July news — Wildfires, geopolitics, tariffs & industry developments

The news cycle for July has mostly been dominated by fires of one sort or another in various places, mostly Europe and the Middle East, with plenty of geopolitical tensions, and therefore costs, and very little sign of any relief.

Several wildfires are still raging across Europe, which has forced mass evacuations in France and Spain, as well as in the UK where a fire in Suffolk has come dangerously close to the Sizewell nuclear power plant. It’s almost as if the planet is trying to tell us something about the dangers of letting the atmosphere heat up too much. If so, then no one is paying much attention.

There has been a brief slowdown in the fighting between the US and Iran, though it’s not clear if this is because the Americans are running low on munitions, or have exhausted their target list, or are hoping for further negotiations. The conflict has expanded and now includes Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been drawn into carrying out attacks.

Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia have traded strikes on each other’s energy and logistical infrastructure. There is a direct link between the two conflicts since Iran has supported Russia and supplied many of its drones, while Russia has been accused of giving the Iranians targeting information. Iran has also complained that Ukraine attacked one of its supply ships near the sea of Azov. At the same time, Russia is leaning more heavily on support from North Korea, which may result in more missile technology being transferred to Pyongyang, making the entire Pacific region much more dangerous.

Peter Hegseth, the toy action man figure that is cos-playing the role of America’s secretary of state for defence, has now put the cost to the US for its Middle Eastern adventures at around $37.5 billion. Most countries around the world are also incurring costs, particularly the higher oil prices and the rising inflation that will follow but the Americans appear to have mostly ignored these concerns.

Instead, the US has just applied a fresh round of tariffs to 60 countries, adding further economic pressure. These effectively replace the previous tariffs after the Supreme Court ruled that the American president Donald Trump did not have the legal authority to apply tariffs on a whim. That ruling has forced the US to repay some $81 billion in refunds this month. Regardless of the current excuse, the tariffs are really about Trump’s belief that he can jump-start US manufacturing, though so far the tariffs have mostly led to increased costs for US consumers.

The cost to British consumers can be seen in the Bank of England’s decision this week to hold interest rates at 3.75 percent but with the warning that it expects inflation to rise later this year due to the Middle East conflict. That in turn would force the bank to raise its interest rates. Analysts expect that the Americans will return to negotiations, or at least dial down the military action as the mid-term elections come closer. But it’s equally possible that Trump will simply double down as he seeks to show a decisive win; it’s hard to see how he can win without putting troops on the ground, which he is clearly reluctant to do. In other words, most other nations can look forward to continuing high oil prices and rising inflation.

Trump has also threatened a 100% tariff against countries that apply any kind of tax on American tech companies, which Britain and several European countries already do. Up to now, these efforts have been focused on social media providers. But now there is a new concern regarding the safeguards – or lack of – around artificial intelligence. An OpenAI agent broke out of a sandboxed testing environment and attacked Hugging Face, a company that specialises in developing machine learning systems, in its effort to find solutions to a benchmarking test. That’s been followed by a disclosure from Anthropic that its Claude AI attacked three different companies during its own testing.

We’re not quite at the point where an over-enthusiastic RIP server attacks a competing print service provider. But such incidents are surprisingly common with little sign that the AI industry fully understands the dangers of this technology. If anything, OpenAI’s response can be characterised as “Dude, shit happens, just chill out and think of our sponsors.” That’s probably the best approach to take when reading newspapers these days. Luckily, thanks to Printing and Manufacturing Journal’s unique funding method – or lack of – I’ve no need to worry about sponsors. You can find longer analysis of these events filed under this month’s Letter from Lincoln and Return to Sender.

Meanwhile, researchers at Ritsumeikan University in Japan have published a new study that claims to establish the point at which a fluid stops acting like a liquid and officially becomes a rigid solid, with viscosity defined here as resistance to material flow over finite timescales.

