Morning Brief, Tuesday 9 June

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck near General Santos in the southern Philippines at 7:37am local time, shaking a dozen provinces and sending tremors as far as Manado in Indonesia. Authorities confirmed at least 35 deaths, more than 130 injuries and about 12 people missing by evening, while rescue workers searched a collapsed supermarket for trapped employees. The Philippine seismology agency urged coastal residents to move before tsunami warnings were later lifted.

The damage spread through homes, roads, bridges and power lines, and aftershocks kept people outside after dark. Disaster officials said a landslide in Glan buried houses and killed 14 people, while residents in General Santos prepared to sleep outdoors rather than risk another collapse. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center had warned of possible waves of up to 3 metres along Philippine coasts, and a smaller wave of about 1 metre was recorded before the threat passed.

The Philippines lives with the Pacific Ring of Fire, but repetition does not make the toll routine. This quake will test whether fast warnings can be matched by sturdier buildings and quicker rescue in places that keep absorbing nature's first blows.

The Israel-Iran ceasefire that had held since 8 April broke on Sunday evening, when Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel and described the move as retaliation for Israeli strikes linked to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel said its air defences intercepted the salvo, then struck what its ambassador to Washington described as missile launch pads and non-energy infrastructure in Iran. Iranian state television reported explosions in Tehran, Tabriz and Isfahan, before Iran's armed forces announced that their operation had ended.

US President Donald Trump demanded an immediate halt and said talks on a peace settlement should move quickly, but his words landed after both sides had already made their point with missiles. The exchange stayed limited, for now, yet it showed how Lebanon, Yemen and the Gulf oil route can turn one local violation into a regional price shock.

Oil markets reacted at once. Brent for August delivery rose more than 5% to $97.83 a barrel, while US West Texas Intermediate climbed 4.8% to $94.85, as traders focused on the restricted Strait of Hormuz, a route that normally carries about one-fifth of global oil trade. A Commerzbank report estimated that roughly 13m barrels a day were missing from the market, dwarfing the planned Opec+ July production rise of about 188,000 barrels a day.

The paradox is blunt: a carefully bounded military exchange can still price like a much wider war when it brushes the world's most important oil chokepoint.

A French Rafale shot down a drone over eastern Latvia on Monday after it entered from Russia, marking the first NATO interception and destruction of a drone over Latvian territory. Latvia said the unmanned aircraft appeared to have strayed in because of Russian electromagnetic warfare, while NATO command made the decision to engage. No injuries or property damage were reported, but the episode joined a growing list of airspace incidents along Europe's eastern border.

The same day, France and Germany effectively scrapped the Future Combat Air System fighter project after Airbus and Dassault failed to settle disputes over workshare, control and intellectual property. The programme, launched in 2017 and later joined by Spain, was meant to deliver a sixth-generation aircraft, drones and a combat cloud by around 2040 at an estimated cost above €100bn. Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz concluded at the London Ukraine summit that the companies would not converge, though other digital and unmanned parts of the programme may continue.

European officials keep warning that Russia poses a growing threat, while Donald Trump's America casts more doubt on NATO habits that once felt automatic. Yet the continent can scramble jets with impressive speed and still fail to build the next one together. The drone over Latvia was a live alarm; FCAS was the broken fire drill.

Thousands of people gathered outside courthouses across France on Monday to mourn Lyhanna, an 11-year-old girl found dead on 4 June in a disused grain silo near Fleurance. Police arrested the 41-year-old father of a classmate, and anger intensified after it emerged that he had faced several earlier accusations involving young girls. In one case filed in August 2025, a mother alleged repeated rape of her 10-year-old daughter, yet the suspect had still not been questioned nine months later.

Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin summoned all state prosecutors to Paris and ordered them to review 70,000 ongoing allegations of violence against minors by 14 July. He called the handling of Lyhanna's case a terrible failure of the state and the justice system, and said an internal investigation would report within two weeks. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu will convene ministers responsible for interior, justice, health, education and equality to add measures to a child-protection bill already before the government.

The planned measures include tougher penalties for serial rape, changes to limitation periods, better information for victims and written reasons when sexual crime cases are dismissed. Magistrates also warned of crushing caseloads, the kind that makes investigators triage files they know may be dangerous. France now faces an old administrative nightmare in its most painful form: the file that sat in an inbox became a child's name on a placard.