World, in brief

Small drones, big targets

Drones from Iraq shut Saudi Arabia's main oil pipeline on Friday. [1] Russian drones hit two petrol stations in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, killing two people. [12] A drone carrying explosives at Leipzig airport in Germany failed to go off. [18]

Governments pulled two ways

Pakistan is Saudi Arabia's defence partner and also a channel to Iran. [11] India hosted Russia's president while keeping its ties to the United States. [23] Hungary expelled ten Russian diplomats and now faces a gas cut-off. [20]

Trade deals rewritten in a hurry

Mexico and the United States want a deal before US elections in eight weeks. [31] The European Union dropped an aluminium duty to protect a trade deal with India. [34] Canadian shoppers are still avoiding American brands a year on. [32]

Fighting crossing other borders

Iraq sacked the army commander for the province the drones came from. [4] Germany charged seven men over a Hamas plot against Berlin and Vienna. [43] A Bulgarian arms depot burned overnight, the second at one owner's sites. [19]

One pressure seen across the day runs through World too.

• Oil routes closing one by oneHigh ↑ · seen in 4 beats→

1. 1Saudi Arabia shuts the pipeline that goes around Hormuz, after drones from Iraq
2. 2Houthis take the island in the Red Sea gate
3. 3BRICS leaders meet in Delhi
4. 4Xi visits India for the first time in seven years
5. 5Modi and Putin agree to deepen ties

Saudi Arabia shut its East-West oil pipeline on Friday, a day after drones struck it. [1][3]

Watch whether Saudi Arabia keeps holding off: it said it would give Iraq time to act, and in July it answered a similar attack by bombing armed groups inside Iraq alongside the United States. [5][1]

Also seen in Finance, Climate and Food.

Yemen's Houthis, the Iranian-backed group that controls most of northern Yemen, reached Perim island on Friday, a day after capturing the mainland port of Mokha. [8][7]

The island sits at the narrowest point of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the gateway between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, where about 12% of world trade normally passes. [7]

Yemeni government forces withdrew and witnesses saw Houthi fighters move in, though the group has not confirmed it. [8]

The Houthis have taken as much as 130km of Yemen's coastline in days. [10]

Saudi oil that leaves the pipeline at Yanbu has to sail past this island to reach Asia, so the two events are one squeeze on the same exporter.

Saudi Arabia answered with air strikes on the airport at Mokha. [7] A Houthi spokesman said shipping is safe for everyone except Saudi vessels. [8]

India's prime minister Narendra Modi is hosting the 18th summit of BRICS in Delhi, with Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Xi Jinping and Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian among the leaders attending. [21][28]

BRICS began in 2006 with Brazil, Russia, India and China, added South Africa in 2010, and now has 11 members holding about half the world's people. [21]

Saudi Arabia came as an invited guest. [22] Thousands of police and paramilitary officers were placed around the venue and traffic was diverted across the city. [21]

The group is expected to press for more say at the IMF and World Bank and for more trade in its own currencies.

It is unlikely to agree a statement that criticises the United States by name, because India cannot afford one. [21][22]

China's president Xi Jinping is in India this weekend for his first visit in seven years, and both governments confirmed he would meet Modi. [24][26]

Relations broke down in 2020 after hand-to-hand fighting in the Galwan valley in the Himalayas killed at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers, the first deadly clash on their 3,800km border since 1975. [25]

India then banned Chinese phone apps, cut direct flights and tightened checks on Chinese investment. [25] The two sides agreed to pull troops back in October 2024. [25]

Both countries are being hit by US tariffs at the same time, which gives each of them a reason to make the other less of a problem. [22][26]

Modi and Putin met on the eve of the summit and agreed to strengthen what India's foreign ministry calls the special relationship between the two countries, covering energy and defence. [23]

It was their second meeting in a fortnight. [23] Putin arrived in Delhi on Friday morning. [28]

India's foreign ministry said the two men also discussed the wars in the Middle East and around the Black Sea, and the safety of Indian sailors caught up in them. [23]

India is trying to hold on to Russia, the Gulf states, Iran, Israel and the United States at once, while the shipping disruption in those same seas raises its own costs. [23]

Russian jet-powered drones struck two Ukrnafta petrol stations in Kyiv on Friday, the second day running that fuel stations in Ukraine's capital had been hit. [12][13]

Two people were killed and six wounded, and a 12-year-old boy was among 12 people injured. [12][14]

Russia has struck around 300 petrol stations in Ukraine in recent months, almost all of them near the front line until this week. [14]

Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Sybiha declared Friday a day of mourning. [13]

Ukraine's authorities are now telling people not to fill up when the air raid sirens sound, which is the effect the campaign is aimed at. [13]

When the front line stops moving, the fighting moves to fuel, pipes and power stations, because a country cannot stand guard over all of them at once.

