World, in brief

The far-right AfD won about 44.5% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, an eastern German state of 2.1 million people. [2][1]

The Christian Democrats, the party of Germany's chancellor Friedrich Merz, came second on 18.5%. [2]

No far-right party has run a German state since the Second World War, and a state government there controls policing, local schools and culture. [1]

The AfD may still not govern, because it needs a majority of seats and the exit polls do not clearly give it one. [1][2]

The seats depend on the small parties. German state parliaments admit only parties above 5%, and every party that misses hands its share to the ones that got in. [4][2]

The party closest to that line is the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a small left-wing party that has said it would work with the AfD. [2]

Every other party refused. The Christian Democrats' general secretary, Franziska Hoppermann, said there would be no cooperation with the far left or the far right. [3]

Germany's domestic intelligence agency classifies the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt as confirmed far-right extremist. That is the formal reason the others give. [3][1]

The AfD's state leader, Ulrich Siegmund, is 35 and softened nothing. There will be no compromise with me, he said. [3]

The party's programme includes faster deportations, a work requirement for asylum seekers, cuts to money for democracy projects and a citizens' patrol group aimed at migrants. [3]

Turnout rose sharply. By midday 34.7% had voted in person, against 22.4% at the same hour in 2021. [4]

If nobody can build a majority, the AfD says it will sit in opposition and wait. Its group co-chair in the state parliament, Oliver Kirchner, said that would be brutal for the others. [3]

Why it matters. Watch the final seat count rather than the vote share: if the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance misses 5%, its share is redistributed upward and the AfD could reach a majority on its own. [2][4]

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the two men Donald Trump sends to negotiate, met Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Sunday. [6] It was their first visit to Ukraine's capital since Russia's full invasion in 2022, and they travelled by train because flying is not safe. [7] They had spent more than three hours with Vladimir Putin in Moscow the day before, and Putin's foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov called those talks highly useful while giving no sign of a breakthrough. [5][9] Russia and Ukraine both paused strikes for three days to let the visit happen. [10]

Why it matters. Putin told the envoys Russia is making gains on the battlefield. Ukrainian officials told them Ukraine took more ground than it lost in August, so the two sides are giving the same American ear opposite accounts. [7] Putin still wants Ukraine to give up land, drop its bid to join NATO and shrink its army; Zelenskyy wants what he calls strong and clear security guarantees. [7]

Mohsen Rezaei, who runs Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said on Sunday that Iran will declare a prohibited zone outside the Strait of Hormuz within days. [11] The strait is the narrow sea gate at the mouth of the Gulf that used to carry about a fifth of the world's oil. [11] Any ship that enters the new zone meaning to pass through will be added to Iran's own sanctions list. [11] The zone would start at the line of the American naval blockade, and neither government has said publicly where that line runs. [11]

Why it matters. It mirrors the American blockade, which has redirected 92 commercial ships and disabled three: each side is now telling merchant captains that using the other's route will cost them. [11] Traffic has already fallen to about ten commodity ships a day, the lowest since May. [12]

Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, said on Sunday that any further attack on Iran will get a faster, heavier and more painful response. [13] He spoke a day after American forces destroyed three Iranian oil tankers, one of them off Kharg Island, Iran's main export terminal. [12] Iran's Revolutionary Guard says it fired at three tankers and three American vessels in return. [12] Iranian state media then said the navy hit an unmanned American boat entering the strait, and a US Central Command spokesman, Captain Tim Hawkins, called that a total lie. [14][15]

Why it matters. The war began with US and Israeli attacks on Iran on 28 February and is now six months old. [15] Both sides have moved from bombing each other's territory to burning each other's ships. [19] Two accounts of Sunday's attack are in circulation and they cannot both be true. [14]

Three senior Iranian officials told Reuters that the American squeeze is becoming hard to bear. [16] A naval blockade and tighter sanctions have cut oil sales, restricted access to foreign currency and made imports harder. [16] Iran's bet was that closing Hormuz would shock the world economy hard enough to force the American government back to the table, and the Iranian analyst Arash Azizi says that simply has not happened, because other suppliers filled the gap. [16] Iran's economy minister, Ali Madanizadeh, said the answer is reform at home, not concessions abroad. [13]

Why it matters. Iran's strongest card was the fear of a global oil shock, and that fear is fading while the damage to its own economy is not. [16] Iranian leaders worry that rising prices and unemployment could restart the street protests that have repeatedly shaken the country. [16]

