World, in brief

Attacks nobody claims

Nobody has claimed the drones that shut Saudi Arabia's pipeline. [18] Germany's Leipzig airport drone case now has two named suspects, one reportedly linked to Russian military intelligence. [30] US officials say Iran got satellite pictures of a US base in Jordan from Chinese entities before a strike killed three soldiers. [52]

Oil routes under fire

The Saudi pipeline that moved 4 to 5 million barrels a day around Hormuz is shut, and a ship was hit in the strait on Sunday. [17] Iran says Monday's meeting in Oman will not reopen Hormuz. [22] In Yemen, 76,000 people have fled as the Houthis advanced along the coast. [12]

Russia's war reaching further

Russian strikes killed at least nine people in Ukraine on Saturday. [26] Putin said European troops in Ukraine would mean a war with Russia. [28] The head of the UN development agency says Ukraine faces its toughest winter since 2022. [29]

Money and anger in Europe's politics

About 150,000 people marched in 20 German cities against the AfD, a week after it won 44% in Saxony-Anhalt. [32] Two crypto billionaires gave Britain's Reform UK 72 million pounds, more than either big party spent at the last election. [34] Hundreds faced off at rival immigration rallies in Glasgow. [54]

2 pressures seen across the day run through World too.

• Oil and gas still stuck behind the straitHigh ↑ · seen in 3 beats→
• Rivals deciding things among themselvesBuilding ↑ · seen in 3 beats→

1. 1BRICS signs a paper against war that names nobody, and the Gulf keeps shooting
2. 2Trump says Iran was probably behind the pipeline attack
3. 3Iraq closes two border crossings with Iran
4. 4Iran says Monday's Oman meeting will not reopen Hormuz
5. 5Bahrain refuses to sit with Iran

The ten BRICS countries adopted a joint declaration in New Delhi on Saturday, and India's prime minister Narendra Modi said no member objected to the text. [1][4]

Watch whether Monday's meeting in Oman on the Strait of Hormuz happens with Iran and the Gulf states in one room: Bahrain has already said it will not come, and an Iranian official expects no signed deal. [21][23]

Also seen in Sports and Tech.

Donald Trump was asked in Dublin on Saturday whether Iran was behind the drones that shut Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline. "I think they are, probably they are," he said. [16]

He said everything would "work out fine and dandy". [12]

Three sources told Reuters the crown prince had phoned Trump on Thursday to ask for US military help against Yemen's Houthis, and was told the US would not step in directly for now. [17]

Saudi Arabia has named no group. It said it would not hit back yet, to give Iraq time to act. [19][18]

The pipeline carried 4 to 5 million barrels a day, about 4 to 5 percent of the world's oil, while Hormuz has been shut. [17]

With the US declining to fight the Houthis directly, Saudi Arabia answers the attack alone or not at all. [17]

Iraq's government says the drones were launched from Maysan province on its border with Iran. By Saturday it had sacked the province's operations commander and its police chief. [15][18]

It also closed the Shalamcheh and Chazabeh crossings into Iran, halting all passenger and commercial traffic, Iranian state media said. [15]

The Popular Mobilization Forces, the alliance of Iran-backed militias that is formally part of Iraq's security forces, denied any involvement, and no group has claimed the attack. [18]

Iraq has told armed groups to disarm by 30 September, and several of the biggest say they will not. [15]

In July the United States and Saudi Arabia bombed those militias in seven Iraqi provinces after a similar attack, killing at least 20. [19]

Iraq is trying to punish someone visibly before that happens again.

When an attack comes from an armed group on another country's soil, the victim must first prove who ordered it, and that proof takes weeks.

Saudi Arabia said it would not hit back yet, to give Iraq time.

Iraq sacked a commander and a police chief, the militias denied it, and the drones have still not been answered.

The drone was left on 4 August.

It took until early September for Germany to name Russia, and the two suspects it names now are a Russian and a Belarusian, not a government.

