Ukrainian President Zelenskiy said special operations forces struck a refinery in Russia's Tatarstan.

Iran state TV said on July 8 a U.S. military strike on Sirik in southern Iran wounded several. Hours after arriving in Najaf to attend a funeral for the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President PEZESHKIAN left Iraq and returned to Iran early following the strike.

Trump's hawkish remarks drove an intraday crude rally, prompting markets to price renewed "second‑round" inflation risk and cooling Fed rate‑cut expectations. US Treasury yields and the dollar rose, raising the holding cost of non‑yielding assets and triggering concentrated selling in gold and silver. The move looked liquidity‑driven: long gold positions were highly concentrated after bets that geopolitical risk would sustain prices, and simultaneous selloffs in tech and semiconductors forced cross‑asset funds under margin pressure to liquidate the most liquid, previously profitable holdings first—gold and silver. Pressure on high‑valuation tech (Samsung Electronics, NVIDIA) and a sharp intraday plunge in Korea 3x leveraged ETF KORU signalled broad risk‑exposure reduction. Breaches of key technical levels then triggered quant and trend funds' chain selling, amplifying volatility. Core takeaway: not a collapse in safe‑haven demand, but a de‑leveraging episode in which rising rate expectations and liquidity stress temporarily overrode traditional safe‑haven dynamics.