World, in brief

US pressure to settle

Trump's envoys saw both leaders in one weekend, and a White House official says next steps come within weeks [1]

Russia's belief it is winning

Putin is determined to take all of Donetsk and believes his army can do it within six months [4]

Ukraine's staying power

Zelenskyy is planning for a winter of war and for talks with the US, France and Germany [2]

Talks about talks

Russia's government will not rule out three-way talks and will not name a place or a day [3]

1. 1Russia strikes Kyiv the hour the pause ends, and the US envoys leave with nothing agreed
2. 2Nicaragua takes Germany to the World Court
3. 3Israeli strikes kill 11 in a south Lebanon town
4. 4Trump's Gaza envoy says two states are now near impossible
5. 5Britain moves to ban trade with Israeli settlements

Russian drones hit Kyiv early on Tuesday, hours after a three-day pause in attacks on the Ukrainian and Russian capitals ran out. [1]

Watch whether the three-way talks get a date.

Russia's government says they are possible but will not name a venue or a day, and nothing has been announced as agreed. [3]

Germany appeared at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Monday to argue that the court has no right to hear a case against it. [6]

Nicaragua brought the case in March 2024, saying Germany broke the 1948 Genocide Convention by sending Israel military equipment while knowing genocide might be committed in Gaza. [7]

Germany is Israel's second largest arms supplier after the United States and denies the claim. Its foreign ministry legal adviser Julia Monar asked the judges to reject it. [6][7]

This week's hearing decides only whether the case can go further. [7]

Israel is not a party to these proceedings, so the country in the dock is the one that agreed to be judged rather than the one accused of the acts. [6]

A German lawyer argued in 2024 that 98 percent of exports to Israel since October 2023 were helmets, vests and binoculars. [7]

Israeli warplanes hit a residential building in Kfar Rumman in southern Lebanon just after midnight on Monday, killing nine people including two children, Lebanon's national news agency said. [8]

A drone then hit a car in the same town and killed two paramedics inside it, taking the toll to 11. [8]

Haaretz, citing the same agency, reported that two of the dead were babies. [10] No online evacuation warning was posted first. [8]

A ceasefire agreed in June was meant to stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group and political party. [8]

At least seven people had already been killed in Israeli strikes the day before, and Israel did not answer questions from Reuters about Monday's. [8]

Separately, the Houthi movement in Yemen said it shot down a Saudi reconnaissance aircraft over Jawf province, a claim the Associated Press could not verify. [9]

Nickolay Mladenov, the lead envoy for Gaza on Trump's US-backed Board of Peace, said on Monday that a two-state solution is practically impossible unless the Gaza plan is carried out. [11][12]

Israel has not let in the commission of Palestinian technocrats the plan created to run Gaza's daily affairs, saying they may enter only once Hamas gives up its weapons. [11]

Mladenov said two more countries are likely to join an international force that would train Gaza's police. [11]

He named where it is stuck: Israel is in an election campaign next month and Benjamin Netanyahu has made national security the centre of it. [11]

Mladenov said Hamas agreed in July to hand over its heavy weapons. [11]

Britain's foreign secretary Ed Miliband was due to announce a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, officials told Middle East Eye. [13]

The ban is meant to bring the UK into line with a World Court opinion of July 2024. [13]

The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, wrote on X on Saturday that the British government's hatred of Jews knows no facts. [13]

Israel's foreign minister Gideon Saar warned last week that if Britain acts against Israel, Israel will act against Britain. [13]

Campaigners say the measure is late and narrow, and that Britain's government still refuses to use the word genocide or stop all arms sales. [13] Miliband is Jewish; Huckabee is not. [13]

Russia's foreign ministry ordered the German consulate in St Petersburg to stop work by 18 September and its staff to leave the country by the same date. [14][15]

It is a direct answer to Germany, which closed Russia's consulate in Bonn and the Russian House cultural centre in Berlin last week after accusing Russia of an attempted drone attack on Leipzig airport. [14][15]

Russia then ordered every branch of Germany's Goethe-Institut language centres shut. [14] Putin says the evidence against Russia was planted. [14]

Germany has given Ukraine more than $50bn in civilian aid and almost $67bn in military help, by its own foreign ministry's count, which is why it is the European country Russia squeezes first. [14]

Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said the German closures marked the beginning of a real war. [14]

The first road bridge between Russia and North Korea opened on Monday, with flag-covered trucks crossing the one-kilometre span over the Tumen River. [16]

Until now the two countries were joined only by air and by a rail bridge commissioned in 1959. [16]