Brent crude, the main world oil benchmark, rose 52 cents to $96.80 a barrel on Monday morning, and American crude reached $92.14. [12] Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has averaged ten commodity ships a day over the past ten days, the lowest since May, according to the tracking firm Kpler. [12] OPEC+, the group of large oil exporters, met on Sunday and left its October output unchanged. [12] Analysts at ANZ expect exports from the region to stay constrained until late this year. [12]

Why it matters. Costlier oil feeds into prices everywhere, and the European Central Bank is now seen as certain to raise interest rates to 2.75% on Thursday, with a further rise to 3.0% priced as likely by December. [17]

Kim Jong Un commissioned a warship called the Kang Kon at the eastern port of Wonsan on Sunday, with his teenage daughter beside him. [20] It is North Korea's second 5,000-tonne destroyer this year, after the Choe Hyon in June, and both carry missiles that can take nuclear warheads. [20] Kim said the two ships let North Korea use its nuclear deterrent in more ways than before. [20] On Monday the United States, South Korea and Japan began a five-day exercise called Freedom Edge in the waters off Jeju island. [20]

Why it matters. Trump ended a joint drill with South Korea six days early in August as a gesture to Kim, and North Korea answered with about ten short-range missiles and now a second nuclear-capable ship. [20]

China has sent an average of two coast guard cutters a month into the waters east of Taiwan since June, the first such patrols in tracking data going back to January 2025. [21] They covered 27,100 square nautical miles, more than twice the area of Taiwan, and stayed 30 nautical miles offshore, outside waters Taiwan claims. [21] China's coast guard calls them routine law-enforcement patrols. [21] Ships carrying oil, gas, iron ore and grain made 527 crossings east of Taiwan in June, more than the 420 through the busier Taiwan Strait. [21]

Why it matters. The eastern side is where the United States and its allies would bring supplies to Taiwan in a war, and it is the side China had not previously contested. [21] The patrols began after Japan and the Philippines announced plans to define their overlapping sea border in the same region. [21]

The United States plans to raise artificial intelligence safety with China when the two leaders meet later this month, according to people familiar with the preparations. [22] Xi Jinping is due to visit Washington. [22] The two governments are separately arguing over which tariffs are non-sensitive enough to cut before the meeting. [22] Both governments restrict what the other can buy in advanced computing, and people close to the preparations describe the safety discussion as an opening despite that rivalry. [22]

Why it matters. Nothing binds either government to anything yet, but a shared conversation about safety is the one part of the technology fight both say they want. [22]

Polish police recorded 180 ethnically motivated crimes against Ukrainians in the first half of 2026, thirty percent more than a year earlier. [23] In July two men were arrested after a 20-year-old Ukrainian woman and her partner were beaten outside a shop in Wroclaw; in August a Ukrainian man was attacked on a tram in Poznan. [23] Poland has hosted a large Ukrainian population since Russia's invasion in 2022 and has been Ukraine's strongest supporter. [23] In a state pollster's survey, sympathy towards Ukrainians fell from 51% in 2023 to 29% in January 2026. [23]

Why it matters. Poland votes in autumn 2027, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk says attackers have grown bolder because they believe they have political cover. [23] Poland's government has tightened Ukrainians' access to welfare, while nationalist parties outside it demand more. [23] It also set up 50 specialist prosecution teams for hate crimes this year, and prosecutors sent 283 cases to court between February and June. [23]

Magdalena Andersson, leader of Sweden's centre-left Social Democrats, said Russia has entered the country's election campaign. [24] Sweden votes on 13 September. [24] A 3 September report by the anti-racism group Expo alleges that an official of the far-right Sweden Democrats, Polina Malaberg, promoted pro-Kremlin lines for a decade and brought Russian relatives onto the grounds of Sweden's parliament. [24] Malaberg still works for the party, and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said she should be sacked if the claims are true. [24]

Why it matters. The Sweden Democrats support Kristersson's government from outside it, with a coordination office inside government run by a party member, and have never held a ministry. [24] Kristersson has said that if he wins he will take them into government for the first time. [24]

Jamaica's government will hand a petition to King Charles on Monday, its culture minister Olivia Grange said. [25] The King is Jamaica's head of state. [25] The petition asks him to send three questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which is Jamaica's highest court. [25] Was the enslavement of Africans in Jamaica legal under English law? Did it break international law? Does Britain now have a legal duty to provide redress? [25] It does not ask for money. [25]

Why it matters. It converts a political argument into a legal one, and the court being asked to rule sits in London. [25] Grange will also meet British Museum officials about returning objects taken during the colonial period. [25]

