Morning Brief, Thursday 13 August

Colombia pushed rescue crews through the critical first 72 hours after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake killed at least 239 people, injured 3,755 and left 287 missing. The quake damaged 403 municipalities across 14 departments, destroyed 9,215 homes and damaged 45,457 more, while hospitals, schools and water systems also took hits. The government declared three days of national mourning as local and international teams searched collapsed buildings in Cali and Pereira.

Rescuers still found life. In Pereira, teams pulled Daniela Largo from a collapsed lodging house after nearly 38 hours under concrete, while firefighters in Cali extracted Diana Marcela Troncoso through a narrow tunnel beneath more than 20 feet of rubble. A Venezuelan volunteer brigade arrived before Bogotá had fully opened the door to foreign help, prompting a blunt local verdict on the gap between civic urgency and state machinery.

Zimbabwe faced a second disaster on water. A ferry on Lake Kariba capsized after strong waves struck it near Long Island, killing at least 44 people, with the true passenger count uncertain because children were not properly registered. The vessel was licensed for 90 passengers but carried at least 114 adults and five crew, according to ticketing records and official accounts.

Disasters expose weak beams before they break: Colombia now needs rescue speed, but it also needs rebuilding that does not recreate the same traps.

Iran kept the Strait of Hormuz effectively choked while demanding that Washington meet Tehran's conditions for ending the war, including frozen-asset relief and movement on other regional conflicts. Shipping data showed traffic far below prewar norms, with just six vessels transiting Hormuz on Monday and eight on Tuesday by one Kpler count, compared with roughly 125 to 140 vessels a day before the war. Brent crude rose to $88.91 a barrel as the International Energy Agency cut its global supply estimate again.

The maritime squeeze widened beyond one strait. Houthi-run media said the group attacked a Saudi ship in Bab el-Mandeb, while shipping analysts said Saudi Red Sea exports increasingly disappear from tracking as tankers switch off transponders. Gulf markets edged higher, but the calm looked provisional, because investors now price geopolitics by the ship movement as much as by the communique.

Ukraine opened another front of pressure at sea. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces hit at least four Russian warships at Novorossiysk with a coordinated mix of missiles, aerial drones and sea drones, while Russia said it shot down more than 500 Ukrainian drones overnight. Russian regional authorities reported civilian deaths and injuries, and two major grain terminals with combined annual export capacity of 15.6 million tonnes stopped operations after damage.

The shared lesson is grimly simple: modern wars now attack chokepoints, ports and insurance spreadsheets as surely as they attack troops.

Donald Trump faced two governance fights that both turn on the same question: where the presidency ends and private or personal benefit begins. The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued in Manhattan to shut down Truth API, a paid service that offers faster access to posts from Donald Trump and other senior officials for as much as $100,000 a month. The complaint argues that many presidential announcements appear only on Truth Social, making paid priority access a constitutional problem as well as a market-moving advantage.

The other fight is made of stone, glass and donor money. Public budget records show the administration has moved $875 million into the White House Repair and Restoration account, far above its usual maintenance scale, for projects that could cost $927 million. Plans include a $600 million ballroom replacing the East Wing, Lafayette Square improvements, a helipad, a visitor screening centre and fountain work. A federal appeals court ruled that Congress must approve the ballroom project, and Donald Trump said he would appeal to the Supreme Court.

The administration casts the construction as security modernization, while critics point to confidential contracts, private donors and corporate beneficiaries with federal business. The press-posting case asks whether public information can be sold through a presidential business; the building fight asks how much of the people's house one president may rebuild without the people's representatives.

Britain braced for temperatures as high as 38C as its fifth heatwave of the summer peaked, with amber health alerts across England and warnings of rail delays, power cuts and pressure on hospitals. Prime Minister Andy Burnham chaired a Cobra meeting, urged shops to pull disposable barbecues from sale and said ministers would consider banning them in public spaces. Fire services have responded to 966 wildfires this year, including 458 in July, while roughly 70% to three-quarters of the country is officially in drought.

France moved 78 departments onto orange heatwave alert, with 40C recorded at Joué-lès-Tours and 62 million people, or 94% of the metropolitan population, living under drinking-water restrictions. Soil drought stood at record national levels, small waterways reached the most critical condition recorded for this time of year, and nearly two-thirds of groundwater tables started August at low levels. Météo-France expects little relief before the weekend.

The political strain now runs through everyday things: nurses fainting on hot wards, trains slowed by rails, residents sealing windows against night heat and governments discovering that adaptation is not a future file. Europe's summer has stopped behaving like a season and started acting like a rolling public-service audit.

German companies already using artificial intelligence expect the technology to hit younger workers hardest. An Ifo Institute survey of more than 3,000 firms found that about half expect wage declines for workers with fewer than five years of experience. For graduates in that group, 50.8% of firms predicted falling wages and 16.3% expected increases; for non-graduates, 48.3% expected declines and only 5.9% expected gains.

The pattern weakens but does not disappear with seniority. Among graduates with at least five years of experience, 37.5% of firms still expected wage declines, though 26% saw increases, the highest positive share in the survey. The message is not that AI destroys all work; it is that it may remove the cheap learning rungs by which workers once climbed into better-paid judgment roles.

Spotify moved on the cultural version of the same boundary problem. From mid-September it will label artist profiles whose public identity appears AI-generated with an AI Persona badge, exclude such tracks by default from editorial and algorithmic recommendations, and allow appeals when Spotify applies a likely label. The music can still be found directly and can still earn streams, but the platform is drawing a line between tools used by artists and synthetic identities presented as artists.

AI is not just automating tasks; it is forcing markets to price experience, authenticity and disclosure before anyone has agreed what they are worth.