Russia's front line has barely moved this year, so it is hitting fuel instead, and there are hundreds of filling stations to choose from

one device that never even went off now means every German airport has to be watched, and Germany pays for that watching whether or not another drone arrives

a shell factory cannot be moved or hidden, and this is the second fire at one owner's sites in a month

Iran cannot beat the US Navy at sea, so it hit the buildings the Navy sits in, and the Navy is now deciding whether to rebuild them

A pipeline shuts in the Saudi desert, the oil price rises, and weeks later a bus fare in Nairobi and a bag of shopping in Lisbon both cost a little more.

Britain's defence chief Knighton told reporters that more than 500,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine, a figure close to Ukraine's own count. [12]

He said Russia has also lost more than 10,000 armoured and protected vehicles, close to 3,000 air-defence and artillery systems, and over 370 aircraft and helicopters. [12]

Russian officials did not comment. [12] Western officials and analysts say Russia's rate of advance has slowed sharply this year. [12]

It is the clearest public measure of what Russia has spent for a front line that has barely moved in 2026. [12]

Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy told DW he is willing to meet Putin at the G20 summit in Miami, saying that what either man says does not matter and only results do. [15]

The two have not met since Russia's full invasion in February 2022, and Russia has not said whether Putin will go. [15]

Zelenskyy also said he signed a 100-year partnership with Canada's prime minister Mark Carney on Thursday, covering security, financing, energy, veterans and culture, plus a deal on joint drone production. [15]

He said Russia now makes 140 ballistic missiles a month. [15]

Ukraine is preparing for another winter of war and for talks at the same time, and it is signing long-term partnerships while the American role stays uncertain. [15][17]

The US House of Representatives has set a Rules Committee meeting for Monday on a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia, with a procedural vote later in the week that could decide whether it passes. [16]

The US Senate approved it by 86 votes to 11. [16] It is named after the late senator Lindsey Graham, who spent more than a year pushing for it. [16]

Senior Democrats object that it would sharply expand the US president's power to impose tariffs, including on American allies. [16]

Zelenskyy publicly urged the House to pass it, calling it an important historical moment for the United States. [16]

Israel's military destroyed an underground complex beneath the Ali Taher ridge in southern Lebanon, in an explosion the US Geological Survey recorded as a 4.1 magnitude tremor. [38][9]

Israel said the site held a command centre for Hezbollah's Badr unit, plus rockets, missiles, drones, anti-tank weapons and mines, built over two decades with Iranian money and planning. [38]

Residents of Nabatieh, about 6km away, described a fireball and a sound like an earthquake. [38] Israeli officers then ruled out withdrawing from the areas Israel holds in southern Lebanon. [39]

Israel has occupied a large part of southern Lebanon since fighting with Hezbollah resumed in March, and its officers say any withdrawal is a matter for talks rather than a date. [38][39]

The acting US Navy secretary Hung Cao said Iranian strikes had blown the hell out of the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. [40]

The Wall Street Journal analysed satellite images and interviewed service members. [40]

It found the command centre and at least a dozen other buildings were hit hard between February and June, damage the US defence department never acknowledged. [40]

Iranian strikes on Tuesday also hit the Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan, damaging several US aircraft. [40]

Cao said the Navy is deciding whether to repair the Bahrain base at all. [40]

Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi quoted the American's own words back at him in public. [40]

Whether the United States can keep bases inside Iranian missile range is now an open question within its own Navy. [40]

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been detected in South-Ubangi, a province in the country's west that borders the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville. [36][37]

Until now the Bundibugyo strain, a rare form of Ebola with no approved vaccine or treatment, had stayed in six provinces in the east and north-east. [37]

The country has recorded 6,942 cases and 3,349 deaths. [36][37]

It is already the worst outbreak in Congo's history, and the World Health Organization says it is on course to pass the 2014-16 West African epidemic. [36]

Local spread has not been confirmed in South-Ubangi, so the province is not yet on the official list of affected areas. [37]

It is the first case found in western Congo since a traveller from the east tested positive in the capital in May. [36]

Brazil's supreme court unsealed documents showing that senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the leading right-wing challenger to president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. [29][30]