A Boeing 767-300 freighter flying for Amazon overran a runway at Miami International Airport just before 2pm on Sunday and caught fire. [26] It had flown from San Juan in Puerto Rico, and it struck several vehicles on the ground. [26] Miami-Dade's mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, said five people were killed and five injured, three of them critically. [26] More than 200 firefighters attended, all flights were grounded, and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. [26]

Why it matters. It happened over a holiday weekend, one of the busiest travel periods of the American year, and several of the injured had to be cut out from under vehicles on the ground. [26]

A United Nations fact-finding mission reported this week that a cross-border network supplied Sudan's Rapid Support Forces with weapons, training, logistics and foreign fighters. [27] It named companies, intermediaries and individuals operating in or through the United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Chad, Libya and Somalia; the UAE denies it. [27] More than 1,000 civilians were killed in drone attacks between January and May 2026. [27] In one case in December 2025, successive RSF drone strikes on a kindergarten and hospital in Kalogi killed 114 people, about 60 of them children. [27]

Why it matters. The mission's chair, Mohamed Chande Othman, said the outside support has brought civilians no protection at all. [27] Sudan's war has killed at least 59,000 people and displaced about 13 million since April 2023. [29]

Fighters of the SPLM-N, a rebel group led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, killed at least five people in South Kordofan, a doctors' network said, hours after reporting more than 21 killed in the villages of Debi and Luweri. [28] The dead were from the Otoro, a minority group in the Nuba mountains. [28] Al-Hilu has allied his fighters with the Rapid Support Forces and joined the parallel government they set up. [29] He never signed the ceasefire the RSF backed last month, and his forces attacked ten Otoro villages between 20 and 26 August. [29]

Why it matters. This is a second war inside Sudan's war, fought between communities over land, and it is displacing people who had already fled the first one. [28] At least 158 people have been killed since the land disputes flared in March. [29]

Nearly all of Sudan's gold is sold through the United Arab Emirates, and gold is the main way the war is paid for. [30] The country's largest mining operation, run by Alliance Mining and Kush for Exploration, sits in territory held by the Sudanese army near the Red Sea and River Nile states. [30] It is owned by Emiral Resources, a company based in the UAE. [30] The Sudanese army publicly accuses the UAE of arming the Rapid Support Forces it is fighting. [30]

Why it matters. The army's own gold revenue runs through the country it says is funding its enemy, which is one reason stopping the trade has proved so hard. [30]

Palestinian civil defence teams buried the remains of 100 people recovered from rubble in Gaza City, the service's deputy head Mohammed al-Aloul said. [31] Most were bone fragments rather than whole bodies. [31] The head of the civil defence, Raed al-Dahshan, said about 8,000 bodies are still believed to be under rubble and the work could be finished in roughly 90 days with proper excavators. [31] He offered to let that machinery stay under international control rather than his agency's. [31]

Why it matters. Without the equipment the search runs for years instead of months, and families cannot bury people who have not been found. [31] Al-Aloul said Israeli forces destroyed and dug up cemeteries elsewhere in Gaza during the war, so a marked grave is not available to every family. [31]

An Israeli strike killed a man and his daughter in Gaza on Sunday, medics said, and the Israeli military did not comment. [32] A ceasefire backed by the United States has been in place since October 2025 but did not end Israeli strikes, which Israel says are aimed at Hamas and other armed groups. [32] More than 1,300 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza since that ceasefire began, according to the territory's health officials. [32] The Israeli military says four of its soldiers have been killed in the same period. [32]

Why it matters. Hamas says Israel is breaking the ceasefire and blocking Trump's wider plan, which also requires Israeli withdrawals and the disarming of Hamas. [32]

Israeli strikes killed at least four people in southern Lebanon on Sunday, Lebanon's health ministry said. [18] Two died in the village of Arabsalim and two in the city of Nabatiyeh, near a hill Israel said on Thursday it now controls. [18] At least twenty more were wounded, among them three children and five women, and a hospital that was empty and out of use was levelled. [18] Israel's military said the strikes answered a Hezbollah drone attack on its troops earlier the same day. [18]

Why it matters. A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect more than two months ago, and the fighting around that single hill has not stopped since. [18]

The World Food Programme will cut the number of people it feeds in the West Bank from 400,000 to 200,000 this month. [33] In Gaza it already cut the value of cash payments by 40% for 375,000 people in July. [33] The agency says it needs another $386 million over six months to reach an estimated 2 million people who do not have enough food. [33] Its spokeswoman for the Palestinian territories, Claire Nevill, said the cuts come exactly when the need is rising. [33] The agency estimates 900,000 people in the West Bank do not have enough food. [34]

