WeekDay AM: 10 Things you need to know this morning
Israel strikes Iran, Air India's sole survivor, and the US dollar tumbles

 
today's aviation story

British man is sole survivor of Air India crash

What happened
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh miraculously walked away from yesterday's devastating Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad, the only survivor of a flight carrying 242 people. The London-bound Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner went down in a residential area just minutes after taking off, with the overall death toll in excess of 260. Air India has confirmed the 241 fatalities comprising passengers and crew, making it the world’s deadliest aviation disaster in more than a decade.

Who said what
British man Ramesh, from London, described the confusion and panic of the disaster. "Thirty seconds after take-off there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly," he told the Hindustan Times. "When I got up there were bodies all around me."

Exactly what caused flight 171 to crash "will be the subject of an investigation that might take months", said The Telegraph. "Bird strikes and mechanical failure" are among the possibilities that will be looked at.

What next?
British Indian communities around the UK are "braced for hard days ahead", said The Guardian, with many people likely to have connections to someone who has died. "This is a day that we won't forget," said Aneka Shah-Levy, a Harrow Labour councillor. "For all the wrong reasons.”

 
 
today's middle east story

Israel launches attack on Iran

What happened
Explosions were heard across Tehran early this morning as Israel unleashed air strikes on Iran, targeting its nuclear and missile infrastructure. Israel's Defence Minister Israel Katz confirmed the attack, calling it a "pre-emptive" move. Sirens sounded in Jerusalem and a special emergency was declared across Israel in anticipation of retaliation.

Who said what
Eyewitnesses in Tehran described seeing jets overhead and military installations ablaze. "What I can see is two massive flames and smoke coming from two military bases in eastern Tehran," one resident, Mohammad Jamali, told The New York Times. Iran responded by scrambling fighter jets to intercept Israeli warplanes.

A sense of "imminent drama" had intensified late last night, said The Guardian, when the US State Department ordered the departure of all non-essential personnel from its embassy in Baghdad. Israel's strikes on Iran appear to be "targeted at the country's nuclear program and its long-range missile capabilities", said CNN. An Israeli source told the broadcaster that Israel was planning to carry out multiple rounds of strikes. "This is not a one-day attack," said the source. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that the United States was "not involved in strikes against Iran".

What next?
Global oil prices jumped and stocks fell after the attack. Iran has repeatedly refused a US demand to give up the ability to enrich uranium that it says it needs to fuel its nuclear power program, but "which could also be used to build a nuclear weapon", said The Independent. The US and Iran had been due to hold another round of talks on Sunday.

 
 
Today's economics story

US dollar tumbles as inflation cools

What happened
The US dollar fell to its lowest level in more than three years yesterday while the FTSE 100 hit a record high of 8,884 points. The dollar has declined nearly 10% against major currencies this year, with investors shifting to the yen and euro amid fears of an economic slowdown and escalating trade tensions triggered by Donald Trump's tariff threats.

Who said what
The dollar's slide followed Trump's renewed threat to impose country-specific tariffs. Speaking in Washington, the US president said: "We're going to be sending letters out in about a week and a half, two weeks, to countries, telling them what the deal is."

Markets were also unsettled by "growing speculation that the Federal Reserve would begin to cut the cost of borrowing more quickly than expected" following weaker than anticipated consumer and producer inflation data, said The Guardian.

What next?
Investors are now "rushing into safe-haven assets", said Reuters. The combination of Israeli attacks on Iran and concern over the "fragility of the US-China trade deal" is drawing investors away from the dollar, according to the news agency.

 
 

It's not all bad

People with sickle cell disease in England will gain faster access to life-changing treatment thanks to a £9 million government investment. The funding will expand specialist centres and provide more machines that replace damaged blood cells with healthy ones. This move could save the NHS £12.9 million a year and significantly improve patients’ quality of life. The condition affects about 17,000 people – mostly from African-Caribbean backgrounds – who will now receive more equitable, effective care closer to home.

 
 
under the radar

Why Syrian antiquities are flooding Facebook

Listed alongside the more familiar knackered sofas and unwanted books on Facebook Marketplace are ancient, stolen treasures, with the platform having become a profitable hub for the sale of trafficked Syrian antiquities.

Since the fall of the Assad regime, "widespread poverty" and the "collapse" of the nation's "once-feared security apparatus" have sparked a "gold rush" of looters robbing 2,000-year-old graves for artefacts to sell online, said The Guardian.

Syria's location in the "heart of the fertile crescent where settled civilisation first emerged" means it is "awash" with "mosaics, statues and artefacts" that "fetch top dollar" from Western collectors.

Nearly a third of the 1,500 Syrian cases that the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research (ATHAR) Project has documented since 2012 have occurred since last December alone. When Assad fell, there was a "huge spike on the ground", said Amr al-Azm, a co-director of the project.

Once the treasures are "out of the ground", they "make their way online". And Facebook has "emerged as a key hub" for their sale, with public and private groups offering "ancient coins, entire mosaics and heavy stone busts" to the "highest bidder".

The ATHAR Project is tracking the route of trafficked Middle Eastern antiquities over the internet and building a database of more than 26,000 screenshots, videos and pictures. But the team wants more help from Facebook. In 2020, the social media behemoth banned the sale of historical antiquities on its platform, but ATHAR Project co-director Katie Paul said the policy was rarely enforced.

 
 
on this day

13 June 2000

The leaders of North and South Korea, Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae-jung, met in Pyongyang in the first inter-Korean summit since the war in the 1950s. Tensions on the divided peninsula have escalated dramatically in recent years, but South Korea's new President Lee Jae-myung has vowed to improve relations between the two nations.

 
 
Today's newspapers

The "miracle" of seat 11A leads The Telegraph, The Sun and several other papers, which all cover how Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a father from Leicester, was the only survivor of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner crash which killed all the other 241 passengers and crew on board. "I don't know how I am alive" is the Daily Mail's headline. The episode will pile "new pressure" on Boeing, says the Financial Times, coming as the carrier has tried to "rebuild trust" following two fatal crashes of its Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in 2018 and 2019.

See the newspaper front pages

 
 
tall tale

Barred man goes feral

A man in Kentucky was arrested after being accused of releasing a raccoon inside a bar he was banned from, according to the Murray Sentinel. Jonathan Mason, 40, let out the furry mammal in the Big Apple Grill and Bar before fleeing the scene, said the Murray Police Department. The animal reportedly bit someone and the episode came back to bite Mason, known locally as "Cowboy Cody", when he was caught by local police.

 
 

Morning Report was written and edited by Arion McNicoll, Harriet Marsden, Ross Couzens and Chas Newkey-Burden, with illustrations by Marian Femenias Moratinos.

Image credits, from top: Menahem Kahana / AFP / Getty Images; Siddharaj Solanki / Bloomberg / Getty Images; Boy Anupong / Getty Images; Illustration by Marian Femenias Moratinos / Getty Images.