Russia's prime minister Mikhail Mishustin said up to 300 vehicles a day will be able to cross and that the bridge will link to Russia's national road network. [16]

Building started in April last year, after Putin agreed it on a visit to North Korea in 2024. [16]

North Korea sent thousands of troops to help Russia push Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region in 2024, and Mishustin thanked those soldiers at the opening. [16]

A country cut off from Western trade has spent a year building a road to the neighbour that will still use it. [16]

When one route might be shut, everyone who needs it starts paying for a slower one straight away — and keeps paying after the danger passes.

the same step four: Anwar Gargash is expanding ports, pipelines and railways now, against a closure that has not happened yet

four companies bidding together for airwaves so that Europe owns a link it currently rents from one American firm

$3.03m spent searching for an intruder nobody has found, because waiting for the attack is the one thing that cannot be undone

a country shut out of Western trade spent a year building a road to the one neighbour that will still use it

Each is answering something Mohsen Rezaei said on Iranian television on Sunday night, and none of them can see what the others will do next.

Friedrich Merz said on Monday he would stay as Germany's chancellor after the far-right Alternative for Germany won 43.8 percent in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt and his own Christian Democrats fell to 17.2 percent. [17]

The AfD is three seats short of governing the state alone and is openly asking Merz's state lawmakers to defect. [18]

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said the conservative bloc will never win a national election again. [18] The party's lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund said he had already started talks on a majority. [54]

The aim is not only the three seats. Splitting Merz's party would break his hold on it, and France and Poland have both said the result worries them. [17][18]

The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen signed a joint declaration in Nuuk on Monday with Greenland's premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen and Denmark's prime minister Mette Frederiksen, together with an investment package worth 200 million euros, about $232m. [19]

Greenland is a self-governing Danish territory of 57,000 people that Donald Trump has repeatedly said the United States should take. [19]

The money is for administration, housing and tourism over two years, and the EU has proposed doubling its direct aid to 530 million euros from 2028. [19]

The visit began on the same day as Arctic Shield, a NATO exercise putting about 400 soldiers from 11 countries into Greenland until 18 September. [19]

Trump would not rule out using force to take the island at the height of the crisis. [19]

Hundreds of people blocked roads in Portsmouth, on England's south coast, on Sunday night to stop coaches carrying about 140 migrants leaving the city. [20]

A handful of police officers were treated for injuries and police vehicles were damaged; no arrests had been made by Monday. [21]

The crowd was called out by Daniel Thomas, known as Danny Tommo, an associate of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who was livestreaming from the scene. [21][22]

He had organised a separate protest at the Port of Dover the day before. [22]

Border Force landed the boat at Eastney, the very slipway that serves the ferry to Thomas's home on Hayling Island, which made it easy for him to gather people fast. [22]

The coaches got away in the early hours and were followed along a motorway. [21]

The boat that landed at Portsmouth carried about 140 people and set off from the Bay of the Seine in Normandy, roughly 170 miles from Calais, where crossings normally begin. [23]

French rescue boats shadowed it for around ten hours and said it was not safe to stop on the water. [23]

In August a single boat carried a record 230 people across the Channel. [23]

Summer crossings are at their lowest since 2019, but smugglers are loading more people onto fewer, larger boats. [23]

The longer route is why the passengers were landed at Portsmouth rather than Dover, which is what put them in front of a crowd. [20][23]

Britain's prime minister Andy Burnham and France's president Emmanuel Macron met on Thursday and agreed they had to go further. [23]

Panama may cut traffic through its canal further as a strengthening El Nino weather pattern drains the lakes that fill the locks. [24]

The daily limit has already fallen from 36 ships last month to 34 on 4 September, and drops to 32 on 15 September. [24]

The canal's new administrator Ilya Espino de Marotta said limits could reach about 29 by February or March. [24]

Each crossing uses roughly 200 million litres of fresh water, and Panama's government declared a national emergency over El Nino on 26 August. [24]

The canal handles 5 percent of world sea trade, and it matters more now that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has fallen sharply. [24]

Some ships have paid over $1m at auction for a slot. [24]

Indonesia reopened Soekarno-Hatta airport, the main gateway to Jakarta, on Tuesday after wind blew away the ash from the Anak Krakatau volcano. [25]

Four more airports reopened with it and one had reopened on Monday, leaving two of the eight closed since Friday still shut. [25]

About 341,000 people were hit by the delay, diversion or cancellation of 2,961 flights, the infrastructure minister Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono said. [25]

Engineers still have to check 178 aircraft that sat at Soekarno-Hatta through the closure. [25]