Why it matters. This is a funding decision made in donor capitals, not a change on the ground, where an economic downturn, settler violence and lost access to farmland have all made food harder to get. [33][34]

Pakistan's deputy prime minister Ishaq Dar spoke by phone on Sunday with the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Hakan Fidan. [35] They were following up the first meeting of the Makkah Defence Alliance, held in Istanbul on 31 August. [35] The three countries signed the pact on 7 August, and it treats an attack on one of them as an attack on all. [35] Pakistan will run its secretariat for the first three years. [35]

Why it matters. It is a new mutual-defence bloc stretching from South Asia to the Middle East, and Pakistan says it is open to any country in the region that accepts the terms. [35] Turkey has said Egypt could join, though Egypt has not confirmed it. [35]

Pakistan is fighting to keep GSP+, a European Union scheme that lets it export to Europe with little or no tariff in return for meeting conventions on human rights, labour, the environment and governance. [36] A European envoy told the newspaper Dawn there are serious doubts inside the European Commission about how well Pakistan has kept to them. [36] In 2024 the scheme saved Pakistani exporters about 732 million euros in tariffs on 7.1 billion euros of goods. [36] The European Union takes about 28% of Pakistan's exports, and clothing and textiles are most of that. [36]

Why it matters. Sri Lanka lost the same preferences outright once and Bolivia had them partly withdrawn, so the threat has precedent. [36] Textiles are between 70% and 76% of what Pakistan sells to Europe, so the jobs at stake are concentrated in one industry. [36]

Pakistan's foreign ministry condemned the demolition of a mosque in Saharanpur, in India's Uttar Pradesh state, calling it part of a drive to erase Islamic heritage. [37] A mosque staff member, Tanveer Ahmed, told the Indian Express that the order had been for eviction rather than demolition, and that the land was recorded in their names. [37] The Hyderabad lawmaker Asaduddin Owaisi asked whether India's constitutional guarantee of religious freedom applies to Muslims. [37] A mosque more than 600 years old was razed without notice in Delhi in 2024. [37]

Why it matters. India and Pakistan each use the other's treatment of religious minorities as an argument, so a local demolition becomes a diplomatic exchange within a day. [37]

The United States sanctioned Cuba's oil equipment importer, Abapet, and Fidel Ernesto Castro, a grandson of the former president Raul Castro. [38] Abapet buys the spare parts that keep Cuba's ageing power stations running. [38] Daily blackouts on the island now pass 24 hours, and island-wide failures have become common since Trump threatened tariffs in January on any country selling oil to Cuba. [38] Talks between the two governments stopped earlier this year. [38]

Why it matters. A sanctions specialist, Brett Erickson, said the aim is to create enough hardship that Cubans remove their own government. [38] He expects Cuba to buy the parts anyway, through longer and costlier routes. [38]

The Trump administration asked the US Supreme Court on Sunday to lift a block on new restrictions for mail ballots. [39] Judge Indira Talwani had extended an order stopping the Postal Service from enforcing Trump's executive order for November's elections. [39] The solicitor general, John Sauer, argued that ballots are already going out and cannot be recalled: North Carolina has started, Alabama begins on 9 September, and at least five more states in the week of 13 September. [39]

Why it matters. Whatever the court decides will arrive after millions of envelopes are already in the post, which is the argument each side is now making against the other. [39]

A man lunged at Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor of the US state of Ohio, at the Canfield Fair on Sunday, and police intervened. [40] Acton, the state's former public health director, faces the Republican Vivek Ramaswamy in November. [40] Ramaswamy called the incident unacceptable and said candidates should be able to meet voters without threats. [40] American federal political committees spent more than $40 million on security in the 2023-24 election cycle. [40]

Why it matters. It follows a decade of attacks on American politicians of both parties, including two attempts on Trump and the killing of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband last year. [40]

Donald Trump posted on Sunday that the US state of New Mexico could be renamed New America, calling it more prestigious and beautiful. [41] The US president's office reposted an image with Mexico crossed out and America written in. [41] Some American outlets reported that the idea began as an internet hoax. [41] The state's governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, said the name has been theirs since before the United States existed, and accused him of trying to distract from high fuel prices. [41]

Why it matters. It follows renaming the Gulf of Mexico in 2025, an order renaming Lake Ontario during a trade fight with Canada, and a suggestion last week that the Strait of Hormuz become the Trump Strait. [41]