Three US soldiers died in July. Two months later officials are describing to a newspaper what China supplied, and the response so far is a summit on 24 September.

The Houthis told the US they do not want to fight it and are "letting most ships go through".

The US declined Saudi Arabia's request for strikes, so the one country they do attack answers alone.

In July the United States and Saudi Arabia bombed the Iraqi militias after blaming them for an earlier attack, which ended the delay and widened the war.

The people who carry the waiting are far from those rooms.

A mother in Taiz walks her children out of a camp at 5am, and anyone with a fuel bill pays an oil price that passed $100 this week.

Iran said on Friday it would attend a meeting with Gulf Arab states in Oman on Monday to discuss the Strait of Hormuz.

On Saturday a senior Iranian official told Reuters no signed agreement is expected. [21]

A source told Iran's Tasnim agency that an understanding with Oman sets out how the strait could reopen but does not reopen it, and that reopening depends entirely on the United States meeting Iran's conditions. [22]

Iran still wants to charge ships a fee to pass, which Oman rejects. [21] Oman has not officially announced the meeting. [24]

Oman controls the other bank of the strait and has negotiated with Iran for months.

It says other Gulf states back the talks, but none has said so in public, and Bahrain has now said the opposite. [21]

Also seen in Finance and Climate.

Bahrain's foreign ministry said on Saturday it will not take part in the meeting Iran has proposed in Oman on the future of the Strait of Hormuz. [23]

It said Gulf security "cannot be preserved through a policy of appeasement" and called for the strait to be open without "discrimination, fees or permits". [23]

Bahrain cut diplomatic ties with Iran in 2016 alongside Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia restored them in 2023; Bahrain never did, and says it will join no group meeting with Iran until it does. [23]

Iran wants the region's security settled by the region's countries "without intervention by the foreigners", Baghaei said. Bahrain has answered that it will not be in the room. [23]

The British navy-linked agency UKMTO said early Sunday that a projectile had hit a vessel passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The crew's condition and the damage were not yet known. [17]

On Saturday Saudi Arabia's civil defence said a projectile fired by Yemen's Houthis injured two people in Jazan region, near the Yemeni border, and damaged several buildings including a mosque. [17]

Brent crude, the world oil benchmark, climbed back above $100 a barrel this week after the United States and Iran both fired on tankers in the strait.

Hormuz has been mostly shut by the war for six months. The Houthis' advance now threatens the Bab el-Mandeb, the second route Gulf oil has been using. [17]

The International Organization for Migration, the UN's migration agency, said on Saturday that at least 76,000 people in Yemen have fled their homes since July, up from 46,000 only days earlier. [12]

The Houthis, the Iran-backed group that holds northern Yemen and the capital Sanaa, took the port of Mocha this week and the last of the Red Sea coast on Friday. [25][20]

Yemen's civil war killed 150,000 people before a 2022 truce. [12]

Aman Murshed, a mother of five displaced for five years in Taiz, fled her camp again at 5am on foot with her children. [25]

Government forces said on Saturday they had shelled Houthi positions around Mocha and told civilians to stay off the roads out of the city. [20]

The camp Murshed fled was on the front line. [25]

Lebanese and Israeli negotiators will meet in Rome in October for talks brokered by the United States, after a round planned for this month was postponed with no explanation. [12]

The US State Department said the two countries' ambassadors to the United States will meet next week to discuss the framework agreement reached in June. [12]

The two sides have held seven rounds in the US capital and Rome this year, trying to calm fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group backed by Iran. [12]

The last written result of these talks is the June framework. Lebanon's president visited a southern city on Saturday near the hill Israel captured this month. [12]

A large oil spill off Oman and Iran, believed to come from a tanker hit by the US military, doubled in size between Wednesday and Thursday, Nina Noelle of Greenpeace Germany said. [12]

The tanker Riesco was one of four attacked in the Gulf of Oman on Tuesday. A fifth was destroyed in the Strait of Hormuz near Iran's Kharg island. [12]