Anak Krakatau is one of about 130 active volcanoes in Indonesia and began emerging about a century ago from the area the older Krakatoa volcano destroyed when it blew itself apart in 1883. [25]

The 25-hour eruption that started it ended on Sunday; its boom was heard 700km away, and schools across four provinces moved online to keep children out of the ash. [26]

Nepal flew its flags at half mast on Monday for the thirteenth day after the flood that hit its northern valleys, the day Hindu tradition marks as the end of mourning. [27][29]

A glacier broke off on the border with China's Tibet on 26 August, sending a wall of mud and rock into a river and burying towns, roads and hydropower dams. [27]

Reuters reports at least 1,380 dead and more than 5,500 missing; the BBC reports 1,287 known dead and more than 5,000 missing. [27][28]

No ceremonies were held because search teams are still working. [29]

Rescue work is concentrated on hydropower stations where the army thinks people may still be alive, and Chinese officials recovered 12 more bodies in Tibet on Sunday. [27]

The roads relief travels on are the ones the flood buried. [27]

Chinese researchers said the 26 August glacial collapse on the Nepal-China border is clearly linked to rising temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau. [30]

Their latest survey puts the plateau's glacier area at 39,000 square kilometres, down from 44,000 and 51,000 in two earlier studies covering six decades. [30]

Kang Shichang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said glaciers in the Himalayas and two neighbouring ranges have shrunk by about 40 percent in 60 years. [30]

More than 14,000 glacial lakes have now been mapped there. [30]

Kang warned of growing risks from more glacial flood outbursts, which happen when meltwater held back by ice or rubble breaks loose at once. [30]

More than 14,000 such lakes are now mapped on the plateau. [30]

A five-storey building housing students in Satya Niketan, near Delhi University's South Campus, collapsed on Sunday, and at least seven people had died by Monday. [31][32]

Twelve people were pulled from the rubble alive. [32] Delhi's chief minister Rekha Gupta said water had gathered in the basement during repair work and the nearly 50-year-old building came down. [31][32]

Police were searching for the owner. [31]

Building collapses are common in crowded Indian cities where unauthorised construction is widespread and enforcement is weak. [31] Satya Niketan houses hundreds of students, often several to a room. [32]

Mohsen Rezaei, who runs Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said the maps of a new shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz have been agreed with Oman and should be signed within days. [33]

The corridor would lie in Iranian and Omani waters, and Iran would manage it. [33]

The memorandum has been discussed since a fragile ceasefire took hold in mid-June and has never been published. [33]

Rezaei said Iran will commit to keeping the strait open only when the United States stops attacking it. [33]

About ten commodity ships a day have crossed the strait over the past ten days, the lowest since May, and Brent crude settled at $97 a barrel on Monday. [33][34]

The narrow sea gate used to carry about a fifth of the world's oil. [33]

The United Arab Emirates is building alternative routes for its energy exports and trade so they are not held hostage by the war with Iran, the presidential adviser Anwar Gargash said on Monday. [35]

The country is expanding ports on its eastern coast, which faces the open ocean rather than the Gulf, along with pipelines, railways and trade corridors. [35]

Iran has fired missiles at the UAE and attacked its tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the UAE suspended all financial and economic dealings with Iran in August. [35]

Gargash said relations with Iran can be restored but rebuilding trust may take decades. [35]

He also said the Gulf states understood the danger for years and never turned that understanding into a common answer. [35]

A senior Qatari official told the Hili Forum in Abu Dhabi that having American forces and an alliance with the United States is very important but is not enough for Gulf security. [36]

Self-sufficiency, he said, is the only way forward. [36] Qatar hosts the largest US military base in the Arab world, which is also the regional headquarters of US Central Command. [36]

It has taken repeated Iranian retaliation for the American and Israeli war on Iran that began on 28 February. [36]

Avril Haines, the former US director of national intelligence, told the FT Festival at the weekend that pulling American resources out of the region usually works out badly. [36]

Thousands of US military and embassy staff were evacuated from the Gulf earlier this year. [36]

Iraq's prime minister's office said 30 September will be the fixed and final date for ending the military mission of the coalition fighting ISIL, and for its forces to leave. [37]

From 1 October, it said, Iraq will be free of any foreign military presence. [37]

US forces invaded in 2003, left in 2011 and returned in 2015 as part of that coalition. [37]

Iyad al-Anbar, a politics professor at the University of Baghdad, called the withdrawal largely a formality, because American forces are now concentrated at the Harir base in Erbil. [37]

