Evening Brief, Tuesday 11 August

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck western Colombia on Monday and pushed five cities onto red alert, with the toll rising by Tuesday to at least 132 dead, more than 570 injured and over 2,700 missing. Cali suffered some of the worst destruction: officials reported more than 85 deaths there, hundreds of injuries and at least 40 collapsed buildings, while firefighters, soldiers and families passed concrete by hand through rescue lines. Authorities also counted roughly 1,600 damaged or collapsed buildings nationwide, and seven airports suspended operations as the shock spread across Cali, Quibdo, Pereira and surrounding towns.

President Abelardo de la Espriella travelled to Quibdo and deployed the military, police engineers, rescue workers and search dogs, while the government promised rental subsidies for families whose homes need repair. The European Union activated Copernicus satellite mapping and reallocated €100,000 for first relief in Chocó, while the United States announced $15.5 million in aid. Senate President Honorio Henríquez urged members of Congress to donate one month of salary.

The first 48 hours after a quake often decide who survives under rubble, so the political argument will come later. For now, the Colombian state faces the simplest and hardest test of all: find the living before the earth settles into paperwork.

A Damascus criminal court sentenced Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia, convicting the former Syrian president of murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and crimes against humanity in the first such ruling since he fled to Moscow after his ousting in December 2024. Six former military and security officials, including Maher al-Assad, also received death sentences in absentia; only Atef Najib, Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and former Daraa security chief, stood in the dock. Outside the court, Syrians held photographs of disappeared relatives and celebrated a verdict that carries moral force but little immediate chance of enforcement while Bashar al-Assad remains under Russian protection.

Russia and Ukraine meanwhile kept widening the war’s punishment zone. Russian forces struck Ukrainian cities overnight with missiles, drones and glide bombs, killing at least nine civilians in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk, while Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Moscow used North Korean ballistic missiles. Ukraine launched drones into Russia, where officials reported a fatal strike at a Wildberries logistics centre in Voronezh and a fire at an oil refinery in Orsk.

In the Gulf, stalled US-Iran talks over the Strait of Hormuz lifted Brent crude to $88 a barrel and cut Monday traffic through the waterway to six vessels, far below pre-war flows of 130 to 140 ships a day. Donald Trump demanded compensation from Iran, while Tehran demanded sanctions relief, a US withdrawal and war damages before reopening the strait.

The common thread is not breakthrough, but leverage: courts, missiles and shipping lanes now serve as bargaining chips in conflicts that keep refusing tidy endings.

Donald Trump signed an executive order cutting the number of vaccines recommended for all American children from 18 to 11 and moving hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal disease and RSV shots into a high-risk category. Influenza, COVID-19 and rotavirus vaccines would shift to shared decision-making between parents and doctors. The order also calls for replacing the combined MMR shot with separate measles, mumps and rubella injections once single-disease products exist on the market, although they are not currently available in the United States.

The politics turned awkward because the sharpest rebuke came from inside Donald Trump’s own party. Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator from Louisiana and a doctor, said the president lacked the expertise to make such changes and warned that splitting combined vaccines would mean more injections, not fewer. The order is guidance rather than a binding mandate, since states set vaccination rules, but it lands during the worst US measles year in more than three decades.

The decision also pulls Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now health secretary, deeper into the machinery he long attacked from outside. The old anti-vaccine movement wanted official doubt; it has now received official stationery. That matters because public-health systems lose compliance slowly, then all at once, usually when the rash appears.

Europe’s hot, dry summer moved from weather map to balance sheet. In Romania, the Cernavodă nuclear plant prepared to shut its last operating reactor as the Danube fell to record lows, after Unit 1 had already stopped in late July. Officials said Unit 2 could remain offline for at least two weeks, while the government prepared imports, coal generation and tighter evening consumption to cover lost output.

France faced its own heat squeeze. Jellyfish clogged seawater pumping stations at EDF’s Gravelines nuclear plant, forcing three of six reactors offline and reducing a fourth, while Météo-France extended orange heat alerts to 67 départements and forecast temperatures of 36 to 39C in affected zones. The problem sounds comic until the grid maths arrives: Gravelines is Western Europe’s largest nuclear power station, with six 900MW units.

Britain declared 71.3% of England in drought, with all of Wales affected, after the driest July since records began in 1836. More than 27m people face water restrictions, river flows keep falling and reservoirs dropped 16% in July, the largest monthly fall in at least 30 years.

Germany’s Rhine added a trade shock. At Kaub, water levels hit record lows, cargo loads collapsed and several states suspended Sunday lorry bans to move goods by road. Climate adaptation used to sound like an environmental budget line; this week it looks like the operating manual for power, food and freight.

Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, visited Ceuta after tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave on July 30 and 31. Madrid says about 72,000 entered irregularly and roughly 70,000 returned quickly to Morocco, while local leaders dispute how many remain and warn that Ceuta’s services are overwhelmed. The death toll is contested, with Spanish rescue teams and legal-medical authorities reporting dozens of bodies, while later reports cited more than 140 lives lost.

Albares promised that every irregular entrant would be returned to Morocco and praised Rabat’s cooperation, though he gave no timetable. Ceuta’s president Juan Jesús Vivas described the mass entry as an assault on territorial integrity and demanded stronger border infrastructure and more EU backing. The crisis has also filled shelters for unaccompanied minors far beyond planned capacity, pushing Madrid to start transfers to the mainland under emergency rules.

The European fight widened fast. Twenty-two member states demanded urgent action from Brussels, Italy reintroduced checks on travellers from Spain and Madrid matched them on Italian arrivals. Meta and TikTok also agreed to an EU fact-checking mechanism after migrants said false videos claimed the Ceuta border had opened.

Ceuta shows how a rumour on a phone can become a crush at a fence, and how quickly Europe’s migration policy reverts to the familiar choreography of blame, checks and emergency meetings.

Nvidia recruited Apollo Global Management, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilise more than $500bn in third-party capital for AI infrastructure. The plan would create compute-financing platforms that treat Nvidia chips and the computing capacity around them as collateral for debt. Jensen Huang said Nvidia may help create a new class of investable infrastructure, while reports said the company could secure up to $125bn of the total itself.

The numbers explain the rush. Morgan Stanley estimates global data-centre construction between 2025 and 2028 will require about $2.9tn, with private credit, private equity, sovereign funds, corporate debt and securitisation all invited into the machine room. Nvidia also keeps pushing on models, with reports of a forthcoming open-source Nemotron 4 family that could include a model of at least 1tn parameters.

Europe’s publishers see the same AI boom from the other side of the invoice. APIG, representing nearly 300 French daily newspapers, filed an antitrust complaint against Google over AI Overviews and AI Mode, arguing that the search group deployed summaries before negotiating payment for press content. Marc Feuillée said publishers do not want to stop innovation, but want the value shared.

AI is becoming both a toll road and a toll dispute: Nvidia wants financiers to fund the roadbed, while publishers ask why their work is being paved over without rent.