The visible slick covered about 400 square kilometres on Thursday, and satellite images reviewed by the Associated Press showed it stretching almost 70 kilometres. [12]

It lies between two protected marine areas. [12]

The spill endangers both protected areas, Greenpeace says, and it is growing while the shooting in the same water continues. [12]

Russian air strikes killed at least nine people and injured dozens across Ukraine on Saturday, officials said. Euronews counted eleven dead and 96 injured over the night. [26][27]

Odesa was hit hardest, with 35 injured including a five-month-old baby when cruise missiles struck a block of flats. [27]

In Kramatorsk, a front-line city in the east, drones hit three private cars in 90 minutes and killed three people. [26]

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had sent nearly 500 drones since morning, aiming at the economy because the front is not moving. [26]

Vladimir Putin, speaking at the BRICS summit on Friday, said that if European governments send troops into Ukraine it will mean "a war with Russia". [28]

Alexander De Croo, head of the UN development agency and a former Belgian prime minister, told the BBC in Ukraine that this winter will be the hardest since Russia's full invasion in 2022. [29]

He said there is a "race against the clock" to repair the power network before temperatures fall, and a risk of "humanitarian catastrophe" if strikes cut power and water. [29]

He accused Russia of systematically hitting energy sites, petrol stations, shopping malls and business centres. [29] Russia has begun using faster jet-powered drones that are harder to shoot down.

Both countries deny targeting civilians. [29]

Winter temperatures in Ukraine can fall to minus 20C, and De Croo said heating, water and sewage systems could all stop if the grid is badly damaged. [29]

Investigation files seen by the German newspaper Welt name two suspects in the failed drone attack on a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle airport on 4 August. [30]

A Russian, Oleg Le., is believed to have organised the logistics, and a Belarusian, Andrei Ka., is suspected of carrying out the attack; one is reportedly linked to Russia's GRU military intelligence. [30]

The drone carried about 1.8 kilograms of Semtex plastic explosive and came to rest beside an Antonov aircraft fuelled with around 25,000 litres of kerosene.

It did not go off because the detonator came loose. [30]

These files are what led Germany's foreign and interior ministers to publicly blame Russia about ten days ago. [30] The suspects named so far are two men, not a state.

About 150,000 people demonstrated in around 20 German cities on Saturday, including Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, against the far-right Alternative for Germany, organisers said. [31][32]

The rallies were called by Pruef, a campaign group that wants the party banned; signs read "Ban the AfD now". [31]

A week earlier the AfD won nearly 44% in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, against about 17% for Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats. [32]

It is projected to hold 39 of 83 seats, three short of a majority, and every mainstream party has so far refused to govern with it. [32]

The AfD held a counter-rally in Berlin with Kristin Brinker, its lead candidate in the capital's own regional election next weekend. [31]

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD's lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, said at a press conference that arms production should not be demonised because suitable equipment would later be needed for "remigration and deportation offensives". [33]

He was discussing a planned factory in Sangerhausen for Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence company that makes drones, howitzers and rocket launchers and already supplies Germany's armed forces. [33]

After criticism he said he meant vehicles and protective gear for police and security agencies, and that the AfD rejects supplying arms for "foreign wars". [33]

The AfD is three seats short of a majority in Saxony-Anhalt and looking for a partner. Every other party is being asked to govern beside the man who said this. [32][33]

Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based cryptocurrency investor, said on Saturday he had given 36 million pounds ($49m) to Nigel Farage's Reform UK, matching a gift by Ben Delo, co-founder of the BitMEX crypto exchange, a day earlier. [34][35]

Each is the largest donation ever made to a British political party; the previous record was 10 million pounds. [34]

The total exceeds what either Labour or the Conservatives spent in the whole of last year's election campaign. [34]

The Metropolitan Police is investigating whether Reform accepted illegal foreign donations, which the party denies. [35][36]