He is accused of taking 61 million reais, about $12m, from the banker Daniel Vorcaro to fund an unreleased film about his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro. [29]

Vorcaro was arrested in March and is accused of defrauding clients of Banco Master, which had 800,000 customers. [29] Bolsonaro denies any wrongdoing. [29]

The first round of the election is on 4 October, and several polls have shown him and Lula level in a run-off. [29][30]

Anthropic, the US company behind the Claude AI model, said it found and blocked users in northern Yemen who were using it to help develop weapons. [41][42]

It named three projects: a guided rocket, a ballistic missile with a claimed range of more than 2,000km, and a missile family called the R2000. [41]

The company published the findings on Thursday and said its report did not establish whether the users were Houthis. [41][42]

The same report described Russian developers using the model to write software for attack drones. [42]

Northern Yemen is Houthi-held territory, and the group has spent the week firing at Saudi Arabia and taking ground along the Red Sea coast. [42][7]

German federal prosecutors filed a 214-page indictment charging seven men with planning coordinated Hamas attacks in Berlin and Vienna around the anniversary of the 7 October massacre in Israel. [43]

The intended targets were Israeli diplomats, Jewish community centres and pro-Israel demonstrations. [43]

Prosecutors say a weapons network moved pistols, an automatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition through Denmark, Germany and Austria. [43] All seven are being held before trial. [43]

One of the accused was working at the time as a paid informant for Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which makes the case partly about the agency. [43]

Hungary expelled ten Russian diplomats for conduct its government said is not acceptable under the Vienna Convention, the treaty that sets out what diplomats may do. [20]

Foreign minister Anita Orban announced it. [20]

It is the sharpest break yet from the policy of Viktor Orban, who lost power in April and had been the European Union's most pro-Russia leader. [20]

Hungary's new government has declared Russia a threat to national security, and Russia is considering halting gas supplies in response. [20]

In February it emerged that Viktor Orban's foreign minister had passed confidential material from EU meetings to his Russian counterpart. [20]

An explosion set fire to a weapons storage site near the village of Tsareva Livada in central Bulgaria overnight, the second blaze at a munitions facility in the country in a few weeks. [19]

Nobody was reported hurt, and the fire moved from warehouse to warehouse, regional governor Kristina Sidorova said. [19]

Local media said the site is run by EMCO, whose other facility exploded last month. [19] EMCO belongs to the Bulgarian arms trader Emilian Gebrev. [19]

Bulgarian prosecutors say Gebrev's facilities were targeted by Russian operatives in the past, and in 2024 Bulgaria issued arrest warrants for six Russians over the destruction of an EMCO depot. [19]

A drone carrying military-grade explosives was placed at Leipzig airport in Germany and failed to go off only because it had been put together wrongly, a security analyst told Euronews. [18]

He argued that NATO's lack of a firm answer to such incidents is why they keep happening. [18]

A US intelligence assessment in August warned Russia could test NATO within a few years, with either a small land incursion or a serious cyber attack on essential systems. [18]

Members are unsure whether the United States would join a collective response. [18]

Article 5 of the NATO treaty says an attack on one member is an attack on all, and its worth depends on every government believing it. [18]

Pakistan has spent the past year acting as both Saudi Arabia's defence partner and a quiet channel between the United States and Iran, and the fighting in Yemen is testing whether it can keep doing both. [11]

Last month Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey signed a mutual defence pact under which an attack on one counts as an attack on all three. [11]

Pakistani soldiers are deployed near the Saudi border with Yemen. [11]

Pakistani officials told Reuters they think a Houthi attack is more likely to trigger that pact than Iranian missiles were earlier this year. [11]

Pakistan needs Gulf defence deals and the investment that tends to follow them, and it also relies on oil and gas shipped through the same waters. [11]

Mexico and the United States are trying to close a bilateral trade deal before US midterm elections in under eight weeks, six people in both countries told Reuters. [31]

The talks aim at an interim bargain giving Mexico relief from some US tariffs in return for meeting American demands on how much of a car must be built locally and on Chinese investment. [31]

There is no formal deadline. [31] The urgency comes from the collapse of Canada's own talks with the United States. [31]

Mexico has watched what happened to Canada and is trying not to be next in line. [31][32]

A year into the trade fight with the United States, Canadian shoppers are still hunting for the small maple-leaf symbols that mark Canadian-made goods. [32]

Mateus Gujrel, a software developer, told Al Jazeera he switched almond milk brands and stopped buying an American sparkling water. [32]