Extremely high-viscosity materials are usually composed of rock-forming minerals, which are rarely discussed within the traditional framework of fluid dynamics. A combination of Earth observations, laboratory experiments, and numerical simulations was used to estimate a physically meaningful upper viscosity limit of 1030±2 Pa s. For comparison, water has a viscosity of approximately 10-3 Pa s and honey about 101 Pa s, making the proposed upper bound roughly 1033 times greater than the viscosity of water and somewhat beyond the average inkjet printhead.

Lead researcher Professor Masaki Yoshida of the Department of Physical Sciences, College of Science and Engineering, explained: “The proposed upper viscosity range represents a timescale-dependent criterion above which a material behaves as an effectively rigid body rather than as a deformable viscous continuum.”

The implications extend beyond geophysics. The proposed upper limit may provide a broader rheological perspective for understanding high-viscosity non-Newtonian fluids, glassy materials, soft matter, and related systems. The research also supports ongoing efforts to reconstruct Earth’s past interior dynamics and improve predictions of future geological evolution through numerical simulations.

Elsewhere, Europe’s largest additive manufacturing tradeshow, Formnext, is to host a Defence Summit at the show in Frankfurt, Germany this November. This summit will highlight the role of industrial 3D Printing in defence supply chains, bringing together people from military, politics, industry, and academia. Martin Huber, founding member of the Additive Manufacturing Defence Network, explained: “Additive Manufacturing offers distinct advantages for the security and defence industry, enabling more resilient supply chains, shorter response times, and flexible, demand-driven production all the way to decentralized manufacturing solutions. As such, AM is increasingly becoming a strategic factor in security-related scenarios.”

Back in July 2025, Heidelberg acquired the IP and most assets behind Polar Mohr but left ownership of Polar with SOL Capital Management GmbH. I wrote at the time that this did not seem like a long-term relationship, and now Heidelberg has taken over the production of Polar presses and related systems. Polar’s Hofheim site will be sold off and production integrated into Heidelberg’s facilities. This follows Heidelberg’s acquisition of Manroland Sheetfed’s global sales and service companies, leading CEO Jürgen Otto to comment, “By integrating the businesses of Manroland Sheetfed and Polar, Heidelberg is strengthening its leading position in the printing and packaging industry.”

Steve Fyfe, the CEO of Magnum Digital Solutions, has acquired Timsons Engineering from Jane Brown, the granddaughter of founder Arthur Richardson Timson. Following a restructure at Kolbus, Fyfe has also picked up the rights to the Rotary FlexFold, which will be manufactured at Timsons. Clays, which operates the UK’s largest book printing site at Bungay in Norfolk, has ordered two Timsons ZMR book presses, which should be installed in 2027. The 2021 joint venture with book printers CPI, which had allowed Timsons Engineering to continue manufacturing presses after Timson’s Ltd collapsed in 2015, will be dissolved. Fyfe was formerly managing director at Timsons North America before setting up Magnum, which specialises in high-speed digital finishing systems.

The Belgian software company Pragmeta, which specializes in automated PDF print solutions, has rejoined the Ghent Workgroup, which develops best practices and specifications for printing with PDFs. Peter Claes, owner of Pragmeta, noted: “We are at a pivotal inflection point. The transition from desktop publishing to online publishing is not simply a technological shift – it is a structural transformation of the graphic arts industry. The rise of platforms such as Canva and Adobe Express signals a democratisation of content creation. This is not a threat to our industry; it is an expansion of it. The real opportunity lies in how we, as professionals, evolve our expertise to bring control, quality, and scalability to this new wave of creation.”

Soyang Europe has introduced a paper-based transfer media as an alternative to the conventional PET transfer film used in Direct-to-Film printing for textiles.  Soyang DTF Paper is a single-sided release-coated transfer paper featuring anti-static treatment and a hot-peel release. It is OEKO-TEX certified and can be recycled through standard paper waste streams. Oliver Mashiter, sales director at Soyang Europe, commented: ”As businesses look for practical ways to reduce their environmental impact, this paper-based transfer media offers a straightforward alternative to traditional PET film without requiring changes to established production workflows.”