Iraq's own prime minister's office announced the date rather than the coalition. [37]

Iyad al-Anbar says the change will be mostly symbolic, because the American presence has already shrunk to one base. [37]

Two days after China's World Humanoid Robot Games ended last month, the People's Liberation Army's own newspaper called for research on robot fighters to be moved faster from laboratories to training grounds. [38]

Reuters reviewed more than 100 Chinese military purchase notices, academic studies, patents and company documents and found military institutions testing humanoid robots against battlefield requirements and studying how they might work alongside soldiers. [38]

Chinese manufacturers made about 95 percent of the world's humanoid robots shipped in 2025, according to BofA Global Research. [38]

That commercial lead gives the army a supply chain it does not have to build. [38]

Reuters notes the same pattern in Ukraine, where drones that steer themselves have already changed how the war is fought. [38]

Taiwan's military has set aside NT$95.93m, about $3.03m, in its proposed 2027 budget for a team that searches its own networks for intruders who are already hiding in them. [39]

The unit would go beyond firewalls and clean-up after an attack, and foreign instructors would run realistic training. [39]

Taiwan's defence ministry did not say where the instructors come from; local reports say mainly the United States. [39] The budget still needs approval from Taiwan's parliament. [39]

The team would search networks in peacetime for hackers already hiding inside them, rather than clean up after an attack. [39]

It comes as Taiwan and the United States expand military contact well beyond weapons sales. [39]

Japan is building defence partnerships across the Indo-Pacific and beyond that could help it hold out in a long conflict over Taiwan, the South China Morning Post reported. [40]

Japan and Australia agreed last month in Canberra to work together on defence planning, advanced weapons and the building and upkeep of Japanese-designed warships. [40]

The United States is Japan's only treaty ally, and Japan is now adding industrial and technology partners in North America and Europe alongside it. [40]

The point is endurance rather than firepower: a country that can be resupplied from several directions is harder to isolate. [40]

Economic, population and political limits still cap how far Japan's military change can go. [40]

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone and Telefonica are in early talks to form a group that would bid for satellite airwaves and offer calls straight from satellites to ordinary phones, Bloomberg News reported. [41]

They would bid together for a share of the 2 gigahertz of airwaves the European Union has proposed reserving for a European operator. [41] No decision has been made.

Vodafone and Orange declined to comment, and Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica did not respond. [41]

The plan would create a European rival to Elon Musk's Starlink, and it fits the EU's push to own its satellite communications rather than rent them. [41]

Volker Turk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday that he shares the worry of people inside the industry that advanced artificial intelligence could threaten humanity's survival. [42]

He called for cast-iron guarantees around the safety and security of AI before it is too late, and said he would press companies directly in the coming days. [42]

He spoke ahead of the start of his second term next month. [42]

The High Commissioner is the UN's most senior human rights official, and he said he shares the concerns of people working inside the industry itself. [42]

The US secretary of state Marco Rubio travels to Colombia on Tuesday to meet its newly elected president Abelardo de la Espriella, then to Ecuador to see Daniel Noboa and to Peru to see Keiko Fujimori. [43]

The US State Department says he will discuss American help with Colombia's earthquake response, cooperation against drug trafficking and closer trade. [43]

Trump also backed Honduras's president Nasry Asfura and Bolivia's Rodrigo Paz, both elected late last year. [43]

The trip is part of what Trump calls the Donroe Doctrine, a play on the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine, under which his government claims a larger say across the Americas. [43]

Pakistan's foreign office rejected what it called India's baseless claims about the status of Jammu and Kashmir on Monday. [44]

The exchange followed a UN vote on Friday, backed by 164 countries including India, for a more accurate drawing of continents that makes Africa bigger and Europe and North America smaller. [44]

India then said the vote endorses no particular map and that its territory, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, must be shown according to its own official map. [44]

Pakistan says the dispute remains one of the oldest on the Security Council's agenda. [44]

Kashmir is claimed by both countries and divided between them, and each treats how it is drawn as evidence about who owns it. [44]

The Japanese yen rose as far as 153.53 to the US dollar on Tuesday morning, its strongest since February and past the level Japan's government spent money to defend in July. [45]

It has firmed nearly 4 percent from about 160 early last week, including a 1.2 percent jump on Monday in thin trading during an American holiday. [45]

Traders are betting the Bank of Japan will raise interest rates faster than expected, and Japanese investors may bring money home. [45]

The dollar index, which measures the US dollar against a basket of other currencies, slipped to 98.83 as the yen climbed. [45]