The boycott grew after waves of US tariffs and after the US president repeatedly said Canada should become the 51st state. [32] There is little sign the feeling is fading. [32]

Canada's talks with the United States collapsed, and shopping habits that outlast a negotiation are harder for any later deal to undo. [31][32]

The European Union abandoned a plan to charge a 15% export duty on aluminium scrap for three years, because it risked complicating the final signature of a free trade agreement with India. [34]

The measure was due to be announced on 23 September and was meant to keep scrap at home for Europe's own smelters, which had asked for a 30% duty. [34]

India buys about a third of the EU's aluminium scrap. [34] The EU will now rely on its environmental rules instead. [34]

Europe's smelting industry loses a protection it asked for so that a trade deal with India stays on track. [34]

Peru has sent India a counterproposal and hopes to sign a trade treaty in 2027, its trade minister Valencia told Reuters. [33]

Peruvian exports to India reached $6.184bn between January and July, up 152% on a year earlier, overtaking the $5.971bn sent to the United States. [33]

Peru expects total exports above $100bn this year, against about $91bn in 2025. [33] New US duties introduced in July have hit Peruvian blueberries, textiles, grapes and avocados. [33]

For one of the world's biggest copper exporters, India has just become a larger customer than the United States. [33]

The Reserve Bank of India cancelled part of an auction of short-dated government debt in order to stop bond yields climbing further, traders said. [35]

It is the first partial cancellation in a year. [35] Traders read the move as an early signal from Indian authorities about where interest rates are heading. [35]

India is hosting the BRICS summit this weekend while its own cost of borrowing is rising. [35][21]

China lodged formal complaints with Italy and the European Union after Taiwan's vice-president Hsiao Bi-khim and foreign minister Lin Chia-lung attended a democracy conference at Ventotene in Italy. [45]

China claims Taiwan, which governs itself, and opposes any official contact between Taiwanese officials and countries that recognise China. [45]

European Parliament vice-president Pina Picierno kept news of the visit quiet until the pair arrived, for their safety. [45] She said nobody else decides who is welcome at Ventotene. [45]

It is rare for a Taiwanese vice-president to visit a country with formal relations with China, because of the trouble it causes the host. [45]

Finance ministers and central bank governors from the BRICS countries issued a joint statement calling for changes at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the two institutions that lend to governments in trouble. [27]

They said developing economies now make up a growing share of world output and growth and should have a stronger voice. [27]

The statement was published late on Thursday, before the leaders met. [27] They promised to coordinate to make both bodies more representative, transparent and accountable. [27]

This is the part of the BRICS agenda every member agrees on, which is why the finance chiefs could publish it while the leaders are not expected to agree a statement about the United States. [27][22]

The number of people confirmed dead in a ferry fire in the Philippines has risen to 35, with dozens still missing. [49]

The coast guard said early interviews with survivors suggest the fire started in the cargo hold, and that some passengers were not wearing life vests. [49]

One survivor told the BBC he was trampled by panicking people as he tried to escape. [49]

The ferry was built in 2002, held valid safety certificates and passed an enforcement inspection in March. [49]

Investigators are looking at whether the passenger list matched who was actually aboard, and at how the cargo was loaded and secured. [49]

A passenger train running between Rouen and Caen in Normandy derailed on Friday evening near the commune of Cleon, just south of Rouen, injuring at least 44 people. [50]

An 18-year-old woman was flown to hospital in a critical condition. [50]

Transport minister Philippe Tabarot said 180 passengers were on board and that 140 firefighters and other emergency crews were sent to the scene. [50] Three carriages overturned. [50]

Nobody has said yet what caused it, and the state railway SNCF reported significant disruption on routes in the area, with replacement buses laid on. [50]

The US Export-Import Bank lent $100m to Africell, the only American-owned mobile network operator in Africa, to expand its network in Angola. [51]

Africell said the money would be spent on American and European equipment and would support telecoms jobs in the United States. [51]

Huawei, the Chinese firm, is the world's biggest supplier of network equipment and is reckoned to have supplied more than half of Africa's 4G and 5G infrastructure. [51]

A criminal racketeering trial against Huawei opened in New York this week, and the company calls the US allegations demonstrably false. [51]

Africell also runs networks in Congo, Sierra Leone and Gambia, so the loan buys a foothold in four countries rather than one. [51]

Masked men in paramilitary-style balaclavas blocked roads around the port of Dover in England, standing in ranks and staring down drivers and police officers. [52]