Delo was convicted in the US of a banking-law offence and later pardoned by Donald Trump. [34] Reform has slipped behind Labour in the polls since Andy Burnham became prime minister. [36]

Donald Trump said in Dublin on Saturday that he would "love" to see Ireland unified with Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and that it "is going to happen eventually". [37]

He was speaking after meeting Ireland's prime minister Micheal Martin at Farmleigh House, before going on to a golf tournament at one of his own resorts. [37][17]

"Now the UK will have something to say about it," he added, "but I think it would be a great thing." [37]

He said he did not want to cause any problems. [37]

Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom is meant to be decided by its own voters under the 1998 peace agreement, not by outside governments.

A US president saying it out loud, as a guest in Dublin, is a new thing for both governments to answer.

Hungary's prime minister Peter Magyar said on Saturday his government will change a 2020 law that effectively stopped gay and lesbian couples from adopting children. [38]

Under Viktor Orban's law, single applicants needed the family minister's personal approval, which closed the route same-sex couples had used. [38]

Magyar said the decision should rest with child-welfare professionals, "not the minister, a politician". [38] Magyar beat Orban in April after 16 years of Orban's rule.

In the same month the European Court of Justice ruled that Orban's restrictions on LGBTQ content broke EU law. [38]

Orban also ended gender changes in official documents and banned school materials seen as promoting homosexuality.

Those laws remain, so this is one change out of several the new government could make. [38]

Congo's Ebola outbreak reached 7,022 confirmed cases and 3,398 deaths, government figures showed late Friday.

It is the largest in the country's history and second worldwide only to West Africa's 2014-16 epidemic. [40][39]

The virus is the rare Bundibugyo species, first detected in mid-May in Ituri province in the northeast, and it has no approved vaccine or treatment. [39]

A 23-year-old man who died on Tuesday tested positive in South Ubangi, a seventh province, in the far northwest; he had left South Kivu in July and spent time abroad. [40]

837 people are in isolation or treatment now, and the outbreak is spreading through remote regions where armed groups roam and clinics are scarce. [39]

Indonesian rescuers began searching the Java Sea on Sunday for the Virgo Transport 8, a passenger ship that lost contact at about 2am local time in bad weather. [41]

It left Surabaya, Indonesia's second city, on Saturday morning bound for Banjarmasin on Borneo. Its manifest lists 241 passengers, and its last known position was about 148 kilometres from Banjarmasin. [41][42]

Search chief I Putu Sudayana said every available boat and person was being sent. There were no reports of casualties as of Sunday morning. [41]

It is the third passenger vessel in the region to be lost or burned in a week, after a ferry fire in the Philippines and a sinking in Vanuatu. [44][43]

The inter-island ferry MV Matui sank in bad weather on Friday between the islands of Ambae and Santo in Vanuatu, a Pacific nation about 1,750 kilometres east of Australia.

At least one person is dead and more than 30 are missing. [43] Fifteen people have been found alive, the prime minister's office said on Sunday. [43]

The prime minister's statement said the loss appeared to result from strong winds, marine warnings not being heeded and possibly overloading, and promised an investigation. [43]

The open-water search is being wound down in favour of the south-east coast, where currents may have carried survivors. The ferry's operator did not respond to questions. [43]

Thirty charred bodies from the ferry MV June Aster arrived at the port of Coron in the western Philippines on Saturday for identification, and coast guard officials said more remained inside the burned ship. [44]

At least 35 people died and more than 50 are missing from the fire on Wednesday evening, 39 kilometres short of Coron at the end of a 20-hour trip from Manila; 43 of 132 aboard survived. [44][45]

Survivors said there was no time to reach life jackets. [44] Investigators are looking for the captain, who reportedly survived but is not listed. [44]

The inquiry will look at a tarpaulin that shielded the open decks from rain and may have trapped people inside, the coast guard said. [44]

