bill unless his Save America Act, which Titans' vote. access is passed. To me, compared to the Save America Act,

just about everything, is a big yon. The housing measure would expedite or waive some environmental reviews for new housing projects and limit how many single-family homes large Wall Street investors can own. Now, one move by the president that is not symbolic,

Trump has removed the final three members of a small but critical federal election agency, leaving it with no sitting commissioners just months before the midterms. The White House says the move is to ensure election security, but critics say it raises concerns about political interference. Now, the move comes just after a recent Supreme Court ruling that grants the president more powers to fire members of independent agencies. Our reporter Bo Erickson is in Washington, D.C. So this little-known commission is called the Election Assistance Commission. And it was started by Congress in 2002 to be this

bipartisan commission kind of in the aftermath of that very consequential 2000 U.S. presidential election, which was quite controversial if people remember. And since this time, there has been two Democrats and two Republicans on this commission. The path forward for this commission is very unclear at the moment. The White House is not saying what the president's plan is. So we keep asking, well, what can the president and the White House and the administration do without these commissioners? And there's actually rules built in that says they really can't change a lot of the guidelines and the voting systems that they weigh in upon without these commissioners. This commission certifies election systems throughout the country. And that is just

very important because it comes at a time when the president and his top allies, are questioning the 2020 election result, which, of course, he lost to former President Joe Biden. And of course, this decision comes just months before that crucial November election, which will decide who controls Congress. China is evacuating more than 600,000 people ahead of Typhoon Bavi. The storm has already battered Japan's Sakishima Islands and brush past northern Taiwan. To follow the latest on the typhoon, head to Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Firefighters in southern Spain are trying to control a fast-moving wildfire.

A dozen people have died so far, and more than 20 others are still missing. Authorities say many of the victims died while trying to flee by car or on foot, despite instruction to shelter in place. The mayor of Los Gallardo, Francisco Reyes says high winds are causing the fire to spread quickly during what's been an intense wildfire season fueled by heat waves and drought conditions. Aisland Lang is in Madrid with the latest. What we're hearing from fire experts and from the local authorities is effectively that there had

been a very kind of rainy spring. We saw that across Spain. So that meant that lots and lots of vegetation grew. But we have had an extremely hot tune. and so that really dried everything out and made an absolute tinderbogs. That was compounded by really high winds and the regional president said

that the fire at one point swept 15 kilometres in two hours, which is pretty extraordinary. So the absolute power of this, he said they've never actually seen anything like it, but unfortunately with the hot dry summers, we will be seeing more. Now Aisland says forensic services are working to recover

and identify bodies in hard-to-reach areas of the mountainous region. It's likely that a significant number of those fatalities are foreigners, people who are probably living here but may not have had a command of the language, and that might have been a factor in what caused it. So I think the key message that everybody is transmitting at the moment here in Spain is it is really important to make sure that you understand the areas you're going to, whether they are a fire risk, you really have to listen to the authorities.

You know, unfortunately, it looks like these fatalities were people who either didn't want to evacuate when they were asked to, or they left their homes when they'd asked to be sheltering in place. And therefore, they followed tracks that they thought were safe, but fires can change direction very quickly. Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year. Someone else said that last year, too. A round of Jameson, ginger, and lime arrives at a table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for. for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. How did Jameson to your match day lineup? Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. Anti-immigration protesters march through the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa, carrying sticks

and machetes. Some break into homes and forcibly remove foreigners to hand them. them over to police. The door-to-door raids follow a June 30th deadline that protesters set for undocumented immigrants to leave. South Africa, where millions of people are unemployed, has seen a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment in recent months. And that's triggered a mass exodus of tens of thousands of migrants from Malawi and Zimbabwe in recent weeks. Our reporter, Nellie Payton, is in Johannesburg. One of the leaders of the movement has announced that. that they would hold marches now every Thursday. And so this Thursday was the first of the weekly marches.

And what we saw in at least one part of Johannesburg was that people were not only marching. They were actually going door to door and basically dragging people out of their houses who they suspect to be undocumented immigrants and taking them to the police. And one person told us that he actually was documented. I mean, that's been kind of part of the story

of this whole movement, is that the protesters say they're only against illegal immigration, but they're really kind of targeting people indiscriminately. Now, Nellie says the tensions fueling these protests are about more than immigration. The president, Rabapos had said in a speech that these are deeply rooted problems, which are South Africa's problems, and that immigrants shouldn't be scapegoated for them.

But there's a feeling that the government hasn't quite come down strongly enough on that point because people still feel that they have license to go and, you know, attack people and chase them out of their home. So even though the government has said, you know, we don't condone this, they haven't exactly tried hard to make it stop. South Africans do have a lot of things to be frustrated about the country is not in great shape. But I think that, you know, you can blame a lot of it on poor governance, on, you know, poor economic growth. You could blame a lot of it on the legacy of apartheid, which is still very much a factor. But objectively, undocumented immigrants are not really causing these problems.

In Ukraine, nature has a way of adapting, even to war. Ultra-thin fiber optic cables, miles long, are tangling up in trees, draping across rooftops and stretching across fields along Ukraine's front lines. They're used by Ukrainian and Russian troops. to fly attack drones. The cables prevent enemy forces from jamming signals sent to those drones. But now, birds have found the cables

and are using them to build their nests. Researcher Yana Rinko is studying two nests made out of grass and fiber optic cables that were sent in by soldiers. They've been finding them across Donetsk, Harkiv, and Zaporizia. Those nests will see. stay at the Kiev War Museum, while another is on its way to a lab in the Netherlands.

And by documenting this nest, we're also documenting the impact of war on nature in Ukraine. That's Dutch biologist Alk Florian Himstra, who's trying to determine exactly which birds built these nests. For more on any of the stories you heard today, check out roiders.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. If you're listening on a smart speaker, just ask for the latest news from Reuters seven days a week. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headlines show.