Morning Brief, Wednesday 12 August

Colombia shifted from shock to search after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake devastated western cities including Cali, Pereira and Quibdó. Authorities raised the death toll from 111 on Monday afternoon to at least 240 by Tuesday evening, while injuries and missing-person reports kept climbing. Rescue crews, soldiers and volunteers moved concrete by hand, and the government placed five cities on red alert after roughly 1,600 buildings collapsed or suffered damage.

Rescuers pulled one survivor alive from rubble in Cali on Tuesday, giving a crowd a rare cheer amid a day of widening loss. President Abelardo de la Espriella travelled to Chocó, deployed the military and police apparatus, and promised rental subsidies for damaged homes. The European Union activated satellite mapping and reallocated emergency funds, while the United States announced $15.5 million in aid. Italy offered solidarity as foreign governments waited for a fuller damage map.

The first test is rescue, but the harder one will be rebuilding cities where informal housing, stretched services and aftershocks can turn one terrible minute into years of displacement.

Russian forces launched missiles, drones and glide bombs across Ukraine overnight, hitting Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Kharkiv and Chernihiv, according to Ukrainian authorities. Regional officials reported deaths in Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk, while Kyiv said a children’s hospital compound and an infectious-diseases hospital were damaged. Russia’s defence ministry said its forces struck military-industrial facilities and transport-logistics centres, a claim that Kyiv disputes when civilian sites are hit.

Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia used North Korean ballistic missiles in the strike on Zaporizhzhia and had received more weapons from Pyongyang. He also warned that Moscow was preparing to deploy additional North Korean troops on Russian soil, with figures cited by Ukrainian officials ranging from 30,000 to 50,000. The warning landed as North Korea fired another suspected ballistic missile toward the Sea of Japan, its second such launch in less than a week, ahead of joint South Korean and American military drills.

Ukraine said it had passed proposals to American negotiators for a plan to end the war, but Washington’s diplomacy has slowed as the Iran war consumes attention. Russia barred the liberal Yabloko party, the only registered party openly opposing the war, from next month’s parliamentary election. The battlefield now carries a second message: the longer talks drift, the more outside arsenals and domestic repression shape the war’s next phase.

Oil markets climbed as the US-Iran confrontation tightened around the Strait of Hormuz. Brent settled at $88.91 a barrel on Tuesday and traded around $89.60 on Wednesday, while US crude rose to $83.94. Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei said Hormuz would stay closed unless Washington accepted Tehran’s conditions, and shipping data showed traffic through the strait had fallen to six vessels on Monday, against a prewar daily flow of 125 to 140 vessels.

The military pressure also spread across nearby sea lanes. US Central Command said an American helicopter fired Hellfire missiles that disabled the Panama-flagged Vela Nova after its crew ignored warnings and sailed toward Iran in breach of the blockade; all 17 crew members were reported safe. Near Yemen, the Tanzania-flagged Tihamah was struck off the Bab el-Mandeb area, with Yemeni officials blaming the Houthis and reporting up to four dead, while the Houthis had not claimed the strike.

The EIA estimated that 5.5 million barrels a day of Middle East output was shut in during July, and investors now face inflation data with energy costs already moving against them. A sea lane is not a price forecast, but when one-fifth of the world’s oil route turns into a checkpoint, every central banker inherits a naval problem.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak has become its largest on record, with 2,011 confirmed deaths among 4,381 confirmed cases across five provinces. Health officials declared the outbreak in May, but the WHO said the virus first surfaced in February, allowing transmission to build before detection. The Bundibugyo strain has no approved vaccine or treatment, and responders face armed groups, bad roads and strikes by unpaid health workers.

In Washington, Donald Trump signed an executive order that recommends universal childhood vaccination against 11 diseases, down from 18 in the CDC’s late-2024 guidance, and moves COVID-19, flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, bacterial meningitis and RSV vaccines into narrower categories. The order does not immediately change the schedule, but it directs health officials to draft changes within 90 days and tells the attorney-general to challenge some state laws. Medical groups opposed the move, and Republican Senator Bill Cassidy broke with the administration.

The two stories sit far apart but point to the same weakness: public health fails first where trust, logistics and evidence lose the argument.

Lebanon’s parliament voted to abolish the death penalty, making it the first country in the Arab world and broader Middle East to formally end capital punishment. The bill replaces existing death sentences with life imprisonment with aggravated hard labour and applies retroactively to 85 detainees who faced execution at the end of 2025. Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement opposed the measure, while Prime Minister Nawaf Salam backs it and President Joseph Aoun must still sign it after cabinet approval.

Human-rights groups welcomed the decision, though enforcement remains murky because Lebanon’s prisons are overcrowded and hard labour has rarely been carried out in recent years. The vote also collided with a separate fight over a general amnesty law, showing how legal reform in Lebanon still moves through sectarian bargaining, anger from victims’ families and pressure from foreign donors.

Hungary’s parliament, meanwhile, elected András Baka as president by 140 votes to 6 after Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz deputies walked out. Baka, a former head of the Supreme Court whom Orbán’s government removed after he criticised attacks on judicial independence, returns as Prime Minister Péter Magyar dismantles parts of the old system and promises a new constitution.

Neither vote fixes a country by itself, but both show governments trying to reclaim the state from the habits of fear, punishment and partisan capture.

Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilise more than $500 billion for artificial-intelligence infrastructure. The plan treats computing capacity as an investable asset class and would finance data centres, energy systems and what Jensen Huang calls AI factories. The agreements remain letters of intent, but they show how quickly the AI boom has moved from chips to balance sheets.

At the other end of the AI economy, French newspapers filed an antitrust complaint against Google over AI-generated search summaries launched in France on July 22. The Alliance de la presse d’information générale, representing nearly 300 newspapers, says Google used publishers’ work before transparent negotiations and offered only a technical opt-out that would damage visibility. The group points to traffic declines of 33% to 38% in countries where AI summaries already run.

Spotify also moved to police the presentation of AI by announcing AI Persona labels for artist profiles whose public identities appear generated rather than human. The company will exclude those labelled profiles from default editorial and algorithmic recommendations unless users already follow them. AI is no longer just a product pitch; it is becoming a fight over capital costs, copyright rents and whether users know who, or what, is speaking to them.