At least 16 elderly residents died when fire swept through the El Eden care home in Pitrufquen, about 640 kilometres south of Santiago, on Friday night. Ten others were evacuated. [46]

The blaze began around 22:30 and was not put out until Saturday morning, when firefighters were still clearing collapsed metal roofing. [46]

Prosecutor Jorge Granada said the cause is not yet known. [46]

Chile's president Jose Antonio Kast ordered a review of the condition of nursing homes across the country and said the state would find out "where failures may have existed in oversight or prevention". [46]

The review covers every care home in Chile, so the question of who inspected El Eden, and when, now applies nationwide. [46]

Nigeria's foreign ministry said two Nigerians were killed in South Africa this month.

It says James Uchechukwu Nwankwo died after "gruesome interrogation techniques" by police in Cape Town on 5 September, and Taiwo Michael Fakunle, a bishop, was killed at his home in Johannesburg on 4 September. [47]

On Friday Nigeria's parliament suspended all official visits to South Africa indefinitely. [47] Anti-migrant protests in South Africa blame foreigners for unemployment and crime and have pushed thousands to leave.

Nigeria says at least 98 of its citizens have been killed there since 2022. [47]

Two Nigerians were also killed in June, two days before a deadline protesters had set for foreigners to leave. The two governments are now arguing over who is responsible. [47]

General Abdourahamane Tchiani, who has ruled Niger since a 2023 coup, appointed Brigadier General Mamane Sani Kiaou as chief of the armed forces in a decree read on state television late Friday. [48]

Kiaou replaces Major General Moussa Salaou Barmou, a junta member who had held the post since the coup; no reason was given. [48]

The change follows a nearly 24-hour mutiny on 28 and 29 August at the base beside Niamey airport, where young soldiers took comrades hostage and fired on sensitive sites until Russia's Africa Corps helped retake it. [48]

Kiaou is a field commander who ran operations in the regions worst hit by militant attacks, which diplomats say is the grievance that drove the mutineers. [48]

Myanmar's military-backed government said on Sunday it had revoked the status of Kyaw Moe Tun, the country's ambassador to the United Nations, accusing him of "illegal activities" and misuse of mission funds. [49]

Kyaw Moe Tun was appointed by Aung San Suu Kyi's elected government.

Weeks after the February 2021 coup he made an emotional appeal to the UN not to recognise the generals, and they sacked him the next day. [49]

He has kept his seat for five years because the UN's credentials committee keeps deferring a decision on who represents Myanmar. [49]

The committee is due to meet after this month's UN General Assembly in New York, and the junta's statement lands two weeks before it. [49]

A South Korean law that took effect on Sunday makes spying for any foreign country a crime with a minimum three-year sentence.

Until now espionage charges applied only to acts benefiting North Korea. [50] Prosecutors had to use trade-secret laws for leaks to other countries, which carried lighter penalties. [50]

Parliament passed the change in February after cases including five former Samsung employees indicted last year for allegedly passing memory-chip technology to the Chinese firm CXMT. [50]

The National Intelligence Service said it would help protect semiconductors, displays, batteries and AI. The law names no country. [50]

Asked whether it targets China, China's foreign ministry said it requires its companies to follow international rules and asked all countries to protect "normal investment and business activities". [50]

Police in Puebla state, central Mexico, found a secret cryptocurrency mining operation in the Sierra Norte mountains after noticing electricity use far beyond what the villages around it could need.

It was allegedly drawing power from a nearby hydroelectric system. [51] Inside were 300 graphics processors, 80 medium-voltage terminals and eight satellite dishes. [51]

Authorities suspect it was mining coins to launder criminal money. It is the fourth such farm found in the area since early last year. [51]

Illicit crypto transactions worldwide more than doubled in 2025 to an estimated $154 billion, the analytics firm Chainalysis says. [51]

Electricity is the biggest cost of mining crypto, so the operations go where power can be stolen or where organised crime already controls the area, a Chainalysis specialist said. [51]